Bridgewater Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, May 2015

Bridgewater Review

Volume 34 | Issue 1 Article 1

May-2015 Bridgewater Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, May 2015

Recommended Citation Bridgewater State University. (2015). Bridgewater Review. 34(1). Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol34/iss1/1

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Bridgewater Review

In this issue: Also in this issue: KENNETH ADAMS on JAMES BOHN on Dream Metaphors BRIAN PAYNE on Bridgewater’s ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE in Classic Disney Songs “Third Nature” with photographs by KAREN CALLAN ELLEN SCHEIBLE on the Female Body and the Irish Nation in Short Fiction by WARD HEILMAN the Works of James Joyce DAN JOHNSON on Captain Francis Brinkley’s Japan Described and Illustrated STEPHEN J. NELSON on the University as Servant and Critic in American Democracy LINDEN MACINTYRE on Terrorism and Fearism Book Reviews by SARAH WIGGINS, KATHRYN EVANS, and LEONID HERETZ

VolumeMay 2015 34 Number 1 May 2015 Bridgewater State University1 Wild Flowers, Great River Preserve (Photograph by Karen Callan)

Credits for Author Photographs Andrew Holman (by Frank Gorga); Kenneth Adams (by Paul Lipton); Brian Payne (by Bill Levin); Karen Callan (by John Winters); Dan Johnson (by Yulia Stakhnevich); Sarah Wiggins (by Molly Speece); and Leonid Heretz (by Andrew Holman).

2 Bridgewater Review Bridgewater Review Volume 34, Number 1 May 2015

2 Editor’s Notebook EDITOR Andrew C. Holman Andrew C. Holman History & Canadian Studies 4 Alzheimer’s Disease: From Clinical Tragedy to Reason for Hope ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kenneth Adams Ellen Scheible English 9 Melodic Metaphors for Dreams in Three Classic Songs EDITORS EMERITI from the Disney Catalog Michael Kryzanek James Bohn Political Science & Global Studies 12 The Domestic Interior, the Female Body, and the William C. Levin Metaphorical Irish Nation in the Works of James Joyce Sociology Ellen Scheible Barbara Apstein 16 ILLUSTRATED ESSAY English Bridgewater’s Third Nature and the Brian Payne Re-Wilding of the Landscape History Brian Payne With photographs by Karen Callan DESIGN Philip McCormick’s Design 24 SHORT FICTION Works, Inc., North Easton, MA Ulmus Ward Heilman

26 Exporting Exoticism: Captain Brinkley’s Japan Described and Illustrated Dan Johnson

29 Contentious Compatibility and the Common Good: The University as Servant and Critic in a Democracy Stephen J. Nelson

32 VOICES ON CAMPUS Linden MacIntyre

35 BOOK REVIEWS Fashioning Coco Chanel, Sarah Wiggins What is Good Grammar?, Kathryn Evans Will the Real Henry Kissinger Please Stand Up?, Leonid Heretz On the Front Cover: The Face of Alzheimer’s Disease: Auguste Deter c.1902 (Uncredited photo).

Bridgewater Review is published twice a year by the faculty and librarians of Bridgewater State University. Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies of Bridgewater Review or Bridgewater State University. Letters to the Editor are encouraged and should be sent to: Editor, Bridgewater Review, [email protected]

May 2015 1 truly, a global “footprint” and a com- Editor’s Notebook mitment to connecting our students Andrew C. Holman with the world. And that feels new. Well, in fact… mong the more popular concepts that scholars Sitting in the Archives, it was hard not in the social sciences and humanities have to draw some comparisons between bandied about recently is transnationalism: the who we are today, and what the BNS A of the 1890s and 1900s must have felt study of how people, goods, and ideas flow and have like. One thing that surprised me was flowed among nations and among the regions of the how global our old school was back in world. Today, at the height of globalization and our the day, both in terms of its students and its reputation. technological revolution, we are convinced that the The first wave of Bridgewater’s world has never been more integrated—economically, globalism began during the long and socially, and, especially, culturally; Bridgewater State’s past will matter formative tenure of Albert Gardner that we have never been more trans- this year, perhaps more than in others. Boyden as principal of the school national; and that this new reality is a We celebrate 175 years of continuous (1860-1906). As early as 1876, only really remarkable thing. The evidence operation as an educational institution, 36 years after the school’s found- is abundant and clear: Sushi bars in an uncommon mark matched by ing, BNS had enrolled students from Topeka, McDonald’s in Beijing, Salsa comparatively few other universities Burma, Canada and Japan, including week in Italy, Disneyland in France. in the United States. There are a great the celebrated Shuji Isawa (1851-1917), A hookah bar in Plymouth! More than many things about who we are and the father of public education in Japan, ever before, everything and everyone what we do that deserve our celebra- whose impressive record my History is everywhere. Or so it seems. tion. Among them is the relatively Department colleagues Thomas Turner recent push to become a global campus. and Wing-kai To have documented so It is an annoying habit among historians The activity in this regard over the past well. In the 1880s, the pattern broad- (or maybe just this historian) to exercise decade has been appreciably brisk: the ened, reaching its apogee, perhaps, in an almost involuntary reflex whenever expansion of our course offerings, the the 1890s. On our campus, in these we encounter claims of novelty. The establishment of Area Studies programs decades, could be found students from tool in historians’ professional toolboxes and a Global Studies Major, the recruit- Mexico, England, Jamaica, “South most often employed is a trump card, a ment of foreign-exchange students and America” and Armenia. In the first wet blanket, a cocktail-party conversa- the concomitant growth of semester- decade of the twentieth century, the tion killer; the one that begins, “Well, abroad and travel courses, all under catchment broadened further: Turkey, in fact, my friend, that phenomenon the guidance of dedicated, professional Peru, France, and Venezuela. A few about which you speak is not really administrators in the Minnock Center of these students enrolled in typical ‘new.’ You see…” And so it is with for International Engagement. Add 2- or 4-year programs, but most of transnationalism. Historians and other to this the more than 30 cooperative them came to BNS as students in the scholars are discovering that for much partnerships that BSU has signed with college’s “Special Course” (later called of the past several centuries, the world foreign institutions of higher education “Advanced”), most of them older stu- has been a great deal more globalized and the result is impressive. In the past dents who had already graduated from than our presentist perspective today decade or more, we have developed, classical or normal colleges in other allows us to contemplate. National boundaries have always been weak containers for people, ideas and materials. The point dawned on As early as 1876… BNS had me recently as I thumbed through some dusty, old nineteenth-century enrolled students from Burma, manuscript enrollment registers and photographs from the Bridgewater Canada and Japan, including the Normal School (BNS) housed in our Maxwell Library Archives. celebrated Shuji Isawa… the father of public education in Japan

