A VIEW FRO)UO,THE '30S IBCs~DiTBlfe 8-···- i;EFi~ (ITV IDITO·R TUINIGUT (IU8 ~II Stanley Walker Stanley Walker 4:li~;I;i.. !:r:"-~ Ji)l~~~lt~o~·rlbJtAl~sanrlf~·CYoollcotf Olh.orl~~ctio,l hJ,A[vaJol~,lslo~l i "Walker writes about his craft in a "An extremely amllsinr! book ... b:I' style which seems fresh from the very bl·iskly and pleasantly rePo'ter's typewriter, written to catch wlitten.'---H. L. Mencken an edition."-SNrl~l~lnll Xe~,ien· of' T~e Night Clllb E,n offers a singulal·l Lite~ntl~,-e serious--though nevel· sobel~- As city editor of the N~~~lYo,~li Ne~nlrl history of New York City during 'I T~·iOll~le,Stanley Walker earned a Prohibition.I-Iel·e we meet muldelels /, repLltationas one of the city's 1170St and millionaires, gangstels, resoul·ceful and astute newspaper bal·tenders, celebrities of the stage, men. In Cit~:Etliro~·, he distillshis screen,and society,and a host of i* esperiences into a robust insider's other colol·fill characters who ~ accountofthejournalism ofhis day, populatedthe city's diverse night Sixty-five years after its first clubs, from El Fey to the Cottoll p"blication, it remains a lively, entel·- Club. taiIling, and valuable record of the $17.95 paperback yolden age of American journalism. $17.')5 paperback

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he media hoopla surrounding the millennium has already gained the intensity of a tropical storm, and the WQ is not going to toss more Treams of intellectual confetti into the tempest. Yet there is a paradox about this milestone that calls out for attention. With the 20th century, we have capped a thousand years of stupendous material and, yes, moral progress with the hundred bloodiest years in the history of humankind. Not only have we endured two world wars and innumerable smaller ones but the unimagin- able human devastation wrought by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their imitators. Not one of the nine centuries that came before can rival our own in blood. Apart from the almost accidental tragedy of World War I, the great clash- es of our bloody century have not been provoked by the hunger for land, or riches, or other traditional sources of national desire, but by ideas— about the value of individual dignity and freedom, about the proper organi- zation of society, and ultimately about the possibility of human perfection. These conflicts were not incidental to the moral progress of the past thou- sand years but a tragic part of the quest, as societies cast off all traditional sources of moral and political authority and embraced new ideas and ide- ologies that led to radical evil. So while the world faces many concrete challenges in the future, from controlling nuclear and biological weapons to coming to terms with the possibilities of genetic engineering, our own recent history should remind us that our destiny will be most powerfully influenced by the larger ideas to which we give our allegiance. At the WQ, this millennial reminder of the urgency of ideas fortifies our sense of mission, and we hope that read- ers, too, will take from the history of the 20th century a fresh appreciation of the often questioned “relevance” of the mind.

Editor: Steven Lagerfeld The Wilson Quarterly (ISSN-0363-3276) is published in Deputy Editor: Missy Daniel January (Winter), April (Spring), July (Summer), and Managing Editor: James H. Carman October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson International Senior Editor: Robert K. Landers Center for Scholars at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Literary Editor: Stephen Bates Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004–3027. Editor-at-Large: Jay Tolson Complete article index now available online at Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano http://wwics.si.edu/WQ/WEBIND.HTM. Subscriptions: Contributing Editors: Martha Bayles, one year, $24; two years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one year, Linda Colley, Denis Donoghue, Max Holland, $39; two years, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: $7; Stephen Miller, Jeffery Paine, Walter Reich, outside U.S. and possessions, $8; selected back issues: $7, Alan Ryan, Edward Tenner, Charles Townshend, including postage and handling; outside U.S., $8. Alan Wolfe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. All unsolicited manuscripts should be Assistant Editor: Justine A. Kwiatkowski accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Researchers: Erin E. Bair, Jennifer A. Dowdell Members: Send changes of address and all subscription corre- Librarian: Zdenek˘ V. David spondence with Wilson Quarterly mailing label to Editorial Advisers: K. Anthony Appiah, Subscriber Service, The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Robert Darnton, Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding, Palm Coast, FL 32142–0406. (Subscriber hot line: Robert Hathaway, Elizabeth Johns, Michael Lacey, 1-800-829-5108.) Postmaster: Send all address changes to Jackson Lears, Seymour Martin Lipset, The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Palm Coast, Robert Litwak, Wilfred M. McClay, Richard Rorty, FL 32142–0406. Microfilm copies are available from Blair Ruble, Ann Sheffield, Martin Sletzinger, Bell & Howell Information and Learning, 300 North Zeeb S. Frederick Starr, Joseph Tulchin Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. U.S. newsstand distribution Founding Editor: Peter Braestrup (1929–1997) by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Publishing Director: Warren B. Syer Sandusky, Ohio 44870 (for information, call 1-800-221-3148). Publisher: Kathy Read Advertising: Hank Arizmendi, Tel.: (800) 801-8558), Fax: Business Manager: Suzanne Napper (954) 730-8404. Publisher/Mail Order: Kalish, Quigley & Circulation: Cary Zel, ProCirc, Miami, Fla. Rosen, Tel.: (212) 399-9500, Fax: (212) 265-0986.

2 WQ Autumn 1999 AUTUMN 1999 THE WILSON QUARTERLY Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars WQ Online: http://wwics.si.edu/WQ

35 THE LONG ROAD TO BETTER SCHOOLS Tom Loveless •Chiara R. Nappi •Charles L. Glenn •Paul A. Zoch All the reforms of recent years, from charter schools to teacher certification tests, won’t add up to much unless Americans face up to deeper questions about the character and direction of the public schools.

14 THE ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR by Geoffrey D. Dabelko Should American foreign policy address deforestation in Haiti and population growth in Africa?

20 CALL ME MISTER by George Watson The high cost of living on a first-name basis

24 THE FORGOTTEN FORERUNNER by Michael Kazin William Jennings Bryan launched the Democratic Party on the path of liberal reform and pioneered, for better or worse, the politics of celebrity.

70 AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by R. Shep Melnick Why Americans can’t live with big government, and can’t live without it

DEPARTMENTS 2 EDITOR’S COMMENT 4 CORRESPONDENCE 10 FINDINGS The Cool Revolution • Please Pass the Poison • Red Rebound? 13 AT ISSUE Our Educational Ambivalence 79 PERIODICALS The Joyless Victory The Antiliberal Philosopher Deconstructing the Professors 107 RESEARCH REPORTS 109 BOOKS The Poet-Critic Laying Down Arms Au Revoir to France? Q 128 FROM THE CENTER W cover Detail from Magical Thinking (1996), by Bo Bartlett. Courtesy P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, N.Y. Design by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden.

The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

USPS 346-670 Volume XXIII Number 4 Printed in the U.S.A. CORRESPONDENCE Letters may be mailed to One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004–3027, or sent via facsimile, to (202) 691-4036, or e-mail, to [email protected]. The writer’s telephone number and postal address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors’ requests for comment.

Overcoming the Great Disruption regards human beings as responsible for others Francis Fukuyama’s account of our recent as well as for themselves, but as needing guid- history [“How to Re-Moralize America,” WQ, ance and inspiration from language, symbols, Summer ’99] follows the Hegelian pattern of and the example of heroic lives to aid them in thesis (1950s = order) giving way to antithesis the ceaseless battle against what religion calls (1960s = chaos) until our buffeted ship of state temptation and sin. Moreover, if these symbols finally reaches calmer waters (synthesis) in the are to retain currency and power, they must be waning 1990s. Along the way, the storm, or freshly created or periodically renewed. “Great Disruption,” shakes up the passengers Prompted by these essays to look around, I and damages the cargo (“Conservatives need don’t find in our market-driven culture many to be realistic in understanding how thorough- such landmarks by which we might navigate ly the moral and social landscapes have been forward, or backward (if one subscribes to altered....”). Fukuyama’s nostalgic view of history), toward a Paul Berman [“Reimagining Destiny,” WQ, society more fully devoted to responsibility, Summer ’99] reminds us that this story is rather charity, and genuine self-fulfillment. We may, stark and incomplete; the 1960s, after all, were as Fukuyama believes, be settling down and also years of moral progress, especially in civil sobering up; but surely there is in contempo- rights and women’s rights. But allowing for its rary America, as Berman suggests (“We have defects as history, one may still ask if no big plans for making society any better than Fukuyama’s narrative has value as a motivating it already is”) an equally evident, and unslaked, prophecy. One reason I don’t think so is its longing for something more. implicit determinism. Articulated consent to its Andrew Delbanco vision of history seems irrelevant to the Julian Clarence Levi Professor prospects that it will be fulfilled. “Order and in the Humanities rules will tend to emerge spontaneously from Columbia University the ground up,” so we need not worry or dream New York, N.Y. overmuch. “The innate ability of human beings to evolve reasonable moral rules” will Astonishingly, Fukuyama and Berman miss save us, and has already begun to bring us the central development behind both the around. As Berman points out, the application “Great Disruption” and the emergence of a of such evolutionary ideas to history typically new mass culture: the transformation of comes in dark and light variants. Some who America into an ideological state. read our destiny in our “innate” compulsions The ideology in question is perhaps most conclude that we are rapacious monsters, often known as “political correctness,” now while others, with Fukuyama, regard us as inculcated in Americans by the government, rational negotiators working in the service of the media, the entertainment industry, even community interests. many churches. Its history, which goes back to I am drawn to a more dualistic description World War I, reveals its true identity: Marxism of experience that understands human beings translated from economic into cultural terms. not as programmed creatures but as free beings The key intellectual work was done in the at war within themselves, capable of both cru- 1930s and ’40s, with the development of elty and love. This view, well expressed by, but Critical Theory by the Frankfurt School, hardly restricted to, various religious traditions, Adorno’s crossing of Marx with Freud, and recognizes in both our inner and outer lives Marcuse’s answer to Horkheimer’s question of (the two are not, to be sure, always perfectly who will replace the proletariat as the agent of congruent) a perpetual conflict between our revolution: a coalition of students, blacks, fem- demons and the better angels of our nature. It inist women, homosexuals, and other socially

4 WQ Autumn 1999 marginal elements. Marcuse, who joined the puts President Kim Dae Jung in clear per- Frankfurt School in 1932, injected the school’s spective, particularly for those unaware of his ideas into the baby boom generation during past travails as an opposition leader and failed the 1960s, and that generation has now made presidential candidate. them the American norm. The real gem of the triptych appears in History should warn us of what an ideologi- Kathryn Weathersby’s essay on the Korean cal state can do to its own citizens. Given that War and Soviet-North Korean relations this ideology is one of radical cultural inver- [“The Korean War Revisited”]. Her observa- sion—the old sins are proclaimed virtues, and tions on the lingering effects of Stalin’s “cyn- the old virtues are denounced as sins—the ical, high-handed treatment” of North Korea consequences are likely to be especially dire. does as much to explain its sometimes violent The “end of history” is likely to be a culturally and enigmatic behavior today as anything I Marxist world regime. It’s time for Christians have read. North Korea’s lack of trust toward and other cultural conservatives to start build- all foreigners and its obsession with juche ing parallel structures. (self-reliance) are what Weathersby calls “an Paul M. Weyrich impossible legacy,” leaving Pyongyang “with- President, Free Congress Foundation out an understanding of normal relations Washington, D.C. with other states or even an understanding that such relations can exist.” Those who Deciphering North Korea hope for quick changes in North Korean With Washington and much of Asia on ten- behavior are doomed to disappointment. terhooks over the possibility of a second multi- Weathersby’s piece should be required read- stage missile launch by Pyongyang, the WQ ing for all armchair strategists on North showed impeccable timing with “Korean Korea. Questions” [WQ, Summer ’99]. Robert Donald P. Gregg Manning’s piece is very strong, with the excep- Chairman, The Korea Society tion of its lurid opening, and Don Oberdorfer New York, N.Y.

Correspondence 5 While Kathryn Weathersby’s article on the WOODROW WILSON Korean War shows again that the real-time INTERNATIONAL CENTER vision of U.S. leadership in the Cold War was FOR SCHOLARS much better than the hindsight of academic “revisionists,” her analysis needs correction: Stalin’s reference to a “changed international situation” as a basis for approving Kim Il Sung’s

Lee H. Hamilton, Director request for permission to attack South Korea in June 1950 did not mean a Soviet decision to BOARD OF TRUSTEES “abandon cooperation with the Americans and Joseph A. Cari, Jr., Chair pursue [Soviet] interests through more aggres- Steven Alan Bennett., Vice Chair sive means.” The last vestige of any such coop-

Ex Officio Members: Madeleine K. Albright, eration died with the initiation of the Marshall Secretary of State, James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, Plan in 1947. The Prague Coup and the Berlin John W. Carlin, Archivist of the United States, Blockade of 1948 were already signs of Stalin’s Penn Kemble, Acting Director, U.S. Information Agency, increasing boldness. The “changed interna- William R. Ferris, Chair, National Endowment for the tional situation” to which Stalin referred Humanities, I. Michael Heyman, Secretary, Smithsonian meant his belief that prospects for a successful Institution, Richard W. Riley, Secretary of Education, Donna E. Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services. conquest of South Korea had improved due to Private Citizen Members: Carol Cartwright, Daniel L. the Soviet Union’s possession of the atomic Doctoroff, Jean L. Hennessey, Daniel L. Lamaute, Paul Hae bomb since September 1949 and communist Park, Thomas R. Reedy, S. Dillon Ripley, Nancy M. Zirkin. control of the Chinese mainland. Designated by the President: Samuel R. Berger. Weathersby implies that “careful examina- tion” of the Panmunjom talks by a British his- THE WILSON COUNCIL Albert Abramson, Cyrus A. Ansary, J. Burchenal Ault, Charles torian in 1990 showed the United States was F. Barber, Theodore C. Barreaux, Joseph C. Bell, John L. responsible for “dragging out” the talks. Bryant, Jr., Conrad Cafritz, Nicola L. Caiola, Raoul L. Carroll, Missing is any reference to the disinclination of Albert V. Casey, Peter B. Clark, William T. Coleman, Jr., the United States, not to mention its ROK ally, Michael D. DiGiacomo, Frank P. Doyle, Donald G. Drapkin, to force North Korean and Chinese F. Samuel Eberts III, I. Steven Edelson, John Foster, Barbara Communist prisoners of war to return unwill- Hackman Franklin, Bruce Gelb, Jerry P. Genova, Alma ingly to their homelands, which was the real Gildenhorn, Joseph B. Gildenhorn, David F. Girard-diCarlo, Michael B. Goldberg, Raymond A. Guenter, Robert R. Harlin, sticking point in the negotiations. Verna R. Harrah, Eric Hotung, Frances Humphrey Howard, Weathersby’s account of the Chinese inter- John L. Howard, Darrell E. Issa, Jerry Jasinowski, Brenda vention is elliptical and leaves the impression LaGrange Johnson, Dennis D. Jorgensen, Shelly Kamins, that Mao had limited goals and sought a stale- Anastasia D. Kelly, Christopher Kennan, Steven Kotler, mate, whereas in fact the Chinese recaptured William H. Kremer, Kathleen D. Lacey, Donald S. Lamm, Seoul and endeavored by “cautious advance” Harold Levy, David Link, David S. Mandel, Edwin S. Marks, Robert McCarthy, C. Peter McColough, James D. to force the United States out of Korea. In McDonald, Philip Merrill, Jeremiah L. Murphy, Martha T. mid-February 1951, Mao Zedong said China Muse, Gerald L. Parsky, L. Richardson Preyer, Donald Robert might need two more years of fighting to Quartel, Jr., Edward V. Regan, J. Steven Rhodes, Edwin achieve its objective. Only when the tide of Robbins, Philip E. Rollhaus, Jr., George P. Shultz, Raja W. battle turned again did a negotiated settle- Sidawi, Ron Silver, William A. Slaughter, Timothy E. ment become feasible. Stapleford, Linda Bryant Valentine, Deborah Wince-Smith, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. Kenneth N. Skoug, Jr. Alexandria, Va.

The Wilson Center is the nation’s living memorial to Robert Manning’s article [“The Enigma Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. It is located at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Penn- of the North,” WQ, Summer ’99] is an excel- sylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004–3027. lent antidote for much of the thinking that is Created by law in 1968, the Center is Washington’s only prevalent in Washington on North Korea. Its independent, wide-ranging institute for advanced study importance lies in his comment, “Contrary where vital cultural issues and their deep historical back- ground are explored through research and dialogue. Visit the to the conventional wisdom, North Korea is Center on the Worldwide Web at http://wwics.si.edu. neither crazy nor unpredictable. Once its logic of bluster and brinkmanship is under-

6 WQ Autumn 1999 stood, its behavior appears to be quite pre- dictable.” There is a widespread belief in Washing- ton, both in the administration and on the Hill, that the regime in the North is mad, and its leader, Kim Jong Il, bizarre. The dan- ger is that as long as the regime is considered irrational and its leader non compos mentis, a coherent U.S. foreign policy toward that regime appears unnecessary, and indeed impossible, and thus one can resort to ad hoc responses. If we consider that the prima- ry focus of the government in the North is regime survival, then its actions become, as Manning argues, predictable. However despicable the North may be to its own peo- ple, and however provocative it is to the South, few regimes in the world have lasted as long. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il have not been stupid on their own terms. North Korea’s mistake lies in using provocative actions and the vilification of the United States as bargaining chips. Such actions are self-defeating if the North Koreans want Washington to lift sanctions and develop normal relations, as it appears they do. Each action provokes a negative reaction in Congress and makes it more difficult for any administration to justify “carrots.” advanced missiles of a range sufficient to David I. Steinberg strike the United States, and hundreds more Director, Asian Studies to intimidate Taiwan. In each instance, Georgetown University states are using nuclear weapons to bolster Washington, D.C. their strategies, to send a wake-up call, or to intimidate. Robert Manning has done a service for The dispute on the Korean Peninsula is the policy dialogue on North Korea by clari- usually seen as the last gasp of the Cold War. fying the options facing Washington. As But it more accurately marks the beginning Manning makes clear, North Korea is now of a second nuclear age, one that involves “using” nuclear weapons. In fact, it is using new powers and has little to do with the nuclear weapons in more or less the way the Cold War. Until this fundamental change is Soviet Union and the United States did dur- understood, U.S. policy will continue to re- ing the Cold War, by exploiting their politi- fight the last (cold) war. cal utility. It is true that North Korea is not Paul Bracken firing nuclear weapons at Okinawa or Seoul, Yale University but it is certainly using them as instruments New Haven, Conn. of deterrence and coercion. North Korea is the most extreme case of a The more the United States and its allies more general pattern in Asia. Nuclear esca- address their problems directly with Pyong- lation dangers are an important factor in the yang, the less successful they seem to be. As Kashmir dispute between India and Robert Manning points out, continued ship- Pakistan. Iran makes overtures to the West ments of food and fuel will do little but while simultaneously protecting its missile “beget more bad behavior” by the North. and nuclear weapons projects. China tests And as long as North Korea persists in

Correspondence 7 threatening South Korea and Japan with expansion. In cities, this meant carving out conventional forces, ballistic missiles, and large public spaces near the center to guar- nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, antee that at least some land remained the prospects of an armed rivalry among the undeveloped. While his parks now repre- Koreas, Japan, and China will only sent the crown jewels of their cities and increase. some of America’s best efforts at urban Instead of groveling before Pyongyang planning, for Olmsted they were a rear- to get it to behave, the United States and guard action. For him, a more effective its allies need to work together to advance way to see that nature survived future the only sure path to peace: Korean unifi- urban expansion was to develop land at cation. This requires that the United much lower densities, or in other words, to States and its allies stop bribing Pyongyang build suburbs. out of fear of what it might do militarily Olmsted saw private spaces in the sub- and instead hold it to its 1991 pledge to urbs as more important to the survival of eliminate its ability to make nuclear nature than the great public spaces in weapons. It also demands that Seoul’s cities. The large yard, extended over thou- emerging democracy become sufficiently sands of homes, provided families with pluralistic to accept citizens from the daily access to nature. In his book Public North, as well as sufficiently accessible to Parks and the Enlargement of Towns foreign capital to speed its own rebuilding. (1870), Olmsted argues that “probably the Finally, the United States must maintain advantages of civilization can be found its Asian defense obligations and make it illustrated and demonstrated under no cir- clear to Beijing that China has more to cumstances so completely as in some sub- gain from a prosperous, denuclearized urban neighborhoods where each family Korea than from a divided Korea with the abode stands fifty or a hundred feet or North goading Japan to remilitarize. more apart from all others, and at some These efforts may not result in any new distance from the public road.” The state- “deals” with Pyongyang, but they are far ment places Olmsted squarely in the tradi- more likely to produce peace. tion of American planners and architects Henry Sokolski who advocated decentralizing cities. Executive Director, Surely many aspects of the modern Nonproliferation Policy Education Center metropolis would dismay Olmsted, but the Washington, D.C. large-lot subdivision that continues to drive urban sprawl would not likely be one Olmsted’s Urban Ideas of them. Witold Rybczynski’s article on “Why We Robert E. Lang Need Olmsted Again” [WQ, Summer ‘99] Director, Urban and Metropolitan Research in light of urban sprawl is well argued, save Fannie Mae Foundation for one detail: Olmsted’s ideas have con- Washington, D.C. tributed to sprawl. Rybczynski himself rais- es the issue in the rhetorical question, Regarding the fine Olmsted essay by “Olmsted, the Godfather of Sprawl?” But Witold Rybczynski, I must offer one small he then argues that Olmsted, despite but, to Buffalo, important correction. designing the first large planned residen- While our city did dreadfully convert tial community and living in the suburbs Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway into an express- for much of his life, was really more con- way in the 1960s, I am pleased to report that cerned with urban public space and would Olmsted’s Lincoln Parkway, Bidwell Parkway, likely have rejected the private world of and Chapin Parkway are beautifully intact, wait- contemporary suburbia. While we can ing to be strolled and enjoyed by all traveling never be sure of the answer to this ques- Olmsted scholars and fans. Readers can find tion, it is worth exploring the issue a bit more information and a map online at further. http://www.geocities.com/brodericksm/index.htm. Olmsted was deeply concerned with Cynthia Van Ness ensuring that nature survived urban Buffalo, N.Y.

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The Cool Revolution shutting down in summer. Remember the old theory that cli- “Engineered air” changed our living mate shapes the economic, cultural, and working quarters as well, though not and political destinies of nations? An always for the better. After air condition- exhibit at the National Building ing entered the average American home Museum in Washington, D.C., unin- during the 1950s, deep porches, high ceil- tentionally restores a bit of credibility ings, and thick walls disappeared. Man- to this very un-PC notion. made climate also reshaped On display until January city skylines. Without air 2, 2000, Stay Cool! Air conditioning, soaring sky- Conditioning America scrapers on today’s scale shows how “man-made were unthinkable. What the weather” transformed exhibit doesn’t mention is 20th-century America, that without air conditioning and leaves the distinct we also wouldn’t have “sick” impression that an engi- buildings and, perhaps, the neered indoor climate is frenzy of the “24/7” life. It’s an important source of remarkable to think that the country’s sustained between the office and the success. car, Americans now spend Imagine a world without much of their time in envi- computers, reliable pharmaceuticals, glass ronments that simply did not exist a cen- skyscrapers, space modules, or precision tury ago. Stay Cool! leaves no doubt that equipment—a world where cities “emp- life before AC differed from that of today tied in summers as residents fled to in more ways than temperature. mountain and seaside resorts,” as the exhibit puts it, and “workers’ productivity Please Pass the Poison declined in direct proportion to the heat The controversial Australian philoso- and humidity outside.” Imagine Silicon pher Peter Singer recently arrived in the Valley—or Houston or Las Vegas or United States to take up a new chair in Atlanta—thriving in 100-degree heat. bioethics at Princeton University’s Center Oddly, the transformations wrought by for Human Values. Singer is the chief air conditioning have attracted little schol- theoretician of the animal rights move- arly attention, with notable exceptions ment—he compares the human including Raymond O. Arsenault’s 1984 “speciesist” dominion over the animals to article in the Journal of Southern History “the centuries of tyranny by white and Gail Cooper’s Air Conditioning humans over black humans.” A thorough- America (1998). As early as 1888, factories going vegan, he pads around in canvas installed mechanical cooling systems, sneakers. Yet he is also an aggressive advo- allowing pasta and chocolate to be made cate of euthanasia and infanticide. It all year-round without turning limp or gray. makes sense if, like Singer, you’re a radi- Film, computer chips, many synthetic cal utilitarian and believe that animals textiles, and medicines are among the and humans have similar experiences of goods that could not be made at all with- pain and suffering. Not one to mince out a controlled climate. Nor would words, he has argued that infanticide is Hollywood likely exist. The Folies justified when it makes way for another Bergère Theater in New York offered baby with “better prospects of a happy patrons summertime frost and fantasy as life.” Discussing one case, he wrote: early as 1911, ending a theater custom of “Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac

10 WQ Autumn 1999 infant has no adverse effect on others, it quoted Tocqueville’s Democracy in would, according to the total view, be America: “I think I can see the whole des- right to kill him.” tiny of America contained in the first Singer has been equally plainspoken Puritan who landed on those shores.” about his new country, writer Michael They named John Winthrop as that first Specter notes in his New Yorker (Sept. 6, Puritan. But in the Jesuit magazine 1999) profile of the philosopher. Singer America (July 31, 1999), Bellah now says once declared that America’s social fabric that they (and Tocqueville) were wrong. “has decayed to the point at which there The first Puritan who contained our des- are grounds for fearing that it has passed tiny, writes Bellah, was Roger Williams, the point of no return.” Specter writes: the Baptist proponent of religious free- “When I asked him why he thought it dom who was banished to Rhode Island was worth bothering with the place if it from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. was so far gone, he replied, ‘The alterna- “Roger Williams was a moral genius,” tives are all too horrible to consider. I Bellah writes, “but he was a sociological have to at least give it a try.’ ” catastrophe. After he founded the first Reading this, it occurred to us that if Baptist church, he left it for a smaller and Singer is our only hope, he may be right: purer one. That, too, he found inade- there really is a case for euthanasia. quate, so he founded a church that con- sisted only of himself, his wife, and one Red Rebound? other person. One wonders how he stood After decades of bad breaks in the pub- even those two. Since Williams ignored lic relations area, things finally seem to be secular society, money took over in looking up for the Communist Party Rhode Island in a way that would not be USA. Its youth arm, the Young Com- true in Massachusetts or Connecticut for munist League, says it has picked up a long time. Rhode Island under 1,500 new members since launching a Williams gives us an early and local Web site in 1997, Leora Broydo reports in example of what happens when the Utne Reader (May–June 1999). The party sacredness of the individual is not bal- itself, which saw membership slide to anced by any sense of the whole or con- 15,000 in the early 1990s, claims cern for the common good.” it signed up 4,000 new mem- Bellah likens America’s Protestant “cul- bers during a recent four- tural code” to a genetic code. “A genetic month stretch. code can produce a highly successful Speculation is rife about species, successful because specialized for the sources of the Reds’ ris- a particular environment. But then, even ing fortunes. Maybe it’s the at its moment of greatest success, because allure of lost causes or the of a dramatic change in that environ- promise of making a really awesome ges- ment, the code can lead to rapid extinc- ture of rebellion. Or maybe the Party sim- tion.” The United States faces such a ply isn’t keeping up its old membership challenge today, he warns. standards. One young Communist told Bellah looks to the religious imagina- Swing (Oct. 1998), “Kids who are 17 and tion for a solution, and specifically to the 18 today were 10 when the Soviet Union Catholic vision of society itself as a sacra- collapsed. They’re like, ‘Communism, ment of God. “Just when we are in many what’s that?’ ” ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, A Catholic Correction? our capacity to imagine a social fabric Fourteen years ago, in Habits of the that would hold individuals together is Heart, an examination of contemporary vanishing. This is in part because of the American culture and character, sociolo- fact that our ethical individualism ...is gist Robert Bellah and his colleagues linked to an economic individualism that,

Findings 11 ironically, knows nothing of the sacred- private English schools in Cairo. ness of the individual. Its only standard is Replying in the online magazine money, and the only thing more sacred CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org), than money is more money. What eco- Said alleges a number of factual errors nomic individualism destroys and what and labels Weiner a Zionist “propagan- our kind of religious individualism cannot dist.” He does not directly answer the cen- restore is solidarity, a sense of being mem- tral charge that he did not grow up in bers of the same body.” Jerusalem. “I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my A Tale of Two Autobiographies extended family ...was,” Said writes. The appearance of Edward Said’s The house on Brenner Street was “a fami- new autobiography, Out of Place, is ly house in the Arab sense, which meant putting book reviewers in quite a pickle. that our families were one in ownership.” A professor of English and comparative Much of the true story, Weiner says, is literature at Columbia University, recounted in Said’s new book, albeit with- author of the influential Orientalism out any hint that the facts may be at vari- (1978) and other books, Said has also ance with his earlier accounts. been on the front lines of the Palestinian cause as a member of the Y2K II? Palestine National Council and, lately, What could be worse than the Y2K a critic of Yasir Arafat’s compromises problem? No less a source than software with Israel. On the left he is seen as a maker Adobe gives the answer in the sainted public intellectual. summer issue of its eponymous maga- Much of Said’s moral authority zine: “Paper documents, especially those derives from his own oft-declared status made before the use of pulp (and the as an exile, along with thousands of oth- introduction of acid), can remain in good ers, from his native Palestine. In a self- condition for hundreds of years, but a typ- portrait he has offered in various forms ical digital file on and forums, from Harper’s to a BBC a CD-ROM might documentary, Said has suggested that stay fully intact for he lived happily at 10 Brenner Street in only 30 years. Jerusalem until, when he was 12, he Hardware and soft- and his well-to-do family were driven ware can become out by Jewish forces months before the obsolete even Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49. more quickly. Like But it is all a lie, charges Justus Reid the millennium Weiner in Commentary (Sept. 1999), bug, digital storage which is published by the American is taking time to Jewish Committee. A scholar in residence register as a serious at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, problem, but it Weiner says he spent three years research- could be far more potent: huge amounts ing property deeds, school records, and of knowledge recorded in the late 20th other sources. He says that Said was born century exist only in digital form. in Jerusalem—apparently on one of his Obviously, important digital files must be family’s visits to his uncle’s house on transferred every few years to fresh Brenner Street—but as his birth certifi- disks.... cate specified, his permanent residence “But skeptics claim that there won’t be was in Cairo, where his family had time or money to make sure all that moved about nine years earlier. Until important data get transferred—there’s Said went to the United States (his father just too much of it. The best way, they was a U.S. citizen) to complete his educa- say, to preserve a digital file? Print it on tion in 1951, Weiner asserts, he attended acid free paper.”

12 WQ Autumn 1999 AT ISSUE Our Educational Ambivalence

merica’s schools must be doing at least examined in the ensuing controversy was the A a few things right. After all, despite assumption that whites themselves “act their well-publicized shortcomings, the white.” The truth is that Americans of all kinds United States is—for the moment, at least— are deeply ambivalent about academic the undisputed economic and cultural achievement. champion of the world. There are many One source of mixed emotions is American other explanations for this success, such as egalitarianism and its noxious sibling, the spir- the American openness to immigrant talent it of conformity. Over the past summer, I and an economic system that gives generous watched some overachieving suburban par- scope to the ambition of individuals. But ents worry (along with my wife and me) over surely our educational system has something whether to send their children to an enriched to do with it. public school program. Beneath the prudent It’s not difficult to pinpoint some of the sys- questions—would the additional challenges tem’s strengths. Higher education in this be good for the child?—there was a strong and country, for all its flaws, is the envy of the unexpected undercurrent of another sort, a world. We make up for a lot of lost intellectu- worry that committing the children so com- al ground when the kids go off to college, and pletely to academic pursuits might deprive especially when they enter graduate school for them of a “normal” childhood. By junior and more specialized training. Noth- senior high school, the forces ing seems to concentrate the of “normalcy” are cresting American mind like the need to inside the schools, pushed pay the rent. If international test along by those two great comparisons are to be believed, forces for adolescent confor- moreover, the American system WQ mity, hormones and popular also performs relatively well in culture. High achievers still the earliest years of education, up to junior tend to earn as much ignominy as honor. high school. But then relative performance More educational ambivalence grows out begins to slip, and by graduation day of our cultural decision to value schooling American kids are clinging to some of the almost solely in economic terms, reducing the lower rungs of the international ladder. (See intrinsic rewards of learning to a mere after- the chart on page 47.) thought. If the purpose of an education is to What happens in those middle years—the get a good job, schooling itself becomes a job, last years of formal education for many stu- or very like one. There’s merit in this dents—is one of the great mysteries of approach, yet in the back of their minds many American education. The stacks of education- parents also want to spare their children this al research produced over the last couple of introduction to the rat race. They watch with decades yield little enlightenment. Experts a certain dismay as the homework piles high- tend to change the subject when queried. I er with every new school year and the acade- suspect that one reason for this silence is that mic stresses weigh ever heavier. Perhaps they many of the answers lead straight to the “soft” decide not to insist on that extra hour with the realm of culture and values. books—there will be time enough for all that We missed one opportunity for a national later in life, they think. discussion of educational values some years These forms of educational ambivalence ago when controversy exploded around a are deeply rooted in soil far from the classroom study showing that black students were ham- door. They ought to serve as reminders that the pered by a cultural prejudice of their peers: improvement of American education cannot doing well was seen as “acting white.” It was end with the renovation of the schoolhouse. an important discovery, but what wasn’t much —Steven Lagerfeld

At Issue 13 The Environmental Factor

Do the world’s environmental problems threaten American national security? A look inside a decade-long debate.

by Geoffrey D. Dabelko

t should have been the best of times for cle was called, touched a nerve in a little-known assistant professor at the Washington. Vice President Al Gore asked IUniversity of Toronto. In a lengthy 1994 the Central Intelligence Agency to oversee a Atlantic Monthly article that electrified read- systematic investigation of the causes of “state ers all the way to the White House, journalist failure” it described. Samuel R. Berger, then Robert Kaplan not only paid homage to the deputy national security adviser, scheduled a research of then 37-year-old Thomas Homer- hurried meeting to address the issues Kaplan Dixon but compared him to George F. Ken- had raised. Homer-Dixon became a regular nan, the architect of the containment doc- on flights between Washington and Toronto. trine that guided the United States during a The article appeared at an opportune half-century of cold war. Citing Homer- moment, arriving on the heels of a series of Dixon’s 1991 work in the academic journal foreign-policy crises far afield of usual International Security—“even bolder and American interests: the 1993 military debacle more detailed” than Kennan’s “X” article of in Somalia, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, 1947—Kaplan sketched a dark view of the and the simmering civil war in Liberia. global future in which growing scarcities of President Bill Clinton suggested that “the water, forests, arable land, and fish, along with coming anarchy” might be the successor rapid population growth and other ills, would vision to Mel Gibson’s emblematic depiction breed civil strife and war. The environment of a broken and lawless post-nuclear holo- will be the national security issue of the 21st caust world in the film The Road Warrior century, Kaplan declared, and Homer-Dixon (1982). American foreign policy officials were held the keys to understanding it. struggling to understand the roots of these Kaplan’s own travels through the chaos of conflicts, casting about for a new vision to West Africa, where he saw governments and replace containment as a guide in the post- entire societies in places such as Sierra Leone Cold War world. Was the violence in the less and Togo crumbling under the weight of developed world finally sufficiently menac- unbearable environmental and demographic ing to warrant sustained attention from secu- stresses, seemed to bring these academic rity thinkers? Were the long-ignored environ- hypotheses to life. “Africa may be as relevant mental and population crises in these areas to the future character of world politics as the finally reaching a boiling point? Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to As they read Kaplan’s account of anarchy the two Balkan wars and the First World in West Africa, moreover, officials in War,” he suggested. Washington were faced with what seemed a “The Coming Anarchy,” as Kaplan’s arti- parallel case much closer to home. For years

14 WQ Autumn 1999 Capital Growth (1997), by Martin Langford

there had been a steady influx of impover- farmers tending tiny plots became increas- ished refugees from Haiti, but in 1994 it sud- ingly precarious, Haitians migrated by the denly turned into a torrent, as thousands of thousands to the cities, where overcrowding Haitians attempted the desperate raft trip to and deteriorating conditions provoked southern Florida. In October, President protests and riots. The instability weakened Clinton felt compelled to respond, ordering Aristide’s government and encouraged the the U.S. military not only to stem the tide of 1991 military coup against him—and ulti- refugees but to restore the democratically mately helped spur the exodus to Florida. elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s ut inevitably the “coming anar- dismal ecological state seemed a likely root chy” bubble burst. Kaplan’s thesis cause of its problems. Decades of rapid pop- Bwas beset by critics on all sides—by ulation growth had pushed poor farmers defense planners and intellectuals con- onto ever more marginal lands, stripping the cerned about diverting money and attention island nation of its forests and the precious from the Pentagon’s core war-fighting mis- topsoil they protected. As the lives of hillside sion (was the army supposed to plant trees on

Environmental Security 15 Haitian hillsides?), as well as by environ- 1993 article, now claimed the spotlight. mentalists who objected to the idea of defin- (Kaplan added fuel to these fires as well with ing the environment as a security issue. a 1993 book, Balkan Ghosts.) The job of fig- Some academics criticized Homer-Dixon uring out precisely what role the environ- for going beyond his evidence—he spoke in ment does play as a source of conflict is now Kaplan’s article of proliferating dictatorships back in the hands of a growing group of and predicted the collapse of India and scholars and specialists. A handful of these Pakistan. Most important, Kaplan’s “anar- people work at places that represent the ten- chy” thesis suffered an obvious logical flaw. tative institutionalization of environmental While poverty and environmental destruc- thinking in the traditional national security tion were grievous problems in the less devel- apparatus, such as the Pentagon’s Office of oped countries, most of them remained far Environmental Security. from the complete collapse suffered in Haiti and West Africa. “The Coming Anarchy” he environment has often been looked to many critics like little more than a used as a tool of war, from the salt- perverse form of travel journalism with intel- Ting of Carthage to the Russians’ lectual window-dressing. It certainly was no scorched earth retreats before the armies of guide to the world’s future. Napoleon and Hitler. Plato, mocking the The nature of the environment’s contribu- notion of a republic of leisure, argued that tion to conflict—“sub-national, persistent, such a regime would soon resort to war to sat- and diffuse,” to quote Homer-Dixon in one of isfy its taste for more space and natural his more characteristic cautious moments— resources. But sustained thinking about the also made responses difficult to devise and environment-conflict connection is a prod- even harder to justify. There is something uct only of the last few decades. While clash- appealing about taking aim at the root causes es over non-renewable resources such as oil of conflict, but reactive steps aimed at the or gold are as familiar as the Persian Gulf symptoms (seal off the borders, and if that War, the question now is about the role of doesn’t work, send in the troops) always seem renewable resources such as water, fish, to take precedence. American foreign policy forests, and arable land. and security spending patterns strongly reflect Many of the first systematic thinkers took that predilection—just over $18 billion in a sweeping view, speaking not only of new 1997 for foreign aid (which includes military environmental challenges but of entirely assistance) and more than $300 billion for new definitions of national security, as the the Department of Defense and intelligence Worldwatch Institute’s Lester Brown did in a community. 1977 monograph, Redefining National Yes, there are meaningful connections Security. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, now between environmental problems and orga- president of the Carnegie Endowment for nized violence, many concluded, but in the International Peace, argued in a much-noted backlash after Kaplan’s article, few were pre- 1989 article in Foreign Affairs that just as the pared to say that the environment plays a meaning of national security was expanded more significant role than the traditionally during the 1970s “to include international understood political, economic, and social economics as it became clear that the U.S. causes of conflict. As the meltdown of economy was...powerfully affected by eco- Yugoslavia commanded more of its atten- nomic policies in dozens of other countries,” tion, the policy crowd moved on to other the- so it would need to be enlarged in the 1990s ories about the roots of conflict. Ethnicity to “include resource, environmental and and “the clash of civilizations,” as Harvard demographic issues.” As a case in point she University’s Samuel Huntington put it in a cited Haiti, observing that bulldozers were

> Geoffrey D. Dabelko is director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at the Wilson Center and edi- tor of the Project’s ECSP Report. He is coeditor with Ken Conca of Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto (1998). Copyright © 1999 by Geoffrey D. Dabelko.

16 WQ Autumn 1999 The Cost of Progress (India, 1992), by Bhudev Bhagat needed to clear Port-au-Prince streets of top- a “Green Helmet” force to react to natural soil swept off the mountains during the rainy catastrophes and environmental crises. season. “Until Haiti is reforested,” she pre- Also skeptical of arguments for “securitiz- dicted, “it will never be politically stable.” ing” environmental problems are a number Former leaders Gro Harlem Brundtland of of scholars such as Daniel Deudney, a polit- Norway and Mikhail Gorbachev of the ical scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Soviet Union joined the argument, contend- Long before Kaplan’s article appeared, ing that the environment at least deserved to Deudney had attacked the notion that envi- join economics and politics as a stabilizing ronmental scarcities necessarily breed con- third leg of the security stool. flict and scolded his fellow environmental- In the less developed countries of the ists. “The nationalist and militarist mindsets world, these ideas have elicited mixed emo- closely associated with ‘national security’ tions. Obtaining food and water is a daily thinking directly conflict with the core of the struggle for the world’s 800 million malnour- environmentalist world view. Harnessing ished people, and according their problems these sentiments for a ‘war on pollution’ is a the high priority of a security issue obviously dangerous and probably self-defeating enter- has great appeal. But leaders in Brasília, prise,” he declared in 1990. Cairo, and Kuala Lumpur also fear that such an approach will invite violations of their athews and others who argued national sovereignty as outside powers inter- for a broad redefinition of secu- vene to “help.” They gave a frosty reception, Mrity sought to place the physical for example, to Gorbachev’s 1988 proposal to health of the individual or the society, rather complement the blue-helmeted armed than just the territory of the state, at the cen- forces serving under the United Nations with ter of what was to be secured. Beginning in

Environmental Security 17 the early 1990s, Homer-Dixon and other fessor of political science and director of the “second wave” scholars and practitioners— program) and the Swiss Environmental many based in peace research institutes in Conflicts Project have identified and studied Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Germany— more than 50 cases. narrowed the scope to focus on environmen- The states of Assam and Tripura in eastern tal stress that causes or triggers violence: what India, for example, have been inundated in environmental problems breed armed recent decades by tens of thousands of threats to territory and populations? Their Bangladeshi immigrants seeking to escape findings have been surprising. flooding, drought, and famine in their low- It is an article of faith, for example, that lying, land-poor homeland. The newcomers the world faces imminent “water wars.” altered the local balances in landownership, Former United Nations secretary-general political power, ethnicity, and religion, stir- Boutros Boutros-Ghali once predicted that ring local resentments, riots, and an anti- “the next war in the Middle East will be over immigrant movement that advocated inde- water, not oil.” But scrutiny of the historical pendence from India and deportation of record reveals that scarcities of renewable “alien land-grabbers.” The violence, which environmental resources have rarely been a was particularly intense in the early 1980s, direct cause of wars between states. There are has claimed thousands of lives. arguably only two relevant cases in recent history. During the intermittent Anglo- n Chiapas, Mexico, another set of envi- Icelandic “Cod War” of the 1970s, a dispute ronmental disturbances—soil erosion over access to dwindling fish stocks, British Iand deforestation, along with rapid pop- and Icelandic vessels played chicken in the ulation growth among the local Indian pop- frigid waters off Iceland. The 100-hour ulations—helped fuel the angry demands for Honduran-Salvadoran “Soccer War” of 1969 land reform that propelled the 1994 was a far more serious affair. Sparked by soc- Zapatista uprising. The Zapatistas’ attacks cer match incidents, its root causes lay in shocked Mexico and the world, speeding the overcrowding and severe deforestation that peso crisis that rocked not only Mexico but over the years had driven thousands of world financial markets. Salvadorans across the border to an unwel- Yet for every Chiapas, there is at least one coming Honduras. The brief war left several other case where severe environmental stress thousand dead. does not lead to conflict—Taiwan with its severely polluted air and water, Madagascar nvironmental woes do, however, with its rapid loss of biodiversity, or Costa contribute to conflicts within Rica with its appalling deforestation. During Enations—and the overwhelming the second wave, researchers asked only how majority of armed conflicts occurring the environment might contribute to con- around the world today are internal battles. flict, not why it might do so in some cases Writing in 1994, Homer-Dixon pointed to and not in others. This is one of the subjects an environmental influence on two types of of the current “third wave” of research. internal conflicts: “ethnic clashes arising Efforts in the third wave include the con- from population migration and deepened tinuing statistical work of American scholars social cleavages due to environmental scarci- on the U.S. government-sponsored State ty,” and “civil strife (including insurgency, Failure Task Force and other quantitative banditry, and coups d’état) caused by envi- research conducted by Norwegian peace ronmental scarcity that affects economic pro- researchers Wenche Hauge, Tanja Elling- ductivity and, in turn, people’s livelihoods, sen, and Nils Petter Gleditsch. These mas- the behavior of elite groups, and the ability of sive number-crunching efforts seek to find states to meet these changing demands.” correlations between “state failures” or “civil Researchers at Homer-Dixon’s Peace and wars” and environmental stress. Both studies Conflict Studies Program at the University of are quick to identify other political, econom- Toronto (where he is now an associate pro- ic, and social variables as more critical than

18 WQ Autumn 1999 the environment. They highlight instead the environment and conflict research will be weaker indirect effects of the environment used. Will the more industrialized coun- on other factors that correlate with state fail- tries use this knowledge to anticipate con- ure or civil war, such as infant mortality and flicts and attempt to seal them off from the other quality of life indicators. rest of the world, or will they try to fashion They also seek to identify both the specif- cooperative remedies for environmental ic vulnerabilities of states and what and demographic problems and strength- researchers call their “capacity,” or ability to en the ability of less developed countries to cope with environmental challenges. These meet challenges? are difficult statistical exercises, hampered by the absence of even the most basic data on ome encouraging signs suggest that such matters as deforestation, air quality, and the industrial powers will take the water quality. For vulnerability, one can ask, Swiser way. Earlier this year, for exam- as the State Failure Task Force did, What ple, a pilot study on environment and securi- proportion of the population is engaged in ty by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization subsistence agriculture? How much storm included in its recommendations a call for damage is experienced each year? For capac- environmental and developmental aid. ity: How professional or corrupt are the state Recognizing shared environmental prob- bureaucracies? How developed are rail and lems—which are in a sense common ene- road systems? In his new book, Environment, mies of our own creation—holds the poten- Scarcity, and Violence (1999), Homer-Dixon tial to bring countries together. The promise points to the importance of addressing the can be glimpsed not only in all-encompass- “ingenuity gap” many less developed coun- ing efforts such as the 1987 Montreal tries suffer. Protocol on ozone depletion, but in much In a sense, this focus on the ability of gov- smaller realms. In southern Africa, joint water ernments and societies to cope with environ- projects have eased tensions between semi- mental challenges merely puts the problem arid South Africa and its once hostile neigh- back in terms of age-old concerns. The abil- bors. Despite intense differences over human ity to adapt has always been paramount in rights, Taiwan, spying charges, and other the survival of peoples, nations, and civiliza- issues during the last three years, the United tions. But it also does something new if until States and China have managed to sign more now you have been thinking only in terms of than 20 cooperative bilateral agreements targeting root causes (environmental stress) involving water, energy, forest, and other or obvious symptoms (violence). environmental projects. Homer-Dixon argues that “the world will Our new understanding of the impact of probably see a steady increase in the inci- environmental challenges tends to blur dence of violent conflict that is caused, at some of the hard and fast distinctions least in part, by environmental scarcity.” This between traditional definitions of security is the kind of statement that has earned him and more ambitious modern ones. Helping criticism in the past for violating the scholar- a Haiti or a Sierra Leone may not yield an ly taboo against “using the future as evi- immediately identifiable payoff in averting a dence.” Looking over the horizon is the busi- particular conflict, yet it does aid the cause of ness of practitioners and politicians, these peace and tranquility. In the future, a defini- critics maintain, while scholars properly con- tion of security that leans exclusively on con- fine themselves to the evidence of the past flict and its prevention will be too cramped and present. Yet, at the same time, policy- to accommodate the reality of a world in makers complain that Homer-Dixon and oth- which renewable resources will be ever ers fail to offer specific policy recommenda- scarcer and in which it will be increasingly tions. It may be a good sign that both sides are difficult to seal ourselves off—morally, emo- unhappy, a sign that progress toward some tionally, and physically—from poverty, dis- kind of new understanding is under way. ease, and environmental degradation in the An important question now is how the less developed nations.

Environmental Security 19 Call Me Mister

In which the author laments the demise of formal address and other useful ceremonial distinctions. by George Watson

ome years ago, when T. S. Eliot of first names. “The Prime Minister has was the grand old man of English noticed that the habit of Private Sletters, a younger poet, Kathleen Secretaries and others addressing each Raine, wrote a letter to a newspaper com- other by their Christian names about mat- plaining about the growing lack of for- ters of an official character is increasing, mality in London literary life. and ought to be stopped.” First names She had just had a letter from an aspir- should only be used in brief notes, he ing young poet she hardly knew address- went on, or in “personal and private” ing her as “Dear Katherine.” So the communications. That shows how soon offense was double. Her name was the decline started. Churchill, who was Kathleen, after all, and in any case they by then in his sixties, already belonged to were not on first-name terms. Worse still, another age. The last British prime minis- the letter writer was asking her to show his ter to enter the House of Commons dur- poems to someone he called Tom Eliot, ing the reign of Queen Victoria, who died whom he had never met. It was all going in 1901, Churchill seems also to have too far, said Miss Raine, too far and too been the first whom his sovereign fast, and unless someone protested it addressed in letters by his first name. would all go further still. During the war, King George VI often Which it did. But the rot had set in wrote to him affectionately as “My dear much earlier. On November 12, 1940, as Winston.” There is no reason to suppose the danger of a Nazi invasion receded, Churchill resented it. But then, his objec- Winston Churchill issued a memo from tion to informality among officials had a 10 Downing Street condemning the use practical motive: “It is hard enough to fol-

20 WQ Autumn 1999 low people by their surnames.” dogmatic protest against a repressive soci- By the end of Churchill’s century, how- ety; then more formal again. That may ever, informality had gone much further, surprise Americans who usually think of and it is no longer realistic to expect to be their social life as rootedly simple, com- addressed by a last name at all, with or pared with that of Europe, but a British without a Mister. It is first names all the visitor can find its minor ceremonials way. Perhaps that helps to explain the vast exacting, and had better get them right. popularity of costume dramas based on Decorum is a matter of little things, and classic novels such as Jane Austen’s or little things can mean a lot. E. M. Forster’s. The appeal of such films The British, for example, do not nec- is anthropological, among other things, essarily shake hands with a host on leav- since they tell of a world of manners in ing a party; in America the gesture is the last century, or early in this, hardly obligatory, and its omission can be less remote than that of the Trobriand resented. Nor do the British repeat a Islands. In Pride and Prejudice, for exam- name on being introduced, which to that ple, the Bennets, who have been married small extent makes life simpler in the for years and have several daughters of United Kingdom, where the name is in marriageable age, address each other with any case often inaudible and one is not evident affection as Mr. Bennet and Mrs. necessarily supposed to care. If Amer- Bennet. That probably leaves a young icans think their social life informal, they audience gasping in wonder. Why did should think again. It has plenty of rules, people ever behave like that? Many who along with its own characteristic table watch such films, it seems clear, have not manners. Some of them are nationally just forgotten formality but the whole distinctive, and strangers had better try to case for formality, which goes far wider observe them or at least take note of than forms of address. So perhaps this is them. But then it is a law of existence the moment to make that case. that one only notices a rule when it is unfamiliar. Rules you already know, such ormality and informality are con- as saying please and thank-you or know- trastive systems, and the one ing how to use a knife and fork, are Fexists only by virtue of the other. obeyed without thinking, and cease to If you abolish formality, then you abolish exist, in the mind, as rules at all. informality too. Those who say they like Some issues are subtler than shaking things to be informal should consider that hands. The trouble with being told, “You argument closely. It is not only forms that don’t have to worry, we are all quite infor- are lost when they are forgotten. It is inti- mal here,” is that the statement can easily macy too. That is why, if you totally aban- mask a silent certitude that rules will in don conventions in favor of social sim- fact be observed. A visitor to an East plicity, you find conventions re-entering Coast university was once assured at a fac- the back door. In the 40 years I have ulty party, where first names were univer- known the United States, as a British visi- sal, that everybody was treated equally— tor, I have watched middle-class America no nonsense, for example, about the col- pass through several such changes. In the lege president arriving last, as royalty 1950s, as if conscious that the new sim- does, or leaving first. There was a good plicity was making life dull, which it was, deal of happy laughter, in which the pres- the American middle class dedicated ident joined, at the thought of institutions itself briefly to the interesting task of where such rules are kept. Then the visi- recomplicating it, and a visitor could find tor noticed that the president had arrived life in the United States something of a last, and, incidentally, left first. social minefield. Alistair Cooke used to Another aspect to the cult of the infor- call it “Galloping Gentility.” Then it mal in America is its myth of youth, turned simple again in the 1960s, as a which Bernard Shaw once remarked was

Call Me Mister 21 among its oldest traditions. There is a ten- But after biting her pen for ten dency to think that the United States is a minutes, during which she pic- recent institution. The myth may have tured to herself how pleasant it weakened lately, but it is still there, and would be to call him Frank when you can still astonish people by telling he should have told her so, and them that the United States has the oldest had found, upon repeated whis- constitution in the world or, to drop a real pered trials, that of all names it was bombshell, that the White House, which the pleasantest to pronounce, she was rebuilt after Washington, D.C. was decided upon refraining from writ- burned in 1814, is older than Bucking- ing it now. ham Palace. The earliest surviving por- tions of Buckingham Palace, which are No doubt she did manage it in the end, invisible from the street, date only from after they were safely married—the world the 1820s, and what you see from the out- had moved on from Jane Austen’s time— side, if you are prepared to crowd in and there are other trials of courage the among all those Japanese tourists, dates heroines of English fiction have never had from around 1913, including its famous to face at all. Pronouns, for example. balcony. That is a truth that goes against English is the only European language the grain, and if you have come to with only one pronoun of address, which is England to see old things, that is not what “you.” On the continent of Europe, where you want to be told. there are two, there are tough decisions to be taken every day, and you had better get n Europe, Old World courtesy can be them right. In northern India, there are sadly lacking, and the decay of formal three pronouns of address, which occa- Iaddress is only part of a wider pattern. sionally baffles even Indians. But one can E. M. Forster, shortly before he died in always walk around a pitfall. One solution, 1970, remarked that he had stopped writ- a student at the University of Delhi once ing fiction because he did not understand told me, is to address a total stranger in modern manners. In his Cambridge English. youth, young men had walked arm in arm First names were once a shock, though and addressed each other by their last sometimes a pleasant one. Virginia names; now they did not walk arm in arm, Woolf, in a letter to Siegfried Sassoon in and addressed each other by their first which she first called him Siegfried, calls names. That must have made him feel he it uncompromisingly “the horrid wanted to retire. But if the formal and the plunge,” which amounts to asking him to informal depend on each other, then first forgive her, as he did. In English boys’ names have by now lost their power to schools down to the Second World War, make any point at all. Once upon a time last names were in universal use, and their initial use felt like ice breaking, even to know the first name of another especially between a man and a woman. boy could feel like acquiring a guilty In The Eustace Diamonds (1873), secret that could one day be used to Anthony Trollope tells how, when Frank mock him. But then a lot of English first Greystock proposes marriage to Lucy names from the 19th century, such as Morris, who already loves him, she begins Archibald and Marmaduke, suddenly her letter of acceptance with “Dear Mr. looked ridiculous in the 20th, for Greystock,” and it was a matter of great unknown reasons, which perhaps consideration for her, Trollope remarks, to explains the sudden fashion among get even as far as that. authors for initials on title pages:

> George Watson, a Fellow of St. John’s College at Cambridge University, is the author of The Lost Literature of Socialism (1998). Copyright © 1999 by George Watson.

22 WQ Autumn 1999 P. G. Wodehouse, I. A. Richards, C. S. bowing, or rather the obligation to bow, Lewis. I only once heard Lewis called and “I would sooner he should till the Clive, which was indeed his baptismal ground than bow to a customer.” The name, and that was by a colleague who curtsey seems to have gone the same way was his contemporary. In practice he as the bow—gone with the wind— expected to be called Jack. though it was once customary in the Old On the other hand, the “horrid plunge” South. sometimes had to be taken. The question All this once seemed of enormous was how. When Harold Nicolson’s son importance, and perhaps was. When Nigel was a schoolboy at Eton in the Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United 1930s, he wrote to his father asking how he States in the 1830s and wrote a famous could most tactfully switch to calling his book called Democracy in America, the best friend James. Harold Nicolson, a country did not yet have universal adult, helpful and loving father, had an or indeed male, suffrage, even answer to that. He advised in the northern states. Nigel to “smother the explo- But then by democracy sive word” with a casual Tocqueville meant the phrase. “Do not say ‘James, abolition of hereditary have you borrowed my Latin rank and the manners dictionary?’ Introduce it that habitually accom- more gently: ‘Oh by the way, panied it, and he saw James, have you borrowed America as a land where my Latin dictionary?’” differences of rank no That is in Harold Nicol- longer counted, as he son’s diaries, and it shows believed, and had not yet that even if in been replaced by the English there is majesty of the law. The nat- only one pronoun ural fear of such a of address, subtle society was anarchy. problems still The more realistic fear, remain. But then as Tocqueville perceptively Harold Nicolson had discerned, was an excess of social been a diplomat, and for subtle conformity. Leveling could make for a problems he had subtle solutions. dull, uncreative land. Perhaps he was right to be worried. here do we go next? Some Americans still do not sense the majesty would say that formal of law, though they take prudent care to Waddress is now forever dead stay out of its way, and formal address has and buried, that we should accept it by mostly gone the way of the curtsey and shifting to other ceremonial distinctions the bow. Social conformity, many would such as wearing neckties for dinner, if say, is here to stay, and I no longer confi- not always for lunch, opening doors for dently expect to be addressed as Mister, ladies and older men, and deferring to on either side of the Atlantic, though I the opinions of social superiors. Manners am not against it. But though much is change, but remain manners. The dogs lost, much remains, and other formalities bark and the caravan moves on. Nobody expressive of social distance are still firm- bows anymore, for example, though it ly in place and likely to remain so. I hope was common in Europe down to the 19th in my time to take advantage of all of century and one of the reasons, as the them. I wear a tie for dinner, if not for poet Keats tells in a letter of May 1818, lunch, expect younger men to open why his brother George emigrated to doors for me, and above all I expect them farm in the United States. He disliked to defer to my opinions.

Call Me Mister 23 “Shall the people rule?” was Bryan’s slogan in his third presidential campaign in 1908.

24 WQ Autumn 1999 The Forgotten Forerunner

William Jennings Bryan survives in popular memory chiefly as the much ridiculed figure of the Scopes trial. But he was much more than that. The first celebrity-politician and thrice the Democrats’ presidential nominee, he turned his party into the standard-bearer of modern liberalism.

by Michael Kazin

n the United States, few things ests of small farmers, railed against the are more durable than the histor- speculators of Wall Street, crusaded to ban ical images of our national lead- the saloon, and denounced the teaching of ers. Despite the arduous efforts of evolution in public schools. His clumsy debunkers, both scholarly and performance at the 1925 Scopes trial in Ipolemical, George Washington remains, Dayton, Tennessee (followed, just days for most Americans, the selfless father of later, by his death), earned him the deri- his country, Abraham Lincoln the self- sion of leading intellectuals and journal- made man who emancipated the slaves, ists. H. L. Mencken’s scathing postmortem and Franklin Roosevelt the empathetic on Bryan as an agrarian charlatan, the leader who ended the Great Depression would-be “Pope of the peasants,” has and won the antifascist war. Negative per- echoed through the decades. ceptions have similarly long lives, to the Yet for all his defeats, electoral and oth- chagrin of those who’ve written revisionist erwise, Bryan was more a pioneer than an biographies of the likes of Herbert Hoover opponent of political change. Although he and Richard Nixon. was not blessed with a powerful intellect, On the hazy image of William Jennings he and his career in politics gave early Bryan hangs a sign that reads “old-fash- notice of two of the most significant fea- ioned.” Thrice the unsuccessful Demo- tures of American political life in the 20th cratic nominee for president (in 1896, century: the empowering of the federal 1900, and 1908), Bryan is easy to portray as government to regulate corporate power a tribune of lost causes. The man known as and, in limited ways, to redistribute the Great Commoner defended the inter- income; and the building of a mass follow-

William Jennings Bryan 25 ing on the strength of celebrity. Moreover, Bryan won the nomination (as well as that of with Congress today urging that the Ten the Populist party) but lost that election to Commandments be posted in school- William McKinley, who had a war chest 10 rooms, Bryan’s fundamentalist stand no times larger and posed as “the advance agent longer seems quite so out of step with our of prosperity.” Although the turnout of eligi- political culture. ble voters (more than 80 percent) was among The lifelong Democrat was the key fig- the highest ever, the underfinanced ure in transforming his party from a bul- Democrat lost thousands of votes to fraud wark of conservative thinking and policy and employer intimidation. into the standard-bearer of modern liberal- Despite the outcome, the conviction at ism. In 1896, after a short legal career and the heart of Bryan’s candidacy lived on in two terms as a Nebraska member of the more than a half-century of public rhetoric U.S. House of Representatives, Bryan won and action. The big issue of the 1896 elec- his first presidential nomination by elo- tion—whether to adhere to the gold stan- quently defying Grover Cleveland, the dard or to inflate the currency by basing it incumbent president of his own party. on both gold and silver—soon faded. But Confronted by the worst the idea that the federal depression the United government should rou- States had ever en- tinely take the side of dured, Cleveland re- wage earners and other buffed pleas by wheat citizens of modest and cotton farmers for means (known in debt relief and by unem- Bryan’s day as “the ployed workers for jobs—but producing classes”) rushed federal troops to Chicago grew in popularity to break an 1894 national railroad and was the basis for strike led by future Socialist the domestic poli- leader Eugene V. Debs. cies of liberal presidents from In 1896, Bryan became chief Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon spokesman for insurgent rank- Johnson. (It also was evident in and-file Democrats and adherents the rhetoric, if not the actions, of of the Populist party (including centrists Jimmy Carter and Bill Debs) who vowed to reverse Cleveland’s Clinton.) disastrous course. Bryan demanded that the Though Bryan was unable to win the state intervene to help “the struggling mass- White House, by remaking the Democrats es” of workers, farmers, and small business- into a vigorous party of reform he set the men and rein in the power of their employ- stage for the men who did. Under his lead- ers and corporate competitors. “There are ership, Democrats first pushed for ener- two ideas of government,” declared the getic antitrust prosecutions, laws to limit Nebraskan at that year’s Democratic nation- working hours and set minimum wages, al convention. “There are those who measures to subsidize farmers and protect believe that, if you will only legislate to union organizers, and a federal income tax make the well-to-do prosperous, their pros- (for many years, imposed mainly on the perity will leak through on those below. rich). Conservatives in his party, backed by The Democratic idea, however, has been wealthy men such as financier August that if you legislate to make the masses pros- Belmont and including the redoubtable perous, their prosperity will find its way up machine of Tammany Hall, refused to through every class that rests upon them.” accept many of the changes. In 1904—

> Michael Kazin, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, published this fall by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1999 Michael Kazin.

26 WQ Autumn 1999 four years after Bry- an’s second loss to McKinley—they wrested control of the Democratic conven- tion away from the Great Commoner and his allies and nominated for presi- dent one of their own, Alton Parker, a respected New York judge. That fall, Park- er suffered a crushing defeat, winning fewer states and more than a million fewer popu- lar votes than Bryan had in either 1896 or 1900. Laissez-faire Democrats would never be able to dom- inate the party again. In 1908, Bryan faced only minor opposition on his way Though alone on a burning deck in this 1896 cartoon, Bryan won 47 to a third presidential percent of the popular vote to McKinley’s 51 percent. nomination. That year, he again proved a political pioneer, winning the active sup- for each certified member of a new party. port of the American Federation of Labor, “This would,” Bryan predicted, “prevent headed by Samuel Gompers—and thus the obligating of parties or candidates to forging the bond between unions and lib- the predatory interests.” Americans today eral Democrats that has lasted into the might not endorse his particular plan, but postindustrial age. Herbert Hoover once they would certainly applaud his determi- snapped that the New Deal was “Bryanism nation to get big money out of politics. under new words and methods,” proving that bitterness need not impair one’s his- century after Bryan’s heyday, torical vision. many assume that candidates or Bryan’s progressive populism also led A officeholders espousing such him to champion causes that did not gain liberal views will be secular minded, or at majority support in his time and remain least careful to wall off their religious controversial in ours. He argued, for exam- beliefs from their politics. The Great ple, that private businesses should be Commoner would have considered any banned from giving any money at all to such separation both illogical and political campaigns. “Big contributions immoral. He was raised in a family of from those who are seeking Government devout Protestants who prayed three times favors,” Bryan warned in 1924, “are a men- daily and regarded the Bible as the fore- ace to honest government.” His solution most guide to correct behavior, both pub- was public financing—10 cents for each lic and private. Though, like all good vote an established party received in the Democrats, he idolized Thomas Jefferson, last federal election and the same amount perhaps the least pious man ever to occu-

William Jennings Bryan 27 of Christ, who will say that we are command- ed to civilize with dynamite and prose- lyte with the sword?” In 1908, to underline the urgency of break- ing up trusts, he told a Carnegie Hall audi- ence, “I insist that the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ applies as much to the monopolist as to the highwayman.” Bryan routinely applied his fundamen- talist faith to social maladies. While re- jecting the liberal interpretation of the Bible espoused by some Social Gospel- ers, he warmly agreed with the practical remedies proposed by such figures as Baptist Critics decried Bryan’s use of Christian symbols and rhetoric. theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who py the White House, Bryan routinely drew called for churches to side with the urban on Scripture to underline the righteous poor. Bryan, a man from the Great Plains, sincerity of his own political views. “If my did not move in the world of municipal party has given me the basis of my political reformers and settlement house workers that beliefs,” he concluded in 1924, speaking at was the crucible of the Social Gospel. But his last Democratic convention, “my Bible he backed their causes and worked with the has given me the foundations of a faith Federal Council of Churches, founded in that has enabled me to stand for the right 1908 to coordinate their activities. as I saw it.” Where Bryan did part company with Protestant liberals was in his insistence ryan brought his version of that the religious creed of the majority democracy by the Good Book to always ought to prevail in the public Bbear on every major issue he sphere. This led him to take positions cared about. In 1899, to press the case that that provoked the scorn of Mencken and employers should pay higher wages, he other, less iconoclastic critics. Bryan was declared, “God made all men, and he did firmly convinced that any nation that not make some to crawl on hands and allowed destructive, un-Christian prac- knees and others to ride upon their backs.” tices to flourish was on the road to ruin. A year later, while opposing, on anticolo- Few Social Gospelers objected when he nialist grounds, the U.S. war against directed this indictment against the Filipinos fighting for their independence, liquor “trust.” After all, the demand for he asked: “If true Christianity consists in prohibition enjoyed support from nearly carrying out in our daily lives the teachings every Protestant denomination in the

28 WQ Autumn 1999 country. More controversial was Bryan’s an impossible system!” Hitler’s excursion proposal that states mandate Bible read- into eugenics only a decade later suggests ing in public schools. And his decision, that Bryan’s fear was not entirely in the early 1920s, to throw his declining unfounded. energies into the crusade against Darwinism tarred him ever after as an few figures on the contempo- apostle of ignorance. rary religious right have em- One need not defend Bryan’s role as A braced the Great Commoner chief prosecutor in the case against John as a pioneer in their own struggle to Scopes for violating a Tennessee law remoralize politics. In 1994 Ralph Reed, against the teaching of evolution in the then chief strategist of the Christian public schools. But one should recognize Coalition, placed Bryan alongside Mar- that it sprang from the same spirit of tin Luther King, Jr., as one of the great Christian empathy that motivated his American champions of “religious dis- support for wage earners and farmers and sent.” Certainly, the Nebraskan’s cam- his denunciation of corporate power and paign against Darwinism didn’t expire imperial conquest. with him. Kansas opted this summer to Bryan objected to evolutionary theory delete virtually any mention of evolution on the grounds of what might be called from the state’s science curriculum. sentimental democracy. He feared that Numerous school boards have bowed to agnostic intellectuals were seeking to grassroots pressure and now grant equal substitute a cruel belief in the “survival time to Genesis and natural selection. of the fittest” for faith in a loving God—the only basis for moral and altruistic con- duct that most ordi- nary people had. Bryan, like many other Americans at the time, thought that Darwinism im- plied social Darwin- ism, particularly a belief in eugenics, promoted by influen- tial scientists as the surest way to improve the human race. The consequence, the evangelical populist predicted (in a speech he did not live to deliver), would be “a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-ap- pointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the Cartoonists were often unkind to Bryan, but their endless attention mass of mankind— helped to turn him into a national celebrity.

William Jennings Bryan 29 Bryan’s whistlestop campaign in 1896 was a first for major-party presidential nominees.

Last spring, Representative Tom DeLay an equal basis, Americans of all religious (R.-Texas), one of the most powerful con- faiths and none. Had Bryan lived another servatives in Congress, laid some of the decade, he would have had to make a tor- blame for the massacre in Littleton, turous choice between his party and the Colorado, on school systems that “teach political demands of his faith. the children that they are nothing but Bryan did, however, presage the future glorified apes.” in a way that goes beyond matters of leg- islation and ideology. He was the first ryan, of course, would blanch at celebrity politician in the modern DeLay’s hosannas to the free sense—renowned for his personality and Bmarket and his contempt for his communication skills as much as for labor unions. The America in which one the substance of his beliefs. Before Bry- could be both a prominent conservative an’s 1896 campaign, no major-party in religion and a left-liberal in politics no nominee for president had toured the longer exists. Even in Bryan’s heyday, country, speaking to millions and shak- fundamentalist Protestants split their ing hands and sharing small talk with the votes between the major parties, neither crowds. Tradition required presidential of which had a monopoly on pietistic candidates to maintain at least the causes. But starting with the Scopes trial, appearance of a dignified distance from the national press subjected fundamen- the hurly-burly of politics. But the Dem- talists to such ridicule that many gave up ocrat needed to overcome the huge politics altogether and others withdrew to financial advantage enjoyed by his oppo- their Bible schools and denominational nent, McKinley, who stayed on his front institutes to build strength for future porch in Canton, Ohio, greeting a con- challenges. In the 1930s, the Democrats tinual stream of citizen delegations trav- under Franklin Roosevelt muted talk of eling to see him gratis on the GOP’s evangelical moralism and welcomed, on money train.

30 WQ Autumn 1999 The remarkable canvass during which based on foreign trips undertaken, in Bryan traveled more than 18,000 miles part, to burnish his statesmanlike image. and delivered as many as 36 speeches a This man who had enjoyed his only elec- day (resting, of course, on the Sabbath) toral success as a congressional candidate proved to be a superb form of self-pro- from Nebraska in the early 1890s was sel- motion. One newspaper dubbed him dom out of the public eye until his death “the best advertised man the country has more than three decades later. Bryan’s produced since the days of P. T. presidential nominations in 1900 and Barnum.” The 1896 campaign made 1908, his status as the most stalwart Bryan a controversial but universally rec- reformer in his party, and his 1913 ognized figure who, for the rest of his appointment as Woodrow Wilson’s secre- life, was in constant demand as a public tary of state (a post he resigned in 1915 to speaker, the subject of countless newspa- protest the U.S. tilt away from neutralism per profiles, editorial cartoons, and silent before the country entered World War I) newsreels. Even if they didn’t share his all depended on his ability to cultivate views, Americans enjoyed reading about his status as an affable political star the Commoner’s exploits and listening to whose eloquence always made for good his stem-winding oratory. copy. But the Commoner was one celebrity ryan reveled in all the attention who did not take his nickname for grant- and knew how to stoke it. From ed. Bryan had risen to fame as a champi- Bthe late 1890s to the early 1920s, on of “the struggling masses,” and that his lengthy talks on political and religious identity enabled him to build and retain subjects were always the top attraction on a loyal following with which every other the Chautauqua circuits that wound national politician had to contend. The through small towns in the Midwest and most abundant evidence of how “Bryan’s West; he also consistently drew big crowds people” viewed the world can be found in urban venues. Even in traditionally in the huge volume of mail they sent to Republican towns, “Bryan Day” was a big him, a sample of which is kept in the occasion. At each stop on his schedule Library of Congress. Bryan received during a 1912 swing through Michigan, thousands of letters from ordinary storekeepers and factory owners gave Americans—craftsmen, self-employed employees the day off, flag-draped autos professionals, farmers, traveling sales- paraded him through the streets, and a men, homemakers, and a surprising National Guard band serenaded the number of children. The size and pas- uncommon Commoner as he approached sion of this correspondence were the big tent for his address. Bryan unprecedented for a political figure endeared himself to local planning com- never elected to the White House. mittees by charging a flat fee of $250 per Contrary to his agrarian image, Bryan’s speech, no matter how big the crowd. correspondents were found as frequently The permanent campaign to boost his in cities as in small towns and were fortunes and his favorite issues was also spread across the nation, most numerous waged in print. Starting in 1901, the in the Middle West and thinnest in New once and future candidate published— England and the Deep South. The over- from Lincoln, Nebraska—his own week- whelming majority were, like their hero, ly newspaper (inevitably titled The white Protestants from evangelical Commoner), which boasted a circulation denominations. But until the eve of the in excess of 100,000. Throughout his Scopes trial his correspondents rarely career, he also penned a steady stream of expressed anger at those of other reli- pieces for national magazines and big- gious persuasions. city newspapers, as well as a dozen books Often, in fact, Bryan’s followers por- rich in anecdote and aphorism—two trayed their defeated champion as a man

William Jennings Bryan 31 ahead of his time, “an inspired prophet in American political culture. Before the the affairs of our nation,” as a Baptist min- 1896 campaign, major-party presidential ister put it in 1915. The Commoner candidates considered it undignified to seemed to them a paragon of honesty and stump for themselves; partisan foot soldiers principle in a public arena that had grown took the battle to the enemy, while aspi- venal and mendacious. Frequently, corre- rants for George Washington’s chair spondents mingled spiritual and secular remained above the fray. After Bryan broke images in ways that must have gratified that tradition and almost scored an upset their hero. Just after the 1896 election, W. victory, future nominees increasingly R. Alexander, an unemployed printer from found it necessary, even enjoyable, to let Des Moines, Iowa, wrote to Bryan, the voters judge them in the flesh. “Yesterday I took off the badge...which I Inevitably, the personal campaign tend- had worn during the campaign and left it ed to equate the man with his message. In on the dresser.” His wife found the badge, 1900 Theodore Roosevelt, Republican “burst into tears,” and quickly pressed it candidate for vice president, made a point within the pages of the family Bible. Later of traveling more miles and claiming to that day, the couple opened the book to give more speeches than Bryan had four find that the badge “rested” next to the years before. The hero of the Spanish- 37th Psalm—which opens, “Fret not thy- American War regarded the populist self because of evildoers....” The message Democrat as naive and dangerous, but he seemed self-evident to the couple, who was quick to imitate Bryan’s oratorical had depleted their savings and were about marathons and relentless self-promotion. to default on an $800 mortgage. “We both Later, as president, Roosevelt continued in read it and cried.... We feel that we have the same fashion, becoming the first chief lost a near and dear friend in this cam- executive who routinely traveled around paign, but thank God he is not dead, but the country to speak to the public. TR’s more determined than ever to lead us out.” great popularity as a “rhetorical president” Adoration of Bryan could also spring was built on the same friendly but vigor- from less desperate motivations. In the late ously anticorporate image Bryan had pio- 1890s, his handsome, virile likeness was neered. familiar to anyone with access to a Democratic broadside or a partisan news- otwithstanding Roosevelt’s best paper. The many letters he received in efforts, the affable, go-to-the-peo- those years from Americans too young to Nple national campaign was, for vote often exhibited the kind of whimsical decades, closely associated with progressive infatuation we now associate with fans of Democrats who followed Bryan’s lead, movie stars and rock musicians. In 1899, embracing the idea that theirs was the only Texas teenager Ruby Gardner tried to kiss party of and for the common people. the Commoner when he passed through Woodrow Wilson, with his restrained, pro- her hometown on a speaking tour. Bryan fessorial manner, was something of an jokingly declined the offer, and the exception. But from the late 1920s to the episode became an amusing item in the late 1960s (and again, in the 1990s, with nation’s press. Soon after, Gardner wrote Bill Clinton), every Democratic nominee to her hero that “very proper old ladies” for president played the happy warrior— were upbraiding her, but, to her delight, “I cracking jokes, beaming for the cameras, am the recipient daily of letters from all flailing the rich and the comfortable before over the country sympathising [sic] with audiences of the insecure. During the 20th me in my failure to kiss the great W. J. century, the GOP could produce only two Bryan.” Youth rebellion could take rather candidates—a war hero, Dwight Eisen- innocent form in late Victorian America. hower, and a movie star, Ronald Reagan— The object of all this affection had a able to project a relaxed yet uplifting image large, if seldom appreciated, influence on on the stump and in the media.

32 WQ Autumn 1999 Bryan’s clumsy performance at the 1925 Scopes trial, along with ridicule from defense lawyer Clarence Darrow and journalist H. L. Mencken, gave him the lasting image of an agrarian charlatan.

The rise of the accessible, rhetorical more than by the stated principles or pro- chief executive has a structural element as gram of the party to which he or she well as a partisan one. As the governmen- belongs. Such anticipation may have tal apparatus grew more bureaucratic and weakened the everyday practice of legislation more complex, Americans han- democracy, which requires citizens to kered for leaders who could make the draw inspiration from the routines of gov- enterprise of governing seem more person- ernance. These are seldom as entertain- al and comprehensible. The electorate has ing as a speech by a master orator or a struck an implicit bargain with the politi- witty, 30-second spot. cal class: if we can no longer understand So some blame or credit must be given or control much of what our government is to the great political evangelist for blaz- doing, at least give us men and women to ing the path that has led to our uncertain head it who can comfort us and, on occa- present. He was as liberal on social and sion, provide a thrill. economic policy as FDR, as consistent a political evangelist as Pat Robertson, and eadership by celebrities has its nearly as beloved a political celebrity as drawbacks, of course. The ten- Ronald Reagan (though the latter was Ldency—first exemplified by better at converting renown into votes). Bryan—to build a following that often What is more, Bryan was the first in a confuses loyalty to the candidate with line of ideologically stalwart candidates knowledge about the candidate’s issues for president—Robert LaFollette, Barry has only been magnified in the age of Goldwater, George Wallace—whose cru- televised campaigning. Since the sades foreshadowed shifts in national pol- epochal campaign of 1896, American icy. “He was one of the creative losers,” voters have expected or, at least, hoped to columnist George Will has remarked, be moved by a presidential candidate “having left larger marks on the nation

William Jennings Bryan 33 than many a winner has done.” Why, 1930s, their heirs—urbane liberals of then, does Bryan still get labeled a reac- immigrant stock—drew the portrait of tionary? Bryan as benighted and passé. Grad- Part of the reason is the poor reputation ually, evangelical Protestants of the mid- of those who are viewed as trying to impose dling classes and the middle of the coun- their moral standards on others. Hardly try moved toward a Republican Party anyone at the end of the 20th century sug- that lauded them as part of a “silent gests that making alcoholic beverages ille- majority.” gal would solve the manifold problems The tribal bitterness of a losing faction is associated with drinking. And, notwith- difficult to erase from historical memory. standing Tom DeLay’s recent remarks, no Thus, historian Richard Hofstadter con- one of prominence in the Christian Right cluded that Bryan, at his death, “had long is eager to mount a serious challenge to outlived his time.” And viewers of the pop- the teaching of evolution. Americans ular play and movie Inherit the Wind come remain among the most religiously obser- away wondering how a major party could vant people on earth, but most have also ever have considered this humorless zealot accepted the reality of their nation as a a suitable nominee for the presidency. quilt of pluralisms—creedal, cultural, and Yet dismissing the man sells both him demographic—that neither should nor and our political history short. During the could be unraveled. campaign of 1896, a teenager in Springfield, Illinois, sent a poem of praise he political consequences of that to the Democratic candidate. In the last assumption lie at the root of stanza, Vachel Lindsay (who grew up to be TBryan’s image problem. In poli- a writer of some distinction) wrote: cy, the Commoner was a forerunner, but his strong bond with his followers ended Hail to the fundamental man up limiting his understanding of how the Who brings a unifying plan nation was changing. He was too good a Not easily misunderstood, politician to believe that the white evan- Chanting men toward brotherhood. gelical Protestants who flocked to his So be you glad, American, speeches and flooded him with adoring When, after planning many weeks mail were, even then, a working majority (in fact, he never won more than 47 per- The folks by thousands come to town cent of the vote). And Bryan SPEAKS. Yet Bryan’s deepest concerns were always the same as theirs, and, as he Those awkward lines suggest why, more grew older and abandoned his hopes for than a century later, Lindsay’s boyhood the presidency, electoral wisdom gradu- hero deserves our attention. Bryan did ally gave way to crusading zeal. In the indeed have a knack for making significant 1920s, he disagreed with his more bigot- public issues sound urgent, dramatic, and ed supporters who parroted Henry Ford’s clear—and encouraged average citizens to anti-Semitic theorizing or joined the Ku question the words and interests of the Klux Klan. But he refused to exclude powerful. That attribute made reform, eco- them from the ranks of the well-meaning nomic and moral, seem both more attrac- majority, as eastern, big-city progressives tive and more feasible. It is a skill lacking such as Alfred E. Smith demanded. The in our contemporary leaders, as tolerant as New York governor, after all, was a “wet” most now are of religious and racial diver- and the spawn of Tammany Hall. Bryan sity. Bryan’s sincerity, warmth, and evan- could not allow his kind to win the cul- gelical ardor won him the hearts of many tural war within the Democratic Party or Americans who cared for no other politi- in the nation at large. After they did tri- cian in his day. We might listen to their umph with Franklin Roosevelt in the reasons before we decide to mistrust them.