2 Bridgewater Review in Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Chili, France, England, South Africa, India, Japan, in the Philippines, cannot be estimated” (17). It is difficult to know why this first wave of globalism declined at BNS in the 1910s, but it seems likely that a con- fluence of factors contributed to it. In 1900, Massachusetts legislators passed a bill that introduced a $50 tuition fee for students from out of state and “other countries,” and demanded that all normal school applicants in the common- wealth declare it their intention after Randolph Leonard Harlow, Luis C. Infante and classmates in the 1909-10 “Specials” Class graduation to teach in Massachusetts Play The Revenge of Shari-Hot Su (Courtesy of Orson Kingsley, Maxwell Library Archives public schools. Perhaps the end of and Special Collections). A.G. Boyden’s principalship mattered. Certainly, the arrival of World War I countries and had come to Bridgewater dozens before 1910, not the hundreds), blocked the ease with which foreign for polish, or to master the celebrated but we should not underestimate the students could come to BNS, and the system of pedagogy that Boyden impact their presence would have had political culture of isolationism in 1920s championed. “We are gathered from on a small, isolated, provincial cam- America would have dampened local the old world and new, from Armenia pus whose students came largely from interest in hosting foreign students. to the land of the Incas,” the class entry the rural towns and villages of eastern Foreign-student enrollment dwindled for the “Specials” notes in the 1910 Massachusetts. These were the days to a trickle in the 1920s, and the Special yearbook, the BNS Normal Offering. before radio, newsreels, television and Course disappeared. Finally, in the “The three Americas send forth their the internet began to bring the world 1930s, the transformation of BNS into a sons. We speak many languages… [I]n to southeastern Massachusetts; and so, comprehensive state college, a regional the pursuit of learning we are joined in a way, at BNS, these walking, talk- service institution, must have empha- together.” What’s more, these foreign ing globetrotters were the world. And sized the school’s local mission and ori- students were active members of the BNS seems to have been peculiar in entation and checked the reemergence college community—athletes who this aspect: a cursory look at the alumni of a transnational campus. represented the school on the playing records of other contemporary normal field, politicians who deliberated in schools in New England and New York But, happily, not forever. One hundred student government and actors who shows nothing like the numbers of years later, we can celebrate the revival trod the boards in their class plays. In foreign enrollments at BNS. of a second wave of transnational late May, 1910, in what can be read as a culture on campus that is grand, ambi- But Mr. Boyden’s School “went global” telling statement of globalism at BNS, tious, robust and deliberate, even if it is in these years in another way, too – in the Specials’ class production was The not entirely new. its growing reputation abroad. Specials Revenge of Shari-Hot Su, a 1880s play and others who were educated at written by an American during the Bridgewater took their experiences height of western infatuation with the home with them and broadcast the Orient. Playing the lead role of Shari- good news about BNS. They were Hot-Su Sama, “learned Japanese,” Bridgewater evangels. “What have was a Canadian, Randolph Leonard been the results of Mr. Boyden’s fifty Harlow, while, on the same stage, play- years of teaching, forty of which have ing Kioto, “a young Japanese,” was Luis been as principal of the school?” cor- C. Infante, a Mexican-born graduate respondent F.H.K. asked in a Normal of the Peru Normal School in Lima. Offering editorial 1900. “The results in Transnationalism indeed. buildings and equipments stand here These foreign students only ever con- in Bridgewater; the beneficent work of stituted a small fraction of the student the thousands of graduates who are to population (we can count them in the be found in all the States of this Union,

May 2015 3 identities and their families are forced Alzheimer’s Disease: From Clinical to watch helplessly. In its final stage, Severe AD, patients suffer a near com- Tragedy to Reason for Hope plete loss of memory and the ability to communicate or process information; Kenneth Adams they lose their mobility and, eventually, even their capacity to swallow. From lzheimer’s Disease (AD) is ruthless. At its diagnosis to death, the disease’s dura- earliest stage (Pre-Clinical AD), it begins tion typically lasts 8-10 years and, sadly, wreaking havoc on the brains of patients we lack effective therapeutics to halt, let A alone reverse, the disease’s progression. without causing clinical symptoms, leaving them As a budding cell biologist exiting grad- unaware that they need medical counsel. As the uate school in 2007 and in the process disease progresses, symptoms start to manifest as of discerning the next step in my career, this heartbreaking reality prompted me episodes of short-term memory impairment, which to seek research opportunities to con- are often dismissed as normal cognitive decline tribute to the fight against this dreaded disease. This led to a research fellowship during aging. If not dismissed, these episodes can at the Massachusetts General Hospital instill fright and uncertainty about what the future Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, holds. This period, referred to as Mild Cognitive where I was inspired by a diverse and collaborative community of physicians, Impairment (MCI) can last months or years before scientists, and philanthropists who are symptoms worsen to a degree that triggers alarm. devoted to battling AD. We have much to learn about its underlying pathology In this stage, referred to by clinicians toll on patients’ loved ones, as assis- and effective approaches for treatment, as Mild AD, individuals’ short-term tance with some aspects of daily living but the commitment and spirit of the memory is clearly impaired and new becomes necessary. Mild AD typi- AD research community gives us symptoms emerge, such as difficulty cally lasts 1-2 years before worsening hope that one day we can eradicate speaking and understanding language, symptoms qualify it as Moderate AD, the disease. alongside frequent mood swings. Here, when individuals experience severe formal diagnosis of AD becomes much memory loss and exhibit behaviors that Tracking the etiology more likely, forcing patients to endure can be emotionally traumatizing to of AD—from clinical the anticipation of their looming all involved, such as rambling speech, dementia to plaques dementia. Moreover, the disease also delusions, and uninhibited actions. In begins to take a physical and emotional the process, patients are robbed of their and tangles to beta- amyloid aggregation Given its brutality and prevalence (more than 5 million people currently live with AD, a figure that is projected to rise to 13.5 million by 2050), enormous resources have been put into biomedical research focused on understanding and treating AD. Effective treatments have yet to be established; nonetheless we have learned a great deal about the pathology that takes place in the AD brain. The earliest insights were provided over a century ago by German physician Alois Alzheimer (1864- 1915), after whom the disease is named (Figure 1). When his patient, Auguste Figure 1. Dr. Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) and his patient Auguste Deter (1850-1906). Deter (a woman who was suffering Source: Uncredited photos from Wikimedia Commons.

4 Bridgewater Review Healthy Brain Severe AD Hallmark microscopic lesions in these observations alone suggested Alzheimer’s Disease brain that Alzheimer’s Disease results from the accumulation of toxic plaques and tangles in the brain that cause neuro degeneration and the clinical symptoms associated with the disease. Testing this hypothesis, however, required answers to several fundamental questions that Alzheimer could not address due to the technological limitations of his time. These questions included: What Plaque Tangle are plaques and tangles composed of? How do they form? Why do they form in brains Figure 2. Coronal brain sections of healthy brain versus AD brain that has undergone severe of AD patients? Are plaques and tangles atrophy (left) and microscopic analysis of AD brain tissue highlighting the hallmark lesions that the toxic agents that cause the neurodegen develop in AD brain—plaques and tangles (right). Sources: National Institute of Health, Wikimedia eration during AD? Or, conversely, might Commons; LaDu Neurodegeneration Research Lab, University of Illinois Chicago. they be an inconsequential side effect of the disease process? From diagnosis to death, Perhaps surprisingly, addressing these fundamental questions awaited 80 the disease’s duration typically years of progress in our understanding of biology, development of research lasts 8-10 years and, sadly, we technology, and national commitment to combating AD. Nevertheless, when lack effective therapeutics to these three developments converged in the 1980s, they ignited an explosion of halt, let alone reverse, the AD research that has continued to pre sent day. The explosion began in 1984 disease’s progression. when researchers identified the core component of plaques—the protein beta-amyloid (aka, amyloid-beta and from dementia) died in 1906, Dr. control and execution of virtually all Aß)—which set the stage for research Alzheimer performed an autopsy on her human behaviors including those lost in ers to determine where it comes from brain and identified three abnormalities AD (memory, language and commu and how it forms plaques. Subsequent that to this day are regarded as hall nication skills, information processing, studies showed that beta-amyloid is mark features of AD pathology. On a and mobility). His discovery provided a first produced in brain cells as part of macroscopic level, Alzheimer observed clear causal link between brain atrophy a larger, membrane-embedded pro that Deter’s brain had undergone severe and the clinical symptoms that take tein called APP (Figure 3), which is atrophy (Figure 2, left), which we now place during the disease. On a micro regularly cleaved by enzymes, releas know results from extensive neuro scopic level, Alzheimer determined that ing beta-amyloid into the surrounding degeneration (the death of brain cells Deter’s brain also contained two abnor brain tissue. Critically, in Alzheimer’s called neurons) that occurs during AD. mal lesions referred to as plaques and Disease the released beta-amyloid Neuron activities are central to the tangles (Figure 2, right). Importantly,

Figure 3. Schematic depiction of the process of amyloid plaque formation. Sources: National Institute on Aging and Wikispaces.