34 WQ Autumn 1999 THE LONG ROAD TO BETTER SCHOOLS

Nobody is claiming victory yet, but there is a distinct sense in the air that a corner has been turned in the struggle to improve America’s public schools. State standards, charter schools, and other structural reforms all satisfy the quintessentially American belief that if you fix “the system,” you fix the problem. Our contributors demur, maintaining that our commitment to excellence in education has yet to be truly tested. They point to several human and intellectual problems that still stand in the way of the schools’ escape from mediocrity.

36 Tom Loveless on the uncertain commitments of parents 44 Chiara R. Nappi on the pitfalls of local control 52 Charles L. Glenn on the mission of teachers 60 Paul A. Zoch on the ignorance of school administrators The Parent Trap

by Tom Loveless

new kind of revolution of ris- improving education is not a pain-free ing expectations is sweeping exercise. In Virginia, when tough new Athe United States. It is a revo- statewide tests revealed earlier this year lution fomented by reformers who that only 6.5 percent of the schools met believe that setting higher expectations state standards, many parents (and oth- in the schools is the key to improving ers) responded with cries of anger and academic performance. There is biparti- disbelief. Their anger was directed not at san political enthusiasm for the creation the schools but at the standards. There of tough new learning standards. Just are other signs that parents’ commitment about everyone wants to end social pro- to academic excellence is not very deep. motion, the practice of passing a student A 1996 Gallup Poll asked: “Which one of on to the next grade regardless of the following would you prefer of an old- whether he or she has learned anything. est child—that the child get A grades or Reformers poke, prod, cajole, and coax that he or she make average grades and schools to embrace lofty academic expec- be active in extracurricular activities?” tations which, they believe, schools Only 33 percent of public school parents would not adopt on their own. They are answered that they would prefer A confident that such heightened expecta- grades, while 56 percent preferred aver- tions will yield dramatic increases in stu- age grades combined with extracurricu- dent achievement. lar activities. (Among private school par- In focusing on the schools, however, ents, the breakdown was almost the reformers are taking for granted one of same, 34 percent to 55 percent.) the most powerful influences on the The importance of nonacademic activ- quality of American education: the ities in teenagers’ lives is thoroughly doc- American parent. They assume that par- umented in Beyond the Classroom ents will do whatever is necessary to raise (1996), a study of how American teens children’s levels of achievement. But will spend their out-of-school time, the por- they? Do parents really consider class- tion of their weekly schedule that (in the- room learning the most important aspect ory at least) parents directly control. of their children’s education? What are Three nonacademic categories domi- they willing to give up so that their chil- nate, according to Temple University psy- dren will learn more? Will family life chologist Laurence Steinberg: extra- change as academic achievement as- curricular activities, primarily sports, sumes a more prominent role in educa- consuming 10 to 15 hours; part-time tion? Will political support for reform employment, 15 to 20 hours; and a host remain firm if parents recoil from the of social activities, including dating, everyday costs? going to the movies, partying, and just There are indications that many par- hanging out with friends, 20 to 25 hours. ents have trouble accepting the fact that The national average for time spent on

36 WQ Autumn 1999 The Choice (1998), by Marlene Baron Summers

homework is four hours per week, not “well-rounded” life. American families surprising given the few waking hours might value academic achievement, but that remain after the whirlwind of not if it intrudes on the rituals of teen nonacademic pursuits. existence, especially part-time employ- ment, sports, and a busy social calendar. his distribution of teens’ time This stands in stark contrast to the situa- represents a huge drag on acad- tion in other nations. In Europe and Temic learning. More than one- most Asian countries, it is assumed that third of the teens with part-time jobs told the central purpose of childhood is to Steinberg they take easier classes to keep learn. Part-time employment of teenagers up their grades. Nearly 40 percent of stu- is rare, sports are noticeably subordinate dents who participate in school-spon- to a student’s academic responsibilities, sored activities, usually sports, reported and although there is plenty of socializ- that they are frequently too tired to study. ing, it is usually in conjunction with More than one-third of students said they studying or working with others on acad- get through the school day by “goofing emic projects. The American student’s off with friends,” and an equal number four hours per week of homework is reported spending five or more hours a equal to what students in the rest of the week “partying.” And these self-reports industrialized world complete every day. probably underestimate the problem. Significant cultural differences also The big story here is that teenagers’ appear in how parents judge their chil- time is structured around the pursuit of a dren’s academic performance. A study by

Schools 37 The Building Blocks of Life (1985), by John Fekner

James Stigler of the University of achievement as a product of intrinsic California, Los Angeles, and Harold ability rather than hard work, as just one Stevenson of the University of Michigan, of many attributes they want children to Ann Arbor, asked several hundred moth- possess, and as something their own kids ers from the United States, Japan, and are accomplishing anyway. These beliefs, China about the school performance of along with widespread peer pressure their fifth-grade children. More than 50 against academic excellence (who wants percent of the American mothers pro- to be a “geek”?), an unrelenting strain of nounced themselves very satisfied with anti-intellectualism in American culture, their children’s schoolwork, as opposed and the weak academic demands of to only five percent of the Asian mothers. schools, combine to dampen the impor- On tests measuring what these same chil- tance of academics for American youth dren actually knew, however, the and their parents. American students scored far below their Chinese and Japanese counterparts. e need not let educators off the When asked to explain their children’s hook, but parents bear some poor performance, the American moth- Wresponsibility both for the lax ers cited a lack of inborn ability. When standards in today’s schools and for students’ the Japanese and Chinese children mediocre achievement. Parents appear more failed, their parents blamed the kids for willing to embrace academic excellence in not working hard enough. the abstract than to organize their family’s American parents see academic daily life in order to achieve it. They enthu-

> Tom Loveless is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (1999). Copyright © 1999 by Tom Loveless.

38 WQ Autumn 1999 siastically support attempts to change schools schools outperform public schools on in general but are ambivalent when it comes achievement tests, more students transfer to schools they actually know. from private to public school than vice Polls show that parents believe their chil- versa at the beginning of high school, dren’s schools have higher standards and are precisely the time when one’s academic of significantly better quality than the accomplishments really start to matter in nation’s schools in general. This phenome- terms of college and employment. The non—the idea that “I’m OK, but you’re desire to keep extracurricular activities not”—also shows up in surveys on health close to home and to keep their children care (my doctor is great, but the nation’s close to neighborhood kids appears to health care stinks), Congress (my representa- weigh heavily in parents’ choices. tive is terrific, but Congress is terrible), and Another reason to doubt that empow- the status of the American family (mine is in ered parents will wholeheartedly insist on fine shape, but families in general are going higher achievement can be found in the to hell in a hand basket). history of American schooling. Schools Such complacency undermines meaning- have always attended to the convenience ful school reform. Raising the level of of parents, and, as a result, cultivating the achievement is hard work. Unless children can actually learn more math, science, liter- ature, and history without breaking a sweat, then the prospects for reforms that ask chil- Reading Performance, dren and parents for more—more time, 1971–96 more homework, more effort—are not very good. We don’t hear much about what today’s educational reforms may require of Age 17 families. Indeed, when it comes to the sub- ject of parents, the rhetoric seldom gets beyond calls for more “parent involvement” or for “empowering” parents. Reforms that Age 13 grant parents control over where their chil- dren go to school, a favorite of the Right, or that offer parents a stake in governing local school affairs, a favorite of the Left, may prove to be valuable public policies for other Age 9 reasons, but they have not yet convinced skeptics that they will significantly increase student achievement.

n Chicago, an experiment that The National Assessment of Educational Progress has tracked students’ reading abil- involved creating parent-dominated ity since the early 1970s. The chart shows Ischool “site councils” to oversee a slight improvement among 9- and 13- individual schools produced a few renais- year-olds through 1980, but virtually no sance stories, but also tales of schools change thereafter—and no significant change among 17-year-olds during the engulfed in petty squabbling. As vouch- entire period. The maximum score is 500. ers and charter schools become more There is only one bright spot (not shown): widespread, will parents actually take the gap between white and black students advantage of the opportunities to narrowed from 1971 to 1988. But then improve the education of their children? the improvements stalled, and among 13- year-olds the race gap widened. Buried in the national comparisons of Source: U.S. Department of Education, National private and public schools is an interest- Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of ing and relevant anomaly. Despite well- Education, 1999. publicized research showing that private

Schools 39 mind has simply occupied one place teach students the difference between among many on a long list of purposes for right and wrong and the fundamental ele- the school. At the beginning of the 19th ments of citizenship. In the last three century, education came within the decades, schools have also taken on thera- province of the family. Children learned peutic tasks, spending untold time and reading at home, along with basic arith- resources on sex education, psychological metic and minimal geography, science, counseling, drug and alcohol programs, and history. Farming dictated the tempo of diversity training, guidance on topics such family life. Older students only attended as teen parenting, sexual harassment, and school during the winter months, when a host of other initiatives that have little to their labor wasn’t needed in the fields. At do with sharpening the intellect. other times, even toddlers were sent to Some analysts maintain that parents school, crowding classrooms with students don’t support such diversions from acade- from three to 20 years of age. mic learning, that these programs are Later in the century, as fathers and nothing more than the faddish whims of mothers abandoned the farm for the fac- professional educators. If so, parents have tory and intermittently relocated in been awfully quiet about it. A more rea- search of work, the modern public school sonable explanation is that, with parents began to evolve. One of its functions was busily working at two or more jobs, with custodial, providing a place for children many of these topics awkward for parents to spend the day while busy parents to discuss, and with parental authority earned a living. The magnitude of the showing its own signs of weakening change is staggering. As late as 1870, throughout society, parents now look to American students attended school only schools to provide instruction that they an average of 78 of 132 scheduled days; once delivered themselves. today’s students spend more than 160 days in the classroom, and the modern chools are acting more like par- school calendar runs to 180 days. More ents, and implementing real aca- than 90 percent of school-age children Sdemic standards will probably now attend high school. At the beginning force parents to act more like schools. of the century, less than 10 percent did. They will need to stay informed about But the school’s power is limited. Its tests scores and closely monitor their monopoly over children’s daylight hours children’s progress. Parents of students never led to the recognition of intellectu- who fall short of standards must be pre- al activities as the most important pur- pared for drastic changes in family life. suits of adolescents, either outside or Summers will be for summer school, inside school. Why do parents allow two- afternoons and weekends for tutoring. thirds of today’s teenagers to work? After- This will cost money and impinge upon school jobs are considered good for family time. Struggling high school stu- young people, teaching them a sense of dents will be forced to spend less time on responsibility and the value of a dollar. sports, to forgo part-time jobs, and to Most Americans think it’s fine if keep socializing to a minimum. teenagers spend 20 hours a week flipping No one knows how parents will react to hamburgers instead of studying calculus such changes. Higher standards are over- or the history of ancient Rome. whelmingly supported in public opinion polls, but what will happen when they he development of young minds begin to pinch? In 1997, hundreds of par- also finds competition in the ents in an affluent suburb of Detroit Tschool curriculum itself. For refused to let their children take a high example, the federal government has fund- school proficiency test, arguing that the ed vocational education since 1917. nine-hour exam was too long and that it Americans have always expected schools to would unfairly label children who per-

40 WQ Autumn 1999 The Fail-Proof Teaching Test The Allies won World War II. Really? I wasn’t sure. Thank goodness the study guide I bought for the Indiana state teacher certification test included that important reminder in its social studies review. Other sections explained that it is incorrect to use “double negatives in standard written English,” that “maps are drawings which [sic] show where places are in relation to each other” and that an $80 dress that is 20 percent off costs $64. The actual test, which I took a few weeks ago, wasn’t much more difficult. Sadly, my experience underscored a recent report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization in Washington, that found that teacher certification tests, which are required by 43 states and the District of Columbia, are far from challenging. I should say that while the test I took was not rigorous, it was long. The test, which cov- ered virtually every area of science, math, the arts and education theory, went from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., save for two 25-minute breaks. From questions about the cold war to class- room discipline, the test required basic cognitive abilities, the fortitude to stay focused for eight-and-a-half straight hours and a No. 2 pencil—and not much more than that. This test, like so much of what I am asked to do to prepare for a career as a secondary- school teacher, is not intellectually challenging, but is instead just plain tiring. It’s as though anyone who can simply survive such a mind-numbing, serpentine process is ready to be a teacher. Forget smarts; what it takes to become a state-certified teacher is not critical thinking, but eighth-grade skills and an ability to follow directions and rules that are often arbitrary. Consider the education class I had on adolescent psychology. Each student had to give a presentation to the class. Though the content of my presentation was perfectly accept- able to the professor, I was marked off on my grade because I didn’t give the class a hand- out sheet. “But I didn’t have anything I felt needed to be written up and handed out,” I protested. “That doesn’t matter,” the professor told me. “You always give the class a handout when you do a presentation.” I understand that it is difficult for states to determine who is qualified to teach. And I’m happy to be tested. But challenge me. Make me prove that I can reason and think and, in turn, teach students to reason and think. Give me essay questions about John Dewey or Jean-Jacques Rousseau rather than multiple-choice questions about the pitfalls of using an overhead projector. The Education Trust also states that the scores necessary to pass teacher certification tests are laughably low: “Students would receive F’s for producing such scores in the class- room, yet this is all states require of their teachers.” Indeed, unlike on most standardized tests, you don’t get an extra penalty for giving wrong answers on teacher certification tests. Thus, test-takers are encouraged to guess wildly on questions for which they do not know the answers. Why are the tests so easy, I asked one of my education professors. “If they were any harder, not enough people would pass, and then we would have a shortage of teachers,” he replied. He said it with a laugh, but I fear that he’s right. The number of school-age children is expected to rise substantially in the near future, and thousands of teachers—state-certified ones who know that the Allies won World War II—will be in demand. —Kathleen Mills

Kathleen Mills is a graduate student in education at Indiana University. This essay first appeared in the New York Times (July 19, 1999).

Schools 41 After School (1984), by Kathryn Freeman

formed poorly. In Portland, Oregon, the students approximately two years above school district invited the parents of 3,500 grade level in all subjects. The curriculum youngsters who had failed statewide profi- was accelerated to the eighth- and ninth- ciency exams to send the children to a grade levels, and I taught all academic summer school session set up at great subjects. Students applied for admission to expense and amid much hoopla; only the program, and my fellow teachers and I 1,359 kids were enrolled. Every state has stressed that it wasn’t for everyone. Parents its share of stories. The elimination of seeking an education emphasizing creativ- social promotion presents the biggest test. ity or the arts were advised to look else- Will the parents of children who are com- where. An extremely bright student who pelled to repeat, say, third or fourth grade, hated doing homework would also have continue to support high standards? Or had a difficult time. will they dedicate themselves to the defeat and removal of standards? In districts that etting to know the parents of see huge numbers of students facing my students was one of the mandatory summer school or failing to Gmost satisfying aspects of my win promotion to the next grade, will par- job. They were actively involved in the ents push to water down tests and lower school and indispensable in organizing passing scores? field trips, raising money for computers, Some years ago, I came face to face with putting on plays, and doing anything else some of these implications when I taught that enhanced their children’s education. sixth grade in a special program for excep- If ever a group supported lofty standards, tionally gifted, high-achieving youngsters, this was it. But dealing with parents was

42 WQ Autumn 1999 not all sweetness and light. Grading poli- their children’s school experiences. Just cies drew the most complaints. One as reformers are probably right that the upset parent threatened a lawsuit demand for high educational standards because I gave a zero to a student who must come from outside the schools, the cheated on a test. During a three-hour, imposition of academic burdens on chil- late-night phone call, an angry mother dren probably must come from outside repeatedly told me that I would suffer families. eternal damnation because her son had There is some evidence that parents received grades disqualifying him for intuitively understand this. In a recent admission to an honors program. study by the Public Agenda Foundation Complaints were also voiced because I that examined how parents view their didn’t accept late homework—“We had role in education, parents said that the friends over last night and Johnny simply most significant contribution they can didn’t have time to do his history,” one make is to send children to school who father explained in a note—or because I are respectful, hard working, and well wouldn’t excuse absences for family ski behaved. They do not want a bigger say trips or a student’s “R&R day” of TV soap in how schools are run. Nor do they want operas and game shows. And these com- to decide curricular content or methods plaints came despite the fact that enroll- of instruction. They trust educators who ment in the program was by choice, the have earned their trust, and they want school’s reputation for academic rigor schools to do their job as schools so that well known, and the policies on these parents can do their job as parents. issues crystal clear. Such conflicts go with the territory. hese seem like reasonable senti- Anyone who teaches—and sticks to the ments. But in the same study, principles making the career a serious Tparents also admit that they undertaking in the first place—will expe- absolutely hate fighting kids to get them to rience occasional problems with parents. do their homework. They gauge how The usual conflicts stem from the differ- things are going at school primarily by how ent yet overlapping roles that parents and happy their children seem and nearly 90 teachers play in a child’s life. Both are percent believe that as long as children try concerned with the same individual’s hard, they should never feel bad about welfare, but their roles are not inter- themselves because of poor grades. These changeable. Parents are infinitely more attitudes are potentially in conflict with important to a child’s upbringing, but the more rigorous learning standards. If social teacher is usually the most significant promotion ends, many children will be nonfamily adult presence in the child’s held back in a grade despite their having life and, ideally, is more objective about tried hard. And these children will be the child’s interactions with the larger unhappy. Other children will not get the world. Teachers pursue goals established acceptable grades they once did. A lot of by society rather than the family. They people are going to be very unhappy. must be warm and understanding, but Higher standards and the end of social they must also make decisions serving the promotion now enjoy tremendous popu- best interests of 30 or more people who lar support. But the true test will come have much to accomplish every day in when words become deeds. Until now, the same small space. raising expectations in education has been portrayed as cost-free. It isn’t. he differentiation of parent and Schools and students and parents will teacher roles, which strength- bear the costs. If parents are not willing Tened schools and families in the to do so, few of the ambitious changes 19th century, may be at the bottom of American reformers are now so eagerly many parents’ unrealistic perceptions of pursuing will make much difference.

Schools 43 Local Illusions by Chiara R. Nappi

f there is one thing virtually all American school reformers of every Istripe agree upon, it is the sanctity of local control of the public schools. From conservative voucher advocates to the most liberal proponents of progressive education, the reformers praise local control for ensur- ing responsiveness, flexibility, and account- schools of Princeton, New Jersey, this recog- ability. Parents everywhere are convinced nition took on more than academic signifi- that local school districts give them a mea- cance. Dissatisfied with the curriculum my sure of control over the quality of their chil- children were being taught, I became dren’s education, while the tax-sensitive take involved in several national and state efforts comfort in the notion that local control to draft math and science standards, notably assures scrupulous oversight of their tax the New Jersey Math Coalition Committee money. In a society beset by disaffection on Standards and the New Jersey Statewide from political institutions, the local school Systemic Initiative. Virtually all of these district enjoys a reputation as an idyll of efforts, however, seemed to me exercises in grassroots democracy. futility. Educators who served on the stan- Twenty-three years ago, when I arrived in dard-setting committees did not truly favor the United States as an Italian postdoctoral detailed curriculum standards, which they fellow in physics, I scarcely expected to regarded as an intrusive effort to curtail experience that so-called idyll, much less to teachers’ autonomy. The states were reluc- serve on a local school board. At first, I tant to impose detailed standards for fear of became interested in the question of why interfering with the autonomy of the tradi- women and minorities were so badly under- tionally independent local school districts. If represented in the ranks of American sci- you really want to change the schools, I was ence—more so than in Italy or Brazil or any told, that is where you must go: to the local number of other countries. It was hard not to school district. And so, in April 1993, after conclude that the absence of a standard cur- running with other reform-minded candi- riculum requiring sustained exposure to dates, I won a seat on the Board of Education math and science—the kind of curriculum of the Princeton Regional Schools. other countries have—was largely to blame. There I eventually recognized the unhap- By 1990, when my own children were ele- py truth about the American education sys- mentary school students in the public tem. Far from being the source of the sys-

44 WQ Autumn 1999 School Scene, Pennsylvania (ca. 1920) by J. C. Huntington

tem’s strength, the local school district is per- activities of any advanced society is not haps its greatest weakness. Local autonomy, viewed in the United States as a national and the fragmentation it fosters, is the responsibility. The system grew out of the source of many of the problems of the special circumstances of the country’s American education system, from uneven early European settlement. Carving isolat- student performance to incompetent or ill- ed new communities out of the wilderness, prepared teachers. Instead of ensuring con- the earliest colonists founded their own trol of the schools by parents and taxpayers, schools, raising money, building the it guarantees control by the teachers’ unions. schoolhouse, writing the curriculum, It invites abuse by ideologically motivated choosing books, and hiring teachers. As groups and by special interests. While local rural settlements evolved into towns, pro- communities are deeply divided by their fessional administrators were hired, but the own conflicting visions of education and old local citizens’ committees, now trans- plagued by low levels of community partici- formed into school boards, remained in pation and high levels of lobbying by vested charge. Because the Founding Fathers interests, a deeply entrenched educational made no mention of it in the Constitution, bureaucracy of administrators and teachers responsibility for education fell to the fiercely defends its turf. The local school states. Bowing to the fact that most school board is a dysfunctional democracy. Local funding comes from local property taxes, control has evolved into the ideal structure the states traditionally have delegated for preserving the status quo. responsibility for education to local com- munities. Today, more than 95,000 citi- mericans did not choose local zens govern 15,000 school boards (all but autonomy, they inherited it. The three percent of them elected) across the AAmerican education system has country. always perplexed foreign observers, sur- Few Americans realize what a daunting prised to find that one of the essential and unmanageable job they have handed

Schools 45 to their school boards. Board members, groups—agitating for everything from usually volunteers who hold down full- more spending on special education to time jobs, must shoulder an enormous programs targeted to specific ethnic variety of issues and responsibilities: school groups—whose members tirelessly go to budgets, construction and maintenance, each and every thinly attended meeting to labor negotiations, personnel, and curricu- press their demands. lum—all responsibilities that in other The various costs of school board ser- countries are dispersed among local, vice are great enough to discourage many regional, and national authorities. Hours people from seeking seats. In New Jersey, upon hours must be spent preparing for school board elections attract an average of and attending often interminable public only 1.5 candidates per seat. The average meetings, and there are endless closed- board member serves only two and a half door sessions to discuss labor disputes, years, even though a full term runs three employee grievances, administrators’ eval- years. The demands also tend to winnow uations, contract negotiations, and other out those who are not willing to turn them- “confidential” matters. The board’s most selves into politicians and run a political important job, setting educational policy campaign for office. This does not neces- for the district and overseeing its imple- sarily produce the best people for the job, mentation, often gets pushed aside in the as the contentiousness, ineffectiveness, press of business. and (occasional) corruption of many When educational issues do appear on school boards attests. the agenda, the debate is seldom dispas- The most important result of local gover- sionate and rational. No other arena of pol- nance, however, has been to make teachers’ itics excites as much passion and stirs as unions the major players in school politics. many furious ideological clashes as the School board members and administrators education of children. Board members risk come and go, but the teachers and their not only public abuse but their personal unions stay. School boards are divided and relationships and friendships. Budget hear- weakened by internal strife, but the teach- ings are notoriously acrimonious, but ers’ unions are strong and united. No every educational issue—curriculum, change can occur in the district unless the school construction, redistricting, staff dis- union approves. (State unions and the missals—can stir conflicts. Each issue National Education Association exert enor- draws aroused parents who are affected by mous influence at other levels: 11 percent the specific decision that the board is of the delegates to the 1996 Democratic going to make. The crowds can be rowdy convention belonged to the teachers’ union and intimidating; a vocal and persistent caucus.) If an unwanted reform gets opposition can easily pitch a district into a through, the local union can resort to the continuing state of chaos and completely polls, where the combination of low voter undermine its elected board of education. turnout and union organization gives them Yet citizen participation tends to be a distinct advantage. episodic. School board elections, for exam- ple, have consistently low voter turnout eform-minded school superinten- across the country. Even in Princeton, a dents, charged with the imple- university town with a history of passionate R mentation of school board poli- ideological battles over educational issues, cies but lacking the tenure guarantees that only 15 percent of the eligible voters both- teachers enjoy, are frequent victims of er to cast ballots. Except in times of crisis, union wrath. In 1995, the Milwaukee the educational forum in many communi- Teachers Education Association, opposed ties is left to small but determined pressure to Superintendent Howard Fuller’s pro-

> Chiara R. Nappi is a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She served on the Board of Education of Princeton Regional Schools from 1993 to 1996. Copyright © 1999 by Chiara R. Nappi.

46 WQ Autumn 1999 gram to increase academic achievement education establishment has resisted more (school autonomy in exchange for stricter detailed statements of standards, which it accountability), elected a slate of anti- sees, accurately, as a means of increasing the superintendent candidates. Fuller resigned accountability of teachers and administra- rather than face what he called “death by a tors. Standards are supposed to spell out in thousand cuts.” Philadelphia’s superinten- detail what students are expected to learn dent, David W. Hornbeck, is currently and be able to do at each grade level, but in under siege for similar reasons. Last year, in the many fat books of standards produced at my own district, Superintendent Marcia the national, state, and local levels, it is still Bossart left after four years of pushing to practically impossible to find precise state- introduce district-wide standards and to ments about what students should learn and improve teachers’ performance. She had when they should learn it. struggled on for several months after the Princeton Regional Education Association, which had fought her for years, finally elected a slate of candidates opposed to her The Achievement of attempts to change the system. U.S. High School Seniors An International Comparison nly by understanding the forces of inertia and immobility that Country Mathematics Science grip local school districts is it Netherlands 560 558 O Sweden 552 559 possible to comprehend the damage done Denmark 547 509 by the fragmentation of the American edu- Switzerland 540 523 cation system. Until a decade ago, for exam- Iceland 534 549 ple, it was accepted that school curriculum Norway 528 544 standards were a prerogative of the local France 523 487 school districts. In principle, this meant that Australia 522 527 New Zealand 522 529 there was in place a district curriculum Canada 519 532 approved by the local board of education. In Austria 518 520 reality, individual classroom teachers in Slovenia 512 517 many districts (including my own) were left Int’l Average 500 500 to set their own curriculum, often without Germany 495 497 Hungary 483 471 even the barest guidelines about what was to Italy 476 475 be accomplished in the classroom. Russian Fed. 471 481 Decisions about curricula, textbooks and Lithuania 469 461 other instructional materials, and the Czech Rep. 466 487 United States 461 480 amount of time spent on different sub- Cyprus 446 448 jects—all were left to the discretion of indi- South Africa 356 349 vidual teachers. It was a recipe for educa- tional chaos and underachievement. In the Third International Mathematics and Since the early 1980s, when some of the Science Study in 1995, American 12th first widespread alarms about abysmal stu- graders scored below the 21-nation average in both math and science. The relative per- dent performance were sounded, reformers formance of Americans declines as they have achieved some successes in introduc- advance through the school system. U.S. ing national guidelines and state standards. 4th graders performed very well—outscor- Americans increasingly recognize that a ing, for example, their peers in every nation nation without high standards of education except South Korea in science—but 8th graders’ scores slipped into the middle will not prosper for long in a global econo- ranks. The scale ranges from 0 to 1,000. my. But many of the new guidelines and Source: U.S. Department of Education, National standards are vague and undemanding. Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Americans are still reluctant to compromise Education, 1999. the prerogatives of the local districts, and the

Schools 47 Because there is no agreement on what dren with facts,” as the imparting of knowl- students should learn, there is no agreement edge is often derisively termed, is seen in on what teachers must know. This helps these quarters as a highly regressive practice. explain why so many of the nation’s teach- Thus, 34 percent of U.S. mathematics ers’ colleges and university-based schools of teachers at the 12th-grade level and 53 per- education provide inadequate professional cent of all secondary-level history teachers preparation. Rather than emphasize sub- neither majored nor minored in their sub- stantive knowledge in biology, history, or ject in college. Forty percent of public any of the other subjects the teachers will be school students are likewise without a com- discussing in the classroom, these institu- petent science teacher. tions tend to stress pedagogy and “process”—focusing on teaching method- ometimes it is not just specialized ologies and learning theories, and often pro- knowledge that is lacking. In 1997, moting new, untested doctrines. Teachers, Sthe Connetquot school district in according to the doctrines currently holding Long Island, New York, made headlines sway in some of these institutions, should be when it revealed that only a quarter of the trained to be “facilitators” who enable stu- applicants for teaching jobs in the district dents to learn on their own. “Filling chil- had passed a reading comprehension test designed for the district’s high school juniors. Although the poor performance of American teachers is often lamented, not What We Spend much has been done to improve it. And (Per Student Outlays in again the system’s fragmentation is largely to Constant 1995 Dollars) blame. The teachers’ colleges and schools of $ education have not shown much interest in raising requirements for graduation on their own, in part because they fear that they would lose students to less demanding insti- tutions. The states exercise little supervision over these institutions; most do not even require them to be accredited. Once they graduate, teachers are subject to few assessments. Requirements for obtain- ing a state teaching license vary widely by state, but they tend to be far from demand- ing, often entailing nothing more than a demonstration of general cultural knowl- edge. In most states, passing the test once assures lifelong possession of a teaching cer- Italy Japan U.K. U.S. France tificate. What slips through these procedures Germany is suggested by the case of Massachusetts, which last year became the 44th state to In per-student terms, the United States outspends other major industrial countries require a test in basic competency for on elementary and secondary education. prospective teachers. But unlike most of the U.S. spending (public and private) other states, Massachusetts chose to adminis- amounts to 3.9 percent of the gross ter a rather rigorous test. Sixty percent of the domestic product, a proportion exceeded candidates failed. Predictably, disappointed only by France and Canada, with just over four percent. test takers threatened to sue, arguing that the exam was too hard, a product of irresponsible Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of “teacher bashing.” Education, 1999. Even more problems plague the way teachers are hired and tenured. Hiring is

48 WQ Autumn 1999 Playground (1986), by P. J. Crook

almost always left to school principals, who fewer than five percent of all contracts allow often don’t pay much attention to the acad- a performance-based component in the emic records and professional competency determination of teachers’ compensation. of the candidates. They are more likely to be Why? Because of the determined resistance interested in whether the new teacher fits of local teachers’ unions. the “culture” of the school or whether, apart from teaching, he or she can coach football here are a few signs of change amid or some other sport. all this dismal news. For example, a Once hired, the teacher can look forward Tnumber of states are beginning to to lifetime job security with the almost auto- exercise greater quality control over new matic grant of tenure (after only three years, teachers. In Massachusetts, despite the out- in many states). Once tenure is granted, a cry over the new state licensing exam, state teacher’s performance is often beyond officials have proposed not only retaining the scrutiny. Job evaluations are infrequent, and test but requiring teacher candidates to have the procedures for removing incompetents a bachelor’s degree in a core subject area. No are so expensive and time consuming that longer would a degree in education suffice. many districts do not even try. In Pennsylvania, education secretary Gene As if poor training, ill-conceived hiring Hickok has announced a plan that would practices, and inadequate job performance require certified mastery in each teacher’s assessments were not enough, teachers also academic major. President Bill Clinton receive virtually automatic salary increases. climbed on the bandwagon earlier this year Despite years of agitation by reformers, with his proposal for a national teachers’ test.

Schools 49 But these relatively modest efforts would tance, often complicated by ethnic and apply only to prospective teachers. Attempts racial issues, is probably one of the main to impose quality controls on the teachers reasons district boundaries survive. already working in the public schools meet Shifting to state financing of the schools bitter resistance from the teachers’ unions. would ease the impact of economic dispar- In New Jersey and New York, for example, ities among districts and might help the unions beat back attempts to end the de reduce the fierce commitment to the dis- facto lifetime state certification that protects trict form of local autonomy. many incompetent teachers. New York will now require recertification, but, bowing to fter more than 200 years, local union pressure, it set only minimal stan- governance in American educ- dards for winning it. A ation is here to stay. But its ill Local control of the schools also has effects could be offset if the states played a important consequences for the inequality more active role in education. The intro- and overall cost of American education. duction of educational standards and state Because the schools are still financed tests is a step in the right direction and a largely out of local property taxes, less clear indication that states are willing to affluent districts in New Jersey spent only take on the job. The states have even direct- 70 percent as much per pupil in 1990 as ly intervened to rescue failing school sys- more affluent districts. The city of tems. In New Jersey, the state assumed con- Philadelphia spends on average $3,000 trol of Jersey City’s problem-plagued school less per student than districts in the sub- system in 1989. In 1991, the Massachusetts urbs. In the Chicago area, some districts state legislature, its patience with Boston’s spend twice as much as others ($12,000 ineffective elected school board exhausted, versus $6,000). Several states have tried in gave the city’s mayor the authority to recent years to address these inequalities. appoint its members. The mayors of Under a New Jersey Supreme Court order Chicago and Detroit have won similar pow- to bridge the gap, New Jersey in the mid- ers, and New York City’s mayor may soon 1990s tried to control the outlays of richer join them. Even charter schools, which districts. But the most effective way to alle- appeal to the supporters of local gover- viate economic disparities among districts nance, actually enhance the states’ role in is to switch from local to state financing of public education. Charter schools are pub- schools. In 1993, the state of Michigan lic schools that are run independently of started shifting the source of public school local school boards and district teachers’ revenue from local property taxes to state unions but submit to the same state rules sales taxes. Today, about 70 percent of and regulations as any other public school. school money in Michigan comes from They report directly to the state department state taxes. It is too soon, however, to of education, which judges their perfor- gauge the impact on equity. mance and decides whether to grant or Not to be underestimated, finally, are revoke their charter. the simple dollar costs of local autonomy. There is much more that the states can The duplication of administrative struc- do. Many management tasks can be tures and services in each district signifi- accomplished much more efficiently by cantly increases school costs. Thus, New regional educational agencies. Teachers’ Jersey, with 611 independent school dis- contracts and employees’ salaries should tricts, twice the national average, has the be negotiated at the state level, a step that highest per pupil cost in the country. would certainly go a long way toward pro- Efforts to reduce these expenses by creat- moting “equity” in education. The states ing regional school districts meet stiff resis- should also impose rigorous standards on tance, especially from affluent communi- teachers’ colleges and schools of educa- ties that can afford to create their own tion. They should require serious state islands of educational privilege. This resis- exams and certification for teachers seek-

50 WQ Autumn 1999 Boston Latin School (1996), by Nicholas Nixon ing a job in the state. At the regional level, responsibility for public education, auton- teaching candidates should be listed omy could easily shift from school districts according to their academic credentials to individual schools, which would be run and test results, and schools should hire by their own governing bodies but would their teachers out of this pool of applicants. ultimately be accountable to the state. Small districts should consolidate in order These schools would enjoy enough free- to share services, resources, and personnel, dom to implement their own educational and to increase the educational opportuni- programs, but they would do so within a ties available to students (such as magnet framework established by the state, the and vocational schools). way today’s charter schools operate. Local school boards would still have Without the constraints of district bound- important work to do. Handing over their aries, students could choose to attend the management and administrative functions schools that better meet their interests and to regional and statewide bodies, they needs, as students in many other countries would concentrate on school policy, inter- with successful systems do today. In prac- preting state mandates, tailoring them to tice, elementary and middle school stu- the local situation, and monitoring the dents would likely remain in neighborhood performance of students and staff. schools, while high school students would pick and choose. Not only would such a ventually, by combining ele- design represent a more modern and more ments of school choice and the effective interpretation of the cherished E“site-based management” now concept of local autonomy, but it would thought to be essential to effective schools, also move the United States a good way it may be possible to create a new form of toward the realization of another long-cher- local control. If states finance and assume ished ideal, equity in education.

Schools 51 The Teachers’ Muddle

by Charles L. Glenn

veryone seems to want to get in a them. I am not referring to disagreements whack at the public schools for about specific content—though, as Hirsch Ecausing America’s problems. A few shows, there is vast confusion in that respect years ago they were blamed for the competi- as well—but to conflicting messages about tive weaknesses of the economy—though we the fundamental mission of public schools haven’t heard many people giving them in a liberal democracy. credit for its strong performance since! Lately The conflict over mission involves a prior they have been condemned for their failure question that is fundamental: should schools to prevent violence, though young people seek to influence the character of their are far safer in school than on the streets. pupils, or should they limit themselves to Not all of the criticisms of American pub- developing skills and knowledge in a value- lic education are as mindless as these. free manner? This question would have Thoughtful commentators such as E. D. seemed the proverbial “no-brainer” for many Hirsch, Jr. and William Kirk Kilpatrick have centuries. It was simply assumed that schools shown how poorly many schools meet the taught far more than academic skills and need of impoverished children. These com- knowledge. Many would have argued that mentators have also rightly criticized many character formation was their primary task. schools for failing to guide children of all Under a republican form of government social classes toward a coherent sense of right in which “the people” (or some portion of and wrong. Addressing these and other ills of them) were the final source of political public education will require reforms more authority, this concern was especially press- radical than any tried so far. It will also mean ing. As Montesquieu pointed out in The rethinking some of our most basic practices, Spirit of the Laws (1748), “there need not be and none is more badly in need of reconsid- much integrity for a monarchical or despotic eration than the preparation of teachers. government to maintain or sustain itself. . . . Teachers are often unfairly blamed for the But in a popular state there must be an addi- educational incoherence targeted by critics tional spring, which is virtue.” For this rea- such as Hirsch in The Schools We Need: And son, “it is in republican government that the Why We Don’t Have Them (1996) and full power of education is needed. . . . One Kilpatrick in Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right can define this virtue as love of the laws and from Wrong (1992). It would be fairer to the homeland. This love, requiring a contin- place the responsibility upon those of us who ual preference of the public interest over think and write about the purposes of educa- one’s own, produces all the individual tion, and upon our predecessors. Teachers virtues.... in a republic, everything depends and those preparing to teach receive very on establishing this love, and education confused signals about what is expected of should attend to inspiring it.”

52 WQ Autumn 1999 4-B (1937), by Louise Emerson Rönnebeck

The American founding generation that the state should not be allowed to inter- agreed. Benjamin Rush urged, in 1786, that fere with matters of conscience through con- “our schools of learning, by producing one trol over religion and education. Indeed, pro- general and uniform system of education, posals to give government—which is to say will render the mass of the people more the state or national government—a strong homogeneous and thereby fit them more role went nowhere until the middle of this easily for uniform and peaceable govern- century. Local control through what at one ment.” Thomas Jefferson wrote, the same time were more than 100,000 elected school year, that schools were the most important boards placed decisions close to parents and instrument of society for “ameliorating the other concerned citizens. Slowly and inex- condition, protecting the virtue, and advanc- orably, however, state governments began to ing the happiness of man.” The 1790s assert control over what was taught, and by brought a spate of proposals to create a whom. By the 1970s, local control had grown national system of education. A generation largely meaningless in a public education sys- later, Horace Mann pointed out that “it may tem that strove for uniformity. The official be an easy thing to make a Republic, but it is role of the federal government in education is a very laborious thing to make Repub- still very limited, but the carrots and sticks licans.... But if...a Republic be devoid of that it employs have a profound impact, espe- intelligence, it will only the more closely cially on schools that serve poor children. resemble an obscene giant . . . whose brain has been developed only in the region of the esistance to government control appetites and passions, and not in the organs of education has continued of reason and conscience.... Such a repub- R because critics believe that giv- lic, with all its noble capacities for benefi- ing government the power to shape the cence, will rush with the speed of a whirl- beliefs and attitudes of children is, over the wind to an ignominious end.” long term, a threat to freedom. Such crit- But there is also a strong countertradition ics share with the promoters of a strong

Schools 53 modes of conduct, involves, as of the The Wages of Teaching same unspeakable importance, diver- Annual median salaries of elementary and sity of education. A general State edu- secondary teachers in constant 1998 dollars cation is a mere contrivance for Year Salary moulding people to be exactly like 1971 $34,113 one another; and as the mould in 1975 $31,581 which it casts them is that which 1981 $28,576 pleases the predominant power in the 1983 $31,122 government...in proportion as it is 1987 $34,893 efficient and successful, it establishes 1989 $34,668 a despotism over the mind, leading by 1993 $34,947 natural tendency to one over the 1995 $35,134 body. An education established and 1998 $35,099 controlled by the State should only Teacher salaries fell in real terms between exist, if it exist at all, as one among 1971 and 1981, but have risen slightly many competing experiments, car- since. Swelling school enrollments and the ried on for the purpose of example growing proportion of teachers age 45 and and stimulus, to keep the others up to over (median salary: $41,661) may point to rising pay in the future. a certain standard of excellence.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Educational policy and practice in the Education, 1999. United States, after half a century of increased government interference, seem to be moving in a contrary direction, toward the state role a high estimation of the power of position Mill suggested nearly 150 years ago: schooling to counter the influence of fam- “many competing experiments” in the form ily and society on the developing child. of magnet schools, charter schools, and (at They agree that schools and teachers are a least in a modest way) publicly funded pri- crucial factor in preserving or transforming vate and religious schools. This openness to culture and social life. In On Liberty many different ways of educating is coupled (1859), John Stuart Mill spoke for those with a growing stress on outcomes measured who urged that government should not be by standardized tests. In effect, policymakers entrusted with a monopoly on schooling, are saying to educators, “So long as you get to while conceding it the role of ensuring the goals that we set, you are free to choose that schooling was available to all: what road you take.” Parents, in turn, are showing themselves The objections which are urged with increasingly picky about the schools to reason against State education do not which they entrust their children. And some- apply to the enforcement of educa- thing like a million American children are tion by the State, but to the State’s being schooled at home by parents who have taking upon itself to direct that edu- not found any school to their liking. cation, which is a totally different There seem to be two reasons for the new thing.... All that has been said of the openness to diversity in American education. importance of individuality of char- The first is that parents are themselves better acter, and diversity in opinions and educated and more demanding as “con-

> Charles L. Glenn is professor and chairman of administration, training, and policy studies at Boston University. From 1970 to 1991, he was director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Educa- tion. He is the author of The Myth of the Common School (1988), Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in Twelve Nations (1996), and other books. His latest, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies, will be published early next year by Princeton University Press. Copy- right © 1999 by Charles L. Glenn.

54 WQ Autumn 1999 sumers” of schooling for their children. In increasing num- bers, they are not willing sim- ply to accept whatever is pro- vided by the nearest public school. The second reason is the growing body of evi- dence, notably in the Rand Corporation’s High Schools with Character (1990), that schools with a distinctive character, including faith- based schools, are more effective than schools reflect- ing a lowest common de- nominator of values. For teachers, these two developments mean that they will be held accountable for measurable results, and may well find themselves working in schools offering a distinc- tive approach to education. They will need to adapt to these expectations. If fortu- nate or enterprising, they may find themselves in schools that match their own convictions about educa- tion—if they have any. If they Robert Gaudio, English Teacher, Hazleton Senior High do not have any clear ideas School, Hazleton, Pa. (1992), by Judith Joy Ross about the goals of education, they are likely to find themselves in schools choose to home-school) on the basis of as incoherent as they are, schools that do not their concerns in this domain. have strong parent constituencies and are dif- ficult and unsatisfying places in which to ere is a primary source of the con- work. fusion of teachers today. School What do I mean by “convictions”? Not Hreformers celebrate distinctive beliefs about the comparative merits of approaches to education, and parents seek phonics and whole language as methods them, but the norms of the profession con- of reading instruction, or whether tinue to insist that all teachers (and schools) English or the home language of immi- are interchangeable, and that neither should grant children should be used to teach “impose their values.” But good teaching is them to read. Those are issues that can be all about urging those we teach to accept resolved over time by research, which fre- what we believe to be true and worthy of quently points to some sort of mixed their acceptance. Bad teaching imposes val- model. Nor am I referring to strictly reli- ues, too, and schools that are incoherent are gious beliefs about, for example, the not neutral or “value free.” Cynicism, indif- means of salvation. There is, instead, a ference to truth, disinclination to carry out middle ground of ways of understanding tasks thoroughly, and disrespect for others— what is necessary to a flourishing life, and all of these can be learned in school. parents seem to choose schools (or Only schools with a distinctive character

Schools 55 to which staff and parents alike are com- good and honorable life, which would serve mitted can shape the character of pupils in to anchor such convictions. positive ways. This is one reason why Catholic schools now enroll many non- t would be impossible as well as wrong Catholics, and some Evangelical schools for government to impose a single serve pupils from non-Evangelical families. Imodel of character formation upon Parents in these cases perceive that a school every school, and to insist that teachers share centered on a religious ethos, even if it is or at least express an official worldview in not their own ethos, is more likely to reflect their classrooms. There is room for a variety their own convictions about the good life of approaches capable of nurturing decent they want for their children than a school human beings who are responsible citizens. without such a common ground. Motivated Perhaps it would help, however, to illustrate pupils, a relatively safe and undistracted with contrasting models described in two of environment, and a size that allows the the oldest descriptions of education in the pupils and adults to know one another well Western tradition, and by the most influen- more than offsets, for these parents, the tial 20th-century thinker about education, material advantages that public schools, John Dewey (1859–1952). with their computer labs and highly cre- In the fifth book of the Jewish and dentialed teachers, usually enjoy. Shared Christian Scriptures, Moses tells the people values and clarity about goals offer a distinct of Israel: advantage to faith-based schools. According to a study by Susan P. Choy for the National See, I have taught you decrees and Center for Education Statistics, 71 percent laws as the Lord my God command- of teachers in small (fewer than 150 pupils) ed me, so that you may follow them private schools agree that “colleagues share in the land you are entering to take beliefs and values about central mission of possession of it. Observe them care- school,” compared with 41 percent of those fully, for this will show your wisdom in small public schools. In large schools, and understanding to the nations.... with more than 750 pupils, both numbers Only be careful, and watch your- drop, to 49 percent in private schools and selves closely so that you do not forget only 26 percent in public schools. the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as eachers who want to work in you live. Teach them to your children schools that are built on a shared and to their children after them.... understanding of education—and T These commandments that I give increasingly these will be the schools in you today are to be upon your hearts. demand by parents and supported by public Impress them on your children. Talk policy—need to have thought carefully about them when you sit at home about their own convictions as to how to pro- and when you walk along the road, mote character and worthy life goals in their pupils. Unfortunately, many teachers have when you lie down and when you get been made tentative and confused about up. (Deuteronomy 4:5–6, 9; 6:6–7) such matters by their own schooling, and by college or graduate school teacher-training This way of understanding education programs. They have been told that public sees it as the transmission of a tradition that schools should be “value neutral,” and have provides authoritative guidance about the taken that to mean that they should seek to behavior, including daily habits, and the give the impression that they have no fixed attitudes that sustain an ideal of life and of convictions about any matter on which community. Continuing in this tradition Americans disagree. Even more damaging, signifies “wisdom and understanding,” they may let their pupils assume that they since it requires inner conviction as well as have no understanding of the nature of a external compliance.

56 WQ Autumn 1999 The second account is a famous parable pupils from what parents and society have from Plato’s Republic. Socrates offers “an taught. image of our nature in its education and Plato’s understanding of education is fun- want of education”: damentally different from that expressed in Deuteronomy. While they have in common Behold! human beings living in an a social goal, that of developing and sustain- underground cave, which has a ing the virtues required by a particular soci- mouth open towards the light and ety, the biblical strategy involves binding the reaching all along the cave; here they individual to a tradition of norms and loyal- have been from their childhood, and ties shared generation after generation. have their legs and necks chained so Plato’s strategy involves liberation from the that they cannot move, and can only prevailing understanding of reality in the see before them, being prevented by interest of transforming, rather than preserv- the chains from turning round their ing, the social and political order. The heads. Above and behind them a fire teacher inducts his pupil into a higher wis- is blazing at a distance, and between dom that serves as the basis for a total recon- struction of society, including the most inti- the fire and the prisoners there is a mate relationships. Anything that stands in raised way; and you will see, if you its way is self-condemned as ignorance and look, a low wall built along the way, prejudice. like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over hile John Dewey’s account is which they show the puppets.... informed by an entirely differ- And do you see men passing along ent metaphysic and anthropol- the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, W ogy, he shares Plato’s concept of education as and statues and figures of animals movement away from inherited habits and made of wood and stone and various understandings. “Growth itself,” he wrote in materials, which appear over the Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), “is the wall? Some of them are talking, oth- only moral ‘end.’ ” Everything that promotes ers silent. the growth of the child into a person who continues to grow through new experiences You have shown me a strange of shared problem solving is good education. image [Glaucon replies], and they “‘ Growth,’ ” Dewey wrote a few years later, are strange prisoners. “is not enough; we must also specify the direction in which growth takes place, the Like ourselves, I replied; and they end towards which it tends.... Does this see only their own shadows, or the form of growth create conditions for further shadows of one another, which the growth, or does it set up conditions that shut fire throws on the opposite wall of the off the person who has grown in this particu- cave? lar direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new “Like ourselves,” Socrates says; that is, we directions?” In other words, “truth” resides in are also prisoners of the illusions he has been the search itself. Dewey contrasts his position describing. Education is the process by with that of “reactionaries [who] claim that which one is forced to look toward the light, the main, if not the sole, business of educa- and then is led unwillingly up the path out of tion is transmission of the cultural heritage.” the cave to stand in the light of day, and at The educational goals described in last look toward the sun itself. “Will he not Deuteronomy are consistent with the prac- fancy that the shadows which he formerly tice of many schools, whether religious or saw are truer than the objects which are now not, that give priority to helping pupils to shown to him?” Of course, and this is why master the knowledge and the moral pre- the educator is called literally to disillusion cepts that previous generations have found

Schools 57 important. These schools teach history and often presented as an unwelcome interfer- languages (even “dead” languages) and the ence with their creativity as teachers and great literature of their cultural heritage, as with the real interests and needs of their well as traditional virtues. future pupils. Much of this content, Schools that follow the model suggested inevitably, is “conservative,” in the sense that by Plato try to teach a fundamentally differ- it reflects the accumulated wisdom of society ent way of understanding the world, one that about what is important to know. requires rejection of much in the tradition Future teachers are also told that it is part and much of what children have been told of the mission of the public school to take by their parents. This is education for per- the leading role in the transformation of soci- sonal and social transformation, described ety, by convincing pupils that the beliefs of brilliantly in Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and their parents and of their communities of attempted by various totalitarian regimes, faith or tradition about the roles of men and starting with the French Revolution and cul- women, about sexual orientations and prac- minating in the efforts to create the “new tices, and about a host of other sensitive mat- Soviet man” during 70 years of communist ters are simply wrong. In Plato’s sense, teach- education. A less sinister form of transforma- ers are to disillusion their pupils about what tive education is provided in mission schools they think they know and what meaning to that enroll children from non-Christian attach to it. homes with the goal of instilling a new They are also told that their primary con- understanding of reality in their charges. cern should be with the pupil’s own needs and interests, and that curriculum mandates ewey’s emphasis on growth has should not be allowed to interfere with the had an enormous influence natural unfolding of individuals. Such Dupon American classrooms, and preachments are not only of recent vintage. not only in schools that describe themselves They were given definitive expression in a as progressive. In this spirit, educators book published nearly 75 years ago, invoke the slogan, “Teach the child, not the Foundations of Method, by William Heard subject.” They talk of “critical thinking” as Kilpatrick (no relation to William Kirk more important than mastery of facts about Kilpatrick). Summarizing the book recently, history or society. And they urge that skills Hirsch discerned “the identification of cor- such as reading or accurate spelling not be rect pedagogy with liberal, democratic taught until they are “developmentally American ideals; the dubious claim that it appropriate.” For many middle-class chil- was basing itself on the most advanced sci- dren who benefit from enriching home entific research; the insistence upon the indi- experiences, such an emphasis on self- viduality of the child and the autonomy of direction and cooperative learning based the teacher; the disparagement of mere sub- upon group projects can mean happy ject matter and of other nations’ educational school days. For children from homes that methods; the admonition to teach children are not rich in “cultural capital,” a series of rather than subjects; the claim that knowl- nondirective classrooms can result in a edge is changing so fast that no specific sub- grievously inadequate education. ject matter should be required in the cur- Each of these differing views of education riculum; the attack on rote learning; the could shape a coherent school, though some attack on tests and even report cards; the of us will prefer one and some the other. The claim that following the project method trouble is that seemingly contradictory ele- would develop critical-thinking skills. ments from each are often mixed together in Kilpatrick’s book even celebrated the whole- the orientation that future teachers are given language over the phonics approach to read- to the nature of their vocation. ing instruction.” They are told that they will have to cover Implementing any one of these approach- the content that increasingly is specified in es consistently requires choices that essen- state curriculum frameworks, though this is tially exclude the others. This is not to say

58 WQ Autumn 1999 Possibilities and Pragmatics (1990), by Vivian Torrence that teachers who are seeking to transmit a seems that only the essentially negative tradition of knowledge and virtue are not free virtue of “tolerance” is allowed a role in to criticize aspects of that tradition, or that public schools—which is often a cloak for they should be so enamored of the subject undermining traditional values. But matter that they forget the pupil. Nor is it to foreswearing any intention of influencing suggest that those who follow a “child-cen- the habits, attitudes, and settled disposi- tered” approach have no concern at all with tions of pupils shows a fundamental lack of the needs of society. But teachers who are respect for their potential as human unclear about their primary goals and how beings, and for the noble vocation of they will seek to reach them are likely to fall teaching. into a hopeless muddle of half-attempts and If we are entering, as it appears, an era of self-contradictions. many competing educational experi- ments, teachers and school administrators eacher preparation that fails to must be made aware of an essential truth: grapple with the goals of educa- different ways of understanding the goals Ttion, by showing how the selection of education have different implications of classroom method and curricula follows for the classroom and curriculum. Before from the choice of goals, not the other way this can happen, however, we need to rec- around, is a formula for incoherent and ognize that the competing goals of educa- ineffectual education. That is, unfortu- tion themselves reflect different philosoph- nately, a confusion that “educators” have ical, even theological, choices about how imposed upon teachers. Sometimes it we understand the nature of reality itself.

Schools 59 Our Uneducated Educators

by Paul A. Zoch

here is a troubling paradox at the perhaps another student in the top five per- heart of America’s efforts to reform cent of the senior class. One of my former Tthe public schools. After many students, for example, passed advanced decades of clamor for change and improved placement (AP) exams in chemistry, biology, student achievement, one of the few groups American history, English, calculus, and that seem to lack any sense of urgency is also Latin, making the highest possible score of 5 one of the most important: the principals on all but one, on which he scored a 4; the and other administrators who actually lead minimum passing score is 3. By passing those the schools. Having long resisted state-man- exams, he demonstrated his mastery of the dated tests as intrusive and inaccurate assess- subjects at the college level and earned col- ments of “mere” basic skills and contrary to lege credit in those fields. Many other stu- the true spirit of education, they now cite ris- dents can boast of similar accomplishments. ing scores on such exams as evidence of suc- Can their principals and superintendents? cess. Never mind the evidence of our senses, That the answer is a resounding and sar- much less of international comparisons that donic no points to a grave defect in Amer- show American students barely able to out- ica’s education system: the lack of authen- perform their peers in Cyprus. The nation’s tic intellectual and academic leadership in youngsters are meeting “world class” stan- the public schools. What leadership there dards. The principals and the educationist is sets a standard of academic submedioc- brain trust in the university-based schools of rity, guided by the principle that it is not education have the problem largely in hand. important to be educated; it is important Students in Germany, Japan, and South only to appear educated. Korea, watch out—graduates of American The academic and intellectual aimless- high schools now read at least at the ninth ness of our schools is a direct outgrowth of grade level. their leaders’ impoverished academic back- Some light is shed on this paradox if one grounds. About one-third of the principals asks a simple question: who is the best-edu- surveyed by the National Association of cated person at your local high school, the Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in person whose sterling academic and intellec- 1987 held undergraduate degrees in busi- tual accomplishments serve as a model and ness, education, or physical education. inspiration for students and faculty? Most (More than half had earlier worked as coach- likely it is not the principal or even the super- es, including 28 percent who served as ath- intendent of the district, but the valedictori- letic directors.) The academic quality of an or salutatorian of the graduating class, or degree students entering education pro-

60 WQ Autumn 1999 scored 1570.) We can gauge the academic quality of the remaining two thirds of administrators by ex- amining how graduate students in education score on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a required test for most graduate school applicants. The highest score possible for each of the three sections (ver- bal ability, quantitative ability, and analytical ability) is 800. In verbal ability, education gradu- ate students who took the test in the period from October 1989 to September 1992 scored 462, placing next to last, 25 points behind the supposedly “verbally challenged” engineers. Nor did education stu- dents shine in quantita- tive ability; their average score of 503 placed them dead last. In ana- lytical ability, they barely avoided last place with a score of 531, one point Spring (1986), by Stasys Eidrigevicius ahead of those in the “other fields” category. How will our “educa- grams is revealed by their low scores on the tional leaders” lead our students to success in Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), the ticket math and science after scoring so poorly on a to college admissions. The maximum com- mathematics exam that, according to its bined score is 1600. In 1980, around the designer, the Educational Testing Service, time when many of today’s younger adminis- “does not extend beyond [what is] usually trators were undergraduates, the average covered in high school”? combined SAT score of education majors was 807, and of business majors, 852. e need not rely on test scores Average scores in other majors ranged from to assess the academic abili- 886 in the arts and humanities to 911 in the Wties of these leaders—and, social sciences to 1055 in the physical sci- indirectly, the standards prevailing in ences. (Last year, I wrote letters of recom- the academic discipline that has certi- mendation for graduating seniors whose fied them as educational leaders. combined SAT scores were 1400, 1430, and Consider this memorandum written by a 1490; the AP wizard mentioned earlier principal to the 150 teachers in the

Schools 61 Texas high school where I work: “Spring and administrators. “Faculties and deans in is upon us. We need to take time in your schools of education are frequently embar- classes to re-emphasis the dress code. rassed by the academic performance of edu- There are no shorts to be worn.” Or this cational administration graduate students,” greeting from an administrator who had the report noted—this in a field where peo- previously served as a principal in anoth- ple are not easily embarrassed by low er district: achievement. “Many graduate programs adhere to an unspoken pact that any teacher, even an unsuccessful teacher with Hello, I am the new Tech Prep marginal academic ability, has an inalien- Specialist in the district. In recent able right to study for an administrator’s cer- weeks, I have previously had the tificate, and persistent candidates are almost pleasure of meeting many of you, always admitted.” however there are many that I At no time during their own education, have yet to make your acquain- whether in high school or college, or in tance. It will be my personal their professional training, are educational vendetta to meet each of you and leaders required to succeed, as the best stu- remember your name as well as dents in our schools do, in courses of AP what you do before the year’s end. depth and quality in core subject areas. They do not need to be educated; a degree Alas, many parents and teachers across in education will do. That credential is won the country can report similar incidents. by taking courses in curriculum, education In my school, even a formal document law, education finance, psychology, and such as the school’s student handbook is educational leadership. riddled with grammatical and stylistic Running a school or school district is a errors. It provides one of the few occa- complicated endeavor, requiring specialized sions when a teacher can be glad that knowledge and training. But apart from nec- students read so little. essary instruction in such matters as man- agement and law, our educational leaders dministrators are drawn from the are steeped in the intellectual equivalent of ranks of teachers, of course, and astrology, alchemy, and pig Latin. The A at least in this area of compe- National Policy Board for Educational tence one study shows that they come from Administration itself recommended that the the bottom ranks. In the 1992 National master’s degree in education and administra- Adult Literacy Survey, education adminis- tor certificates be abolished. The content trators’ average score of 326 in prose litera- presented in such programs, it concluded, is cy put them behind the average score of “irrelevant, outdated, and unchallenging.”* 333 attained by the teachers they supervise A few anecdotes illustrate the infa- and, in theory, lead. The administrators tied mous Mickey Mouse nature of education with registered nurses, and surpassed only courses. A colleague of mine, while one professional category: sales supervisors and proprietors. *Our country is awash in products of the education schools. Consider this appalling calculation: Between 1970 and The dismal academic performance of 1993, American institutions of higher learning granted administrators has not gone entirely unno- 2,871,292 bachelor’s and 2,184,671 master’s degrees in edu- ticed. In 1989, for example, the National cation. There are approximately 40 million students in the Policy Board for Educational Admin- public schools today. That means there is at least one person with a bachelor’s in education for every 13.9 students in the istration issued a report calling for a radical United States and one with a master’s in education for every overhaul of the preparation of principals 18 students.

> Paul A. Zoch teaches Latin in a public school in Houston, Texas. His book Ancient Rome: An Introductory History was recently published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Copyright © 1999 by Paul A. Zoch.

62 WQ Autumn 1999 False Ceiling (1995), by Richard Wentworth

teaching full-time at our high school, was courses in other fields, were no more also taking three graduate courses in edu- challenging than 9th-grade algebra. cation at night in pursuit of his master’s degree. “Isn’t that a lot of work?” I asked ecognizing some of the weakness- him one day, noting that he still man- es of today’s schools, educationists aged to go fishing every weekend. He R at universities have been busily said he never had to study, and was mak- churning out books and articles on what ing A’s. I asked why he was not doing makes effective educational leaders and something more interesting and worth- principals. (What were they looking into while, like getting a master’s in his sub- before, one wonders?) The research shows ject, rather than education. “No way,” he that “effective schools”—the schools where, said, astounded that I would even ask generally, students learn what they are sup- such a question. “I probably couldn’t posed to—succeed by virtue of a principal handle just one graduate course in [the who is an instructional leader animated by subject] while teaching full-time.” a vision of what the school should be. A course I took to help fulfill the Therefore, educationists argue, principals requirements for my teacher’s certificate must be given broader powers in the man- had a reading list consisting, in its entire- agement of their schools and the curricu- ty, of one slim book of approximately 100 lum. But what will inform the “vision” of pages and two articles of approximately administrators who lack a solid grasp of aca- 30 pages each. The other education demic subjects? In most cases, it will be the courses I have had, all of which carried vacuous doctrines of the educationists. graduate credit and, according to educa- Many of the guideposts suggested by tionists, are equal in rigor to graduate effective schools research do not bode

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For Faseer Service, Gall 1-800-823-5188 well for the achievement of a clearer dents’ mastery of demanding academic sense of direction at the top of the subjects. nation’s schools. In 1990, for example, To the principal or superintendent for- John E. Walker, now professor emeritus tified by such bizarre doctrines, the fact of educational administration and super- that he holds power and authority in the vision at Arizona State University, pre- school proves that knowledge and acade- sented a list of the “12 key skills every mics really are not very important; it is principal should possess,” derived from a important only to possess the credentials study of three principals by the NASSP: of formal education. After all, he is in a “problem analysis, judgment, organiza- position of authority, despite what is tional ability, decisiveness, leadership, probably a lowly academic record, and sensitivity, stress tolerance, oral commu- he rose to his position of high prestige nication, written communication, range and pay not because of his academic of interest[s], personal motivation, and brilliance but because he fulfilled the educational values.” requirements in education. The honest Never mind that this careful research principal may recognize that many of has produced a list of “skills” (some of the teachers under his authority are bet- which are not skills at all) required in ter educated than he is, but this may virtually any profession. Examine merely serve, in his mind, to validate his instead Walker’s description of the one experience: if the teachers are so smart, singular attribute, “educational values”: why is he in charge of them? Such attitudes have a demoralizing Aside from an excellent academic trickle-down effect. Even teachers who preparation, these three outstand- are fervently devoted to cultivating a ing principals had life experiences love of the pursuit of knowledge in their that enabled them to work with and students may think twice: if academic understand people. All were knowledge is so important, why is a less involved in sports; they knew what educated person earning more money, it took to succeed and the impor- enjoying greater prestige and power, and tance of hard work. They loved peo- serving as the school’s standard-bearer? ple, especially kids. All could be Thus ignorance becomes legitimized, the norm; the school’s academic stan- successful superintendents, but two dards have been compromised and vitiat- out of three said they never wanted ed in the very position where they to lose contact with kids. should be most sanctified. These exemplary principals had a solid grasp of many disciplines, t is very unlikely that, in setting including essential elements of standards and creating their vision instruction, self-esteem programs, of the school, administrators will community education, public rela- I reach the obvious conclusion: “The stu- tions, retention, student testing, sui- dents need to be smarter than I am.” cide prevention, stress manage- After all, they are just kids, and it would ment, and child growth and devel- be unfair to expect them to become as opment. Other areas of expertise knowledgeable as a highly educated included parenting, homework, adult with a master’s degree or doctorate. study skills, latchkey programs, and The principal may even think it reason- school-business partnerships. able if his charges achieve less than he did when he was in high school since, One must remind oneself that Walker after all, he was enough of an academic is describing the principals’ educational success to become the head of his own values. Apparently, effective principals school, and many students will not aim have on their minds everything but stu- that high. It is a frightening thought: to

66 WQ Autumn 1999 administrators it looks like success if Teachers can provide some leader- graduating seniors are as well educated ship, but they hold the least power in as they are! the schools and not infrequently are, In a 1987 survey, four years after pub- like the administrators, ardent educa- lication of the landmark national report tionists. This was vividly illustrated A Nation at Risk, only 46 percent of recently at my own school by a de facto principals agreed with the proposition, straw poll on teachers’ educational val- “Schools require far too little academic ues. During our in-service training work of students.” The former principal before the first day of school, we teach- who did not know the correct meaning ers were divided into groups of seven. of vendetta revealed his thoughts on aca- Each group was given a large paper demic standards by showing teachers a cutout of a student and some marking clip from The Bells of St. Mary’s, in pens, with instructions to list on the which Father O’Malley—no Jesuit, this cutout the characteristics we wanted our padre—advises Sister Benedict to pass graduates to take along with them when the failing Patsy, so her self-confidence they graduate from high school. After 30 (i.e. self-esteem) will not be harmed, standards being rather arbitrary anyway.

rom an administrator’s perspec- Principal Goals tive, higher standards, even if Fthey were needed, would have a In a 1993–94 opinion survey, school prin- variety of other drawbacks. They would cipals were asked to rank their educational increase the chances that more students goals. The chart below shows the percent- would fail courses, making them ineligi- age who ranked each goal first, second, or third. More than one-third of the princi- ble under the “no pass, no play” laws for pals did not choose “academic excellence” extracurricular activities, including, as one of their top three goals. worst of all, sports. Besides the harm that failure might do to the students’ “self- Basic literacy 72.1% esteem” and the certainty of blistering 46.4% phone calls from irate parents, the prin- Academic excellence cipal would also have to be aware of how 62.9% a high failure rate would make the 62.0% school appear. And the drop-out rate Good work habits and self-discipline 57.5% might rise. Overall, the principal would 41.5% have to conclude, higher standards are a Personal growth bad idea. 50.3% Unfortunately, there is no alternative to 43.7% relying on principals and administrators Human relations skills 24.3% for leadership. School boards have too 11.7% many varied responsibilities, and mem- Occupational or vocational skills bers generally serve only part-time. More- 15.2% over, virtually all school boards are elect- 5.9% ed, so popularity with the voters is a more Specific moral values important qualification than academic 6.3% 27.8% achievement and wisdom. Can we turn to parents for leadership? While many are Public school committed to getting the best education Private school possible for their children, many more Source: U.S. Department of Education, National are not. In any event, parents are too Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing removed from the schools’ daily opera- Survey: 1993–94 (Principal Questionnaire). tions to play a very effective role.

Schools 67 minutes of brain- academic back- storming, the groups grounds. A first step presented their re- would be to require sults. that all current prin- The first two cipals and superin- groups listed high tendents pass AP self-esteem, good exams or their equiv- grooming, job pros- alents in English, pects, good ethical calculus, a science, a character, freedom non-native foreign from drugs and al- language, and histo- cohol, politically ry. Administrators active, socially con- who did not pass scious, and similar these tests within characteristics. It was five years would be not until the third sent back to the group—mine—that classroom to teach a singularly academic whatever subject characteristic made they once taught. an appearance. It was An Unusual Period of Company (1997), No matter how pas- not an outlandish by Maysey Craddock sionately and sin- wish: “the ability to cerely they might pro- read and write and do math at the 12th test their love of education and learning, grade level.” The fourth group contin- those who failed such tests would reveal ued in the vein of the first two, setting its that they do not love them enough. sights on producing graduates who wear We should also demand that future their pants at waist level and don’t wind principals and superintendents have at up in prison. To its credit, the fifth group least a master’s degree in a traditional included “has a common core of knowl- academic subject, not education or busi- edge.” The sixth and seventh groups ness. Virtually all principals surveyed by resumed the undiluted stream of educa- the NASSP held at least a master’s tionist psychobabble, adding to their list degree, but only two percent of of objectives the hope that our graduates these degrees were in fields other than would be...happy! Nobody in the education. whole assembly seriously challenged the absurdity of suggesting such an elusive ur schools need more educa- and personal condition as a goal of the tion and knowledge, not schools. Omore educationist tripe, with After the last group finished its presen- its emphasis on vague emotional, social, tation, the school principal, our educa- political, and psychological goals and its tional leader, commented that we had ugly tendency to rationalize and legit- come up with an exceedingly large num- imize ignorance. Knowledge, not the ber of goals. We would need to concen- mere shadow of knowledge, must be the trate on just a few, he suggested. Which guiding principle in our schools, and the few, however, was a subject he never standard for excellence in education addressed. must be set by intellectually accom- Our schools sorely need academic czars plished principals and superintendents. to crack the whip behind students to get Otherwise, we will be left with a choice them moving toward substantial academic between wringing our hands over the ig- goals. If we are to have authentic academ- norance of our young people or content- ic leadership in the schools, we must have ing ourselves with their success at emu- principals and superintendents with solid lating their educational leaders.

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Americans have come to depend on big government, but they aren’t happy about it. We can’t live with the federal leviathan, it seems—yet we can’t live without it. It is a predicament with a history—and a way out.

by R. Shep Melnick

ike New England weather, Republicans who were in retreat, their American politics during the majority whittled away as Clinton, L1990s has been subject to promising to protect Medicare, Medi- abrupt and drastic changes. In early caid, education, and the environment 1992, Republican president George from Republican “extremists,” easily Bush seemed a shoe-in for re-election, won re-election. Who will control Democrats were in firm control of Congress and the White House after the Congress, and pundits were sure that the 2000 elections is anybody’s guess. era of divided government was here to These frenetic ideological changes in stay. But just a year later, Bill Clinton the political atmosphere do not simply was sitting in the White House and the reflect the fluctuating fortunes (or the ascendant Democrats, now in control of follies) of individual political leaders, both the presidency and the Congress, nor are they just the results of the long- were promising a new era of activist gov- standing practice of throwing the rascals ernment. Yet it didn’t happen. In 1994, out. They have occurred too frequently after the health care debacle, the to be taken for the “cycles of history” in Republicans captured both houses of which liberalism and conservatism alter- Congress for the first time in more than nately lay claim to the public’s favor. 40 years, vowing to roll back federal enti- They suggest instead that basic contra- tlements and regulatory programs. “The dictions in the American view of govern- era of big government is over,” Clinton ment, after gathering force for a century, famously conceded in 1996. But later are finally coming to a head. that year, it was the conservative Americans spent much of the 20th

70 WQ Autumn 1999 Political Descent ’96, by Edward Sorel

century expanding the reach and powers explanation of government’s new role. of the federal government. Yet at the Today, as a result, we have a political dis- same time, the practices and institutions course that fails to acknowledge one of that connect citizens to the public the central realities of our political life: realm—from locally based political par- “big government,” Bill Clinton notwith- ties to regional loyalties—were steadily standing, is here to stay. being undercut. No lasting public phi- Clinton’s sound bite is only the most losophy arose to provide a coherent dramatic manifestation of a widespread

Living with Leviathan 71 inability (or unwillingness) to come to welfare of the average citizen. Aided by terms with the permanence of the two world wars and a prolonged depres- national welfare and regulatory state. sion, Progressive and New Deal reform- Liberals are forever warning that it is ers were remarkably successful not only about to be dismantled by devious cor- in expanding the responsibilities of gov- porate interests, closet racists bent on ernment but in destroying the turn-of- eliminating civil rights laws, or religious the-century political institutions they zealots. Conservatives are forever despised. Determined to rid politics of lamenting that “big government” has corruption and parochialism, and to been foisted upon an unsuspecting pub- make it more open, more principled, lic by wily politicians, unaccountable more rational, and more nationally uni- judges, or a secularized elite—and call- form, these reformers attacked and weak- ing for the public to revolt. ened political parties and local govern- ment, precisely the two main institutions mericans en masse are no more that linked average Americans with their satisfied. During the 1950s and government. Consequently, as Amer- A early 1960s, about three-fourths icans became more dependent on gov- of the public believed “you can trust gov- ernment, they became more detached ernment in Washington to do what is from politics. They came to fear that right.” Today, only about one-fourth they had little influence over the govern- expresses such confidence. But this distrust ment that had so much sway over them. of “big government” is not based on hostil- ity to identifiable government activities. By t the beginning of the 20th large margins, Americans support major century, control over most regulatory and entitlement programs. A programs affecting the lives of Indeed, they frequently demand more ser- Americans still lay with state and local vices, benefits, and protections. Though governments. It was nearly as it had been loathing bureaucracy in the abstract, they a century before, when, as political sci- report favorable opinions of agencies with entist James Sterling Young writes, which they have had contact. Americans, “almost all the things that republican it seems, can’t live with big government— governments do which affect the every- and can’t live without it. So the voters day lives and fortunes of their citizens, alternately box the ears of those who and therefore engage their interest, defend it and of those who promise to were...not done by the national gov- shrink it, with the only rule being that the ernment.” By the late 19th century, the party that appears most in control of the federal government had grown some- government takes the biggest beating. what, but almost all its employees The disjunction between Americans’ worked in the Post Office Department, expansive expectations of government the Department of Agriculture, or the and their low opinion of politics is not notoriously corrupt Pension Office, just the product of flawed rhetoric. Its which aided Civil War veterans. Until origins go back to the turn of the centu- the 1890s, even immigration policy ry, when Progressive reformers sought to remained in the hands of the states, construct a strong national government despite the fact that the Constitution to counter the power of the emerging explicitly assigns control over citizenship large corporations and to improve the and naturalization to the federal govern-

> R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Professor of American Politics at Boston College. He is author of Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (1983) and Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (1994). This essay is adapted from Taking Stock: American Politics in the Twentieth Century, which he edited with Morton Keller, published this fall by Cambridge University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Copyright © 1999 by R. Shep Melnick.

72 WQ Autumn 1999 ment. In the first three decades of the In retrospect, the long congressional 20th century (except during World War debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act— I), the federal budget consumed less which banned racial discrimination in than three percent of the gross national schools, employment, and public product—a figure that has since grown accommodations—was the death knell to about 25 percent. Even in those cases for the old regime of limited and decen- where the federal government did act, its tralized government. In 1964 and policies usually reflected local pressures 1965—without depression, war, partisan and demands. realignment, or an immediate crisis of This decentralization of governmental any sort—Congress enacted the Voting powers rested not only on a deeply Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the embedded constitutional vision but on a Economic Opportunity Act, the political foundation defined by intense Elementary and Secondary Education sectional loyalties and marked social and Act, and immigration reform. The next economic differences among regions. 10 years brought the “reconstruction” of Most distinctive was the South, with its southern education; rapid expansion of racial caste system, backward economy, health, safety, consumer, and environ- and peculiar politics. The West stood out mental regulation; and new national too, being sparsely populated, largely programs to aid the elderly, the poor, without water, and dependent on extrac- and the disabled. During the 1970s and tive industries such as mining and, to an 1980s, federal aid to the states shrank, extraordinary extent, the use of federal but federal mandates multiplied. lands. These strong regional differences Washington was in the driver’s seat. in interest and outlook were reflected and reinforced by the local political par- ven as the federal government ties and, through them, shaped national was becoming a pervasive pres- politics. E ence in American life, political A variety of social, economic, and parties—one of the chief links between political changes—everything from citizens and government—were losing world war to the invention of air condi- their vitality. For more than a century, tioning—slowly smoothed away many of the party system stood as a bulwark the sectional idiosyncrasies. Intermittent against the centralization of authority, crises produced policy “breakthroughs,” blocking all efforts to build an effective such as the regulation of the railroads national administrative apparatus or to and the trusts in the late 19th century, end institutionalized racism in the the passage of the Social Security and South. National parties were little more Wagner acts in 1935, the creation of a than large agglomerations of state and permanent military establishment after local parties that mostly tended to mat- World War II, and the enactment of civil ters at home and came together only rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Each quadrennially to choose a presidential of these initiatives was hotly contested. candidate. But each expansion of federal authority That started to change toward the end made the next a little easier. Eventually of the 19th century, when reformers wit- the ruling presumptions about govern- tingly and unwittingly planted the seeds ment were reversed. Today, the discovery of party decline. Primaries and open of new social problems, from AIDS to caucuses limited party leaders’ control teen smoking, inevitably leads to over nominations. The Australian ballot demands for governmental solutions. (which replaced the old one-party paper And—just as important—national uni- ballots that encouraged party-line vot- formity has became the norm. It is ing), stiffer registration requirements, regional variation that now requires spe- direct election of senators, referendums cial justification. and initiatives, limitations on patronage,

Living with Leviathan 73 and nonpartisan municipal elections all regional party loyalties. Much of the helped to deprive state and local party South has moved into the Republican organizations of power and purpose. column, depriving the Democratic Party Later, rising education levels and new of a conservative internal counterweight forms of political communication, from and tilting the GOP rightward. direct mail to TV ads, sped the break- The resulting increase in ideological down, weakening voters’ ties to parties coherence in Washington has further and parties’ links to elected officials. In discredited the parties in the eyes of the escaping the corruption, parochialism, voters. Whether out of moderation, inde- patronage, and inefficiency of traditional cision, or a stubborn desire to have their party politics, the country also lost its cake and eat it too, most American voters most reliable instrument for developing have refused to endorse either party’s stable political loyalties and building program. Instead, they alternate between governing majorities. decrying politicians’ lack of principle and condemning their excessive zeal for n a few respects, the national par- principle. The nationalization of ties have become stronger than American politics thus has paradoxically Iever. The national Democratic produced ideologically polarized parties Party, starting in the 1960s, became without an ideologically polarized or more aggressive in specifying the rules partisan electorate. states must follow for selecting delegates to national nominating conventions. arlier in the century, when The Republican National Committee Progressives and New Dealers has been quite successful in fundraising, E envisioned and built a strong recruiting candidates for Congress and national government, they, of course, state legislatures, and defining conserva- did not intend to produce an alienated tive issues. citizenry. On the contrary, they want- In Congress, party unity has increased ed—by means of presidential leadership significantly over the past two decades and a more collectivist public philoso- despite the erosion of partisan ties phy—to bring the people closer to the among the electorate. On Capitol Hill, government. the ideological gulf between the two They looked to the president, along parties has widened. The tendency with nonpartisan administration by toward the nationalization of politics “experts,” to give unity, energy, and and the ideological polarization of the direction to the country. The president, two parties reached its apogee in the exercising moral leadership from the 1994 elections, when the Republicans “bully pulpit,” would forge direct ties (ostensibly the party of decentralization) with voters, giving them both a political mounted a national congressional cam- voice and a sense of attachment to their paign on the basis of a specific platform, government. Drawing strength from the the Contract with America. Thirty-four people, the president would be able to Democratic incumbents were swept subdue the inevitably parochial from office and House Republicans Congress and the reactionary judiciary. gained a 231–203 majority. Under Strong, determined presidents (espe- Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, par- cially Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon tisanship in the House intensified. In Johnson) certainly played a key role in 1995, two-thirds of all roll call votes in the expansion of federal power. But the House pitted the majority of one since the election of Richard Nixon in party against the majority of the other— 1968, latter-day progressives have regard- a 40-year high. ed the presidency more with trepidation The new congressional partisanship than with hope. The expansion of enti- owes much to the breakdown of the old tlements, social regulation, and civil

74 WQ Autumn 1999 rights has come, for the most part, from tees and federal courts. Thus, remark- Congress and the federal courts, not the ably, the growth of federal responsibili- executive branch. The Warren and ties in recent decades has coincided with Burger courts increased federal control a dispersal of power at the national level. over state and local governments, estab- Not only has the presidency lost power lishing uniform national rules on such to the Congress and the judiciary, but matters as criminal procedures, electoral the whole political system has become participation, desegregation, welfare eli- more fragmented and individualistic— gibility, abortion, and conditions within far from the smoothly functioning unit state prisons, mental hospitals, and other the Progressives imagined. If partisan- institutions. ship was the organizing principle of pol- itics at the last turn of the century, indi- n the 1970s, the Democratic vidual policy entrepreneurship is the Congress reasserted its authority touchstone of politics on the verge of the Iand created a plethora of regulatory 21st century. Congress decentralized its and spending programs opposed by own governance in the 1970s, and today, Republican presidents. Instead of grow- in sharp contrast to the New Deal era, ing more autonomous, most federal individual senators and House members agencies have become subject to frequently cultivate constituencies out- increasing demands, constraints, and side their home states or districts and oversight by congressional subcommit- seek to influence national policy and

Municipal corruption under party bosses such as William Tweed stirred public outrage and led to reforms that weakened political parties.