May 2015 5 Figure 4. How microtubules disintegrate with Alzheimer’s Disease. Sources: Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center, National Institute on Aging and Wikimedia Commons. readily aggregates into insoluble One that is central not only to our AD because it arises sporadically in deposits—plaques. Parallel to these understanding of the disease, but population without a clear genetic studies on beta-amyloid, researchers also to the development of AD thera cause) in that it is passed on through also determined that the core compo peutics is this: Can the root cause of AD generations of a family due to the nent of tangles is a protein called tau, be attributed to either beta-amyloid aggre inheritance of a genetic mutation. which was already known to play an gation into plaques or tau aggregation into Starting in the 1990s, researchers began essential role in maintaining the health tangles? If one of these events can be performing genetic analyses on families of neurons through binding (adher identified as the root cause, then we with FAD in an attempt to identify the ing to) and stabilizing structures called can focus resources on therapeutics that mutation(s) responsible for the disease. microtubules. As depicted in Figure 4, can intervene in that event. In other Since then, more than 200 mutations microtubules are elongated structures words, if beta-amyloid aggregation have been discovered. Strikingly, all of inside neurons that provide stability to represents the triggering event in these mutations are located within one neuronal extensions (called neurites), AD, then blocking beta-amyloid of two genes: the gene that produces a function that is indispensable to aggregation may represent the most APP (see Figure 3); or the one that neuronal health and function. During promising approach to treating AD produces the protein presenilin, a key AD, tau dissociates from microtubules patients; likewise, if tau aggregation enzyme that cleaves APP to produce and aggregates into insoluble deposits is the causative event in AD, then beta-amyloid. Moreover, experimen —tangles—resulting in the disassembly blocking it may prove more effective. tal analysis of these mutations dem of microtubules and consequent degen Major progress toward answering this onstrated that they cause a common, eration of neurites. question started in the early 1990s, critical effect in the brain: they increase This characterization of beta-amyloid stemming from genetic studies on beta-amyloid aggregation into plaques. and tau aggregation into plaques and several families whose members exhib These discoveries, along with studies tangles, respectively, raised several new ited a rare, inherited form of AD proving that plaques and smaller questions about AD pathology, many of called familial Alzheimer’s Disease aggregates of beta-amyloid are toxic which are still being investigated today. (or FAD). FAD differs from the most to neurons, led researchers to formulate common form of AD (called sporadic

6 Bridgewater Review the amyloid cascade hypothesis (Figure 5), the most significant guiding force in Given its brutality and prevalence AD research for the past 20 years. (more than 5 million people The amyloid hypothesis posits that Alzheimer’s Disease is triggered by the currently live with AD, a figure accumulation of small beta-amyloid aggregates and larger plaques that exert that is projected to rise to 13.5 pathological stress on the surrounding brain tissue. This stress, in turn, million by 2050), enormous causes additional pathology, including tangle formation, leading to widespread resources have been put into neuronal dysfunction and, ultimately, biomedical research focused on dementia. Importantly, while inheritance of the APP and presenilin understanding and treating AD. mutations explain why beta-amyloid aggregates in the brains of patients with FAD, the cause of beta-amyloid aggre- pathology. The discovery was that beta-amyloid aggregation in AD. gation in sporadic AD is not yet fully although beta-amyloid represents the In doing so, three fundamental understood. Given the fact that sporadic major toxic agent in AD, its presence “paths” that contribute to beta-amyloid AD constitutes greater than 95% of all in the brain is not limited to individuals aggregation in sporadic AD have cases, determining its cause is a major with the disease. Rather, beta-amyloid been defined. focus of ongoing research. is produced in the brains of all indi- First, while cleavage of APP occurs viduals—young and old, healthy and Three paths to beta-amyloid continuously in brain tissue, the rate diseased—through continuous synthe- aggregation in sporadic of cleavage can vary and is affected by sis and cleavage of APP (see Figure 3). numerous factors that we now know Alzheimer’s Disease This is important because it dismisses contribute to AD pathology. More In 1992, an important discovery was simple explanations for AD etiol- specifically, factors that increase the made that now frames our grow- ogy. Researchers need to pursue more rate of APP cleavage cause increased ing understanding of beta-amyloid nuanced explanations for the cause of rates of beta-amyloid production, leading to its accumulation, which can in turn drive its aggregation (Figure APP Presenilin + + APP 6A). Second, to balance the ongoing FAD mutations FAD mutations production of beta-amyloid, brain cells Beta-amyloid aggregation have concurrent processes to continuously remove or “clear” it from tissue. Thus, factors that decrease the rate Small beta-amyloid Beta-amyloid of beta-amyloid clearance can also aggregates plaques cause its accumulation and aggregation (Figure 6B). Lastly, while no clear Aggregate stress genetic cause for sporadic AD has been identified, one gene—apolipoprotein E (or, apoE)—has been demonstrated to influence a person’s chance of develop- Tangle Formation ing the disease. The apoE gene exists in population as three variants referred to as apoE2, apoE3, and apoE4, all of Neuronal dysfunction & death which produce a protein that transports cholesterol throughout the brain. In Dementia 1993, it was discovered that individuals who inherit apoE4 have a 5-10 times Figure 5. The amyloid cascade hypothesis. Adapted from Figure 1 in Karran et al., “The Amyloid greater risk of developing AD. In addi- Cascade Hypothesis for Alzheimer’s Disease” Nature Reviews 10 (2011) 699. tion, brains of AD patients carrying

May 2015 7 A Rate of B Rate of beta- C Inheritance of APP cleavage amyloid clearance apoE4 gene

Related therapeutic approach: Related therapeutic approach: Administer medication that Administer medication that inhibits APP cleavage enhances beta-amyloid clearance

Rate of beta- Production of amyloid production apoE4 protein

Related therapeutic approach: Administer medication that Beta-amyloid inhibits beta-amyloid aggregation accumulation