Living with Leviathan 75 tate, they do not hesitate to dis- tance themselves from such leaders—as Newt Gingrich painfully learned. The Progressives and New Dealers hoped to supplant the traditional American empha- sis on individual rights with a more collectivist public phi- losophy. Yet over the past quarter-century, Americans have become even more prone to “rights talk.” The traditional understanding of individual rights as limita- tions on government authority has been amend- ed to include positive rights to an array of gov- ernment entitlements and protections. In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR himself pointed the way. His “Second Bill of Rights” included “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recre- ation”; the right to “ade- quate medical care,” “a Wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura is now seeking a Reform decent home,” and “a Party presidential candidate to rally the disenchanted. good education”; and “the right to adequate protection from the eco- gain national recognition. Today’s politi- nomic fears of old age, sickness, accident cians, for the most part, do not advance and unemployment.” Each of those by deferring to authority or working their rights, Roosevelt noted, “must be applied way up the organization, as in the days of to all our citizens, irrespective of race, the party machine. Though some candi- creed, or color.” dates may be recruited to run by the More than a half-century later, the national party, the more common course rights to an appropriate education, ade- is for candidates for public office to quate nutrition, clean air, accessible select themselves, as well as to define public transportation, and a discrimina- themselves, market themselves, and cre- tion-free workplace are all firmly embed- ate their own campaign organizations ded in both statute and American politi- and even their own think tanks. cal culture. And according to opinion Occasionally, as during 1994–95, these surveys, most Americans today would independent contractors find advantage also include health care and adequate in uniting behind a leader who shares provision for retirement as basic rights of their policy preferences. But whenever citizenship. ideology or electoral considerations dic- This new understanding of rights rep-

76 WQ Autumn 1999 resents a tremendous change in outlook. advocacy groups more of a say in the pro- Eighteenth-century liberalism promised ceedings of federal courts and agencies. security from civil war, anarchy, and arbi- Changes in campaign finance laws have trary government action. Contemporary made it easier for thousands of corpora- liberalism promises much more: security tions, unions, and professional associa- against the vagaries of the business cycle tions to participate in politics. While it is and other hazards created by dynamic fashionable to decry the role of money in capitalism, against the prejudices of pri- politics, recent experience confirms the vate citizens and the consequences of observation that James Madison made three centuries of racism, against the more than 200 years ago: increasing the impediments of congenital disability and number of interests engaged in politics inevitable old age, and against the conse- tends to decrease the influence of any quences of poverty and of family decom- one of them. position. Whereas protecting traditional The mobilization of so many compet- rights usually meant restraining the ing groups, along with the new individu- growth of government, the new under- alism and entrepreneurship in politics, standing has required expansion of the has helped to make American political public sector and extension of federal life unusually contentious, unpredict- authority, subtly combining old institu- able, and bitter. No one’s electoral or tional and rhetorical forms with new pol- budgetary base is as secure as it once icy substance. was. Unable to achieve a clear electoral Although this redefinition of rights mandate, Republicans and Democrats, helped to reconcile the American liberal liberals and conservatives, frequently tradition with the welfare state, it also resort to scandalmongering, personal vil- placed many of the most important public ification, and endless investigation. In policies—notably Social Security, this, they are aided by advocacy groups Medicare, and various anti-discrimination that build their mailing lists by exagger- laws—above mere “politics.” Such funda- ating the threats to the interests they rep- mental rights must be protected from the resent. low machinations of politicians, from “pol- itics as usual.” Today’s “rights talk” thus lected officials these days spend reveals both Americans’ high expectations more time campaigning and of government and their lack of confi- E fund-raising and less time legis- dence in politics. lating and getting to know one another. Consequently, they are less likely than in mericans’ pessimism about the past to develop personal loyalties or a popular control of govern- sense of camaraderie. Political differ- A ment should not obscure the ences are no longer suspended for fact that in many ways American institu- evening poker games, as they were rou- tions have become more open, democra- tinely during the late Speaker Tip tic, and responsive. Long-standing barri- O’Neill’s rise to power in Congress. For ers to political participation by African many politicians today, politics is now a Americans have been eliminated. Party “blood sport” to be fought with all avail- competition has at last come to the able means, no matter how low or ludi- South. Today, most candidates are select- crous. The incumbent member of ed in open primaries rather than by a Congress who dons the mantle of “out- handful of party regulars. In many states, sider” and campaigns against “Washing- initiatives and referendums—legacies of ton” has become almost a stock figure of the Progressive past—have become American politics. important forms of policymaking. At the In this overheated political environ- national level, various new legal rules ment, it is hardly surprising that most cit- have given members of the public and izens take a skeptical view of their lead-

Living with Leviathan 77 ers. They have little direct political expe- the close connection between his rience against which to compare the pic- private profit and the general inter- tures painted by hyperventilating com- est. . . . Local liberties, then, which batants. Most Americans, as much as induce a great number of citizens to they claim to admire outspokenness and value the affection of their kindred adherence to principle in their represen- and neighbors, bring men constant- tatives, are uncomfortable with the ly into contact, despite the instincts inevitable contentiousness of politics. which separate them, and force And when the contention turns poiso- them to help one another. nous, as is so often the case now, they are that much more uncomfortable. Not only is it easier to unite to fight Americans have long taken pride in city hall than to change policy inside the cultivating a certain contempt for poli- Beltway, it is also easier to sustain local tics and in verbally cutting their leaders organizations when they experience down to size. In the past, such disdain inevitable political setbacks. reinforced the nation’s deep-seated com- Liberals, of course, fear that decen- mitment to limited government. Today, tralization is merely a Trojan Horse for however, it is awkwardly paired with a delivering a smaller, leaner, and meaner deep-seated commitment to energetic public sector. They can point to many government. instances in which congressional Repub- licans have preferred free markets to or nearly half a century, politi- local control and have cast aside their cal scientists have offered a alleged attachment to federalism in F standard prescription for the order to “get tough” on a nationwide popular disenchantment with politics: basis with criminals, deadbeat dads, and strengthen political parties and make doctors performing abortions. them more “responsible,” i.e. ideologi- cal. But to the extent national parties he fact that conservatives are have become more influential and more often fair-weather federalists ideologically consistent in recent years, T should remind liberals that disenchantment has only increased. state and local governments are not their Clearly, this route to reform has reached enemies. Volumes of research show that a dead end. public education performs best when it More than 150 years ago, Alexis de is most decentralized. In recent years, Tocqueville emphasized the close link state and local governments have often between American decentralization on been more aggressive than the federal the one hand and Americans’ high levels government in support of environmental of political participation and sense of protection and affirmative action. civic efficacy on the other: African Americans wield more power at the local level than they do in Congress. In short, liberals have less to fear from It is difficult to force a man out of decentralization than they realize. himself and get him to take an inter- Americans do not trust “big govern- est in the affairs of the whole state, ment,” but they do not want to relin- for he has little understanding of the quish the benefits, services, and protec- way in which the fate of the state can tions that government provides. One way influence his own lot. But if it is a to cope with this dilemma is to bring the question of taking a road past his providers of those benefits, services, and property, he sees at once that this protections closer to the people who small public matter has a bearing on receive them. This would be a peculiar- his greatest private interests, and ly American solution to our peculiarly there is no need to point out to him American dilemma.

78 WQ Autumn 1999 THE PERIODICAL OBSERVER Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

Politics & Government 81 94 Religion & Philosophy Foreign Policy & Defense 83 97 Science, Technology Economics, Labor & Business 86 & Environment Society 89 98 Arts & Letters Press & Media 93 102 Other Nations The Joyless Victory A Survey of Recent Articles

hen NATO’s war over Kosovo ended forced displacement of the Kosovar Wlast June with the saving appearance Albanians. When the bombing began, an of victory and not a single American life lost, estimated 230,000 had been displaced; when there was, curiously, no sense of triumph it ended, 1.4 million had been. among Americans: no jubilation, no “The alliance also went to war, by its own parades, no boost in the polls for President account, to protect the precarious political Bill Clinton. Was this because of general stability of the countries of the Balkans,” indifference to events in the Balkans—or Mandelbaum notes. “The result, however, widespread suspicion that the victory was was precisely the opposite: the war made all hollow? of them less stable.” Moreover, though the William Kristol and Robert Kagan, editor United States and other NATO countries and a contributing editor, respectively, of the were not waging war to serve their own Weekly Standard (June 14, 1999), see the national interests, the war damaged those victory as all but complete. “Slobodan interests by worsening relations with Russia Milosevic’s capitulation to U.S. and NATO and China. demands represents a triumph for American power and principle, for the U.S.-led hile Milosevic’s “calculated savagery” alliance, for President Clinton, and for the Wdeserves most of the blame for the small but stalwart group of Repub- murderous expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, licans...who supported the war from begin- some must go to U.S. secretary of state ning to end.” It showed “that American Madeleine Albright and her fellow diplomats, power, even when less than artfully applied, contends Mark Danner, a staff writer at the is a potent force for international peace, sta- New Yorker. At Rambouillet, the French bility, and human decency.” chateau to which the Serbs and the KLA were Though the war proved a military success, summoned at the beginning of this year after Michael Mandelbaum, a Fellow of the the cease-fire arranged last fall broke down, Council on Foreign Relations, considers it American and Western diplomats “practiced a “a perfect failure” in light of its avowed statecraft that was ill-prepared, fumbling and objectives. The people of the Balkans erratic,” he writes in the New York Review of emerged “considerably worse off than they Books (July 15, 1999), “and no one can say had been before,” he writes in Foreign Affairs what Kosovo might look like—and how many (Sept.–Oct. 1999). Before NATO’s interven- Kosovar Albanians might still be alive—had tion, some 2,500 people had died in Secretary Albright not handed to the Serbs an Kosovo’s civil war between the Serb authori- arrogant ultimatum”: accept the detailed plan ties and the ethnic Albanian insurgents of presented for the political autonomy of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). After, Kosovo under NATO auspices, or else. “an estimated 10,000 people died violently Albright and her fellow diplomats were confi- in the province, most of them Albanian civil- dent that there would be “a quick capitula- ians murdered by Serbs.” Besides saving tion, or at the very least a rapid Milosevic lives, NATO also sought to prevent the retreat,” Danner notes.

Periodicals 79 The secretary of state subsequently withdrew its diplomatic backing.... [The] claimed “that ‘before resorting to force thousands of bombing sorties...failed to NATO went the extra mile to find a peaceful damage the Yugoslav field army tactically resolution,’” observes Mandelbaum, but the in Kosovo while the strategic bombing of peace settlement that ended the bombing targets such as bridges and factories was “included important departures from poorly planned and executed.” Rambouillet that amount to concessions to The war highlighted a number of interest- the Serbs.” Had these concessions been ing ideological positions. The “humanitari- offered before the bombing began, he sug- an” label seemed utterly spurious to some on gests, the bombing and “ethnic cleansing” the right, such as Thomas Fleming, editor of might have been avoided. Chronicles (Aug. 1999), who quotes the The initial refusal by the KLA (which had Roman historian Tacitus: “They make a been labeled a terrorist organization by U.S. desert, and they call it peace.” But the high officials) to sign the Rambouillet agreement purpose persuaded some on the left, such as “let the NATO alliance off the moral hook New York University sociologist Todd Gitlin, and should have been used as an opportunity to abandon their long-time antiwar stance to step back,” argues Joseph S. Nye, Jr., dean and support—“in fear and trembling”—the of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of NATO war. The Left’s “near-automatic No Government, writing in Foreign Affairs (July- to military force, a staple of conviction, even –Aug. 1999). “Instead, the United States ‘fixed ‘identity,’ for three decades, is finished,” he the problem’ by pretending to believe the writes in Mother Jones (Sept.–Oct. 1999). KLA’s promise to accept autonomy within Yugoslavia. The United States then threat- aged in the name of “principles and ened to bomb Serbia. Milosevic called the Wvalues,” the war over Kosovo is a American bluff and initiated his planned eth- landmark in international affairs, declares nic cleansing of Kosovo.” Czech Republic president Václav Havel in Suddenly, Kosovo took on far more impor- an address delivered while the bombing was tance to the United States, Nye observes. in progress, published in the New York Milosevic’s savage campaign could not be Review of Books (June 10, 1999). “This is an ignored, and Britain and other European important precedent for the future. It has allies now joined the United States in calling been clearly said that it is simply not permis- for NATO action. Failure to act would have sible to murder people, to drive them from meant a major crisis in the American their homes, to torture them, and to confis- alliance with Europe. cate their property.” That indeed was the idea, but Kosovo ilitary analysts are only beginning to shows how unsatisfactory the reality of Mdecipher the lessons of Kosovo. humanitarian war is, columnist Charles John Keegan, the noted defense editor of Krauthammer maintains in the National London’s Daily Telegraph (June 6, 1999) Interest (Fall 1999). Because Americans will and author of The First World War (1999), not long tolerate casualties where no impor- declared that he and other military thinkers tant national interest is at stake, humanitari- of the past half-century had been wrong to an warfare must be virtually bloodless (at insist that a war cannot be won by airpower least for Americans)—which not only jeopar- alone—though he allowed that the evi- dizes victory but exposes the people being dence as to precisely how airpower had “helped” to still greater risks. succeeded in this case was not all in. And even, as in Kosovo, when humanitar- Indeed, Tim Butcher and Patrick Bishop of ian war ends in “victory,” Krauthammer says, the Weekly Telegraph (July 22, 1999) call the rewards are dubious: “The endless occu- that success into question, reporting that “a pation of a murderous neighborhood in pur- private, preliminary review by NATO suit of utopian objectives of the most periph- experts” concluded that the alliance’s 78- eral strategic interest to the United States.” day bombing campaign “had almost no In light of the Kosovo experience, he con- military effect on the regime of President cludes, it is unlikely that “any rational Milosevic, which gave in only after Russia Western leader” will want to repeat it.

80 WQ Autumn 1999 POLITICS & GOVERNMENT The Congressional Crackup “Crackup of the Committees” by Richard E. Cohen, in National Journal (July 31, 1999), 1501 M St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. “Congress in its committee rooms is Junior House members won seats on the most Congress at work. Whatever is to be done must powerful panels, and subcommittee chairmen be done by, or through, the committee.” So gained vast new influence. The introduction of stated budding political scientist and future C-SPAN cable TV coverage in the House in president Woodrow Wilson in his classic 1885 1978 encouraged members to be even more study, Congressional Government. For most of independent. the 20th century this remained true, writes The committee system subsequently Cohen, a National Journal staff correspondent, became ever more ineffectual, Cohen says. but after three decades of decay, committee During the Reagan years, with Democrats still power “has largely collapsed.” in control of the House, important legislation When Wilson’s rule was in force, Cohen such as the Social Security reform of 1983 notes, members working in committees “won “was written largely in informal settings outside deference” for the expertise they developed on of the committee process.” Presented with the particular policy matters, and committee chair- Clinton administration’s “costly, indigestible” men generally “were recognized as first among health care plan in 1994, neither House nor equals. Their legislation was carefully crafted Senate committees were able to come up with after extensive debate and deal-making, and credible legislation. was rarely challenged on the House or Senate The next year, with Republicans now in con- floor.” trol of Congress and committed to their This system began to break down under the “Contract with America,” a “death warrant” Democrats, he says. Committee chairmen, who was issued for the old committee system, were mostly southern and conservative, resisted Cohen says. House Speaker Newt Gingrich large parts of Democratic president John F. “circumvented and intentionally undermined Kennedy’s legislative agenda in the early 1960s. the committee process by creating Republican They went along with most of President Lyndon task forces and demanding that they write legis- Johnson’s “Great Society” initiatives after his lation reflecting his own views.” The Repub- landslide election victory in 1964, but once his licans also imposed a six-year term limit on popularity waned, the southerners and northern committee chairmen in both houses, and cut machine Democrats regained the upper hand committee staff positions. and “engaged in a titanic struggle with liberal Today, on issues ranging from gun control to Democratic reformers who demanded a more patients’ rights, Congress confronts “party-dri- activist federal government.” ven legislation that was hastily brought to the The reformers finally won, thanks to House or Senate floor without a thorough vet- Watergate, which prompted voters in 1974 to ting—or any attempts at bipartisan compro- elect an unusually liberal “class” of representa- mise—among the experts at the committee tives. Out went “iron-clad seniority rules, level.” The committee system’s breakdown, closed-door deal-making, and Southern domi- Cohen says, is “a major factor in the chaos that nance among congressional Democrats.” pervades Capitol Hill.”

Dodging the ‘Magic Bullet’ “Richard Russell and Earl Warren’s Commission: The Politics of an Extraordinary Investigation” by Max Holland, in Miller Center Report (Spring 1999), P.O. Box 5106, Charlottesville, Va. 22905. When the Warren Commission issued its acting alone, had assassinated President John F. report 35 years ago, it shortsightedly fudged a Kennedy. The note of ambivalence, which has bit on its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, fed the popular belief in a conspiracy, was con-

Periodicals 81 was sitting in front of Kennedy in the limousine. This bullet (which skeptics came to call the “magic bullet”) must have hit Connally, avers Holland, for if it didn’t, as Connally claimed, then, after emerging from Kennedy’s body, it “dis- appeared altogether. Such a missile would truly have been a ‘magic bullet.’ ” (That bullet and the second, fatal one that hit Kennedy’s head “probably” did all the damage, the com- Texas governor John Connally, sitting directly in front of President mission said, with the other Kennedy, insisted that one of the bullets had his name on it. shot—Holland believes it was the first one fired—missing trary to “all reliable evidence,” says Holland, a the limousine occupants entirely.) Research Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Despite the unambiguous evidence, Affairs, and was only introduced because of a Holland says, the commission report left open key commission member’s “misplaced pride” the possibility that the so-called magic bullet and antipathy toward the commission’s liberal might not have hit Connally after all. chairman. “Governor Connally’s testimony and certain In testimony before the commission, Texas other factors,” the commission stated, “have governor John Connally, who was wounded in given rise to some difference of opinion as to the attack, insisted that one of the three shots this probability.” heard in Dealey Plaza in Dallas that November Why did the commission thus water down day in 1963 was meant just for him. “He the firm conclusion of its own staff? To avert refused to believe that he had been injured a threatened dissent by one of its most influ- incidentally,” Holland says. “According to ential members, conservative senator Connally, the president was injured by the first Richard Russell of Georgia, says Holland. shot; then he, Connally, was wounded sepa- Russell strongly disliked the commission’s rately by the second shot; then the third and chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the final shot hit the president in the head.” Since bête noire of southern segregationists, and it would have been impossible for Oswald to “would not permit the report—Warren’s have fired the first bullet that hit Kennedy and report—to contradict the sworn testimony of a second one hitting Connally in the scant sec- a southern governor, no matter how impossi- onds between them, his account implied there ble that testimony was.” were two shooters—a conspiracy. Warren wanted a unanimous report to dis- Nevertheless, the medical and forensic evi- pel public fears. So unwarranted doubt about dence was clear, Holland says. The shot that the single-bullet conclusion was introduced. first hit Kennedy entered the back of his neck, Though conspiracy theories were sure to exited his throat, and then—according to what abound anyway, the commission itself, the commission stated was “very persuasive evi- Holland concludes, “bears some responsibili- dence from the experts”—hit Connally, who ty” for the widespread disbelief in its findings.

Liberals Confront Sociobiology “Darwin’s Truth, Jefferson’s Vision” by Melvin Konner, in The American Prospect (July–Aug. 1999), P.O. Box 383080, Cambridge, Mass. 02238. From the moment sociobiology (a.k.a. evo- gist Edward O. Wilson and others, liberals have lutionary psychology) first reared its head in the been aghast. Prominent biologists on the left, 1970s in the work of Harvard University zoolo- such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard

82 WQ Autumn 1999 Lewontin, strongly rejected the idea that many liberals—those with a rosy view of human patterns of human behavior have a basis in evo- nature—uneasy. But it would not have both- lution, branding it unscientific and a reprehen- ered America’s Founding Fathers, he says, who sible revival of 19th-century social Darwinism. had the “gift to be able to take a Hobbesian The notion that much human behavior is view of human life without applying a genetically “hard-wired,” immune to environ- Hobbesian solution.” Scientific materialists mental influences, is unacceptable to many with a realistic view of human nature, they nev- others. But liberals ought to calm down and ertheless constructed a liberal order. “In ques- learn to live with it, contends Konner, a profes- tions of power,” said Thomas Jefferson, “let no sor of anthropology, psychiatry, and neurology more be said of confidence in man, but bind at Emory University. him down from mischief, by the chains of the In recent decades, he notes, sociobiological Constitution.” theory has gained “almost universal accep- Though it must seem inadequate to liberals tance...among researchers in natural history who believe that human nature “is inherently and animal behavior and among many psy- good, unselfish, and cooperative,” the chologists and social scientists.” The theory has Constitution “has more or less worked for a not proved useful in all circumstances, he says, couple of centuries,” Konner notes. To “those but without it, it would be hard to explain, for of us who see human nature as the unpleasant instance, the research finding that a child is at product of too many eons of individual selec- least 10 times more likely to be assaulted or tion,” that is a considerable achievement, he killed if he or she lives in a household with an says. And this shows what may be “the endur- unrelated male—a finding that holds true ing implication of Darwin’s theory for liberal regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, political philosophy: assume the worst and religion, or education, and in at least four you can still get something workable.” countries. Children are much safer in house- Precisely because human nature, as designed holds with men to whom they are genetically by evolution, cannot be relied upon to care related. for the old, the sick, and the very young in a “The implications of evolution are market economy, the case for “programs and not...inherently conservative,” Konner main- supports deliberately designed by a collective, tains. “They are, however, inherently material- humane, political will” to accomplish that is ist and fraught with conflict.” This makes some all the stronger.

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE History Begins Again “Second Thoughts” by Francis Fukuyama, and “Responses to Fukuyama” by Harvey Mansfield et al., in The National Interest (Summer 1999), 1112 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Ten years ago, in a new journal called the Now, Fukuyama says that he was wrong—but National Interest, an obscure researcher from not for reasons his critics suggested. the RAND Corporation ventured to suggest Neither the stalling of reform in Russia nor that with the West’s victory in the Cold War, the the economic crisis in Asia, says Fukuyama, end of History was in sight. Not history, in the now a professor of public policy at George ordinary sense of the unfolding story of man’s Mason University, invalidate his conclusion sad stumble through the centuries, but capital- “that liberal democracy and a market-orient- H History, in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of the ed economic order are the only viable options progressive evolution of human political and for modern societies.” Instead, he writes, the economic institutions. And the “end” that “true weakness” in his argument was this: Francis Fukuyama discerned was not socialism, “History cannot come to an end as long as as Marxists had supposed, but bourgeois liberal modern natural science has no end; and we democracy and capitalism. There would be no are on the brink of new developments in sci- more grand world conflicts over ideas and ide- ence that will, in essence, abolish what ologies. His bold thesis still stirs controversy. [philosopher] Alexandre Kojève called

Periodicals 83 ‘mankind as such’ ” —human nature itself. controlled behaviors that have characterized Within the next few generations, Fukuyama the human race since...human beings lived believes, genetic engineering made possible by in hunter-gatherer societies.” At that point, the biotechnology revolution will allow “what human capital-H History will be over, he says, the radical ideologies of the past . . . were and “a new, posthuman history will begin.” unable to accomplish”: the creation of “a new E. O. Wilson, author of Consilience (1998) type of human being.” It may well be possible, and On Human Nature (1978), and one of a for example, “to breed less violent people, or half-dozen commentators on Fukuyama’s reap- people cured of their propensity for criminal praisal, doubts that things will reach that pass. behavior.” Already, he says, there is a foretaste of “By the time the treacherous waters of possible the Brave New World in the widespread use of genomic intervention and replacement are behavior-altering drugs such as Ritalin and charted, I suspect a moral argument will keep Prozac. Homo sapiens from traveling there except for “For today, any understanding we may have gene therapy and minor enhancement.” of just political arrangements or a universal But the weakness that Fukuyama now sees moral order is ultimately based on an under- in his original argument is not the only one, in standing of human nature,” writes Fukuyama. the view of Robin Fox, a professor of social the- “To the extent that that nature is something ory at Rutgers University. It is a theory that, like given to us not by God or by our evolutionary the Hegelian one on which it is based, applies inheritance, but by human artifice, then we to only a few thousand years of human devel- enter into God’s own realm with all of the opment, arbitrarily isolated from the millions of frightening powers for good and evil that such years of human history. For all the grand talk, an entry implies.” Humans will then be able to what Fukuyama (and others) call “history,” Fox “change once and for all the set of genetically says, is really a mere blip on the radar screen.

Uncle Sam, Don’t Preach From an interview in The New York Review of Books (Aug. 12, 1999) with retired Ameri- can diplomat and author George F. Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine:

I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. Let me stress: I am speaking of governments, not private parties. If others in our country want to advocate democracy or human rights (whatever those terms mean), that’s perfectly all right. But I don’t think any such questions should enter into our diplomatic relations with other countries. If others want to advocate changes in their conditions, fine—no objection. But not the State Department or the White House. They have more important things to do.... I think the executive branch of government has been just as bad, if not worse, than the Congress in this respect. But this whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable. If you think that our life here at home has meritorious aspects worthy of emulation by peoples elsewhere, the best way to recommend them is, as John Quincy Adams maintained, not by preaching at others but by the force of example.

Nuremberg Revisited “Nuremberg, Misremembered” by Jeremy Rabkin, in SAIS Review (Summer–Fall 1999), 1619 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. The 1945–46 Nuremberg trials of Nazi ponents of the recently created leaders are often invoked these days by pro- International Criminal Court or the

84 WQ Autumn 1999 European efforts to prosecute former Chil- ean dictator Augusto Pinochet. It was at Nur- emberg, claimed jour- nalist Tina Rosenberg, writing last January in the New York Times Magazine, that the principle “that how a nation treats its own cit- izens is everybody’s business...was estab- lished.” But it wasn’t, argues Rabkin, a political scientist at Cor- nell University. The Nuremberg trials “were Hermann Goering, standing beside other Nazi leaders in the prisoners’ more flawed than we box, makes his final plea as the Nuremberg proceedings neared an end. like to remember.” At the time, many Americans regarded cutions were not prosecuted. “American the Nuremberg proceedings—which were trial planners were well aware that interna- conducted not by disinterested bystanders tional law, at that time, provided no basis but by the victorious Big Four Allied for holding government officials personally Powers—as political “show trials.” liable for persecution of their own citi- Supreme Court chief justice Harlan Fiske zens,” Rabkin says. Stone, privately calling the trials “a high- Nor was the Nuremberg tribunal author- grade lynching party,” refused to take part ized to look into war crimes generally, cer- in a swearing-in ceremony for the U.S.- tainly not any that might have been com- appointed judges. A few years later, mitted by the Allies. For the most part, the Supreme Court justice William O. German defendants were not even allowed Douglas protested that the leading Nazis to cite Allied practices similar to their own. had been tried under “an ex post facto law,” “While the Germans were charged with and said that “their guilt did not justify us initiating an aggressive war against in substituting power for principle.” Poland,” Rabkin notes, “the Soviet Union What has since come to be called the had launched its own conquest of eastern Holocaust did not figure as prominently in Poland at the same time,” then embarked the Nuremberg proceedings as it does in on aggressive wars against Finland and the people’s minds today, Rabkin notes. Nearly Baltic states. The crimes of communist dic- all the Nazis on trial claimed to know noth- tator Joseph Stalin’s regime were politely ing about the death camps, and with only a overlooked, along with the earlier Soviet- few exceptions, they had not been in situa- Nazi collaboration. tions that required them to know about In 1945, Rabkin writes, “American lead- them. American prosecutors were intent, ers were not prepared to make them- not upon fixing responsibility for the mass selves—or anyone else—the guarantors of murder of European Jews, but upon show- universal justice.... American forces cer- ing that the defendants had committed tainly had not battled their way into “crimes against peace” by conspiring to Germany to stamp out murderous oppres- launch a war of aggression. sion wherever it might be found.” More Though early trial planning resulted in than a half-century later, however, “we see the inclusion of a “crimes against humani- things differently—or pretend that we do,” ty” category, such offenses were never forgetting “that effective justice does rest clearly distinguished from other “war on armed force” and that use of force is crimes.” The Nazi regime’s prewar perse- often very costly in lives and treasure.

Periodicals 85 Sizing Up China “Does China Matter?” by Gerald Segal, in Foreign Affairs (Sept.–Oct. 1999), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. In the continuing debate over China’s sig- Militarily, China is a “second-rate” power— nificance for the West today, Segal, director stronger than most of its Asian neighbors but of studies at London’s International Institute unable to take on the United States, Segal for Strategic Studies, weighs in with a dismis- writes. True, it may pose a threat to the sive appraisal. “Odd as it may seem, the Philippines. “But sell the Philippines a couple country that is home to a fifth of humankind of cruise missiles and the much-discussed is overrated” as an economic market and a Chinese threat will be easily erased.... Even military power, he says. “At best, China is a Taiwanese defense planners do not believe second-rank middle power that has mastered China can successfully invade.” the art of diplomatic theater.” It does matter that Beijing has nuclear Economically, China is of little importance, weapons targeted at the United States, Segal particularly outside Asia, Segal maintains. In notes, and that it steals U.S. nuclear secrets. 1997, it accounted for only 3.5 percent of But China still is, like Iraq, only “a regional world gross national product, compared with threat to Western interests, not a global ideo- the United States’ 25.6 percent, and for only logical rival” such as the Soviet Union was. three percent of world trade—less than the “Such regional threats can be constrained. Netherlands’ share. Even China’s portion of China, like Iraq, does not matter so much that Asian trade is only 11 percent. “Despite the the United States needs to suspend its normal hype about the importance of the China mar- strategies for dealing with unfriendly powers.” ket, exports to China are tiny,” he says. Of U.S. In light of China’s strategic threat, limited exports, less than two percent go to China— though it is, “it is ludicrous to claim, as Western about a third less than go to Taiwan. And, at and especially American officials constantly the moment, China’s economy “is effectively do,” Segal says, “that China matters because in recession,” Segal observes. It is doubtful that the West needs it as a strategic partner. The dis- it has had, or will have anytime soon, a double- course of ‘strategic partnership’ really means digit rate of growth, despite the limited reforms that China is an adversary that could become a of the last 20 years and exaggerated claims serious nuisance. Still, many in the Clinton based on questionable data. He sees all this as administration and elsewhere do not want to part of the overblown view of Asia generally. call a spade a spade and admit that China is a Fears that the Asian financial crisis would crip- strategic foe.” Yet to exaggerate the threat is ple Western economies have proved ground- alarmism. “Only when we finally understand less, but the lesson has yet to be learned about how little China matters,” he says, “will we be China. able to craft a sensible policy toward it.”

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS Overlooked Success Story “U.S. Wage-Inequality Trends and Recent Immigration” by Robert I. Lerman, in The American Economic Review (May 1999), American Economic Assn., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Economists have been sounding the alarm inequality increased between 1979 and the in recent years about a broad increase in mid-1980s. Until now. earnings inequality. Though Lerman, an Lerman insists that something important American University economist, has argued has been left out of earlier assessments: the that no such increase took place after 1986 impact of immigration. In 1996, about seven (see WQ, Summer 1998, p. 126), there has percent of the U.S. labor force consisted of been little, if any, disagreement that wage immigrants who had arrived during the pre-

86 WQ Autumn 1999 vious 16 years, mostly from low-wage coun- Among nonelderly male workers, however, tries. To economists gauging income inequal- the median wage rate ($16 an hour in 1979) ity, Lerman argues, things look worse than still declined, albeit by a lesser amount (5.4 they should, because these low-income folk percent, instead of 10.4 percent). Even so, don’t show up in their 1979 base year mea- the “inequality” ratio for the male workers, surements. But they do appear in later mea- rather than increasing by 22.2 percent, surements, dragging the averages down. dropped by 1.6 percent. According to a 1997 Lerman’s solution is to estimate the immi- analysis, immigration was responsible for as grants’ wages in their home countries, then much as 55 percent of the relative wage add them into the base year (1979) calcula- decline experienced by high school dropouts tions. Instead of falling by 1.4 percent and other low-wage workers. between 1979 and 1996, he finds, the medi- But immigrants’ own wages have more an wage rate for all workers increased by 5.6 than doubled—“more than enough,” percent. And instead of the huge 16.6 per- Lerman says, “to offset relative wage losses of cent growth in “inequality,” there was a 4.7 other workers at the low end of the wage percent decrease. (In this measure of inequal- spectrum.” And when the immigrants’ “rapid ity, the wage rate for the top 10 percent of wage gains” are taken into account, he con- earners is compared with the wage rate for cludes, “most of the estimated rise in wage the bottom 10 percent.) inequality disappears.”

A New Adam “Adam Smith: Critical Theorist?” by Keith Tribe, in Journal of Economic Literature (June 1999), American Economic Assn., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.

Adam Smith (1723–90), the father of modern economics, has long been seen as a prophet of free markets and free trade. In recent decades, a new “histor- ical” Smith has emerged, writes Tribe, an economist at Keele University, in the United Kingdom. But when revi- sionists turn Smith into a moral critic of modern capitalism, he contends, they go too far. “Adam Smith is conventionally thought to have provided an account of the economic path to human progress by demonstrating how market rational- ity arises out of the impulses of individ- uals driven by their own passions,” Tribe says. Neglected, however, was Smith’s role “as an analyst of commer- cial society, ethics, and social progress.” Now, thanks to Donald Winch’s Adam Smith’s Politics (1978), Vivienne Brown’s Adam Smith’s Discourse (1994), and other recent studies, Smith’s place in the Scottish and European Enlightenment has been emphasized. His arguments in The Adam Smith emerges from recent historical scholar- Wealth of Nations (1776) have come to ship as a moral philosopher and a cultural critic. be viewed in the context of an 18th-

Periodicals 87 century debate on commerce and civiliza- Mandeville, who believed that utterly unre- tion—and seen that way, says Tribe, they strained self-interest produced social gains. appear “remote from the ‘economic individ- Smith, though, held a different view, Tribe ualism’ so often attributed to him.” says. “The Smithian conception of self- In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), interest is not an injunction to act egoisti- Smith employed his famous “invisible hand” cally and without moral scruple, safe in the metaphor, writing: “The rich only select from knowledge that by doing so the public good the heap what is most precious and agreeable. would somehow or other result: it is embed- They consume little more than the poor, and ded within a framework of social reciprocity in spite of their natural selfishness and rapaci- that allows for the formation of moral judg- ty...they divide with the poor the produce of ment.” Indeed, Tribe says, Smith’s invisible all their improvements. They are led by an hand metaphor was “an allusion to the invisible hand to make nearly the same distri- manner in which self-interest and sociabili- bution of the necessaries of life which would ty combine to render commercial society have been made, had the earth been divided virtuous and prosperous.” into equal portions among all its inhabitants.” Some revisionists, such as Spencer J. Pack Economists have usually interpreted this to and Patricia Werhane, have gone too far, try- refer to the way in which markets and the ing to turn Smith completely upside down, price mechanism produce the best possible Tribe says. Pack, in Capitalism as a Moral distribution of goods, but Brown—who views System: Adam Smith’s Critique of the Free Smith’s works in the light of Stoicism and Market Economy (1991), offers “what Smith 18th-century rhetoric—gives it a different would write if he were alive today, not what reading: that Smith is endorsing a traditional he did write in the 18th century,” while Stoic idea that the distribution of material Werhane’s efforts, in Adam Smith and His goods has nothing to do with the distribution Legacy for Modern Capitalism (1991), of happiness. Even if she is right, Tribe notes, “founder on the lack of evidence for her that does not invalidate the common under- case.” standing of Smith’s “invisible hand” view of “Smith certainly recognized that, while markets. commercial societies were powerful civiliz- Smith’s argument, however, has often ing forces, not all aspects of their develop- been linked with the “Private Vices, ment were positive,” Tribe observes. But that Publick Benefits” paradox originated some hardly makes him a 20th-century critic of 50 years before by the philosopher Bernard modern capitalism.

The Good Luck Economy “Is Inflation Dead?” by Roger E. Brinner, in The New England Economic Review (Jan.–Feb. 1999), Research Dept., Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, P.O. Box 2076, Boston, Mass. 02106–2076. The American economy has lately situation today is due simply to good luck. seemed to defy the economists’ gloomy wis- “Inflation is not dead,” he asserts. Workers’ dom that a falling rate of unemployment real wages have been rising faster “in eventually leads to a rising rate of inflation. response to low unemployment, just as in Employers, the theory says, start competing past decades.” While nominal wage inflation for scarce labor by offering higher wages. remained relatively stable in 1997 and ’98 at The last few years have brought both very around three to four percent, real wage infla- low unemployment (under five percent) tion began rising in late 1996. and declining or steady price inflation. Is If that is so, why haven’t prices been fol- this because workers, more insecure per- lowing suit, as employers seek to cover the haps because of the well-publicized layoffs higher costs that rising wages represent to of the early 1990s, have become reluctant to them? The answer, Brinner says, is that price demand higher wages? No, argues Brinner, inflation has been held down by some fortu- chief economist of the Parthenon Group, a nate “supply shocks.” These include: Boston-based consulting firm. The happy • Falling oil prices. “After rising sharply in

88 WQ Autumn 1999 1990, oil prices declined in the early 1990s. influence on inflation,” Brinner observes. In They jumped up in 1996 but retreated in the late 1980s, however, a surge in inflation 1997 and plummeted in 1998.” took place that, while frequently blamed on • “Lower costs for imported goods because the drop in the unemployment rate to 5.3 of a strong U.S. dollar. Besides their direct percent, “was actually due to a confluence of effect, lower import prices also cut compo- adverse inflation shocks” from other sources, nent costs and increase competitive pressure including rising prices for oil and other on domestic producers.” imported goods. • A rising stock market has cut pension “Conversely,” Brinner says, “the moderate costs for employers providing defined benefit inflation of recent years is due to a conflu- pension plans. ence of beneficial shocks from all factors • Inflation in health care costs has been other than unemployment.” Were it not for reduced because of changes in the industry the declining prices of imported goods and resulting from increased competition and energy, and the slower growth in the cost of pressures from employers and government. fringe benefits, the tight labor markets in “Prices reflect total labor costs, not just 1997 and 1998, he says, would have added wages,” Brinner notes. “Therefore, any sur- perhaps a full percentage point to the whole- prise reduction in the cost of fringe benefits sale price index. In short, he concludes, the relative to base wages would also trim price good fortune of recent years “[does] not her- inflation.” ald a new economy, forever destined to enjoy Usually, “unemployment is the dominant high growth and low inflation.”

SOCIETY The New Mating Game “How We Mate” by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in City Journal (Summer 1999), Manhattan Inst., 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. Laments about the decline of marriage teens,” says Whitehead, “many single young and the traditional family have almost women have experienced at least one round become a tradition themselves in recent of [sexual] hookup-breakup, and they carry years, but Whitehead, author of the influen- its emotional baggage” into their twenties, tial 1993 Atlantic Monthly article, “Dan as each new relationship “starts out at a Quayle Was Right,” holds out little hope that lower level of trust and commitment than the decline will be reversed. “A fundamental the one before.” and probably permanent change in the way While “living together” was pioneered by we mate” has taken place, she contends. privileged college students during the 1960s “Though the majority of Americans will and ’70s, today it is more common among marry at least once,” Whitehead reports, 25- to 39-year-olds who lack a college degree. “the marriage rate among unmarried adults By the 1980s, 45 percent of female high has nevertheless declined by a third school graduates were opting for cohabita- between 1960 and 1995.” Cohabitation is tion as a first union, compared with 24 per- now the rule rather than the exception. cent of female college grads. Two-thirds of the young adults born Among African Americans, cohabitating between 1963 and 1974, according to unions often begin earlier and are much less Whitehead, “began their partnered lives likely to lead to marriage than such unions through cohabitation rather than marriage,” among whites. Those black couples who do compared with only 16 percent of men and marry—as portrayed in such popular movies seven percent of women born between the as Waiting to Exhale (1995)—have very high mid-1930s and early 1940s. Seemingly van- rates of divorce, and, says Whitehead, “those ished are many of the rituals of romantic who stick it out have strikingly high rates of courtship. “By the time they leave their marital dissatisfaction.”

Periodicals 89 In the evolving new mating ritual, in freedom to walk away at any time, leaving Whitehead’s view, “men and women can women to raise the children. Even women pursue their reproductive destinies with only who opt for single motherhood, according to minimal involvement with each other.” At survey responses, often rethink their choice first, both sides seem to benefit: “men get sex by the time their children reach the age of without the ball and chain of commitment six, particularly those with sons. It is far easi- and marriage; women get a baby without the er for men to find the situation that suits fuss and muss of a man around the house.” them, and many opt for a pattern of serial Women’s economic independence and the monogamy, sometimes involving marriage pill have encouraged women to accept this or remarriage, but more often not. Except for new deal. Today, 53 percent of teenage girls a lucky few in the upper-middle class, think it is “a worthwhile life-style” to have a women are more often left embittered and baby without getting married. Among alone, struggling to work and raise children teenage boys, when asked their views on on their own. In the end, the new mating dealing with an unwed girl’s pregnancy, 59 pattern, says Whitehead, “which began with percent said that rather than marriage, adop- the promise of enlarged happiness for all, tion, or abortion, the best option was for her generates a superabundance of discontent, to have the baby and the father to help with pain, and misery, something that should be a support. matter of concern to a society as solicitous of Such loose arrangements give men the adult psychological well-being as ours.”

The Road to Grandmother’s House “The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States” by Elizabeth Pleck, in The Journal of Social History (Summer 1999) Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213. On Thanksgiving Day 1880, dozens of ducted a campaign to spread Thanksgiving, drunken youths careened through the streets hoping that a unifying holiday would help of Philadelphia, wearing makeshift masks avert a civil war. Partly in response to her and women’s clothing, just as Thanksgiving efforts, President Lincoln declared Thanks- “Fantastics” had been doing for generations. giving a legal holiday in 1863. Even so, it They were followed by eager groups of continued to be little celebrated outside New younger boys who donned rags and knocked England. at the doors of the well-to-do, demanding That changed during the Industrial treats. Beginning with this drunken working- Revolution, when Thanksgiving was readily class carnival, Pleck, a professor of history at adopted by those who wished to restore the the University of Illinois, traces Thanks- morality and simplicity of a previous age. It giving’s progression toward the sedate domes- became a holiday of homecoming for the tic occasion it is today. newly mobile younger generation, a time of Thanksgiving didn’t become a peaceful reunion and renewal. Despite this gradual familial feast by accident, Pleck argues. familialization, however, Thanksgiving While it had bona fide historical origins— would only become an exclusively domesti- starting, of course, with the Pilgrims’ 1621 cated occasion in the 1910s, says Pleck. meal with their Wampanoag neighbors, and Amid the labor strikes and general unrest of later, the issuance of ad hoc proclamations of the period, unruliness of any sort came to a national day of thanksgiving by Presidents seem threatening to the middle and upper Washington, Adams, and Madison—Pleck classes. Public tolerance of the Fantastics’ contends that the holiday was “invented and rowdy parades declined and the ritual disap- reinvented” over a period of almost two cen- peared. turies by a series of politicians, social reform- As immigrants streamed into the United ers, and ordinary citizens. Among them was States, the holiday took another turn. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Progressive social workers and teachers, anx- Magazine. Beginning in the 1840s, she con- ious about the immigrant tide, portrayed

90 WQ Autumn 1999 Thanksgiving “as a day when all Americans turkey day since the 1880s (as the upper- could feel they belonged to the nation.” class counterpart to Fantastic parades), Schoolteachers filled their classrooms with football did not become a central part of pictures of Pilgrims and turkeys, painting a the holiday until the advent of radio broad- rosy picture of the Pilgrims as the very first casting in the 1920s. This, for Pleck, was immigrants—historical figures with whom the last feather on the old Pilgrim turkey, any recent arrival could identify. for it carved out a masculine niche in what Only one element was missing from had become a feminine domestic festival, Thanksgiving as it is today—football. cementing Thanksgiving’s place in Amer- Though collegians had played the game on ican life and lore.

Justice for Juveniles “The Honest Politican’s Guide to Juvenile Justice in the Twenty-First Century” by Barry C. Feld, in The Annals (July 1999) of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104. In its landmark 1967 ruling, In re Gault, from the traditional therapeutic emphasis in the Supreme Court extended to youthful juvenile justice, emphasizing instead respon- offenders some of the procedural safeguards sibility and accountability. Yet at the same given adult criminal defendants. In the time, “most states continue to deny juveniles decades since, contends Feld, a University of access to jury trials or other rights guaranteed Minnesota law professor, the juvenile court to adults,” he says. (In any event, Feld avers, has been turned into “a scaled down, second- juvenile correctional facilities provide virtu- class criminal court” that provides “neither ally no “meaningful rehabilitative pro- therapy nor justice.” grams.”) The Progressive era “child savers” who Feld welcomes some of the changes. “The brought the juvenile courts into being juvenile court...characterized delinquents around the turn of the century aimed to as victims rather than perpetrators, and sub- reform rather than punish youthful offend- jected them to an indeterminate quasi-civil ers. Unwittingly, says Feld, the Supreme commitment process.” Its “treatment ideolo- Court opened the door for judicial, legisla- gy” underemphasized “offenders’ duty to tive, and administrative changes that have exercise self-control.” effectively ended that mission. But the juvenile court’s underlying con- Juvenile courts now turn over many youth- cept of combining “social welfare and crimi- ful offenders to other institutions. Many nal social control in one agency” remains white, female, and middle-class school tru- “fundamentally flawed,” Feld maintains. ants and troublemakers, whose missteps Why wait for youngsters to commit crimes would not have been offenses if committed before giving them better education and by adults, have been shifted to private mental health services? Why offer social services to health and drug treatment facilities. At the those young criminals who won’t benefit? other end of the spectrum, serious youthful Feld’s solution: abolish juvenile courts, offenders, disproportionately black and male, putting youths accused of crimes in the regu- increasingly have been transferred to crimi- lar justice system with special procedural nal courts for prosecution as adults. There, safeguards and formal recognition of youth- Feld observes, violent offenders are given fulness as a mitigating factor with categori- “dramatically more severe sentences” than cally shorter sentences. Then, once sen- they would have received as juveniles. tences have been imposed and personal Ironically, most of the nonviolent serious responsibility affirmed, place the convicted offenders “actually get shorter sentences.” youths in designated correctional facilities The ordinary delinquents left in the juve- “with resources for self-improvement.” By nile system, meanwhile, are punished more virtue of their age, he notes, youthful offend- severely than they would have been in the ers eventually return to society. They ought past, Feld says. The states are moving away to be prepared.

Periodicals 91 Rescuing Idle Youth “‘An Ideal Life in the Woods for Boys’”: Architecture and Culture in the Earliest Summer Camps,” by W. Barksdale Maynard, in Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 1999), Univ. of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, Ill. 60637. With the approach of Labor Day each small wooded island in Squam Lake, New year, some four million children return Hampshire. This “utopian experiment in the home from more than 7,000 summer camps physical and moral education of boys,” says throughout the United States. Now often a Maynard, began with a single house and six way for working parents to keep their vaca- boys, and grew to serve more than 30 boys. tioning offspring occupied, summer camp “Camp architecture . . . toed the line between once was intended to serve a more overtly nature and culture, wildness and civility.” In character-building purpose: giving boys from shanties that a visitor described as “pretty much affluent families an antidote, in the form of all roof and piazza,” the boys had a protected nature, to the corrupting influences of urban view of nature, Maynard notes, while “a blaz- life. Maynard, an art historian at the ing fire in the hearth” inside “offered a reassur- Delaware College of Art and Design, ing, homelike ambience.” The camp operated explains how summer camp became a trea- for nine summers. In the end, however, sured American institution. Chocorua proved a financial disaster, ultimate- Springing from a long tradition of rural ly costing Balch $8,000. boarding schools, the summer camp was estab- But the venture inspired imitation. In lished on an entirely separate basis for the first 1885, John F. Nichols, a Massachusetts divin- time in 1881. Ernest Balch, a Dartmouth ity student, founded Camp Harvard at College student, founded Chocorua on a Rindge in southern New Hampshire. Two years later, the camp—renamed Asquam—moved to a forested hilltop overlooking Squam Lake. Asquam became “the flagship of the early camping movement, a high-profile institution catering to the sons of rich and influential families,” Maynard says. At Asquam, the now-familiar title “counselor” came into use. But in 1899, the camp made the mistake of setting up a winter session to complement the summer one. “The result was financial ruin and the demise of both versions of Asquam in 1909,” says Maynard. Fortunately, the Asquam system had spread, leading to an “explo- sive growth in camping, from about 20 programs in 1890 to some 500 by 1905.” The “most successful and influential” camp modeled on Asquam, Maynard says, was Pasquaney, also located in New Hampshire. Founded by Yale University alumnus Edward S. Wilson in 1895, the camp served the “scions of prominent Boys at Camp Chocorua join Ernest Balch, the New Eastern families” and itself Hampshire camp’s founder, in an outdoor chapel service. inspired at least a dozen other

92 WQ Autumn 1999 institutions, including the “first girls’ camp of Boy Scouts (imported from England in importance,” Redcroft, in 1900. Pasquaney 1910), and the Camp Fire Girls. For youths continues to thrive today. In 1997, a total of who spent their summers in the rustic set- 101 boys from seven countries attended. tings, the experience was often memorable. Summer camps came into existence as Diplomat William C. Bullitt, a former part of the “back to the country” movement Pasquaney boy who attended Yale and that grew out of anxieties about idleness and Harvard Law School, later said that soft urban life around the turn of the centu- Pasquaney stood alone as “the best educa- ry. It also produced the YMCA camps, the tional institution in the United States.”

Cooking Up Soul Food “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947” by Tracy N. Poe, in American Studies International (Feb. 1999), George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C. 20052.

Soul food may be a mouthwatering cooks, using foods and preparations of Africa, emblem of African American identity, but Europe, and early America, Poe says. Besides not so long ago rib joints and chicken shacks fried chicken and fish, typical foods ranged were points of controversy among black from barbecued pork to one-pot dishes with Americans. regional names such as “sloosh,” “cush- When African Americans journeyed cush,” and “gumbo.” “Most significantly, northward in the Great Migration that began however,” she writes, “black people devel- during World War I, they brought their rural oped an affinity for the parts of animals nor- southern culinary tradition with them, writes mally discarded by whites: entrails, known as Poe, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Univer- ‘chitterlings’ (pronounced ‘chitlins’); pigs’ sity in the history of American civilization. heads, which were made into ‘souse,’ a kind But their “backward” ways seemed to threat- of headcheese; [and] pigs’ and chickens’ en the hard-won respectability of the middle- feet.” One censorious front-page story in the class blacks already established in Chicago Chicago Defender, an African American and other northern cities. newspaper, was simply headlined “Pig Ankle “With their sidewalk barbecue pits, ‘chick- Joints.” en shacks,’ and public consumption of water- Gradually, however, a sense of racial soli- melon,” says Poe, “an ugly stereotype of darity emerged, Poe says, and the prejudice Southern migrants” as crude, unclean, and against southern food and eating rituals backward folk “soon developed, no less faded. By 1940, the Defender was reporting a among the black middle class than among southern heritage celebration, complete with white Chicagoans.” The migrants, however, traditional food, sponsored by the NAACP “could not understand what the problem Ladies’ Auxiliary. It wasn’t called “soul food” was” with their traditional southern food. yet, but urban African Americans had already Southern cuisine (eaten by both whites embraced southern cooking as a part of a and blacks) was largely the creation of slave common heritage.

PRESS & MEDIA Wire(d) Stories “What I Saw in the Digital Sea” by Frank Houston, in Columbia Journalism Review (July–Aug. 1999), Journalism Bldg., 2950 Broadway, Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027. Web journalism is fast evolving—but, nalist went to work for Fox News Online in unfortunately, some of its best potential is New York in October 1996, hoping to con- being left behind, according to Houston, a tribute fresh news feature stories. He quit in freelance writer. The twenty-something jour- disillusion a little more than two years later,

Periodicals 93 he writes, having come to see “Web journal- between late 1997 and late ’98, daily page ism for what it is becoming: a machine mov- views on the Fox site as a whole roughly dou- ing at the speed of the [news] wires, in terms bled—from 600,000 to 1.2 million (and of content, and in the direction of television, reached 2.2 million on one particularly hot in terms of form. Experiments in storytelling news day). are on an indefinite hiatus.” In their unquenchable thirst for breaking Houston’s job originally was “to create fea- news, ironically, the Web sites have turned to ture stories that push the technological and the established wire services, such as the interactive envelopes, working with a graphic Associated Press and Reuters. The broadcast designer, two producers, a photo editor, and, owners of online news sites lack the staff to usually, a video producer.” Early in 1997, for compete with the wire services—and, in the example, after IBM’s Deep Blue computer absence of substantial Web ad revenues, the bested chess champ Garry Kasparov, willingness to spend money to develop one. Houston and his colleagues prepared a fea- Newspaper owners of Web sites give priority ture about Cassie, an experimental robot to their newspapers and aren’t accustomed to equipped with artificial intelligence that was publishing on the frenetic schedule of the assembled at the State University of New wire services, with their continual stream of York at Buffalo. Combining video and text updates, adds, and new leads. “When an “in a new way,” he says, the feature—com- Amtrak train crashes...the New York Times plete with links to various explanatory side- and other newspaper sites go with wire copy bars and “a meticulously accurate graphical on their home pages,” Houston notes. Only representation of [the robot’s] thought after the newspaper’s reporters have written processes”—proved one of their most popu- their stories for the paper’s next edition are lar feature stories, getting some 7,000 “page the wire stories on the home page replaced views” during the week it was on the site. with the “homegrown” ones. But top online news stories get that many One way that Fox and other news organi- page views in mere hours, Houston notes, zations have tried to distinguish themselves and most people, research has found, spend from the wire services, Houston observes, is only seconds visiting a news Web page. Not by providing, on big stories, a wealth of back- surprisingly, he and his colleagues soon ground material, from interviews to interac- found the Web moving away from costly and tive maps. But “appending a library” to break- complicated features. “Technology’s thrust, it ing wire stories, Houston says, is hardly the turns out, is to satisfy the need for speed. The same as innovative journalism, with fresh emphasis shifts to shorter, more frequent sto- insight and compelling stories. For now at ries and breaking news”—a trend evident not least, he sadly concludes, Web technology’s only at Fox but at its .com competitors, own imperatives seem to be driving out that CNN, MSNBC, and ABCNews. The result: kind of journalism.

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY The Antiliberal Philosopher A Survey of Recent Articles

magine a world in which the whole scien- no way of coherently reassembling the sur- Itific enterprise has been virtually viving fragments, yet they connect them any- destroyed by a vengeful public maddened by way—and almost no one realizes that what a series of environmental disasters. now comes to pass for “science” is not proper Eventually, enlightened people try to revive science at all. science, but all they have to work with are That, according to philosopher Alasdair shards of the past, devoid of the theoretical MacIntyre, is much the situation in which context that gave them meaning. They have moral discourse is conducted today, with

94 WQ Autumn 1999 words such as good and moral reduced to For MacIntyre, says Edward T. Oakes, a relics of a lost past. Jesuit professor of religious studies at Regis Currently a professor at Duke University, University in Denver, Colorado, “emptying MacIntyre, author of the influential After moral discourse of teleological concepts Virtue (1981) and other works, “is possibly [i.e. concepts of final causes and ends] the greatest moral philosopher of the last 50 because of the perceived impact of Newton years and certainly the most unyielding crit- and Darwin has been . . . the catastrophe of ic of liberalism writing today,” observes our times.” In the Aristotelian tradition, Adam Wolfson, executive editor of the Public MacIntyre has written, “there is a funda- Interest, in the Weekly Standard (July 26, mental contrast between man-as-he-hap- 1999). “You can violently disagree with pens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he- MacIntyre, as many do, particularly on the realized-his-essential-nature.” Were this dis- socialist left. Or you can violently agree with tinction restored to ethics, observes Oakes him, as many do, particularly on the in First Things (Aug.–Sept. 1996), then Catholic right. But you can’t get away with- describing something or someone as out knowing about him.” “good” would not express a merely emo- tional judgment but would convey facts orn the son of a doctor in Glasgow in about the thing or person. For MacIntyre, B1929, MacIntyre studied at the notes Elie, “the moral choice is between University of London and other British uni- Nietzsche and Aristotle, between nihilism versities, then began teaching. In 1947, after and a life and world teleologically “hanging around at the edge of the Catholic ordered.” Church,” he told Lingua Franca’s (Nov.–Dec. 1995) Paul Elie, he joined the n 1983, two years after the acclaimed Communist Party. In his first book, Marxism: IAfter Virtue appeared, MacIntyre convert- An Interpretation (1953), Elie notes, ed to Catholicism. In Whose Justice? Which MacIntyre “espoused the Marxist creed Rationality? (1988), he argued that truth while...lamenting ‘the death of religion.’” emerges from the conflict of traditions. He Leaving the party well before the Soviet proposed Thomism, which reconciles invasion of Hungary in 1956, he became Aristotelianism with Christianity, as the most involved with a Trotskyist group, the truthful tradition, “rationally superior” to all International Socialists. “As MacIntyre its rivals. The book was given a hostile recep- explains it now,” writes Elie, “Marxism was tion on the left, and the reviews, says Elie, most valuable to him as a critique of liberal- “were fragrant with anti-Catholicism.” ism,” with its arbitrary moral judgments. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum accused In 1969 MacIntyre moved to the United MacIntyre of “recoiling from reason,” of States, where he would teach at a succession being “in the grip of a worldview that is pro- of universities and make a philosophical mulgated by authority rather than by reason.” journey from Trotskyist to Aristotelian to Uncowed, MacIntyre went on in Three Thomist—a pilgrim’s progress that would Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), leave many on the left aghast and some on Wolfson notes, to try “to show how the the right uneasy. Thomistic tradition can defeat its two main Discussing After Virtue in the New rivals: the liberal Enlightenment and post- Criterion (Feb. 1994), Maurice Cowling, an modernism.” emeritus Fellow at Peterhouse College, Though conservatives find much to Cambridge University, says MacIntyre con- admire in After Virtue and the subsequent tended “that moral inquiry had been impov- works, some are disturbed by what Wolfson erished by the destruction of Aristotelianism calls MacIntyre’s “root-and-branch antago- in the 17th century and the disconnection of nism towards the liberal tradition, which ethics from divine law in the 18th century. dates back to his Marxist past.” MacIntyre Existing ‘languages of morality,’ in his view, confuses real liberalism with what passes for were merely fragments of a conceptual it in academe, in Wolfson’s view, and over- scheme which was no longer present in its looks “the moral resources within [the] liber- entirety.” al tradition.”

Periodicals 95 Fundamental Intolerance? “Religious Outlook, Culture War Politics, and Antipathy toward Christian Fundamentalists” by Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1999), Annenberg Public Policy Center, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104–6220. In recent decades, Americans have become lution. Mencken called fundamentalism a quite intolerant of religious intolerance. Anti- “malignant imbecility,” and its followers Semitism and anti-Catholicism are no longer “anthropoid rabble.” The harshly unflattering socially acceptable, a sign of progress for image has more or less stuck. But Bolce and which the spread of education is often given De Maio say it no longer fits. Today’s funda- some credit. Yet ironically, the highly educat- mentalist is “more educated [and] politically ed seem to be among the chief harborers of sophisticated...less the ignorant hillbilly or religious intolerance today: they simply can- cracker, and more a conservative suburban not stand Christian fundamentalism. housewife who votes Republican.” “Roughly one-fifth of the nonfundamen- For many years, antifundamentalism was talist [white] public hold intensely antagonis- spread across religious and political lines, but tic sentiments toward fundamentalists,” a distinct shift occurred in 1992, the authors report Bolce and De Maio, political scientists say, as fundamentalists allied themselves at the City University of New York. Other more explicitly with the Republican Party. “culturally conservative religious groups” This polarized sentiment, with other conser- (e.g., Evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, vative groups warming toward their new Pentecostals, and Mormons) also stir “signifi- allies, while “Jews, the highly educated, sec- cant” antipathy. In surveys taken in 1988, 1992, and 1996, Americans’ feelings toward vari- ous groups were gauged on a “temper- ature” scale running from 0 (most nega- tive) to 100 (most positive). Feelings about the poor were as warm as 69, while attitudes toward poor people on welfare got as cold as 47. Attitudes toward Christian fundamen- Pariahs to the Volvo set: Baptists at a revival meeting. talists were just about as frosty (45–49)— scoring higher than the frigid 35 for illegal ularists, and Democratic voters became rela- aliens, but still well below the scores for past tively more negative.” Indeed, Bolce and De pariahs. Catholics, Jews, and blacks were Maio say that 37 percent of highly educated held in warm regard (58–64). white Americans are “intensely antagonistic” The term fundamentalism was coined in toward fundamentalists. 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws, a Baptist editor seek- Foes of fundamentalism claim their oppo- ing to rally support for the “fundamental sition reflects not prejudice but rather truths of Christianity.” Five years later, icono- “attempts to guard democratic civility and clastic journalist H. L. Mencken popularized pluralism,” note Bolce and De Maio, who the term in his coverage of the famous Scopes avoid evaluating the claim. Similar argu- trial, in which a Tennessee teacher was con- ments, of course, were once made about victed of violating a law against teaching evo- Catholics and Jews.

96 WQ Autumn 1999 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT The Fetal Patient “The Littlest Patient” by Dario O. Fauza, in The Sciences (July–Aug. 1999), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021. Surgeons in recent decades have acquired a same sort of fetal problem, used a needle new patient: the fetus. The risks of fetal surgery guided by X-rays instead of open surgery, and are great, but so is the ultimate promise, says the baby survived. Two years later, in San Fauza, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Juan, Puerto Rico, the first open fetal surgery Hospital in Boston. in which the child survived was performed. It “Only about 200 fetal surgeries have been remained an isolated success, however, as performed so far on human beings,” he most subsequent attempts failed. writes, “and the results have been tantalizing, Interest in fetal surgery revived in the late but disappointing as well.” Of some 120 1970s, when prenatal ultrasound became com- fetuses operated on in the last two decades at monplace, letting physicians observe the the University of California, San Francisco— unborn in the womb. In 1981, a pediatric sur- which is one of two major fetal surgery cen- geon at the University of California, San ters in this country, along with the Children’s Francisco, introduced open fetal surgery to Hospital of Philadelphia—only about half treat severe blockages of the urinary tract. the babies survived; lately, though, the suc- Then, in the early 1990s, videofetoscopic cess rate has been closer to 75 percent. “Fetal surgery was introduced, in which the lens of a surgeons,” says Fauza, “have treated such video camera is inserted into the uterus potentially fatal defects as a hole in the through one of several small incisions, enabling diaphragm, which can prevent the lungs the surgeon to see the fetus on a screen while from developing adequately, and an obstruc- carrying out the operation through the other tion of the urinary tract, which can destroy incision(s). the kidneys. And the day may not be far off Fetal surgery, however, is still relatively dan- when more intricate operations, such as gerous to the pregnant woman, who risks hem- open-heart surgery and even liver transplants, orrhage, or lung or kidney failure. Because of will be performed inside the womb.” that, Fauza says, such surgery “is undertaken For most of medical history, the fetus was only when the fetus’s life is imperiled, and only largely a mystery. Not until the 1960s were if there is little chance that the mother’s fertili- the first tentative efforts at human fetal ty will be compromised.” As the techniques surgery made. In 1963, two Columbia become more refined, he says, success rates will University obstetricians performed a blood increase and the strain on the mothers will transfusion on a fetus suffering from fatal lessen. Eventually, he believes, fetal surgery anemia. While the open surgery was techni- will allow “most birth defects to be repaired in cally a success, the baby was born prema- an optimal way.” Inasmuch as three percent of turely and died. However, that same year, a newborns today have major birth defects, that New Zealand obstetrician, addressing the will be no small advance.

The Empire of Science “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science” by D. Graham Burnett, in Daedalus (Spring 1999), Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138. Forty years ago, British novelist and former scholarly symposia, cited by academic adminis- physicist C. P. Snow (1905–80) decried the trators, and invoked to help account for every- chasm separating “the two cultures,” scientific thing from the ‘science wars’ to the history of and literary, stirring up tremendous controversy environmental policy,” observes Burnett, a his- on both sides of the Atlantic. The disjunction torian of science at Columbia University. Snow posited is still “regularly lamented in Unfortunately, he contends, the “Snovian dis-

Periodicals 97 “a double irony binds these claims” about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That law, articulated in various ways beginning in the 1850s, holds that while energy is conserved, entropy (or disorder) seems to be constantly increasing in the universe. The implication— that the universe “appears headed for maximum entropy or ‘heat-death’ ” —was spelled out in popular journals and Snow (right) is “as intellectually undistinguished as it impressed writers in Britain is possible to be,” sneered Leavis (left). and France, as scholars have shown. “If you take it to heart,” junction,” as it has been called, is simplistic and wrote the novelist Joseph Conrad, “it becomes pernicious. an unendurable tragedy.” Thus, Burnett points In his 1959 lecture at Cambridge University, out, “the very decay Snow decried in the moral Snow claimed that scientists “have the future in fiber of literary culture, it turns out, cannot be their bones,” while literary intellectuals and fully understood without reference to the histo- other humanists could not even describe the ry of his own beloved Second Law.” Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, he At the same time, and with equal irony, asserted, was roughly “the scientific equivalent” Burnett adds, Conrad’s Shadow-Line (1917), of a play by Shakespeare. The result was a tra- “which Leavis brought forward as a self-evident ditional (nonscientific) culture devoid of “social proof of the irrelevance of the Second Law, hope.” And this, in the context of the Cold War would be better read as a parable of its broad and the rising expectations of “poor” nations, cultural significance.” he warned, was dangerous. In the hands of those who use it, Burnett Three years later, British literary critic says, the “two cultures” disjunction—given F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) mounted a venomous renewed expression, for instance, in attack. To link “social hope” and material Consilience (1998) by Edward O. Wilson, the goods, Leavis said, was “a confusion to which founding father of sociobiology—tends to all creative writers are tacit enemies.” Science devalue humanistic inquiry. In Wilson’s eyes, and technology would never bridge the gap according to Burnett, “the humanities and between the individual and society; only lan- social sciences represent science’s last fron- guage and literature could allow human beings tier,” a domain awaiting conquest. The real to transcend themselves. Any comparison need, however, suggests the historian of sci- between the Second Law of Thermodynamics ence, is not to “bridge” Snow’s two cultures, and the sacred sphere of literature was just “a but to recognize that both are part of a larger cheap journalistic infelicity,” Leavis said. culture and to understand how they and it “For the historian of science,” writes Burnett, came to be.

ARTS & LETTERS Deconstructing the Professors A Survey of Recent Articles

ll right, so tenured radicals in academe tion for today is: Have the resulting sunbursts A have turned English departments into of theory nevertheless lit up the landscape for ideological hothouses for the growth of liter- the humble souls at work trying to create lit- ary theory. That’s yesterday’s news. The ques- erature? Have writers found the critics’ reve-

98 WQ Autumn 1999 lations about the hidden influence of class, ever said one thing that mattered to me or race, and gender, all the exquisitely nuanced to any of the writers I know and admire,” insights into the literary enterprise, helpful? comments Pulitzer Prize-winning poet The overwhelming answer is not at all, to W. D. Snodgrass, whose most recent book judge from a symposium on “The Situation is After-Images (1999). of American Writing 1999” in American Literary History (Summer 1999). Of the 26 ontemporary criticism, according to novelists, poets, and other writers canvassed Cthe stern indictment delivered by by the journal, only three give today’s aca- William Gass, author of The Tunnel (1996) demic critics anything like an unqualified and Omensetter’s Luck: A Novel (1966), and “thumbs up.” an emeritus professor at Washington “Literary theorists are creating their own University in Saint Louis, “has fallen into kind of creative writing and no longer pro- the clutches of obfuscating ideologues who ducing literary criticism to explain or trans- have no feeling for literary quality, who late traditional literary efforts. Good on write only for one another, who are partisan them!” declares Michael Martone, author of in all the wrong ways and ignorant of what Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List: is going on in contemporary literature as a Indiana Stories (1993). developing art. Philosophically, many of Samuel R. Delany, a black, gay writer of these critics are scandalously careless of science fiction whose 22-page response to evidence, incapable of clarity, eloquence, the editor’s questions takes up one-sixth of or rigor.... Most writers and most philoso- the whole symposium, says that, being a crit- phers have nothing but contempt for these ic as well as a fiction writer, “I have all the ‘movements.’” sympathy in the world for critics. (Do I have Annie Dillard, author of For the Time something important to say? I should hope Being (1999) and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek so.)” He calls for “much more scholarly con- (1974), agrees. “Academic criticism has lost sideration of contemporary writing—prefer- all usefulness to literature; it sees writers as ably passionately felt.” mere unconscious spokespeople for their races, classes, and genders,” she says. “The he third yea-sayer is feminist Gail New Criticism [of the 1940s and ’50s] TGodwin, author of Evensong (1999) focused on close readings of texts, and as and other novels. “Yes, academic critics such gave writers heart. Academic criticism have something important to say to me. I today abandons literature as elitist in very often read criticism to get fresh orienta- concept; it has become mere sociology.” tion.” The criticism she reads, however, is However, she anticipates that “this abuse apparently not of the more theory-ridden will stop soon. It’s a dead end.” variety. She credits Richard Poirier’s “For the whole of my career,” writes nov- Renewal of Literature: Emersonian elist Madison Smartt Bell, author of Doctor Reflections (1987), George Steiner’s Real Sleep (1992) and Waiting for the End of the Presences (1989), and Caroline Walker World (1985), “academic scholarship has Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the abdicated its interest in contemporary litera- Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1984) ture in favor of myopic concentration on crit- with having recently inspired her. She also ical theory.... Right now, I can think of only “treasure[s] the three book-length studies of three significant literary critics who are not my work to date.” Godwin, too, would like [also] practitioners of the genre they criti- scholarly critics to give more attention to cize: Helen Vendler, Sven Birkerts, and contemporary fiction. But she also urges Bruce Bawer...and the latter two built their them to be prepared to defend “important careers outside the academy.” literary works” from assaults in the name of Scholars should be taking the lead in “current academic ideologies and current “defining the shape of literary posterity,” Bell standards of political correctness.” observes. The absence of such criticism The other 23 symposium contributors, today poses “a real problem,” in his view. however, have few kind words about acade- “Consider the critical rescue and reconstruc- mic criticism today. “None of the theorists tion of Faulkner’s reputation in the ’50s—

Periodicals 99 could anything remotely similar happen ly turn to history, much less something called now?” the New Historicism, or cultural studies. Nor In his introduction to the symposium, do they seem to care much about the American Literary History editor Gordon nuances in our various, frequently [heated] Hutner seems somewhat pained by all the exchanges over multiculturalism and the hostile responses. “It is unfortunate enough canon.” that writers have mostly turned away from Nevertheless, Hutner believes there is what professors have to say, but this rejection “richness to be found in continuing is all the more regrettable for being based, as exchanges” between academic critics and it often is, on 20-year-old perceptions about writers. But Gass, for one, disagrees: the academic tolerance for jargon, a convic- “Academics are consumed by political issues tion about the sterility of the academy for they have made as petty as themselves. So I which, with a little bad faith, justification don’t at this time envision profitable can always be found. Not even three of the exchanges between such scholars, such crit- 26 respondents have mentioned the scholar- ics, and such writers.”

A Thoroughly Modern Austen “Jane Austen Changes Her Mind” by Christopher Clausen, in The American Scholar (Spring 1999), 1785 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Fourth Floor, Washington, D.C. 20036. It sometimes seems that the most popular daughter of the flighty, spendthrift Sir Walter serious novelist at the close of the 20th cen- Elliot, having fallen in love with young tury is an author of the early 19th: Jane Captain Wentworth, but nonetheless being Austen (1775–1817). All but one of her six dissuaded from marrying him: Wentworth, novels have made their way to movie theaters without family background or money, is hard- and television screens in recent years. ly qualified for a match with an Elliot. Something about Austen’s well-regulated However, after eight years of separation and a bucolic romances, in which the woman gets good deal of miscommunication, Anne and not only her man, but an estate and a fortune Wentworth marry and find their own sort of as well, is charming readers and audiences happiness. True, Wentworth possesses an on an impressive scale. impressive fortune, but it is a fortune won in Critics, however, have had difficulty pin- his naval victories, not bequeathed along with pointing just what that “something” is. They a title and manor. That the hero of the novel have interpreted the social commentary of would thus choose and pursue a vocation (and Austen’s tales to represent everything from do so enthusiastically and successfully) would radical feminism to “systematic conserv- be unheard of in Austen’s earlier novels. But ativ[ism].” But for all that diversity, there has in Persuasion, it is only the sailors and their been remarkable consensus that all of wives, never the gentry, who find fulfillment Austen’s novels are consistent in whatever in their marriages, wherein men and women social ideology they display. appear to have nearly equal status and child- But Clausen, an English professor at lessness does not equal failure. Significantly, Pennsylvania State University, argues that Lady Russell, a family friend of the Elliots who Austen’s last novel, Persuasion (published can be taken as a stand-in for Austen herself, at posthumously in 1818), “represents an long last admits (in Austen’s words) that “she unprecedented shift of direction.” Persuasion had been pretty completely wrong” in her ear- is still quintessential Austen in its plot and the lier criticism of Wentworth and counsels Anne value it places on the happiness of a match to marry him after all. well made. But where her other novels hold Though Austen herself was silent on the marriage from or into the landowning, for- cause of her shift in values (and Clausen tune-holding gentry as the standard for suc- wisely declines to speculate), the result is a cess, Persuasion promotes different, more new spin on the “authentic” Austen novel. modern manifestations of that happiness. And happily for Austen fans, it still makes a Persuasion finds Anne Elliot, the second pretty good movie.

100 WQ Autumn 1999 Go Fish Architect Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has been hailed as a work of genius. According to Myra Jehlen, an English professor at Rutgers University, writing in Raritan (Spring 1999), Gehry’s success owes much to his grand- mother’s cooking, which provided the fish shape that has long been his aesthetic stan- dard, and to the computer, which has allowed him to pursue it.

It was almost two centuries ago that Emerson thought one should pattern one’s creations on nature, and with the accelerating rate of technological evolution, it might as well be four. An architect mak- ing a building he himself cannot see whole without the aid of a computer while imagining that he was copying nature seems unlikely. But of course Gehry does not think that when, as he puts it, he does fish, he is follow- ing nature directly; he is being an artist.... The fish-shape is more than an aesthetic opportunity but less than a cosmic scheme. It embodies a conception of self-sufficient and at the same time globally effective creativ- ity; the connection between fish and both the beginning of time and the origin of life (in his own biography and in the history of the race) attests to this conception without extending it into a philosophical program. Similarly Gehry’s relation to technology, in contrast, say, to the relation of the Bauhaus to the machine, is personally empowering but does not engage him in a world view. The computer that is enabling him to replace geometric abstraction with zoomorphism has simply made Gehry, in his words, “once more the master builder.” “Once more” because the technology had developed beyond the control of an individual builder and now he has regained mastery. The technology remains as powerful or more, but he has become still more so.

In Defense of Cultural Studies “Those Who Disdain Cultural Studies Don’t Know What They’re Talking About” by Rita Felski, in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 23, 1999), 1255 23rd St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. Ever since physicist Alan Sokal smuggled Cultural studies, she complains, has come his deliberately nonsensical essay (in which to be simply a term of abuse—shorthand for he solemnly maintained, among other taking a political approach to literature. And things, that physical reality is “a social and as such, it is rejected by critics who want “a linguistic construct”) into the cultural studies return to aesthetics in literature.... They movement’s premier journal, Social Text, a want to talk about language, style, and sensi- few years ago, cultural studies has come to bility, about why they love poetry and what seem, well, a bit passé. Felski, an English pro- makes Shakespeare a great writer.” fessor at the University of Virginia, rises in But cultural studies “has always been con- defense of the relatively new (but now appar- cerned with language and form,” Felski con- ently “old”) interdisciplinary field. tends. “It is just as much about the aesthetic

Periodicals 101 dimension of the social world as it is about youth culture,” showing that “punks” employ the social dimension of a work of art.” The “avant-garde techniques of collage, brico- discipline, which originated in England in lage, and surreal juxtaposition, combining the 1960s, treated culture anthropologically, random, mass-produced objects—dog col- “seeking to make sense of the entire range of lars, safety pins, school uniforms—in a per- symbolic practices, texts, and belief systems verse parody of consumer culture.” Similarly, in society rather than equating culture exclu- Kobena Mercer, in a much-cited essay in his sively with high art.” Cultural studies schol- Welcome to the Jungle (1994), “unraveled the ars showed “how the most ordinary behav- multileveled meanings of black hairstyles.” ior—eating, wearing clothes, shopping, Cultural studies seems fated, Felski going to the beach—involves complex ritu- observes, “to be faulted by historians for not als, symbolic expression, and multilayered being historical enough, by sociologists for not levels of meaning.” being sociological enough, and by literary crit- In short, Felski says, cultural studies ics for not being sufficiently interested in liter- “enlarged rather than erased our aesthetic ature. There is also a rich vein of self-criticism sensibility,” expanding it to encompass such within [the field] itself.” Nevertheless, she forms of popular culture as “rap music, sit- concludes, since “cultural studies” has been coms, science-fiction novels, [and] slasher pressed into use as “a much-abused term [of movies.” In the influential Subculture: The abuse] in America’s culture wars,” it is time Meaning of Style (1979), for instance, Dick “to insist on its distinctive identity and its Hebdige “explored the aesthetics of British integrity as a scholarly field.”

OTHER NATIONS The German Left’s Ordeal of Power A Survey of Recent Articles

he postwar era in German history came All three men, Joffe writes, “came of polit- Tto an end last fall when chancellor-for- ical age in the heady ’60s when they imbibed life Helmut Kohl was turned out of office. pretty much the same ideological brew in the During his 16-year rule, the Christian ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ against the Democrat had helped to gain the West’s vic- Vietnam War: anti-capitalism, anti-Amer- tory in the Cold War and the reunification of icanism, and ‘anti-anti-communism,’ plus his nation. When the 68-year-old, pro- what the French call tiers-mondisme [Third American chancellor became “history,” World-ism] (especially of the ‘anti-Zionist’ many observers worried about what would variety) and contempt for ‘bourgeois’ politi- happen under his younger successor, Social cal virtues such as moderation, compromise, Democrat Gerhard Schröder. and pluralism.” In the early 1970s, Schröder was head of Today, Joffe says, “the only thing remotely the Hanover branch of the Jungsozialisten, ‘red’ about [Schröder] is his pricey Cuban radical youth organization of the Social Cohiba cigars,” while erstwhile rock thrower Democratic Party, notes Josef Joffe, editorial Fischer, since moving to the head of the page editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Foreign Office, wears only gray three-piece Munich, writing in National Interest suits. When NATO’s U.S.-led air war against (Summer 1999). German defense minister Serbia began last March, the former antiwar Rudolf Scharping also had been a leader of activists, whose parties had long opposed the radical youth group, while foreign minis- America and NATO, sent German strike air- ter Josef Fischer, the leader of the Green craft into combat for the first time since Party (which is the junior partner in the rul- World War II. ing “Red-Green” coalition), had run with Like Bill Clinton when he first assumed the street-fighting anarcho-socialists in Frankfurt. U.S. presidency, however, Schröder on taking

102 WQ Autumn 1999 office hit the ground stumbling, observes free- Citizenship is based no longer on blood lin- lance writer K. Michael Prince in the eage but on place of birth (provided the par- Washington Quarterly (Summer 1999). ents are married and at least one of them has Germany for the last dozen years has been lived in the country legally for eight years or plagued by high unemployment, now about more)—good news for many of the roughly 10 percent, and twice that in parts of the for- 100,000 children born each year to foreign mer East Germany. Schröder, while offering residents. Moreover, revisions in the natural- few specifics, presented himself to the voters ization law shortening the 15-year residency as an agent of change. But early in his admin- requirement to eight years will allow roughly istration prospective economics minister Jost half of the 7.3 million foreigners in Germany Stollman, who had symbolized the candi- to become citizens. date’s “New Center” approach during the Nevertheless, Markovits says, the govern- campaign, departed. Old-fashioned socialist ment’s overall record is mixed, and the Oskar Lafontaine then became finance minis- German Left, after being in power for a year, ter—only to exit less than five months later, is experiencing “its most profound identity cri- sis since 1968.” There has been little progress on social justice or ecology, he says, and unemployment has been reduced only slightly. Globalization means that Germany’s unemployment problem “can only be solved if the conditions for investment become more attractive,” argues Gerd Langguth, a political scientist at the University of Bonn, writing in the summer issue of the Washington Quarterly. Direct foreign investment in German companies fell from 18 billion deutsche marks in 1995 to 1.1 billion in 1996; Asian and American companies in the latter year withdrew more capital from Germany than they put into it in the form of new investments.

ermany has also been experiencing G“a brain drain” of medical and sci- entific researchers to other countries, Langguth says. He blames this, at least in part, on the ambivalence that many Germans seem to feel toward modern technology. Much criticism is leveled in Britain’s Tony Blair joins Schröder in hailing Germany “against things modern, against the “New Center” political look. progress, and against technology—and it carries more weight than elsewhere in the after encountering stiff opposition from world, thus preventing social progress here. German business. These sudden shifts didn’t In the fields of modern biotechnology and help the Schröder administration’s reputation gene technology, almost all the key patents for disarray. are held by American enterprises.” Much the The Red-Green government does have same is true for the computer, communica- some accomplishments, observes Andrei S. tion, and office machine industries. Markovits, a political scientist at the In the worldwide commercial competi- University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, writing tion for markets, Langguth notes, “many in Dissent (Summer 1999). The most states have much lower wages and impose notable is “a new citizenship law that rede- much lighter governmental burdens (for fines what it means to be German.” example, regarding environmental protec-

Periodicals 103 tion) than Germany.” The average gross June unveiled a package of budget and tax monthly wage in the Czech Republic, for cuts. It would slash state expenditures by $16 instance, was $337 in 1997, and in Bulgaria, billion next year, freeze pensions for two $94—while in Germany last January, it was years, end many subsidies, and reduce the $2,706. state’s share of national income to 40 percent More than half of Germany’s gross nation- over the next several years. al product ($2.1 trillion in 1998) is spent by Many of Schröder’s fellow Social the federal government, the Länder (states), Democrats deem this “New Center” move a or local authorities. Because of global pres- betrayal of their party’s traditions. But politi- sures, this massive public spending must be cal scientist Lutz Erbring told the New York reduced, Langguth says. Times (July 25, 1999) that, in essence, Taking a first step in that direction after Schröder “is gambling that a majority of eight months of economic muddle, Schröder Germans have the common sense to see that and new finance minister Hans Eichel in he is right.”