Beta-amyloid aggregation

Figure 6. Three paths to beta-amyloid aggregation in Sporadic Alzeimer’s Disease (Author’s scheme). apoE4 exhibit significantly more beta- entail administering medications that Will the discovery come in form of a amyloid plaques than those of patients will block or reverse beta-amyloid novel medication that blocks the toxic carrying apoE2 or apoE3, suggesting aggregation in the brain. Of the com- effects of beta-amyloid aggregates? Or that apoE4 promotes AD by increasing pounds generated and tested to date, will it come from advances in our beta-amyloid aggregation. Subsequent many have been designed using our knowledge of AD pathology that push studies have demonstrated that, rather knowledge of the three paths to beta- our focus beyond beta-amyloid and than affecting beta-amyloid genera- amyloid aggregation. For example, its toxic aggregation? For now, it is tion or clearance, apoE4 protein binds several compounds have been created impossible to predict it with much and enhances its aggregation (Figure that inhibit the enzymes responsible for certainty. I nevertheless remain opti- 6C). From patient to patient, it is likely APP cleavage (see Figure 6A), whereas mistic that the spirit and commitment that one or a combination of these others enhance beta-amyloid clearance I encountered within the AD research three paths to beta-amyloid aggrega- (see Figure 6B). A third class of com- community when I entered it in tion—increased production, decreased pounds has been designed to interfere 2007 is stronger than ever and will clearance, and inheritance of apoE4— with beta-amyloid aggregation directly one day prevail. explains the onset of AD. (see Figure 6C). Sadly, however, while many of these compounds have shown Treating Alzheimer’s promise in laboratory models of AD, Disease—Where are we? we have yet to establish one that has Where aren’t we? proved effective as a medication in human clinical trials (due either to Alongside research directed at charac- insufficient reduction in beta-amyloid terizing the cause(s) of AD, enormous aggregation or to intolerable toxic side effort has also been focused on develop- effects). Therefore, patients and their ing compounds with which to treat or families continue to wait for the discov- prevent the disease. Based on the amy- ery of a compound that will alleviate Kenneth Adams is Assistant Professor in the loid cascade hypothesis, the therapeutic their tragic fear and suffering. Department of Biological Sciences. approaches considered most promising

8 Bridgewater Review to nearly all listeners, and thus non- Melodic Metaphors for Dreams intuitive. Further criticism of Schenker can be found in the way it ignores in Three Classic Songs from the rhythm as a musical element, and in the way that it can be characterized Disney Catalog by reducing music to common, James Bohn simplistic formations. Schenker based his theory on an hree of the most-valued songs from the extremely limited body of music. Fully Disney catalog are “Some Day My Prince 80 percent of the musical examples in his book Free Composition (1935) TWill Come,” “When You Wish Upon a are from only eight composers: Bach, Star,” and “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.” Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms All three songs come from animated feature films (Pankhurst, 180). Thus, Schenkerian created during Walt Disney’s lifetime (1901-1966). analysis can be characterized as per Furthermore, all three invoke the idea of dreams or taining to a limited body of Western art music. Even so, Schenker can be wishing. The melodies of these songs feature delayed an effective tool for examining the resolution or a lack of resolution. Such approaches functions of melodic structures. to resolution are symbolic of the intrinsically One of the most renowned melodies unresolved nature of dreams. from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first feature film to come In my analysis of the tunes in ques- progressions, unfoldings, or arpeggia - out of the Disney Studios, is “Some tion, I investigate the melodies in terms tions. Ultimately, this tension is Day My Prince Will Come.” All of the of Schenkerian analysis. Heinrich resolved through stepwise descent from songs from the movie featured music by Schenker (1868-1935) was an accompa- the Kopfton to the tonic. In Schenker, Frank Churchill (1901-1942) with lyrics nist, teacher, critic, and music theorist such resolution must occur in the by Larry Morey (1905-1971). Part of the (Pankhurst, SchenkerGUIDE [2008] 3). obligatory register; that is, in the same dreamy quality of the song comes from During the nineteenth century, range where the original tonic appears, its emphasis of the dominant, the fifth the typical approach to music theory before the initial arpeggiation or ascent. note of the scale (or Sol). The promi- was harmonic analysis. Schenker’s Occasionally, Schenker allows for nence of a tone most typically associ- major contribution to music was a substitution of a tone in a structural ated with the tension of a Kopfton lends system of analysis that focused on melodic line in order to express the melody an unresolved quality. This melodic features. a descent, or express a tone in its unsettled nature can be interpreted as proper register. complementary to the idea of dreams; To Schenker, the fundamental organiz that is the anticipation of an as-of-yet ing principle of music is the elaboration These melodic formations can be unachieved objective. of resolved melodic tension. In this sys elaborated through embellishments, tem, tension is defined as distance from building a layered structure. A piece of the tonic, which is the first note (or music can exhibit any number of levels Do) of any musical scale. This tension is from the surface to the deepest layer, established by an initial arpeggiation or the Ursatz (fundamental structure). To stepwise ascent to a Kopfton (head tone). Schenker, the Ursatz is an embodiment In Schenker, the Kopfton is a promi- of a given piece’s unity. nent, structural melodic note, most Perhaps more than any other approach commonly scale degree three (Mi) or to analysis, reception of Schenker’s five (Sol), which embodies the concept approach is strongly divided between of tension. This tension can be pro- supporters and detractors. Followers longed through melodic elaboration; find the emphasis of melodic concerns Heinrich Schenker, seated, c. 1919 (Oswald that is the use of musical tones that are Jonas Memorial Collection, Special Collections to be intuitive and meaningful. Many subservient to the structural melodic & Archives, University of California, Riverside critics find the Ursatz to be inaccessible line, such as neighboring tones, linear Libraries).

May 2015 9 The arrangement Walt Disney Company. The wish/ of “Some Day dream song instantiates itself numer- My Prince Will ous times in the company’s creations, Come” that appears from “When You Wish Upon a Star” at the end of the to more recent works such as Tangled’s film addresses the “I’ve Got a Dream.” “Some Day My unresolved nature Prince Will Come,” however, falls of the melody. somewhat outside of the archetype in The end of the song that it invokes the specific dream of is appended with the protagonist rather than relating trombones playing the merits of dreams and wishes on a a melodic fragment conceptual level. Figure 1. Schenkerian Analysis of “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” from “One Song” “When You Wish Upon a Star” is ending on the tonic. “Some Day My Prince Will Come” the strongest exemplar of wish/dream The choir further dissipates tension begins and ends on fifth-scale degree song archetype. The tune, which origi- by having the sopranos move to the (Figure 1). The first sub-phrase is an nated in Pinocchio (1940), the Studio’s high tonic, and then upwards to scale elaboration of the submediant chord. second feature, was written by Leigh degree three. This motif is transposed up a fourth to Harline (1907-1969) with lyrics by create the second sub-phrase, which Heinrich Schenker would almost cer- Ned Washington (1901-1976). The elaborates the super tonic. The first tainly have considered “Some Day My song has transcended the film to half of the phrase is an arpeggiation to Prince Will Come” to be unsatisfying, become both the quintessential Disney the dominant. The second half of the due to its lack of melodic resolution. song, as well as the company’s unofficial antecedent consists of a sub-phrase that However, such unresolved tension anthem. Like “Some Day My Prince alternates between root and third of the serves as a powerful musical metaphor. Will Come,” “When You Wish Upon dominant chord (scale degrees five and Furthermore, the score’s resolution a Star” features melodic motion that seven), which is repeated. to this tension at the end of the film is symbolic of the unfulfilled nature The first half of the consequent is the through the use of the Prince’s melody, of dreams. “One Song,” serves as a fitting musical same as the first half of the antecedent. “When You Wish Upon a Star” is summary of the story’s narrative. The second half of the phrase features a comprised of four phrases (Figure 2). linear descent from the tonic down to “Some Day My Prince Will Come” The first features a register transfer of the dominant, sustaining the tension of is a progenitor of a song archetype the dominant from the first note up an the unresolved dominant. There is also that is central to the oeuvre of the octave to the half cadence that ends the an interruption of a register transfer of the supertonic down an octave, elaborated by a chromatic lower neighbor. While “Some Day My Prince Will Come” features a harmonic resolution at the end of the song, the melody is largely unresolved. Both phrases begin and end on scale degree five. Furthermore, both feature a large-scale register transfer of the dominant up one octave. The second halves of both phrases also emphasize notes from the dominant, with the end of the first phrase alternating between the root and third of the dominant. This consistent melodic emphasis of the dominant leaves the song feeling unresolved in much the same way that a dream is open for resolution by its fulfillment. Figure 2. Schenkerian Analysis of “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

10 Bridgewater Review phrase. The first sub-phrase consists of a linear ascent from scale degree five to the tonic. The second phrase is identi- cal to the first, save for the end, which is altered to accommodate an authentic cadence. While this resolution is har- monically satisfying, the lower register tonic leaves the phrase unresolved in the obligatory register. The bridge, the third phrase, features a linear ascent from scale degree five to the leading Figure 3. Schenkerian Analysis of “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.” tone, elaborating the dominant, and furthering the tension of the song. in the sense that the melodic resolu- resolves in the obligatory register, but it tion of the song in question coincides does so coinciding with the lyric “The The final phrase of “When You Wish with the fulfillment of the protagonist’s dream that you wish will come true.” Upon a Star” resolves the melodic ten- dream. Furthermore, both endings land sion of the bridge with an ascent from The coincidental lyrical and melodic on a high-register mediant, voiced by scale degree five to the tonic resolution resolution in “When You Wish Upon a choir. at the cadence. The end of the first sub- a Star” and “A Dream is a Wish Your phrase ends here on scale degree three, After “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Heart Makes” could be attributed to while the authentic cadence resolves the tune that most closely exemplifies good songwriting. However, these the tonic in the obligatory register, the wish/dream song archetype is “A concurrent resolutions function as coinciding with the lyrical resolution, Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.” effective melodic metaphors for the as “Your dreams come true.” The version This tune originates from Cinderella yet unresolved nature of dreams and of the final phrase presented here is the (1950), the Studio’s return to single- wishes. The large-scale resolution of version sung by Cliff Edwards (1895- narrative animated features after an “Some Day My Prince Will Come” 1971) and the chorus at the close of the eight-year hiatus. Walt Disney hired within Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs film. The final phrase ends differently the songwriting team of Mack David and “When You Wish Upon a Star” in in the version of the song from the (1912-1993), Al Hoffman (1902-1960), Pinocchio also function as metaphors for beginning of the feature. and Jerry Livingston (1909-1987) to the resolution of dreams. Such large- create the tunes. Sung by the film’s scale resolutions also provide closure for The conclusion of “When You Wish protagonist, “A Dream Is a Wish Your each film’s respective scores, providing Upon a Star” from the sung version at Heart Makes” expresses her use of a sense of unity. Finally, the meaning- the opening of the film changes the dreams as a means of escapism from a ful conclusions of these investigations final note to a dominant, a full two harsh reality. Like “When You Wish point to the potential usefulness of octaves above the first note of the song. Upon a Star,” “A Dream is a Wish Your Schenkerian approaches to analysis out- This ending is doubly unresolved due Heart Makes” coincides lyrical resolu- side of the narrow band of Western art to its settling on an unstable note, as tion with melodic resolution. music upon which the system is based. well as the high register of its tone. This lack of resolution allows for a large- “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart scale closure of the melody at the end Makes” features two phrases (Figure of the film. While the melody of the 3). The Kopfton of each is a mediant song at the end lands on the tonic, a approached by an upward leap from short tag line sung by the chorus is the dominant. Likewise, each phrase appended with the lyrics, “you’ll find features a stepwise descent to the tonic, your dreams come true,” settling on very much in line with Schenker’s scale degree three. This large-scale theory. However, the end of the first resolution of the melody over the phrase actually lands on the mediant in the low register, with an implied course of the movie is aided by hav- James Bohn is Adjunct Professor in the tonic beneath. This resolution is doubly ing both the opening and concluding Department of Music. arrangements in the same key. The ends unsatisfying due to both its use of a of both Pinocchio and Snow White and substitution (the tonic for the mediant), the Seven Dwarfs are musically similar as well as the lower register of its tone. The second phrase, however, not only

May 2015 11 and pride. The writings of modernist The Domestic Interior, the Female authors such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory that emphasize Irish fairy Body, and the Metaphorical Irish tales and folklore are examples of the turn in the early twentieth century to Nation in the Works of James Joyce a mythologized version of nation that produced the great literary movement Ellen Scheible of the Celtic Revival. Yet, all of the he divided island that houses the Republic of formations of Irish nationalism that succeeded in the late nineteenth and Ireland and Northern Ireland is the birthplace early twentieth centuries are versions of some of the most prolific and powerful of imagined communities, as scholar T Benedict Anderson describes them. western writers of the late nineteenth and early This means that Irish nationalism had twentieth centuries. Most Irish Studies critics agree to invent its own history in order to that Ireland’s literary genius emerged most aggressively propagate the version of the future that it so desperately wanted to attain. That during the period of change that ultimately led to invented history depended heavily Irish independence and the partition of the island on a mythical sense of geography and place—a belief that the land itself was in the early twentieth century. Before the Irish somehow unique and that the culture famine in the middle of the nineteenth century, that sprang from it essential. Ireland was a British colony on the edge of a Modern and contemporary Irish fic- progressive, modern economy that promised to bring tion is saturated with metaphors of location that confront, challenge, and great prosperity for Anglo-Irish landowners and often reconstruct both the geographical British absentee landlords. After the famine, Ireland public sphere and the domestic pri- was left destitute, losing any claim to the modernity vate sphere that frame Irish life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In that seemed inevitable in the beginning of the many of my courses, students read Irish nineteenth century. Consequently, Irish Catholicism literature that either gestures towards the 1922 partition of the nation or and Nationalism developed as powerful cultural confronts partition as a defining aspect agents that sought to rebuild the nation through the of Irishness. To be Irish is to be divided. commodification of tradition rather than the forces of Partition and the consequent hybridity of Ireland as a nation that is both European modernity. However, this new, fetishized, modern and traditional functions as an Catholic nationalism produced its own modernizing underlying metaphor. Within this met- momentum. The Ireland that surfaced in 1922 became aphor gender identities fall victim to the ambiguity of hybridity; gender that is a nation of halves: politically, one part of a partitioned both traditional and progressive is only island and culturally, an idea contingent on the imaginable on bodies that are othered. We focus particularly on the role of conflicted binary of modernist aesthetics and Irish women and the female body as signifi- national tradition. cant figures in the ongoing struggle to construct a national image of Irish cul- The imaginary construct of Ireland that provincial life that we like to associ- ture. The female body emerges as one most contemporary readers, audiences, ate with traditional Ireland, such as the version of otherness in its over-sexual- and tourists understand is a relatively famous Irish step dances and the Irish ized but virginal place in Irish culture. recent phenomenon, even though its sports hurling and Gaelic football, are Structures such as the Anglo-Irish Big inventors emphasize nostalgia for a products of a late-nineteenth-century House and the Magdalene Asylums long-ago past. Many features of Irish push to create national sentiment