The End of Islamic Revolution? “The Decline of Revolutionary Islam in Algeria and Egypt” by Fawaz A. Gerges, in Survival (Spring 1999), International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 Tavistock St., London, England WC2E 7NQ. Though Islamic extremists in Algeria and ing with the Algerian army in its fight against Egypt continue to mount terrorist attacks, the GIA. The GIA guerrillas have been they no longer pose a serious threat to the reduced in number to a few hundred, Gerges survival of the pro-Western regimes there, says, “and the arbitrary and irrational nature contends Gerges, a professor of international of GIA violence has alienated an outraged affairs and Middle East studies at Sarah public.” Lawrence College. “Unable to face or sub- In Egypt, the violence has been intermit- vert the superior forces of the governments tent rather than protracted, but since the they opposed, militant Islamists in Algeria early 1990s, thousands have been killed or and Egypt instead terrorize the civilian popu- injured, and the tourist industry badly dam- lation and deter foreign investment.” aged. By 1995, however, President Hosni In both countries, as elsewhere in the Mubarak’s government had limited the Middle East, Gerges says, the Islamic threat posed by militant Islamist groups movements have been fractured by faction- such as al-Jama’a and Jihad, killing most of alism. In Algeria, the Groupe Islamique their effective leaders and confining most of Armée (GIA) since 1996 “has targeted civil- the violence to gun battles between the ian areas inhabited by supporters of its authorities and militants in central and rivals, particularly the mainstream Front upper Egypt, away from Cairo and most Islamique de Salut (FIS).” Many of the tourist sites. In 1996, the government civilians slain in this oil- and natural gas- declared victory. rich land of 29 million “are partisans of var- But the destruction of al-Jama’a and Jihad ious Islamist groups,” Gerges points out—a as organized movements, Gerges notes, fact often overlooked by the news media. “caused them to splinter into radical cells “Algeria’s Islamist revolution is devouring and factions,” which it was difficult for the its children.” government to control. Just how difficult Now headed by President Abdelaziz became clear in September and November Bouteflika, the military-dominated Algerian 1997, when al-Jama’a and Jihad made ter- regime, which began a crackdown on the rorist attacks in central Egypt, Luxor, and Islamic Front umbrella group in 1992, seems Cairo itself, leaving more than 100 Western to have won the war, Gerges says. In 1997, and Egyptian civilians dead. In Egypt and in the Army of Islamic Salvation (AIS), the the wider Muslim world, the Luxor mas- armed wing of the FIS, declared a unilateral, sacre turned public opinion against al- unconditional peace, and began collaborat- Jama’a, which is now only “a shadow of its

104 WQ Autumn 1999 former self, with its rank and file in exile or stage in an ‘Islamic Revolution’ that began on the run.” with the overthrow of the Shah’s regime in The fall of the Egyptian or Algerian Iran in 1979.” But 20 years after that event, regimes to Islamic militants, Gerges points he concludes, “the Islamist revolutionary out, would have suggested “a new, expansive movement seems to be a spent force.”

Mexico’s Trial by Fire “Mexico’s Coming Backlash” by M. Delal Baer, in Foreign Affairs (July–Aug. 1999), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. As Mexico moves toward a presidential power. The winner next July possibly could election next July, proponents of democracy draw less than 40 percent of the vote. Mexico can take satisfaction in the fact that for the “could become ungovernable,” warns Baer. first time in 70 years, the long-dominant “Mexico has spent billions of dollars creat- Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) could ing technologically sophisticated and credi- lose. But they shouldn’t be too satisfied. So ble electoral institutions, revamping voter ID far, writes Baer, of the Washington-based cards and registration lists, and establishing Center for Strategic and International the nonpartisan, autonomous Federal Studies, “more dem- Electoral Institute,” ocracy has brought Baer says. “But the renewed political cultural values need- infighting, assassina- ed to underpin demo- tions, and guerrilla cratic governance— violence.” If a minori- tolerance, compro- ty government comes mise, and civic partici- to power, the result pation—remain could be chaos. weak.” Mexico, which had “In their 11 years in a history of succession power” under Salinas by assassination until and Ernesto Zedillo 1929, achieved stabili- Ponce de Léon, she ty then by opting for notes, “Mexico’s young one-party rule by the technocrats have led a PRI. Regional chief- restructuring that has tains agreed to submit produced the privatiza- to a powerful presi- Is the ruling PRI, often derisively portrayed tion of state-owned dency in return for a as a snake, coming apart? industries, fiscal disci- share of the political pline, and [the North and economic action. “Only when this sys- American Free Trade Agreement]. But a back- tem of power sharing broke down was lash is in the air.” Mass protests erupted this Mexican democracy born,” notes Baer. In year when President Zedillo proposed electrici- 1987, after President Miguel de la Madrid ty privatization. To the public, Baer says, the Hurtado named Carlos Salinas de Gortari as shadow over the self-exiled former president his successor, a host of young, free-market Salinas, who has been linked with various tecnicos (technocrats) held sway in Mexico shady dealings, “has made privatization synony- City, much to the dismay of old-line PRI mous with corruption.” politicians. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas The 1994 assassination of PRI presidential Solórzano then formed the dissident, center- candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, which left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) ended seven decades of peaceful presidential as a refuge for exiled PRI populists. successions, still hangs over the political Today, Mexico essentially has a three-party scene, Baer says. “The specter of political vio- system, with the PRI, the PRD, and the cen- lence has become very real.... The post- ter-right National Action Party (PAN) vying for Colosio landscape is populated with angry

Periodicals 105 apparatchiks, ruthless drug traffickers, “As the capital sinks beneath a wave of scheming palace politicians, and messianic crime, the provinces smolder, and drug lords guerrillas who have sprung up like poisonous send corruption creeping through the estab- mushrooms.” Mexico’s big cities are also lishment,” Baer writes, “Mexico’s rulers seem being “overwhelmed by crime.” Some 1.5 more interested in fighting one another than million crimes were reported nationwide in their common enemies. For the country to 1997, but only 150,000 arrest warrants were survive as a democracy, this will have to issued. Police corruption is rife. change—and soon.”

Health Care Heaven? “Health Care in Canada: Incrementalism under Fiscal Duress” by C. David Naylor, in Health Affairs (May–June 1999), 7500 Old Georgetown Rd., Ste. 600, Bethesda, Md. 20814–6133. Canadians have long taken great pride in “excellent” or “very good,” compared with their publicly funded health care system, some 60 percent five years before. About 25 which provides high-quality treatment to all percent judge it “fair” or “poor.” citizens, regardless of wealth or income, In a 1998 survey, 46 percent of Canadians while still keeping costs under control. In said the recent changes had harmed the recent years, however, Canadians’ confi- quality of care. That perception may not be dence in their cherished “Medicare” system accurate, however. So far, studies have has been badly shaken, reports Naylor, a pro- turned up little hard evidence to support it, fessor in the Department of Medicine at the Naylor says. One study, for instance, found University of Toronto. “that despite downsizing of the Manitoba As successive governments in Ottawa have hospital sector, surgery volumes rose dra- struggled with budget deficits and a massive matically, utilization fell least for patients national debt, federal support to the 10 who were particularly sick or poor, and provinces and two northern territories, which short-term mortality outcomes for a set of administer the health care system, has been tracer conditions were improving.” A 1996 steadily reduced. As a proportion of provin- poll in Ontario showed much dissatisfaction cial health expenditures, direct cash transfers with waiting times for cardiac and other from Ottawa fell from 30.6 percent in 1980 types of specialized surgery. Yet fewer than to 21.5 percent in 1996 (and to even lower one in 250 patients die while awaiting coro- levels in richer provinces). The provinces, nary artery bypass graft surgery in Ontario— meanwhile, had their own fiscal problems. “a death rate lower than expected for car- As a result, Naylor says, provinces have mas- diac patients in general,” Naylor says. When sively reduced inpatient hospital care, with the waiting lists for that surgery have grown fewer admissions and shorter stays. Between too long, as happened in 1990 and 1997, the 1986 and 1994, despite the growth and aging Ontario ministry of health has expanded of the population, use of costly hospital beds surgical capacity and quickly shortened the for short-term care decreased by 27 percent. waiting lines. Nine out of 10 provinces (with Ontario, the Canada’s budget woes have started to ease, largest, the conspicuous exception) moved to which is good news for Medicare. Its single- consolidate hospitals under regional authori- payer system will emerge usefully stream- ties. In Ontario, a commission appointed by lined, Naylor says. Nevertheless, debate over the government in 1996 ordered 40 out of the ban on private insurance for publicly 139 hospitals to close or merge. insured medical services has been rekindled, “Three decades of centrally capped bud- and many Canadians, including some policy- gets and a decade of unprecedented con- makers, “pine for greater stability in health straints have wrung much of the fat out of care.” The best way to achieve it, in Naylor’s Canada’s hospital systems,” Naylor writes. view, is by piecemeal reforms. Despite their But the cutbacks have also sapped Can- recent loss of enthusiasm, he says, Canadians adians’ confidence, with only about 40 per- are not about to jettison their distinctive cent in 1996 rating the health care system approach to health care.

106 WQ Autumn 1999 RESEARCH REPORTS Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

“The Underclass Revisited.” The AEI Press, c/o Publisher Resources Inc., 1224 Heil Quaker Blvd., P.O. Box 7001, La Vergne, Tenn. 37086–7001, 43 pp. $9.95. Author: Charles Murray ith the crime rate down, welfare still disturbingly high. And in 1997, 26 Wrolls shrinking, and the labor mar- percent of white children were born to ket tight, the underclass is out of the spot- unmarried women, “a figure comparable light. But it has been largely untouched by to the black ratio in the mid-1960s.” these positive social trends, reports It is still uncertain, Murray says, what Murray, author of the influential Losing the slimming of the welfare rolls since the Ground (1984). 1996 reform (by 38 percent for blacks and By underclass, he explains, he means 33 percent for whites, as of mid-1997) the millions of people—chiefly urban, means for the underclass. However, unof- black, and low-income—who are cut off ficial data reported in mid-1998, he says, from mainstream America, “living a life in suggest that many of the women leaving which...productive work, family, [and] welfare “would not have spent much time community...exist in fragmented and in the system anyway and are not part of corrupted forms.” the underclass.” Moreover, “no...body of The falling crime rate—down by 17 per- research demonstrates that it is good for cent nationally between 1991 and 1997— children when a single mother works— has mainly been achieved, he writes, “not by rather the opposite.” socializing the underclass but by putting “Economically,” Murray writes, “under- large numbers of its members behind bars.” class neighborhoods are probably some- During those years, the number of people in what more prosperous than they were dur- prison or on probation or parole increased by ing the recession of 1991–1992.” However, 25 percent, to 5.7 million. it is “not at all clear” that there has been Despite an economy that has employers any social improvement. The infant mor- begging for help, Murray says, 23 percent tality rate fell sharply between 1982 and of young black males not in school, the 1997, but the incidence of very-low-birth- military, or prison were jobless in 1997 weight babies (under 3.3 pounds) and not even looking for work. increased by 38 percent among blacks and Out-of-wedlock births, at least, are not 22 percent among whites. Despite on the rise. The proportion of black chil- improved medical care, it appears that dren who are born to unwed mothers has more and more women “are getting preg- even dropped slightly, from a high of 70 nant and then failing to take even rudi- percent in 1994 to 69 percent in 1997— mentary care of themselves.”

“World Population Beyond Six Billion.” Population Reference Bureau, 1875 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Ste. 520, Washington, D.C. 20009–5728, 44 pp. $7. Authors: Alene Gelbard, Carl Haub, and Mary M. Kent

n the century now ending, the population Reference Bureau. Life expectancy has Iof the world has tripled in size, from fewer increased by two-thirds, and the dire predic- than two billion in 1900 to more than six bil- tions of Thomas Malthus and his successors lion—a landmark theoretically reached on have not come true. October 12, according to the Population Nevertheless, say the authors, all affiliated

Research Reports 107 ~:iththe Population Reference Bureau, more beene\;en greater had fertilit~: rates not begun thanone-fifth of the \vorld'speople li\le in to fall--froman a\ierageof 5.9children per povert~isubsisting on less than $1 a dal;.Man)l woman to three in Latin America and the specialistspredict dramatic declines in life Caribbean,for example. esPectancJIin parts of sul,-Saharan iiV;ica as a But fertilit7·rates remain ]~igh in Africa, resultof the spread of AIDS and HN. theauthors sa);, where "u;idespread pol·ert\l, Inthe United States, life espectanc): isnoM; highrates of illiterac):,largely rural popula- 76J'ears, compared u;ith 68 !;ears at midceIltu- tions,and strong traditional preferences for I)'al;cl 47 )lears in 1900.i-\mericans and others largefamilies do not fa~or a rapid decline." A in de\lelopedcountries also ha\,e had lo\a; rates ]~ighrate alsopersists in the MiddleEast, offertilit);iI1recent decades. In notone major thoughthe situation varies from country to industrializedcount~l toda); do women,on countr)?.In recentdecades, Arab ~,onlen, a\lerage,ha\ie more than t~lo children. In near- who traditionallyMled in their teelns,have i,'"11 of Europe and japan, population growth I,een\I;aiting longer--~Yith the median age I~ascome to a halt.Indeed, in 1LtEuropean of marriagein SaudiArabia, for instance, countries,there is natural decrease--fe\Yer advancingfrom 16 to 31. birthsthan deaths each vear. The\vorld's population isespected tokeep Lessde\leloped countries, howe\·er, esperi- gro\~iing,at least for the nest few decades. But encedrapid poP"lation gro\·irth during the last UnitedZVations projections for 2050range half-cent~ll~,--from1.7billion people in 1950 widely--froma decline to fourbillion to an to 4.7 billion in 1998.The groMlthM;ould ha\ie increaseto 27 I,illion.

The Sousscd Bite Society Television and the American Mind by J eff rey Scheuer

"...brilliant....exploresthe variousconsequences of televi- 1~-I-T HE sion's inherent propensity to simplify complex ideas." I~i~ · · u · ·

--MARIE WINN, Tl?ePlug-in DI·~cg BITE "Scheueremerges as not onlya first-rankscholar of the ~~ S OC ' E T Y media, but a philosopher of the media," ':i" "" --DANIEL SCHORR, National Public Radio ··~~~~~~:···~·;~~

~..no student of the media can afford not to read this book and no serious watcher of television will want to miss it." --VICTORNAVASKY, The Nation WWW.theSOU"db"eSOC'ety.c0m

~..a beautifully written and powerfully argued account of our televisual culture. This is social criticism of the best kind...." --MICHAEL WALZER, FOUrWalls Eight Windows Dzstittltefol·Advanced Study, Pril?ceton University

108 W~Autumn 1999 CURRENT BOOKS The Poet-Critic NO OTHER BOOK: Selected Essays. By Randall Jarrell. Edited by Brad Leithauser. HarperCollins. 376 pp. $27.50 REMEMBERING RANDALL: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. By Mary von Schrader Jarrell. HarperCollins. 173 pp. $22

by Jay Parini

he poet-critics continue to hold our reads his essays as if they were bulletins from Tinterest, especially by contrast to more the front. academic critics—the poststructuralists, in Jarrell was only 51 when he died, yet he particular, whose writing has been ascendant left behind a diverse body of work, including during the past two decades. The poet-critics’ the first-rate essays gathered in this compre- essays, like their poems, are “news that stays hensive selection by Brad Leithauser, him- news,” to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound. self a wonderfully intelligent poet, novelist, One still reads, for example, the criticism of and critic. No Other Book is especially Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Dr. Johnson, welcome because the original editions of Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Jarrell’s essays have lapsed from print. T. S. Eliot. One Taken together, these occasionally rereads pieces represent one essays by John of the most alluring Crowe Ransom or critical projects of Robert Penn War- this century. ren. More academ- What set Jarrell ic critics, by con- apart was good taste, trast, rarely survive broad learning, un- their time. Who but common sense, and historians of criti- a passion for clarity. cism now reads Reading him, one even the best of Cleanth Brooks, Walter J. feels completely confident that what he says Ong, Louis L. Martz, or W. K. Wimsatt, all is what he means, and that he will not put strong critics in their time? on airs or play falsely. This does not, of Randall Jarrell (1914–65) was the best course, mean that he will not use every poet-critic of his generation. Although he device available to the critic, including cer- was by far a better critic than poet, his criti- tain forms of indirection. Jarrell is subtle, cism gained its uncanny power from the fact and the more readers know, the more they that Jarrell understood what was at stake in will get from him. Still, one cannot quite the writing of poems. He knew that poetry hope to know as much as Jarrell: he seems was, if properly conceived and executed, a learned in unlikely ways and confident of central form of culture, and that if the stan- his opinions. That is part of his allure. dards for poetry deteriorated, a general dete- Leithauser wisely puts “The Obscurity of rioration of thought and feeling—of expres- the Poet,” a lovely and wide-ranging piece, sion—would follow. As a result, one still first in his selection. Consider an early,

Books 109 memorable sentence in that essay: “If we changes so fast that his lyric poetry has were in the habit of reading poets their almost been ruined.” Jarrell wrote this in obscurity would not matter; and, once we are 1941, well before his subject launched out of the habit, their clarity does not help.” into what we now think of as “later Jarrell was used to hearing people decry the Auden.” obscurity of Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edward Like Leithauser, I have admired Jarrell Thomas, and others. He was frustrated by for years, and found him particularly brac- this situation, noting with disdain the disap- ing and exemplary when I first began to pearance of a public used to spending time write criticism myself. My impression was with poetry: “You need to read good poetry that Jarrell gnawed at the poem before him, with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp tearing away the flesh to reveal glistening intelligence and of willing emotional empa- bone. What surprised me, on rereading thy, at once penetrating and generous.” In these essays, was how rarely Jarrell gets close effect, he was describing himself. to an individual poem; rather, he selects the “To the Laodiceans” remains the most poems he deems worthy, often the less influential essay ever written on Robert familiar ones, then stands back and admires Frost, mostly because Jarrell understood that them, inviting the reader to gaze beside Frost was a terrifying poet well before this him. In the manner of the New Critics, he became a commonplace. Frost had never adores quoting. “To show Whitman for lacked for an audience that appreciated his what he is,” he writes, “one does not need to work, but he did—at least by the late 1940s praise or explain or argue, one needs simply and early 1950s—seem to be slipping to quote.” among the critics, who preferred the diffi- cult poems of Eliot and Stevens to his blunt, arrell’s prose often seems rushed but plainspoken work. Jarrell declared “Provide, Jnever sloppy. The writer appears to feel Provide” an “immortal masterpiece,” and under immense pressure because he has so offered an explication of “Design” that much to say with so little time, so little would shape the view of Frost taken by space, to do justice to his arguments. Unlike future critics such as Lionel Trilling and Eliot’s essays, Jarrell’s feel shapeless, ad hoc, Richard Poirier. and impulsive; yet they quiver with life, with perceptions one is grateful for, with formu- ike W. H. Auden, whom Jarrell the lations that seem exact, even exacting, as L critic resembles—indeed, Jarrell when he writes of Pound: “A great deal of often strikes me as an impersonator, but a the Cantos is interesting in the way an orig- brilliant one, of Auden’s critical voice—he inal soul’s indiscriminate notes on books and is good at a certain form of abstraction. people, countries and centuries, are interest- Jarrell brilliantly turns the Audenesque ing; all these fragmentary citations and allu- tone on Auden, in “Changes of Attitude sions remind you that if you had read exact- and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry,” when he ly the books Pound has read, known exactly offers an exhaustive list of Auden’s stylistic the people Pound has known, and felt about characteristics in the rhetoric of his early them exactly as Pound has felt, you could poems—and the list runs to 26 entries! understand the Cantos pretty well.” Like many readers (myself included), he In the end, Jarrell’s readings of specific prefers the earlier to the later Auden, poems seem less significant than his tone. where the poet’s rhetoric tends to degener- Jarrell loved poets and poetry, and his work ate. With eye-catching cogency, he writes: teems with affection and sympathetic under- “Auden wished to make his poetry better standing. But that is only part of the tone. organized, more logical, more accessible, There is also a cultivated distance, a sense of and so on; with these genuinely laudable fierce judgment, unreservedly rendered, as intentions, going in the right direction when he writes that “Melville’s poetry has from his early work, he has managed to been grotesquely underestimated.” The run through a tremendous series of stance is bold, intimate, and authoritative—

110 WQ Autumn 1999 and time has proved Jarrell right. We hear North Carolina, was an accident. the characteristic tone again at the end of his In the end, the criticism is what matters. great essay on Robert Lowell, “From the For contemporary poets, Jarrell has tossed Kingdom of Necessity”: “One or two of out bones still worth chewing on, as in “On these poems, I think, will be read as long as Modernism,” where he puts the situation of men remember English.” This was in 1947! the poet in the latter half of the 20th centu- Lowell had a long, tortuous path ahead as a ry quite nakedly: “It is the end of the line. poet, but Jarrell was already making shrewd Poets can go back and repeat the ride; they judgments, predicting developments in can settle in attractive, atavistic colonies Lowell’s work that would become obvious along the railroad; they can repudiate the only a decade or so later. whole system, à la Yvor Winters, for some neoclassical donkey caravan of their own. dmirers of Jarrell will want to know But Modernism As We Knew It—the most A more about the conditions under successful and influential body of poetry of which he wrote, but little help will come this century—is dead.” their way from Mary von Schrader Jarrell, Poets are left, as it were, stranded. Jarrell his widow. Her Remembering Randall con- believed that, and this doubtless added to his sists of nine essays, none of which seems despair. But his essays are so full of life, so especially shrewd or perceptive, although rippled with perceptions, shafts of acute each has moments of interest or charm. vision, neatly framed contrasts, and witty for- Mary and Randall met at the Rocky mulations, that one cannot but hope his Mountain Writers’ Conference, where he death was genuinely an accident. The man was on the faculty and she was a student. in the essays—that familiar voice—does not The teacher-student relationship seem sound like someone who would kill himself; never to have quite been put behind them, he appears wry and full of wisdom, a model and Mary’s obvious adoration retains a of sanity. No Other Book comes at a good slightly immature feel. She obliquely time to remind us of who he was and what describes Jarrell’s sad descent into depres- he gave us. It should grace every serious sion, as if (understandably) she cannot quite reader’s bookshelf. look at the terrible thing directly. She main- tains that a bad review in the New York > Jay Parini, Times provoked Randall to slice his wrists, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. His recent books include Benjamin’s Crossing but that his death seven months later, when (1996), House of Days (1998), and Robert Frost: A Life he was struck down by a car in Chapel Hill, (1999).

Laying Down Arms THE SOUL OF BATTLE: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny. By Victor Davis Hanson. Free Press. 480 pp. $30 by Andrew J. Bacevich

his is a book about citizen armies, mil- to the command of eccentrics, and embark- Titary genius, and wars of liberation. It ing “on a moral trek into the heart of slav- posits a specifically democratic tradition of ery.” Called upon to fight not for glory or martial greatness—of mighty armies raised conquest but for freedom, citizen-soldiers out of seemingly unlikely material, entrusted become fierce, implacable warriors, a

Books 111 “democratic militia” that marches deep into enemy terri- tory to vanquish evil. Having accomplished their liberating mission, these warriors put aside their arms and hasten to resume their peacetime pursuits. Yet in doing so they impart a residue of “civic militarism” to the rest of society. Their sacrifices rekindle a spirit of civic vitality. The right- eousness of the cause for which they fought spurs a democratic renewal that persists long after these “armies of a season” have dispersed. The proponent of this provocative thesis, Victor Davis Hanson, is a distinguished histo- minondas, Sherman, and Patton, according to rian of the ancient world who teaches at Hanson, all understood that the humane way California State University, Fresno, and lives to wage war is to end it quickly and decisively. on (and works) his family’s farm in the San Each believed that doing so required not Joaquin Valley. Hanson is also, not incidental- slaughter but maneuver. Determined to spare ly, an agrarian. Indeed, that outlook, with its his own men, each avoided head-on collisions sturdy faith in the virtue of the common folk, with the enemy’s army, instead (and over the its distaste for the urban, industrialized world, objections of timid superiors) moving on the and its antipathy to privilege, pervades the enemy rear and thrusting deep into his home- work, imbuing it with originality and passion. land. Victory in each instance expanded the Hanson builds his argument for a demo- realm of freedom so that the military cam- cratic way of war on three cases. Beginning paign itself became a ringing affirmation of with Greece in the fourth century b.c., he democracy. recounts the story of Epaminondas, whose The author works hard to make the facts rugged Theban infantrymen invaded Sparta, fit his thesis, but not altogether successfully. crushed its army, and freed the Helots from To portray Sherman’s westerners as decisive, subjugation. Next, he turns to William he minimizes the contributions of Ulysses S. Tecumseh Sherman’s Army of the West, Grant and of the Army of the Potomac. Yet whose spectacular “march to the sea” in from 1861 all the way to 1865, the Army of 1864 doomed the Confederacy and sealed the Potomac did most of the fighting and the demise of slavery. Finally, he examines dying. Sherman could tear through Georgia the campaigns of General George S. Patton’s and the Carolinas only because Grant had Third U.S. Army, sweeping across France fixed the main Confederate army in Virginia and through Germany to destroy Hitler’s and was relentlessly grinding it down. Nor Reich and liberate the prisoners of Nazi did Sherman see his march as a purposeful death camps. act of liberation. His voluminous wartime correspondence suggests a commander less n Hanson’s telling, these campaigns are intent on ringing in the day of jubilee than Iall of a piece. Each pitted an army of on compelling recalcitrant rebels to submit yeomen, inspired by deep-seated convic- to federal authority, thereby restoring the tions, against a self-proclaimed elite: hoplites Union. The fate of African Americans was at against Spartan regulars, midwestern farm best a secondary consideration. boys against the planter aristocracy, conscript In emphasizing the achievements of GIs against Aryan “supermen.” Each army Patton’s army, similarly, Hanson is dismissive fought under a military misfit of fierce dispo- of the other formations, American and allied, sition and unappreciated humanity. Epa- that played a hand in liberating Europe. The

112 WQ Autumn 1999 Third Army alone could no more have defeat- taposed with the perplexing military history ed the Wehrmacht than Sherman’s western- of our own time—Iraq left under the thumb ers could have singlehandedly defeated the of Saddam Hussein, Somalia abandoned, Confederacy. To highlight the genius of Rwanda ignored, Kosovo ravaged by Serb Patton himself, Hanson does a hatchet job on predators, Serbia by NATO bombs—the Omar Bradley, admittedly not one of history’s grandeur of those achievements becomes all Great Captains, but a competent officer and the more evident. decent man. In Hanson’s hands, Bradley Perhaps Hanson’s three cases spread becomes a cautious, unimaginative hack, across two millenniums are too few in num- consumed with dislike and envy of his flam- ber to qualify as much of a tradition. Indeed, boyant subordinate. Dwight D. Eisenhower other cases—in the American experience fares only slightly better. Such, to be sure, alone, the Indian campaigns, the war with were the views that Patton himself harbored, Mexico, the Philippine insurrection, and but to adopt them uncritically is to render an Vietnam—suggest that the democratic way unbalanced portrait of the high command in of war all too often resembles war waged by the European theater. Finally, to imagine that nations to whom democracy is an alien con- Patton viewed his mission chiefly in moral cept. Ultimately, the nature of war at least as terms, with the liberation of death camps his much as the nature of society determines the central purpose, is to engage in myth making, behavior of fighting men and their generals. imposing our present-day consciousness of the Does an appreciation for the enduring Holocaust onto an earlier era. However fash- nature of war (and for the iron laws of poli- ionable it may have become to pretend other- tics) absolve democracies of any obligation to wise—indeed, however much we may wish it attempt to transcend its bleak imperatives? had been otherwise—American soldiers With his unbounded confidence in the peo- fought not to save European Jewry or any ple, Hanson emphatically answers no. He other victims of Nazism, but simply to finish insists that the people can bend war to serve the job and go home. the interests of freedom. Certainly he is cor- rect in suggesting that any democracy that uch reservations notwithstanding, The gives up the effort to do so, that becomes cyn- SSoul of Battle remains a compelling ical and craven in its use of military power, book, suffused with the author’s deep faith in sullies itself and imperils its own existence. democracy. Growing out of that faith are sev- Disguised as a work of scholarship, The eral expectations: that when the people Soul of Battle is in fact a timely and bracing choose war they should do so for reasons that polemic. Its true purpose is to indict the rise above the sordid calculations of kings or democracies of our own day, the United princes; that an army of citizen-soldiers States foremost among them, for fabricating should be an expression of democracy itself, a new military tradition that is paltry, mean differing in spirit and behavior from merce- spirited, timorous—and explicitly designed naries animated by visions of empire or not to engage the passions of the people. expectations of plunder; that democratic Victor Davis Hanson summons those shar- armies should give rise to a humane style of ing his faith in democracy to restore the con- generalship that restores peace without need- nection between that faith and our military less slaughter; that the outcome of wars policies, so that the purposes for which undertaken by democracies ought to be democratic nations employ power and the redemptive. way they fight reflect the will of the people. We might argue as to whether the armies For citizens of the democracy that has arro- of Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton truly gated to itself the role of world’s only super- lived up to such expectations. But surely power, that message demands thoughtful Hanson is correct that there attaches to the consideration. destruction of militarism, slavery, and totali- tarianism by democratic armies a grandeur > Andrew J. Bacevich directs the Center for Inter- that compels lasting admiration. Indeed, jux- national Relations at Boston University.

Books 113 Au Revoir to France? FRANCE ON THE BRINK: A Great Civilization Faces the New Century. By Jonathan Fenby. Arcade. 449 pp. $27.95 by Amy E. Schwartz

rumbling at France and its unac- tinent, bringing with it responsibilities and Gcountable insistence on remaining challenges,” he writes near the end of his French is an indoor sport whose popularity book. “For all the pull of rural life and tradi- reaches from the humblest spat-upon pack- tion, they have to come to grips with the age tourist to the highest levels of France’s modern nature of their nation. The state and fellow NATO governments. Foreign employ- the politicians have to free themselves from ers rage at the restrictive labor rules and the the grasp of lobbies.... Public morality has incredibly high costs of hiring to triumph over corrup- and firing French workers. tion.... Government has to Business types jeer at the see itself an enabler of the impending 35-hour work individual genius of its peo- week enacted by Lionel ple. . . . The elite has to Jospin’s Socialist govern- become more open to the ment. Diplomats tear their world and its ideas.” hair over the French govern- It seems a tall order for any ment’s periodic need to show nation, let alone one that the that its interests are indepen- author has just spent 400 dent of the rest of the world’s, pages denouncing for institu- whether by testing nuclear tional sclerosis and narrow weapons, breaking the ranks self-regard. Yet Fenby styles of a worldwide embargo to himself a Francophile, and enter an oil deal with Iran, or he has the credentials to steering executives of non- prove it: a French wife, years French companies to alleged- of experience covering the ly bugged seats in Air country for various British France’s business class. And newspapers, and an enthusi- individual visitors, no matter astic palate that delights in how admiring, sooner or later the nation’s endless offerings long in private for some of food and wine. But he is a crushing answer to the sub- Francophile mordantly criti- lime French certainty that no cal of the object of his affec- way but the French way can tions, particularly what it has possibly be correct. become in recent years. He Jonathan Fenby maintains writes, he would have you that the French way of doing know, more in sorrow than in things has brought France’s anger. civilization to the brink of dis- In a clever chapter on aster. He believes that “Vanishing Madeleines,” he France—the exceptional, the laments the decay of the brilliant, the stylish—is mired Collection © New 1999 The Yorker Roz Chast from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved. world-renowned symbols of in statism and corruption, French life. “Foie gras is unable to face its problems. “The French imported from Central Europe and snails have to confront the implications of a future from as far away as Taiwan. That essential which lies in an increasingly integrated con- element in traditional French hygiene, the

114 WQ Autumn 1999 bidet, is now installed in fewer than 10 per- Francophobia is little but a collection of cent of new bathrooms.” Berets? Only three lame jokes and nasty newspaper headlines. factories in France still make them—a tenth Elsewhere, the problem is pure rummage: of the number before World War II. Fenby loves lists, and he has an odd habit of Baguettes? “As people grow richer and more rattling off a long series of unconnected one- urbanized, they eat less bread. A century ago, sentence items on a theme, for all the world the average French person consumed 219 like someone reciting the results of a Nexis kilograms a year.... In the 1990s it fell below search. 60 kilos. Parisians now average only 36 kilos a year.” Cafés? Three thousand close each rance on the Brink finally hits its stride year, half of them in Paris, as patterns of life Fin the last four chapters, when it settles change and people do less drinking. In down to a straightforward narrative account another chapter, he bemoans the vanishing of the last three presidents of the Republic: of the country’s rural roots as villages wither Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitter- and their customs die out: “The annual rand, and Jacques Chirac. Here is grist for killing of the pig and the use of every morsel Fenby’s contention that high-level French down to the ears and tail for food has been politics is ingrown and arid of ideas. He fol- supplanted by preserved cold cuts in cello- lows the career-long hatred between the phane from the local supermarket.” Socialist Mitterrand and the neo-Gaullist Chirac—each of whose overriding political ut here the argument becomes contra- goal was to keep the other from power— Bdictory, even circular—because if any- and tracks Mitterrand’s cynical flip-flopping one shares Fenby’s solicitude for these local between left and right. “If one constant ran customs, these symbolic hallmarks, it is the through Mitterrand’s long career,” he French government. It pours out subsidies writes, “it was his ability to disown his for agriculture, for small-town living, for beliefs of yesterday.” Arriving at the great those who bake baguettes in the traditional conundrum of recent French politics— manner. It nests daily life in regulations why, in 1997, a faltering Chirac called new intended to encourage people to patronize elections that lost him his huge parliamen- small grocers and eat fresh bread. And those tary majority and forced him to appoint regulations and subsidies, in turn, are a large socialist Lionel Jospin as prime minister— part of what drives Fenby and other critics of Fenby offers little in the way of new report- French exceptionalism round the bend. His ing to clear up the mystery. Plainly, though, ideal—a modern France, fully integrated he is as suspicious of Jospin’s efforts to with the Continent, no longer in the grip of invent a French “third way” as he is of pre- lobbies and special interests—would be a vious governments’ temporizing. France losing ever more swiftly the things France may well be due for another set of that mark it off from the rest of the world. rude shocks to its beloved way of life. The book has other weaknesses as well. Surrounded by countries buffeted by similar Fenby laments the number of scandals in forces, and committed to that engine of high places, the lack of turnover in political change, the European Union, it has nonethe- office, the gap between the well off and a less held out longer than its neighbors. Its resentful underclass, the strain of integrating many fans—Fenby indubitably among racial minorities—but he never compares them—still hope for a miraculous solution, the French experience with that of other one that lets France retain its distinctiveness countries. What nation has figured out what without lapsing into insularity. Nothing bet- to do about its underclass? An otherwise ter demonstrates the continued aura of gripping chapter on Jean-Marie Le Pen and French aplomb and self-confidence than the his National Front ends with the party’s faith that France will find this salvation. “implosion,” undercutting the author’s argu- ment that the Front’s persistence signals > Amy E. Schwartz writes about cultural issues for the deep trouble in the electorate. A section on Washington Post.