12 Bridgewater Review serve as spaces of oppression where the female body is both domesticated and Irish nationalism had to invent its repressed as a sexually reproductive vessel. Such spaces represent the need own history in order to propagate for the domestic interior to control any the version of the future that it so feminized threat to the newly formed version of Irishness that depended so desperately wanted to attain. heavily on a violent and dominating nationalism and, by extension, a newly formed postcolonial “manhood.” traditional Irish masculine culture and confrontation for an alienated and The private/public binary reflects by the sexual repression of the Church. emasculated Ireland, a nation dreaming political space, too. “Home-making” There are few places where the uses of of wholeness and manhood. and “nation-making” become inter- the domestic interior theme are more Here, we might find relevance in the twined ideologies in many of the texts potent than in the works of James Joyce work of French psychoanalyst Jacques that we read and they are transposed (1882-1941). Lacan (1901-81), whose concept called onto the female body as a reproduc- Joyce wrote Ulysses, his opus novel, “the Mirror Stage” shows how, as chil- tive agent. The body both regulates the both before Irish independence, dren, we become alienated and othered domestic interior of the Irish family and and after 1916, during the process of within ourselves. This is the moment, produces the independent, postcolonial he argued, when a child realizes she is not the person in the mirror being held by her parent; that she and the mirror image are different. A nation functions under the same principle. What Lacan says about self-consciousness (that we are all alienated, othered, split within ourselves) is also inherent to Ireland as a nation. Ireland (like, perhaps, all nations) functions in a state of hybridity. Writing in an historical era when psy- choanalysis redefined the meaning of subjectivity, Joyce’s texts resonate with these concepts. For Joyce, and Ireland, wholeness is elusive and unification an impossibility. In Ulysses, it is through a kind of mirror stage, whenever the male gaze meets the female body, that Joyce imagines a national identity based on non-unification, an Ireland that is essentially divided. nation. The “domestic interior,” then, decolonization that resulted in the Irish is a commonly employed metaphor In the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, Free State. Images of bodies partitioned for the construction of Ireland as an the main character, Leopold Bloom, by otherness or bodies that signify as independent nation during the twen- takes a break from his walk around duplicitous wholes appear often in tieth century. We read representations Dublin to rest on the beach where he his texts, suggesting that Joyce, along of the domestic interior in twentieth- encounters a beautiful young woman with many twentieth-century post- century Irish fiction as commentary on named Gerty MacDowell. After a colonial Irish writers both before and the power and authority of the rising very public expression of sexual desire, after national independence, imagined Irish nation. But writers also portray Gerty leaves the beach and Bloom real- nationhood through the lens of a bifur- the domestic interior as a site of oppres- izes that she walks with a limp and is cated identity. In Ulysses, the disabled sion, the place where Irish women’s permanently disabled. Beyond Joyce’s female body is a source of traumatic bodies are contained and entrapped by descriptions of Gerty as an image of the

May 2015 13 Virgin Mary and Irish girlhood, Joyce The implications of such a community also imagines Gerty’s hybridized body lie in the projections of an original, as an image of domestic Ireland. When communal unification that postcolonial Bloom later sees Gerty on the beach, bodies and groups of bodies, or nations, he desperately lusts for her, but then must reject because they are fictions realizes that her body is disabled and of nationhood proliferated as truths by her mobility limited. Gerty’s disabil- an imperial culture. In other words, ity functions as a suppressed or hid- postcolonial subjectivity must undergo den aspect of her identity throughout a mirror stage where it recognizes the “Nausicaa” and comes as a surprise impossibility of unified nationhood to Bloom. “Tight boots? No. She’s implicit in its development and recog- lame! O!” (page 13. line 771) He nition as a nation. Because women are suddenly recognizes the obstacles the most obvious subaltern subjects in hindering unification—both his Duffy’s reading of Ulysses, it is through unification with Gerty and the nation’s the female characters that we are forced political unification. to ask if “unity can be imagined in any real sense at the moment of anticolonial In his 1994 book The Subaltern Ulysses, James Joyce, 1915 (Photo credit: Alex Ehrenzweig, Zurich). revolution” (172). In Duffy’s analysis, Enda Duffy persuasively argues that the birth of the Irish Free State is coter- women, both as activists during the of the working class that surface in minous with a postcolonial redefinition Irish anticolonial revolution and as the first half. The gendered division of nationhood that rejects unity as its characters in modernist texts, emerged of labor that Duffy identifies as part of founding principle. For him (and Joyce), as “key signifiers of the nation itself in the colonial regime in the novel’s first Irish independence inherently demands the representational economy of the half, where working-class women are division and disunity. Irishness depends revolution.” However, he points out, “it symbols of the subaltern, is transformed on more than an aesthetic reflection in was only as lone figures (in masculinist into a representation of economic the cracked looking glass of a servant narratives) that they were allowed to abjection in the second half. Duffy’s (Joyce’s famous description of Irish suggest the new nation” (167). Duffy’s goal is to seek moments of “postcolonial identity); it depends on the recognition argument posits the female figures in subjectivity” in Ulysses, hoping to iden- that a looking glass without a crack is a Joyce’s novel, specifically Molly Bloom tify the “utopian potential of the text” false image of national unity. The crack in Leopold Bloom’s looking glass is Gerty MacDowell. In the For Joyce, and Ireland, opening pages of “Nausicaa,” when we are safely housed inside of the domes- wholeness is elusive and tic interior, Gerty is not only “as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood unification an impossibility. as one could wish to see,” but she also possesses eyes of “the bluest Irish blue” and, when she blushes, she looks “so lovely in her sweet girlish shy- (Leopold’s wife), as the figures through and he argues that we “can hardly hope ness that of a surety God’s fair land of which Joyce questions the future of the that the male-centered realist narra- Ireland did not hold her equal” (Ulysses Irish nation and the unity inherent in tive, copied from models that celebrated 13.81, 13.108, 13.121-22). In Gerty’s national identity. We can read Gerty an imperialist nationalist world, will own mind, and arguably Bloom’s, MacDowell as a figure of national iden- prove an appropriate vehicle” (170-71). she exists as the trademark image of a tity in much the same way that Duffy Hence, we are left with female charac- feminized and aesthetically perfected reads Molly Bloom. ters as possible figures for a future com- Ireland, where consumer culture and sentimental novels have yoked Duffy positions Molly alongside all munity. But Duffy does not see such a Irishness with youth, girlish beauty, of the women from the second half of community surface in Ulysses, instead and the expansiveness of God’s coun- the novel, including Gerty, who are the novel “poses the more difficult try. Gerty is Ireland’s perfect, complete “the bearers and minders of children” question of what such a community symbol—that is, except for “that one (170) rather than the female members might imply” (171).

14 Bridgewater Review as the markers of the end of the colony, Irishness depends on more than where home rule is only an option an aesthetic reflection in the when the nation is nonexistent. Bloom’s role as a flaneur and voyeur on cracked looking glass of a servant the streets of Dublin traces a city that will soon birth the revolution leading ( Joyce’s famous description of to the Irish Free State. If we follow this image of the male body as the genera- Irish identity); it depends on the tor of national identity through Joyce’s texts, we see it reemerge, particularly recognition that a looking glass in his last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). without a crack is a false image HCE, the main male character in Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses’s Bloom, of national unity. commits a sexual transgression, the importance of which relies on female recognition of the offense, and his broken body then becomes the text’s shortcoming” (13.650) that she “always sun this. Homerule sun setting in the personified map of Dublin. In Joyce’s tried to conceal” (13.651); the “acci- southeast. My native land, goodnight” novels, as in much of twentieth-century dent” that, when conjured, reminded (13.1076-1080). In Bloom’s thoughts, Irish fiction, the partitioned nation is her that “the years were slipping by” his desire overlaps with his identifica- unimaginable without a fragmented (13.649) and no longer was she a girl, tion of the land where he is standing as and cracked body conjured in the mir- winsome and shy, with an idealized the nation on which the ‘homerule sun’ ror of female duplicity. sense of perpetual youth. Gerty tricks finally set. It is after his voyeuristic con- herself into believing in her perfection frontation with Gerty that Bloom says Ellen Scheible is Coordinator of the Irish in “Nausicaa” by trusting the mirror goodnight to his ‘native land,’ seeing Studies Program and Associate Editor of that reflects it: “She did it up all by the duplicity in both woman and land Bridgewater Review. herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her!” (13.161-62). Even when Gerty succumbs to the “gnawing sorrow” that “is there all the time” (13.188-89), her insecurities are mediated by the mirror. Gerty’s reflection in the mirror speaks to her, reassuring her of the existence of herself as a unified and complete being, lovely in its perfect wholeness. From the onset of Gerty’s episode in Ulysses, the use of the mirror as a symbol of infinite duplicity collides with images of national duplicity and divided Irishness, positioning the female, incomplete in both body and image, as the locus for national disruption. Right before Bloom wishes he could be “the rock she sat on,” he ruminates on seeing the Howth peninsula, and by extension Ireland, in the distance: “An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting

May 2015 15 16 Bridgewater Review dominated agrarian strategies through- Bridgewater’s Third Nature and out colonial New England. The Taunton River, in contrast, is one of the Re-Wilding of the Landscape New England’s many industrialized environments. Human “improvement” Brian Payne of the river began in the seventeenth With photographs by Karen Callan century, when it was dammed to provide power for an iron foundry. he Great River Preserve in Bridgewater is a In the 1700s, industrialists began min- web of contradicting yet interdependent forms ing the banks of the Taunton for ore, and during the nineteenth century, Tof land use. Located just a few miles from the the Bridgewater section of the river Bridgewater State campus, the Preserve consists of 124 became a site for shipbuilding. Today, despite this industrial past, the Taunton acres of Wildland Trust land and is part of the larger River is classified as one of the U.S. 410-acre Taunton River Wildlife Management Area. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Wild and What makes the Preserve fascinating is the varied Scenic Rivers.” history of its layered landscape. Today, the Preserve’s The Great River Preserve tells us more than a little about the varied history of ecology consists of open fields, mixed The rural feel of the Preserve is pro- human relations with the nature in our pine and oak forests, and a mile of found and it is easy to visualize the midst. What appears today as a wild waterfront that provides a diverse habi- farmscape that once dominated the oasis of open fields, forests, and river- tat for wildlife. land. Seventeenth-century English front was once a heavily utilized envi- settlers were attracted to Bridgewater Historically, the Preserve is a remnant ronment. The result, in Bridgewater due to the diverse eco-zones, including of the region’s agrarian and indus- as in much of New England, is what lowland marshes that provided grasses trial past. Like most of southeastern University of Maine historian Richard for winter fodder, sandy uplands for Massachusetts, Bridgewater’s land-use Judd calls the “blended landscape.” In orchards, and a rich middle ground for history is both agrarian and industrial. his recent book, Second Nature (2014), grain crops. This mixed husbandry Judd explains: “The region’s long

May 2015 17 post-pioneer settlement experience to local, organic, or “natural” food serve as museums, expensive condos, provides a panorama of shaped environ- production revitalized some of the or office buildings. To some, this ments in which the layers of interac- region’s agrarian landscape, vast acreage is a sad story of post-industrial and tion between people and the land are of former farmland remains meadows post-agrarian economic change that so interwoven that culture and nature and young forest or built-over subur- left New England trailing far behind cannot be isolated” (x). It is too facile, ban cul-de-sacs. Strangely, our region compared to the agrarian output of in other words, to view a landscape’s is actually more heavily forested now California and the industrial output history as either purely unaltered than it was throughout most of its his- of the southern hemisphere. Lost jobs “nature” on one hand, or wholly “cul- tory as “New England.” The seemingly and dislocation were the results of this tivated” and civilized, on the other. random stone walls we find as we hike transition, this late twentieth-century through the woods of New England are “de-industrialization” that gripped The agrarian landscape is now part of historical artifacts of its agrarian past, much of the American northeast and Bridgewater’s past more than its pre- fleeting evidence of abandoned farms midwest. The collapse of agriculture sent. A good many Bridgewater farms, taken over by a resurging nature. and the crumbling of industry pro- like others throughout New England, vide an opportunity for the return went bankrupt during the second half Other remnants in the landscape reveal of “nature;” something Judd calls a of the twentieth century. Although the something about New England’s lost “re-wilding” of the landscape. On one post-1970 back-to-the-land move- industrial might. Smoke stacks, dams, edge of Bridgewater, the once heav- ment and the post-1990 commitment and red-brick industrial buildings now ily industrialized Taunton River now

18 Bridgewater Review Our region is actually more heavily forested now than it was throughout most of its history as “New England.”

meanders through one such re-wilded meanings of that phrase. Although with a Puritan ethic that stressed com- place, a seemingly natural ecosystem of Cronon was interested specifically monwealth over individual profit, New woods and fields. in how railroads changed American England colonial farmers “bound by nature, other scholars have since applied a set of ecological and cultural con- In his pathbreaking 1992 work Nature’s the concept of “second nature” to a straints that guarded against unbalanced Metropolis, environmental historian wide variety of modified landscapes. exploitation of land” (xv). In this way, William Cronon introduced the the agrarian “second nature” became concept of “second nature” as a place Historians of New England’s farmlands both a product of economic practice “designed by people and ‘improved’ note that early farmers consciously and an intellectual construct; a means toward human ends, gradually emerged sought an ecological balance that of cultural self-definition among New atop the original landscape that nature allowed for sustainable food produc- Englanders. In light of Judd’s, Cronon’s, – ‘first nature’ – had created as such tion without dramatically affecting the and Donahue’s historical analyses, the an inconvenient jumble” (56). Here, region’s “natural” rivers, forests and pastoral nature that so dominates the Cronon uses the term “second nature” wild species. Brian Donahue writes in “unused” lands around Bridgewater to suggest that modified landscapes his book The Great Meadow (2007) that is part of a massive rewilding of New have become so “natural” in our minds colonial New England agriculture “was England’s second nature, which repre- that we cannot easily fathom the world an ecologically sustainable adaption sent a profoundly new yet sustainable, without them. They become second of English mixed husbandry to a new, accessible, and rewarding relationship nature in both physical and intellectual challenging environment.” Combined with nature.

May 2015 19 The collapse of agriculture and the crumbling of industry provide an opportunity for the return of “nature;” something Judd calls a “re-wilding” of the landscape.