Books 115 Arts & Letters

FAREWELL: Mercies, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, and many A Memoir of a Texas Childhood. other original stage plays and screenplays, plus By Horton Foote. Scribner. 287 pp. $24 such screen adaptations as Harper Lee’s To Kill Foote tells his memoir of youthful days in a Mockingbird. Texas the same way he has presented the mate- The title of this memoir in no way indicates rial in his many plays, movies, and other books: that Horton Foote is hanging up his pen. It was deliberately, in detail, and unhurriedly. The chosen because, in heading out to the Pasa- man refuses to be rushed. But, in time, one dena Playhouse at age 17 to study acting, he realizes that his wanderings are not without was bidding farewell to the old hometown—or purpose, and that he has achieved a surprising so he thought. He moved back again after economy of words. many years of meandering, though his life’s Foote reveals the deep threshings of sharks work makes clear that Wharton and its people beneath the placid waters of his native Texas never once left his mind. village, Wharton, the “Harrison” of his fiction- —Larry L. King al works. Perhaps no other American writer so consistently depicts small-town virtues or con- vivialities being gnawed away by man’s inher- SIN IN SOFT FOCUS: ent greed or anger or foolishness or fears—yet Pre-Code Hollywood. he comes off more as a casual reporter than as By Mark A. Vieira. one sitting in hard-eyed judgment. Harry N. Abrams. 240 pp. $39.95 Even as a boy working in his father’s dry PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD: goods store, Foote had an eye for people and Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection their conduct. He would listen to the yarns of in American Cinema, 1930–1934. old men in the local spit-and-whittle club: By Thomas Doherty. “Each of the men then began to tell their own Columbia Univ. Press. 430 pp. $49.50 stories of the past. The scandals, private or pub- cloth, $19.50 paper lic, and the deaths by drowning in the river, the In 1999—“the summer of the dirty joke,” as tales of gamblers, and drunks, and murderers, the New York Times dubbed it—65 seconds of and of the ones murdered, of adulterers and orgy in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut were adulteresses, of when this brother did that, and digitally altered to satisfy the Motion Picture no it was the other brother, hour after hour.” Association of America’s rating board. In a rare There is so much evidence in this memoir of show of unanimity, film critics in Los Angeles Foote’s living a life of professional observation and New York condemned the board for “tram- early on—and as much a life of the mind as his pling the freedom of American filmmakers.” cultural circumstance permitted—that one Those critics—and members of the ratings wonders why it took him so long to see himself board, too—will find valuable perspective in for the writer he became rather than the actor he first aspired to be. An editor hoping to make me a “com- mercial” writer at the outset of my career, 30-odd years ago, said, “Don’t write like Horton Foote. He’s good to read, but he won’t make a quarter for himself or his pub- lisher.” Well, I gladly would have written like Horton Foote if I could have. And while his sales figures may never have rivaled those of Tom Clancy or Jackie Collins, they will not have to hold any benefits for this 83- year-old, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and two Oscars, the author of The Young Man from Atlanta, The Trip to Bountiful, Tender

116 WQ Autumn 1999 two new books recalling the merry boom and and photographer, writes with indignation of dismal bust of “pre-Code Hollywood,” that all- the mischief done by cardinals with scissors. but-unexamined period when American film- The Code was almost entirely spearheaded by makers operated free from official censorship. American Catholics, and the author quotes a The label “pre-Code” is something of a mis- Cleveland bishop exhorting parishioners, nomer. The Production Code, setting rules for “Purify Hollywood or destroy Hollywood!” Hollywood’s purity, was adopted with lofty pur- Vieira raises the question whether anti- pose in 1930—“correct entertainment raises Semitism underlay the Code, then lets Code the whole standard of a nation”—and widely czar Breen answer it. Describing Hollywood’s flouted until 1934, when Joseph Breen became mogul class to a fellow Catholic, Breen said: the enforcer of a new and more stringent Code. “Ninety-five percent of the folks are Jews of an Many films from the pre-Breen years no Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, longer exist, at least in their original version. In the scum of the earth.” order to secure reissue thereafter, films made Doherty, by contrast, defends Breen—who before 1934 had to be submitted to the Code enforced the Code from 1934 until 1954 and and—retroactively—to the Code’s splicer. wielded as much power over pictures as Louis This had irreversible results when the original B. Mayer or Jack Warner—as a virtuous aes- negative was cut, as it often was. Among films thete who thought of himself as a “creative col- that no longer exist in the form in which they laborator.” All he wanted for American cine- were made, and in which they made film his- ma, writes Doherty, was “to imbue it with a tory, are All Quiet on the Western Front, A transcendent sense of virtue and order,” and in Farewell to Arms, Mata Hari, Shanghai doing so he came out “on the side of the Express, King Kong, 42nd Street, Frankenstein, angels.” Public Enemy, Tarzan and His Mate, and Really? They would strike Vieira as avenging Animal Crackers. angels, one suspects. And why do virtue and Making the pre-Code era doubly worth order, especially when “transcendent,” sound examining is that it coincides with the worst so like the professed goals of every reformer years of the Great Depression, a trauma that who ever sharpened the scissors, lit the bonfire, challenged the fundamental values and or—come to think of it—digitized the orgy? assumptions of American society. In his witty —Steven Bach and weighty Pre-Code Hollywood, Doherty, who teaches at Brandeis University, traces THE BROKEN ESTATE: Hollywood’s surprising and little-known Essays on Literature and Belief. response to the calamity. Such pictures as Wild By James Wood. Random House. 272 Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale told bitter, pp. $24 disillusioned stories in their titles alone, while Wood, a young, Cambridge-educated others, such as Gabriel over the White House, Englishman who is now a senior editor at the flirted with what Doherty calls a “dictator New Republic, belongs to a critical tradition craze.” Cinematic “insurrection”—a key word that has largely expired in the thin air of cur- in the subtitle—would come to an end with rent academic practice. Learned, passionate, the enforcement of the Code, as would Mae and judgmental, he recalls Lionel Trilling and West’s suggestive sashays and any celluloid Edmund Wilson, critics who believed that lit- hints that the glamor of crime ended anywhere erature matters to the way we live and that its but the gutter or the hot seat. quality can be established through exegesis Vieira’s Sin in Soft Focus details pre-Code and argument. Wood’s grave and rather pre- history and its no-longer-available films in a tentious title sets the tone for this collection of clear and lively text that inevitably pales along- 21 essays on 19th- and 20th-century writers of side the 275 photographs, many of them unfa- fiction and poetry, a span stretching from miliar, all of them beautifully reproduced. Austen and Melville to Pynchon and Updike, They seductively evoke the period, shimmer- with a swipe at Thomas More and a wicked ing with a black-and-white elegance so allur- reduction of the critic George Steiner thrown ing, ironically, that it is easy to see what in for good measure. alarmed the bluestockings. Wood is especially attracted to such writers Vieira, a Los Angeles-based film historian as Melville, Gogol, Arnold, and Flaubert, who

Books 117 seem to him to struggle with the distinctions writers he thinks great are Austen, Melville, between literary belief—the assent fiction wins Gogol, Flaubert, Proust, Lawrence, Woolf, from us to credit its reality—and formal reli- Joyce, and Mann; no argument there (well, gious belief. Those distinctions became harder Lawrence perhaps). Wood’s notions of what to maintain after the ascendancy of the novel makes for great fiction—“fiction as it should in the mid-19th century, when, in Wood’s view, be: a free scatter through time, unpressed, the old estate—“the supposition that religion incontinent, unhostaged, surprised by the was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the shock of its unhindered passage through fron- Gospel narratives were supernatural reports”— tiers it, and not history, has invented”—appear no longer held. Novels caused the Gospels to to champion a wild expansiveness. But they are be read as a collection of fictional narratives, actually rather stern criteria, disqualifying those even as fiction acquired the status of religion who play by different rules (Updike, Pynchon, under the influence of writers (Flaubert pre- DeLillo); allegorists are at special risk of being eminently) who made literary style an object of sent early to the showers. worship. “For it was not just science,” writes “The writer-critic,” Wood says, “is always Wood, “but perhaps the novel itself which showing a little plumage to the writer under helped to kill Jesus’s divinity, when it gave us a discussion.” He shows a lot of plumage, and his new sense of the real, a new sense of how the attraction to simile and metaphor seems irre- real disposes itself in a narrative—and then in sistible. He notices air conditioners “dripping turn a new skepticism toward the real as we their sap, their backsides thrust out of the win- encounter it in narrative.” dow like Alisoun, who does the same in Novels have been credited with a lot in the Chaucer” (though presumably without chill- past: they have ended innocence and toyed ing the room). Then again, he can be graceful with readers’ affections and shredded the social and apt: “Fiction should seem to offer itself to fabric. But did they really bring down God? the reader’s completion, not to the writer’s. (Yes, there is that escape-hatch “perhaps.”) This whisper of conspiracy is one of fiction’s Wood was raised in an evangelical nook of the necessary beauties.” Church of England, he tells us, but has since The last of these essays originated in part as become an atheist. Yet he cannot quite let go of a sermon at an Oxford college, and that’s the faith he has tried to replace with the lesser appropriate, because Wood writes as if he consolations of art; in this book, at least, the loss would be right at home in a pulpit. He is informs his vocation. immensely serious about locating the abiding Wood is a fearless and astute critic, who has achievement of literature and honoring its not only read everything but come to terms importance as an alternative to faith. But when with it—come to his terms with it, that is. the furrow in his brow threatens to suck in the Fiction for him is about narrative and charac- rest of him, he can provoke even an admiring ter, and the best fiction creates characters who reader to blasphemy: “Lighten up: they’re only get away from their authors and move in a real- books.” As indeed they may be, to those whose ity beyond the confines of the page, so that we estate is still whole. can imagine their spillover lives. Among the —James Morris Science & Technology

WHAT A BLESSING SHE league of mine likens to making a fetish out HAD CHLOROFORM: of having dental work without painkillers. The Medical and Social Response Pain relief during childbirth raises a host of to the Pain of Childbirth from questions: What is best for the mother? What 1800 to the Present. is best for the baby? What is “natural,” and By Donald Caton. Yale Univ. Press. does that matter? The world is full of people 288 pp. $30 who think they know the ideal birth experi- I had my kids without anesthesia and trea- ence, and, therefore, full of women who sure the memory, an attitude that a col- think they got it wrong.

118 WQ Autumn 1999 Caton demonstrates that women, obstetri- pretation of pain, the position of women in cians, social theorists, and preachers (among society, and the emergence of science as a dri- others) have been reading significance into ving force in medical change. If his perspective labor pains for at least two centuries. The remains that of an anesthesiologist, convinced author himself is an obstetrical anesthesiolo- that most fully informed women will choose gist, trained to alleviate the pain of childbirth, medication, his intriguing story nonetheless and spurred to undertake this book by his sur- helps us understand childbirth, pain, and pain prise that “many women did not want my control. help.” His historical account is naturally shad- —Perri Klass ed by his professional assumptions (as he freely acknowledges), but it is also informed and THE MEN THEY WILL BECOME: enlivened by his technical and scientific The Nature and Nurture of understanding of anesthesia. Male Character. Ether was first used in childbirth in 1847. By Eli Newberger In 1853, Dr. John Snow (of epidemiologic Perseus Books. 288 pp. $25 fame for tracing a London cholera epidemic Another book on the subject of boys being to a contaminated well) administered it to boys, this one from the pediatrician who testi- Queen Victoria during labor. Later, her fied against Louise Woodward, the British daughter was given chloroform during her nanny found guilty by a Massachusetts jury of labor, prompting the queen to utter the sen- shaking her infant charge to death. The tence that gives the book its title. Caton dis- founder of the Child Protection and Family Violence Unit at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Newberger rejects the argument, advanced by Judith Rich Harris last year in her controversial Nurture Assumption, that peers play a defining role in development. We are born with traits but not character, he says. Character is learned, primarily from one’s par- ents, and as it develops it becomes “a resource for shaping the part of temperament that is malleable.” When character is badly shaped, Newberger looks to the parents first. Parents who, for instance, dislike having an innately cusses the reception of ether and chloroform shy, inhibited child may “drive him into being among physicians and patients, tracing the an aggressively disobedient child.” The author changing social interpretation of pain and the rejects genetic determinism except insofar as strands of medical doubt (in the mother, ether he believes males are hard-wired to pursue caused nausea, chloroform caused liver dam- power and must learn self-control. age—and no one knew their effects on the Newberger concludes his anecdotal analysis infant). He moves on to scopolamine, the by championing the wisdom of “all the great notorious “twilight sleep” of the early 20th moral philosophers from Aristotle to Bernard century, and argues that educated, affluent Shaw,” to wit: the “pathway to character” is “to American women demanded it as their due renounce some of the satisfactions which men and their emancipation. In his account, the normally crave.” In place of caveman power profession has responded to the wishes of plays, he recommends “reciprocity in mar- pregnant women, adjusting medical practice riage, parenthood, work or play.” And to those as the patients’ attitudes shifted. Natural adages he appends the Socratic oath. With self- childbirth and Lamaze simply continue this knowledge “comes the possibility of fulfill- trend. ment, and of character that will continue to be The book’s foremost strength is its intelli- strengthened by choosing to do right, and, after gent combination of the science of pain failure, to do better the next time.” relief—which remains one of the great gifts of You knew this, of course, but there’s no modern medicine—with a rich matrix of social harm in hearing it again. history. Caton touches on the medical inter- —A. J. Hewat

Books 119 Contemporary Affairs

FASTER: thing, we confront too many options, and The Acceleration of Just selecting among them takes time. We also About Everything. structure our lives so that we can have By James Gleick. Pantheon. 324 pp. more leisure—but leisure too can become $24 overstructured, only adding to our feeling Living in the fast lane obsesses us. We of being pressed. In addition, perhaps we speed-dial and leave a message on a quick- seek the sense of accomplishment that playback answering machine. Hastening comes with deeming ourselves organized through our crowded appointment sched- and in control, however delusional the ule, we punch door-close buttons in eleva- belief may be. tors that accelerate to near eardrum-blow- In the dwindling nonindustrialized cul- ing thresholds. In the last decade alone, tures of the world, work and leisure con- we have eliminated fadeaways between TV flate. People don’t fill time; it fills them. commercials, diminished the duration of By contrast, those of us in industrialized news sound bites by half, and developed countries were trained, long before we instant opinion surveys. became technophiles, to treat time as a In this infectious, tongue-in-cheek commodity, an entity that exists outside romp, science writer Gleick—author of ourselves—just look at that gadget on your Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and wrist. All commodities can be spent, wast- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard ed, or rationed, and our stock of time, like Feynman (1992)—examines modernity’s many other commodities, often seems attempts to freeze and squeeze time. He inadequate to our needs. looks at how we poll, trade stocks, package —Anthony Aveni food, and edit TV programs, all with the goal of compacting more information into AN AFFAIR OF STATE: a shorter duration. The author argues that The Investigation, Impeachment, and our quest to live in “real time,” where the Trial of President Clinton. world both near and far reacts instanta- By Richard A. Posner. Harvard Univ. neously to our every action, began with Press. 276 pp. $24.95 the computer. Gleick is a master at Someday a great legal thinker will write explaining how computers speed every- a wonderful book on the investigation and thing from air and road traffic to directory impeachment of President Bill Clinton. assistance. Posner, the prolific and generally brilliant But he argues that all our time-saving chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals measures don’t really add up. The for the Seventh Circuit, seems in many microwave lops only four minutes off food ways the ideal author. He is rigorous factu- preparation time, and about one-quarter of ally and legally, and he has a concern for our phone time is spent on hold. When the interaction of morality and law that is new time savers render old ones obsolete, critical to any meaningful examination of we are obliged to learn new skills, which the subject. of course itself takes time. Overall, our Unfortunately, Posner’s book comes too lives may be less efficient and fast paced early to transcend the discussions that took than we like to think: according to time place as events were unfolding, and too usage surveys, the average American late to add to those discussions. It was writ- spends three hours a day watching TV, an ten as the scandal was playing out, and hour eating, an hour on the phone, four much of it feels like an elegant rehash of minutes having sex (roughly equivalent to arguments debated in real time on the time spent filling out forms), and six MSNBC: what constitutes an impeach- hours working. That last figure, despite able offense, the viability of lame-duck our workaholic frenzy, is not increasing. impeachments, the constitutionality of Why does time so consume us? For one censure. Posner generally defends Ken-

120 WQ Autumn 1999 neth Starr, and he spends considerable the left intelligentsia lacks a moral core, time emphasizing the seriousness of while the right intelligentsia has a morbid- Clinton’s offenses and the strength of the ly exaggerated fear of moral laxity.” evidence against him. He evinces amused But readers looking for big-picture contempt toward the congressional pro- answers will be disappointed. Posner ulti- ceedings, and less-amused contempt mately hedges on whether President toward the president’s defenders. Clinton’s conduct merited impeachment. The author does present several useful His qualified defense of the independent and often witty insights. A provocative sec- counsel, though persuasive as far as it tion examines the battle over Clinton as a goes, doesn’t take on the more sophisticat- species of war. In addition, Posner’s por- ed criticisms, those that focus not on spe- trayal of the Kulturkampf dimensions of cific ethical allegations but on Starr’s pat- the saga is keenly compelling. And he is at tern of sublimating all other social and his best when attacking the public intel- governmental interests to the immediate, lectuals and legal experts who served as though often marginal, needs of his probe. ever-present and almost-ever-banal com- Posner’s distaste for the independent coun- mentators. Posner criticizes them for both sel law (which Congress has allowed to “reticence and stridency”: they generally lapse) and his disapproval of the Supreme failed to take on the scandal’s fundamental Court’s decision allowing the Paula Jones ethical questions, in his view, and the case to proceed are conventional wisdom. commentary we did get was shabby, pre- An Affair of State lacks the altitude needed dictable, and often dishonest. He observes for a major work on this familiar subject. that “it is tempting to conclude . . . that —Benjamin Wittes

Books 121 Religion & Philosophy

DANTE ALIGHIERI: A Catholic scholar in Washington, D.C., Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality. Royal is president of the new Faith and Reason By Robert Royal. Crossroad. 246 pp. Institute, the author of several previous works $16.95 on literature and theology, and a man with a You can’t say we lack tools for the study of deeply mystical sense of Dante’s purpose. Dante (1265–1321). Every used-book store in Interspersing effective commentary with quo- America has a dozen translations of the Divine tations through three chapters, each a long but Comedy, by everyone from Henry Wadsworth helpful run through Dante’s cantos, Royal con- Longfellow and Dorothy Sayers to Mark Musa veys the sense that, however interesting the lost and Kathryn Lindskoog. John Ciardi’s com- sinners in Hell are to moderns, the saved sin- plete version deserved all the prizes it won back in the 1970s, and the first volume of Robert Pinsky’s colloquial translation appeared in 1995, to considerable acclaim. And then there are all the sec- ondary works, many of them designed to help students and general readers through Dante’s poem. Just in the last few months we’ve had Alison Milbank’s historical study Dante and the Victorians, Marianne Shapiro’s Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul, Marc Cogan’s superb Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its ners in Purgatory are even more interesting, Meaning, and a thin paperback entitled Dante and the saints in Heaven more interesting still. for Beginners. Economic considerations seem to have In other words, Royal’s Dante Alighieri, the forced Royal to rely on Longfellow’s 19th- new introduction to the Divine Comedy in century translation, which has an expired Crossroad’s “Spiritual Legacy” series, should copyright and not much else to recommend be an entirely unnecessary book. It should it. Whatever Longfellow means at the end of be—but it isn’t. That’s in part because Royal the Inferno by “The Emperor of the king- does a fine job of leading readers through the dom dolorous / From his mid-breast forth long and difficult poem, but also in part issued from the ice,” it’s not Dante’s Italian. because so few prior commentators seem to It’s not even English. Too, all introductory believe that Dante meant what he said—that commentaries have to scrimp somewhere, the Divine Comedy is genuinely about the and this new volume never clearly presents divine, that it tells the tale of the soul’s journey the cosmological structure of Dante’s uni- to God. You can work your way through thou- verse—the medieval sense that when we sands of pages about Dante, learning all about look up at the sky we are (as C. S. Lewis Italian politics, Renaissance love poetry, and once described it) looking in at the heavens medieval theology, without ever discovering rather than out at space. But in nearly every what Royal emphasizes: every line of the other way, Royal’s Dante Alighieri remains a Inferno aims up through the Purgatorio to the model of the kind of commentary we need, Paradiso and the mystical vision of God. If we a first-rate spiritual introduction to the fail to see the Divine Comedy as spirituality, Divine Comedy. we’ll never grasp it as poetry. —J. Bottum

122 WQ Autumn 1999 History

LAWRENCE: explorer, Asher has previously published a The Uncrowned King of Arabia. biography of the explorer and author Wilfred By Michael Asher. Overlook Press. Thesiger and a study of Lawrence’s adopted 418 pp. $35 brothers, the Bedu. Determined to retrace his Myth and reality were forever at war in subject’s footsteps, Asher roams through the the life of T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935). To Sinai Desert, Jidda, and beyond, constantly detractor-in-chief Richard Aldington, author testing Lawrence’s account of his journeyings of a hugely controversial 1955 biography, against the known documentation and his the soldier-scholar who strove for immortali- own experiences. Did Lawrence really carry ty in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935) was out the execution of his servant, Hamed? Was “an impudent mythomaniac.” To Winston he really raped, as he claimed, after being cap- Churchill, though, The Seven Pillars is tured by the Turks at Dara’a in 1917? Asher at among “the greatest books ever written in least casts doubt on Lawrence’s own words, the English language.” whether in The Seven Pillars or in letters to Eighty years after the Arab Revolt, it is prob- friends. ably fair to say that the abiding view of Curiously, though, the flaws and paradoxes Lawrence the aesthete and champion of Arab that emerge render Lawrence more sympa- independence is kept alive not by the epic thetic, not less. Asher depicts a self-made man prose of his memoir—one of those classics that of action prone to bouts of homoerotic are nowadays more read about than read—but masochism. Shrinking from danger at first, he by David Lean’s spectacular 1962 film. As they consciously forced himself to confront vio- used to say in the old movie trailers: Peter lence, all the while laying the ground rules for O’Toole is Lawrence of Arabia. There is a cer- modern guerrilla warfare—summarized in his tain irony in that appropriation of Lawrence’s own words as the art of deploying “the smallest image. “Other than stars of the screen,” writes force in the quickest time at the furthest Asher, “Lawrence was perhaps the first inter- place.” national megastar of the century, and Asher quickly outlines the final years. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was created by its first Lawrence, seemingly desperate for anonymity, major publicity campaign.” used pseudonyms to enlist in the army and the Newspaper correspondents who inter- Royal Air Force, then went out of his way to viewed the young Army colonel on his return advertise the fact among his VIP friends and from Palestine in 1918 were intrigued by his acquaintances. His death in a motorcycle acci- “unassuming” exterior, unaware that he had dent, aged only 46, can be seen almost as a long used his apparent aloofness and modesty release for a man who once described himself to enhance his personal mystique. (One of his as a clock whose spring had run down. admirers, the military historian Basil Liddell —Clive Davis Hart, described Lawrence’s personality as that of “a woman wearing the veil while exposing THE PALLADIUM OF JUSTICE: the bosom.”) Lawrence made shrewd use of an Origins of Trial by Jury. American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who By Leonard W. Levy. subsequently delivered an immensely popular Ivan R. Dee. 114 pp. $18.95 series of illustrated lectures that did much to “The jury trial is at best the apotheosis of the set in stone the achievements of the “Prince of amateur,” Harvard Law School dean Erwin Mecca.” Though Lawrence affected embar- Griswold once declared. “Why should anyone rassment at seeing his name trumpeted, he was think that 12 persons brought in from the often to be found in the audience at the talks. street, selected in various ways for their lack of No wonder cynical souls accused him of back- general ability, should have any special capac- ing into the limelight. ity for deciding controversies between per- Arriving a decade after Jeremy Wilson’s sons?” These days, the jury system’s perceived authorized biography, Asher’s book is part por- shortcomings and outrages are legion: the trait, part travelogue. A seasoned Arabist and acquittals of O.J. Simpson (after nine months

Books 123 of evidence and four hours of deliberation) and juries (exposing the defendant, James Madison of the police officers who pummeled Rodney wrote, “to trial in a place where he was not King; the $1 million award to a woman who even alleged to have ever made himself obnox- claimed that a CAT scan had zapped her psy- ious”). The Declaration of Independence list- chic powers; the $2.9 million awarded to a ed these practices as proof of Britain’s plot to woman who spilled McDonald’s coffee in her impose “absolute despotism” on the colonies. lap; the $10.5 billion damages against Texaco The issue in the founding era was not amateur (the jury reportedly tacked on another billion versus expert, as Griswold later framed it; it was for each defense witness they loathed); and citizen versus state. other tales of jurors befuddled or bamboozled, When it shifts from Europe to America, ignorant or indignant. Jury-room missteps may Levy’s book unravels a bit, with twice-told tales not be conclusive—judges routinely reduce and meager analysis. A larger problem is that excessive damage awards—but that’s hardly a his story ends around 1800. In that year (as in ringing defense of the system. 1200), local jurors were valued because they Now comes historian Levy, author of the were already familiar with the parties and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Origins of the Fifth dispute. By 1900, judges often kept citizens Amendment (1968) and some 30 other books, with preexisting knowledge off juries. In 1800, to show how we got here. The jury arose eight too, juries often determined the law as well as centuries ago because Henry II (1154–1189) the facts. By 1900, the Supreme Court had distrusted the traditional modes of settling dis- decreed that jurors were duty-bound to heed putes. Professional fighters—lances for hire— the judge’s instructions on the law (though had corrupted trial by battle. Trial by ordeal they had, and still have, the raw power to acquit was at the mercy of the supervising priest, who, against the evidence). Given these and other if feeling charitable, might assign the litigant a changes since 1800, Akhil Reed Amar, in The less-than-nightmarish ordeal: immersing his Bill of Rights (1998), pronounces today’s jury arm in lukewarm rather than boiling water, for “only a shadow of its former self.” Such an instance, or eating bread while those around assessment, or at least another century of histo- him prayed that he would choke if guilty. So ry, would have enriched Levy’s book. Henry established local, 12-man inquisitorial —Stephen Bates bodies and gradually expanded their jurisdic- tion. Why 12? According to the 17th-century THE HOLOCAUST IN treatise Duncomb’s Trials, “If the 12 apostles on AMERICAN LIFE. their 12 thrones must try us in our eternal state, By Peter Novick. good reason has the law to appoint the number Houghton Mifflin. 373 pp. $27 of 12 to try our temporal.” SELLING THE HOLOCAUST: As Britain refined the jury system, Pope From Auschwitz to Schindler, Innocent III (1198–1216) launched the Holy How History Is Bought, Sold, Inquisition against heretics. Conviction and Packaged. required something akin to proof beyond a rea- By Tim Cole. Routledge. 214 pp. sonable doubt, which placed a premium on $22.95 confessions—even confessions obtained by tor- The crime we have come to call the ture. So, despite the putatively pro-defendant Holocaust was not known by this name standard of proof, “the entire history of the during World War II, and, in the years fol- Inquisition reveals not a single instance of lowing the defeat of Nazi Germany, it did complete acquittal.” Levy adroitly contrasts the not receive the kind of public attention inquisitorial system with the jury system, and that it now attracts. These two books con- assesses why Britain did not go the way of the sider how the genocidal assault against the Continent. Jews became “the Holocaust” and The British commitment to the local jury assumed its present prominence in con- waned when jurors in the American colonies temporary culture. refused to enforce unpopular laws. Parliament Novick, a University of Chicago histori- shifted some trials in the colonies to judges an, seeks to trace the development of (“the most grievous innovation of all,” John Holocaust consciousness in the United Adams declared) and other trials to British States and to evaluate whether such aware-

124 WQ Autumn 1999 ness is “good for the Jews” and others in tunate, as is his repeated use of the easily this country. Having read widely in the exploitable phrase “the myth of the archives of major American Jewish institu- Holocaust.” tions, he is at his best in showing how Both authors evince far more interest in Holocaust consciousness evolved over the shifting images of the Holocaust than time, shifting from the margins to central- in the traumatic event itself, an interpre- ity within both Jewish culture and certain tive strategy that, while understandable to sectors of American culture. As pivotal a point, in the end reduces all history to its moments in this development, he correct- representations. It is true that the past can- ly identifies the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial not be understood apart from the forms in Israel and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 that mediate it, but the pain of this partic- and 1973. But with his predominantly ular past cries out for far more attention American focus, Novick cannot explain than it receives in either of these books. why Holocaust consciousness developed —Alvin H. Rosenfeld in other countries as well. Intent on exposing the Holocaust as a WHO KILLED KIROV? deliberately constructed strategy for The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery. shoring up American Jewish identity and By Amy Knight. Hill & Wang. 331 pp. mobilizing support for Zionist causes, he $26 largely ignores less instrumental reasons Bolshevik luminary, firebrand, Lenin- why thoughtful people might feel com- grad party boss, Stalin’s close associate— pelled to take an interest in the Jewish cat- Sergei Kirov was all of these until he was astrophe under Hitler. Where some might killed by a disgruntled, probably deranged point to historical, religious, moral, or eth- militant on December 1, 1934. Con- ical claims on consciousness as legitimate tending that political opponents had prods to remember the Nazi crimes, orchestrated the murder, Stalin launched Novick tends to see only the work of the Great Terror, the monstrous, four-year- “Holocaust professionals” and other “pro- long purges of party members and the moters of Holocaust consciousness.” That whole of Soviet society. Given his rush to approach, far too cynical and reductive, lay blame and the orgy of repression that pervades this book and detracts from its followed, many have suspected that value. Stalin—not Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Selling the Holocaust, the work of a Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, or any of the young British scholar, is more derivative other party leaders—masterminded the but also less tendentious. Cole’s compara- most enigmatic crime of the Soviet centu- tive approach serves him well as he ry, and perhaps the most consequential. explains how the Holocaust has been rep- Based on Soviet archival materials and resented in different ways in Europe, newly published documents, Who Killed Israel, and America. Focusing on three fig- ures (Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, and Oskar Schindler) and three places (Ausch- witz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash- ington, D.C.), he demonstrates how little consensus there is about the proper pre- sentation and ultimate meaning of this his- tory. While portraying Jewish victimiza- tion at the core of their Holocaust narra- tive, Israelis tend to stress the heroic dimensions of Jewish resistance to Nazism, for example, whereas memorial institutions in the United States highlight the role of American soldiers in liberating the Nazi camps. But Cole’s title is unfor-

Books 125 Kirov? amasses a vast array of circumstantial volume for dipping into, not for reading evidence to indict Stalin for the murder. straight through. I mention this because I’m Knight, a respected historian of the Soviet a credulous shopper and often deceived. secret police and its postcommunist incarna- Thomas, president of Corpus Christi tions, provides ample motive. Kirov, she College, Oxford, has created an anthology— shows, was not the mindless loyalist of earli- really, a grab bag—of most anything tooth- er portraits. A former journalist for a left-lib- some ever written about work. With the eral paper in pre-Bolshevik Russia, he was notable exception of rock ’n’ roll lyrics, nary a better educated and arguably more complex stone has been left unturned. Economics, than the rest of Stalin’s camarilla. While toe- philosophy, poetry, fiction, drama—all have ing the party line, he repeatedly voiced reser- been mined, and with happy results. vations about specific policies, including the Take, for instance, this, from a letter writ- campaigns of terror against the Kulaks. “The ten to a friend by Alexis de Tocqueville in Boss,” as underlings called Stalin, distrusted 1858: “It has always been because my mind dissenters, especially those who, like Kirov, was uncomfortable at home that it sallied were so popular with the party rank and file abroad to obtain, at any sacrifice, the relief as to constitute potential chal- of hard intellectual work. This lengers to his rule. So Stalin, is the case now. I have no even as he pretended to love child to enjoy the little noise Kirov, plotted against him. that my name may make. I do In addition to ridding him- not believe that in such times self of a potential rival, Stalin as these the slightest influence was pursuing a second goal. By can be obtained by such writ- blaming the murder on former ings as mine, or even by any intraparty factionalists, he writings except by the bad could justify the total mobi- novels, which try to make us lization that he deemed essen- still more immoral and ill- tial for totalitarian socialism to conditioned than we are. Yet I survive. Mass, unpredictable rise at five, and sit for six hours terror was intrinsic to his rule, before my paper, and often Knight shows, and his obses- leave it still white. Sometimes sion with traitors and capitula- I find what I am looking for, tors was more than personal but find it painfully and paranoia. Kirov’s murder imperfectly; sometimes I am became the rationale for com- in despair at not finding it at pletely replacing the party all.” Hammering Man at No. 3302537, bureaucracy, eliminating any- by Jonathan Borofsky I choose that excerpt not one who had the vaguest recol- only because I love it, but lection of party history, and promoting syco- because it is characteristic. Thomas wields a phants who owed their careers to Stalin. generous knife, and so even this slightly Knight’s book is both a lucid analysis of a piv- trimmed sample has Tocqueville on writing, otal event in Soviet history and a bitter childlessness, the wretched state of publish- reminder of the dark Stalin era. ing, and the absence of Prozac. —Vladimir Tismaneanu Unfortunately, this letter appears not in the section on writing but under the heading THE OXFORD BOOK OF WORK. “Compensations and Rewards,” which Edited by Keith Thomas. Oxford brings me to my last gripe: a volume so clear- Univ. Press. 656 pp. $35 ly intended as a reference should be more The Oxford Book of Work is splendid but precisely indexed. for one great flaw—it’s not a book. Certainly As with any collection of maxims, there it meets the dictionary definition: “a long are contradictions on work and its rewards. written or printed work, usu. on sheets of From Noel Coward we hear that “work is paper fastened or bound together with cov- much more fun than fun,” while C. Wright ers.” What’s missing is narrative. This is a Mills reports: “Each day men sell little

126 WQ Autumn 1999 pieces of themselves in order to try to buy ing with an Oxford don who said of retire- them back each night and weekend with the ment: “It’s not too bad, but I rather miss the coin of ‘fun’.” Still, the book is cleverly con- vacations.” structed, starting with original sin and clos- —Benjamin Cheever

CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, is the author of Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (1989). Steven Bach, who teaches film and literature at Bennington College, is completing a biography of the playwright and director Moss Hart. Stephen Bates is literary edi- tor of the Wilson Quarterly. J. Bottum is books and arts editor of the Weekly Standard. Benjamin Cheever, the author of three novels, is writing a book about work. Clive Davis writes for the Times and the Sunday Times of London. A. J. Hewat is associate editor at the Litchfield County Times in New Milford, Conn. Larry L. King’s 13th book, A Writer’s Life in Letters, Or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, has just been published. Perri Klass, the author of two memoirs and three books of fiction, is a pediatrician practicing in Boston. James Morris is director of publications at the American Enterprise Institute. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, director of Jewish studies at Indiana University, is editor of Thinking about the Holocaust (1997). Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (1998). Benjamin Wittes is an editorial writer for the Washington Post.

Credits: Cover, p. 35, Magical Thinking, by Bo Bartlett, Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, N.Y.; p. 10, Courtesy Lennox International and The History Factory; p. 11, Corbis/Ralph White; p. 12, Corbis/Digital Art; p. 15, Capital Growth (1997), by Martin Langford, 20" x 17"; p. 17, The Cost of Progress, United Nations Environment Programme, Photo by Bhudev Bhagat/Topham Picturepoint; pp. 20, 23, Reproduced from Le Diable à Paris, 1845–6; pp. 24, 28, 87, Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress; p. 26, Reproduced from Political Buttons, Book III, 1789–1916, by Theodore L. Hake, Hake’s Americana & Collectibles Press, Copyright © 1978; pp. 27, 33, Archive Photos; p. 29, Courtesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; p. 30, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; p. 37, The Choice (1998), by Marlene Baron Summers, 50" x 60"; p. 38, The Building Blocks of Life (1985), by John Fekner, 8' x 12', Courtesy of John Fekner Archives; p. 42, After School (1984), by Kathryn Freeman, 48" x 60" ; pp. 44–45, School Scene, Pennsylvania (ca. 1920), by J. C. Huntington, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C./Hemphill Collection, Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 49, Playground (1986), by P. J. Crook, 46" x 52", Collection of Professor and Mrs. Ken Simmonds; p. 51, Photograph copyright ©˙ 1998 by Nicholas Nixon, from School, by Robert Coles and Nicholas Nixon. Copyright © 1998 by Robert Coles. By permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc.; p. 53, 4-B (1937), by Louise Emerson Rönnebeck, 34" x 50", oil on masonite, private collection, reproduced by permission of the artist's estate; p. 55, Robert Gaudio, English Teacher, Hazleton Senior High School, Hazleton, Pa. (1992), Copyright © Judith Joy Ross, Courtesy of Pace MacGill Gallery; p. 59, Possibilities and Pragmatics (1990), by Vivian Torrence, 12" x 9", watercolor collage; p. 61, Spring (1986), by Stasys Eidrigevicius, reprinted by permission; p. 63, False Ceiling (1995), by Richard Wentworth, Installation, books and steel cable, dimensions variable, Lisson Gallery, Photo by John Riddy, London; p. 68, An Unusual Period of Company (1997), by Maysey Craddock, 38 1/2" x 28", Ledbetter Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tenn.; p. 71, Political Descent ’96 (1996), by Edward Sorel, The Nation (cover illustration) November 4, 1996, 24" x 19", Private Collection, Copyright © by Edward Sorel; pp. 75, 82, Corbis-Bettmann; pp. 85, 101, Associated Press/AP; p. 92, Courtesy of Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark; p. 96, Corbis/Patrick Ward; p. 98, left, Corbis/Hulton-Deutsch Collection, right, Copyright © Hulton Getty/Liaison Agency; p. 103, Cartoon by Bunte, Photo by Hatzinger, from Der Spiegel, Reprinted by permission; p. 105, Cartoon by Ahumada for La Jornada, Reprinted by permission; p. 109, Reproduced courtesy of the Special Collections Division, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Randall Jarrell Collection, 1929–1969; p. 112, Corinthian olpe¯ (the Chigi vase). Rome, Villa Giulia 22679. (After Anrike Donkmäler II. pls. 44–5); p. 116, Courtesy of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, N.Y.; p. 119, Corbis/Layne Kennedy; p. 122, Scala/Art Resource, N.Y., Detail from Dante and His Poem, by Domenico di Michelino; p. 125, Copyright © Hulton Getty/ Liaison Agency; p. 126, Hammering Man at No. 3302537, by Jonathan Borofsky, 144" x 69" x 3", Copyright © 1990, Jonathan Borofsky/Gemini G.E.L.

Books 127 FROM THE CENTER

his fall at the Woodrow Wilson Center we Union and its successor states in significant Tare celebrating the 25th anniversary of ways. In recent years, the Institute has stayed the Kennan Institute, one of the most impor- ahead of the curve by focusing extensively on tant institutions in the world for the study of Ukraine and on the increasingly important role Russia and the former Soviet Union. of Russia’s regions. During the past year alone, The Kennan Institute was established in the Institute has hosted several public meetings December 1974 as a division of the Wilson on Ukraine, featuring talks by Ukrainian presi- Center through the joint initiative of dential candidates, World Bank consultants, Ambassador George F. Kennan, leading American scholars, and a then-Wilson Center director James former U.S. ambassador to F. Billington, and historian S. Ukraine. Frederick Starr. Its activities and Third, the Institute has a great focus have evolved over the years, record of sponsoring young schol- but its fundamental mission has ars who have gone on to be leaders remained the same: to promote quality in Russia and other Eurasian countries. Galina research on Russia and Eurasia; to foster a cre- Starovoitova, a guest scholar in 1989, became a ative dialogue between American academic leading member of the Russian Duma and a and government specialists on the region; and Russian presidential candidate in 1996. Yuri to encourage the integration of the American Baturin, who studied the Soviet Union’s role in and international Eurasian studies communi- international computer regulation, became ties into one scholarly enterprise. President Yeltsin’s national security adviser and, The Kennan Institute, which is one of sever- later, a cosmonaut. al area studies programs at the Center, offers Fourth, the Institute plays an important role research fellowships in the humanities and in bringing Russians, Ukrainians, Europeans, social sciences to scholars and specialists in and Americans into a single, ongoing discus- academia, government, the media, and the pri- sion. At last count, there were 243 Institute vate sector. Grant recipients spend up to nine alumni in the former Soviet Union alone. The months at the Wilson Center doing research, Institute has an office in Moscow and, since last writing articles and books, and participating in fall, in Kyiv. public lectures and conferences. Fifth, the Institute works closely with several Several aspects of the Kennan Institute— other programs at the Wilson Center. These which is named after the ambassador’s forebear, joint activities include projects on governance, the 19th-century journalist and explorer of ethnicity, and comparative urban studies, each Russia, George Kennan—make it unique of which has a Russian dimension of immedi- among American institutions of Russian and ate and historical relevance. Eurasian studies. At a time when bilateral relations between First, the Institute truly bridges the worlds of Russia and the United States are in flux, the academia and policymaking. Its Fellows range Kennan Institute plays a critical role in keeping from historians and sociologists to journalists ties between the two countries strong. Of all and government officials. Much of the American institutions in Russia, the Kennan Institute’s work aims to place contemporary Institute is the one with the most respect and Russian and Eurasian issues in a broader his- credibility. It promotes understanding of Russia torical context. and Eurasia here in the United States and, Second, the Institute has often focused atten- equally important, develops an international tion on issues before they became prominent. A community of experts who have a shared com- 1976 conference on the state of Soviet agricul- mitment to fostering dialogue and strong rela- ture, a 1978 conference on Russian national- tions between America and the nations of the ism, and a 1979 conference on the Caucasus former Soviet Union. all shed light on topics that, within a decade, Lee H. Hamilton went on to shape developments in the Soviet Director

128 WQ Autumn 1999 I:i:i:lilii:lililililililil::ii:l:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:iii:iiiiiiiiii:-i:i:::i:::::::::::::::i:i:iiiiiiiiiliii:lilililililil:lililil:i:iii:"i:iii:iiiiiii:iii:i:i:iii:i:i:i'ii:i:i:i:i:iiiii:iii:i:i:i:i::i:ii:i:i:iii::::i:i:::::::i:li::::Xi:i:i:i:i :'iEiZiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii`iiiiiijijiiiiijijij::iiiiiliiiiiiiiiI:~';iiI:'ili'i'''''''''''''''''''''';iliiiijiiiiiiiiiiiii:ii-iiii'i':':liiiiijijijiiiiijiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii'''''::::::::::::::::::::'::::::::"'::'::::':::::::::: :':l:l:l:i:l:l:i:i:l:i:i:ij:ijiiijijiiiiiiiiiiliiiiii)iiililililjiiiliii~Oiiiilijijijijiji)jjliiiiiiiii:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i:i::l:li'i'i'i'i'i'i'iii'iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:iiiiliiiiii.:'iiiiEiiiiiZiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:i:i:i.i.iiii.iiIiiiiiiiiiiiii'-C:liliiililiiiiii~ililiililill(((iiiiiililiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

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Spiritual Capitalism, · Justice is Conflict s"lark~tplace Democracy, and stuart Hampshire BabyBoomers and the IRalph's Pretty " Thisbook, which inaugu- Remaking of American " ratesthe Princeton Religion Good Grocery f~ Monographsin Philosophy r, . series, starts from Plate's Mlade Clark Roof Q John Mueller ~ analogyin the Republic Do Americans value per- 0 Democracyis overrated. " betweenconflict in the soul sonal spirituality over tradi- · Capitalismon the other and conflictin the city.Plate's tional religionand no longer a hand, doesn't get enough ' solution required reason to see themselvesunited in a 6~ credit.In this provocative imposeagreement and larger community of faith? : book, john Muellerargues " ha'monyon the warring WadeClarkRooffirstcredited · thatthesemismatches . passions,and this searchfor this new development to the g between image and reality 8 harmonyand agreement baby boomers in his best- ' create significantpolitical and * c0"stitutesthe maintradition selling A Generation of Seekers. economic problems. We aQ in politicalphilosophy. He returns to interviewmany I should recognize that neither . Stuart Hampshireunder- of these same people, now in ," system is ideal or disastrous : mines this tradition by devel- mid-life,to reveal a genera- ~ and accept instead that both ~ oping a distinction between tion with a unique set of spiri- · are "pretty good." And, to justice in procedures and jus- tual values-a generation that ~ Muelier, that means good ~ tice in matters of substance, has altered our understanding ~ enough. ~ which will alwaysbe disput- of the sacreditself, o Muellerpresents his argu- ~ ed Thisis a brief readable The result is an innova- ~ ments with sophistication, book by a highly respected tive, engaging approach to ' wit, and erudition. Broad in · philosopher. understandinghow religious scopeand richin detail,his . P''"Ce'O"MO"Os'~'phS'"Philosophy: lifeis being reshaped as we ~ bookwillprovokedebateand ' Hc~"yF~~"kfU~t,M'to' move into the next century. ~ reflection. ~ Cloth$18.95 IsBN 0-691-00933-3

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