20 Bridgewater Review But the concept of second nature might wilderness have profoundly changed of land in these years to be designated be inappropriate for a place like the over the course of American history. as wild places and protected them from Great River Preserve. Cronon and Judd Early colonials, especially Puritans in development. Epic political battles each argue that the agrarian landscape New England, saw wilderness as the raged around Yellowstone, Yosemite, of the fields and the industrial use of very real stomping ground of the devil Hetch-Hetchy, the Colorado River, the river represented a second-nature and his witches. Throughout most and the Grand Tetons that in the end modification of the pre-Columbian of United States history, Americans redefined America’s understanding of first-nature forests. If so, than the viewed the wilderness as a place to be and appreciation for wild places. The re-wilding of that landscape in the conquered and transformed into more movement culminated in the Wilderness form of a “wildlands trust” would productive environments. Although Act of 1964, which specifically defined represent a third nature, one that opens there were plenty of early excep- wilderness as “an area where the earth new possibilities, and problems, for tions—naturalists such as Henry David and its community of life are untram- environmental stewardship and wild- Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or meled by man, where man himself is a ness preservation. While there remain George Perkins Marsh—mainstream visitor who does not remain.” virtually no accessible first-nature American culture saw conquering the More recently, our ideas about nature landscapes east of the Mississippi River, wilderness as a form of progress, the have begun to change. Wilderness, there are potentially thousands of third triumph of the civilized over the wild. historian Roderick Nash reminded natures, or re-wilded places that give us The public rhetoric began to change us in his 1967 book Wilderness and the culturally and emotionally rewarding during the Progressive Era (1900- American Mind, is an intellectual crea- interactions with nature; that re-invent 1920) when popular writers such as tion that does not necessarily reflect and echo the wild places of our past. John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo any true ecological reality. Although Even today, many environmentalists Leopold began to champion the “wil- Nash noted that “wilderness was a continue to define “nature” narrowly, derness” idea and became active agents basic ingredient of American culture,” to see wilderness only in pristine for the preservation of “wild” places. he concluded that “there is no specific mountainscapes or large tracts of unim- The National Parks Service, the U.S. material object that is wilderness” (xi). proved acres. Like any other intellectual Forest Service, and a host of state and Wilderness is a state of mind that we concept, our societal definitions of local land agencies set aside large tracts project onto physical places. Building

May 2015 21 upon this work, William Cronon dedication to wilderness, Cronon fears, natural”; it is both. The beauty of the notes that there is trouble with ideal- “may teach us to be dismissive or even Preserve forces us to “embrace the full izing wilderness in the way that the contemptuous of such humble places continuum of a natural landscape that Progressive conservationists did: and experiences” (46) that can be found is also cultural, in which the city, the “[i]dealizing a distant wilderness too in the more common agrarian or semi- suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each often means not idealizing the envi- rural landscape that surrounds us. has its proper place, which we permit ronment in which we actually live, ourselves to celebrate without need- Today, a great many American land- the landscape… we call home.” In lessly denigrating the other” (49). scapes east of the Mississippi River fall other words, we need a middle ground into this middle ground, this “third The nuanced definition of nature that between the categories of “wild” and nature.” In Bridgewater, the Great the Great River Preserve presents to “cultivated,” between use and pres- River Preserve exemplifies well these us takes us beyond this “bipolar moral ervation that aims at “some kind of “humble places and experiences” whose scale” and allows for rewarding experi- balanced, sustainable relationship” subtle layers of history are visible, leg- ences with a third nature that with the land we actually live with on ible to a discerning eye. The Preserve, can become the seedbed for a more a daily basis (Cronon, “The Trouble to paraphrase Cronon, is neither wholly comprehensive environmental ethic. with Wilderness” in Out of the Woods “human nor nonhuman, unnatural nor [1997] 45). His critique did not seek to dismiss wilderness as an important goal of the environmental movement, but only sought to broaden the goals of that movement to better reflect the reality of most Americans, who cannot travel to these wilderness places. The ideal of wilderness preservation is by its very nature exclusive, if not elitist, and allows us to avoid too easily the more pressing problems of environmental Brian Payne is Associate Professor Karen Callan is Assistant Director decay in our own backyards. A sole in the Department of History. of the Publications Office.

22 Bridgewater Review While there remain virtually no accessible first-nature landscapes east of the Mississippi River, there are potentially thousands of third natures, or re-wilded places that give us culturally and emotionally rewarding interactions with nature; that re-invent and echo the wild places of our past.

May 2015 23 After a while he stopped going back to SHORT FICTION town. He stayed in the bower. Ulmus provided seeds and small fruit. Nuts Ulmus came from Carpinus and for his thirst Ward Heilman there were Saccharum. He tended the trees as he knew how. ome people pursue butterflies; some gather They did not need him. The bigger stamps. Some chase knowledge to build low ones had been there before he came and the little ones did not always grow Swalls; others collect adventures to stack one upon when he helped. It would be impossible another in a fortune tower of experience: from the for him to move the elm by himself, he thought, or any of the large trees, garret come stories of princesses. Stirp pursued trees. although they would look better rear- ranged, particularly the elm. He did Long before he moved to the forests, he knew it must transplant the smaller ones but they be trees for him. As a child in the hot, dry plain he often caught disease and wizened. watched the desert plants day after day. They didn’t In time, Stirp took his son to the woods grow. They didn’t even seem to move. He dared not but he could not explain the trees to him. His son always saw stout boughs water them. Then one evening, unexpectedly, just to shape into broadswords, springy after some distant object cast a shadow across it, a branches for bows or long limbs for lances, leaves were camouflage, and plant flowered. It burst out in bright purple. roots rifles. Yet, Stirp noticed, for his Carefully he took off his shoes, sat An American elm, Ulmus Americana, son the trees always clapped hands and down before it and waited. Some with a graceful vase-shaped stem. Near danced. Later his son made a flute from mystery was to be explained, he the ground it divides into many parts; a lance and a harp from a bow, and the thought. He felt he deserved some above, its limbs spread out large and trees sang. account of why. full. No sign of disease. It is separate Once, Stirp put a huge pan in the grassy but not by itself. Over there is another When the full darkness came he could area near the elm. He filled it with not quite as tall. And some newer ones, no longer see the flower, no matter all the wonderful, imaginary food he back in, just beyond the ironwood, how hard he looked. could think of. Under it he lit a fire Carpinus Caroliniana. Stirp loved to of air and let it play on the kindling, Once, for just a moment, he drifted stroke the deep ripples and sinews of twigs, sticks, branches and logs. He off to sleep. His head rolled to the side; the smooth, grey bark - ironwood, harvested fifth-year fruit. He laid his dead hand flopped to the ground. Carpinus - as he searched for the catkins out his earthenware and made place As his fingers came back to life they dangling inconspicuously. What fawn markers – Ulmus on the left, Carpinus touched what seemed to be a snake in nibbled and left this remnant of a shoot? and Saccharum interspersed. the sand. He quickly yanked his hand Who stole the secret of that nutshell? up, then slowly reached down with The trees changed and gave some vague He hoped the trees would come to his two fingers to pick up the thin end of answers with the seasons. function. Perhaps they would arrange a smooth stick. themselves properly. The egg-shaped head of the sugar In the morning, when the first indirect maple, Acer Saccharum, listened with Though the winds and worms encour- light dimly lit the desert, the flower many-lobed leaves. Stirp sat silent, aged them, the trees did not move. glowed blue briefly before folding up sensing the dryads in the maples and Stirp got only dead brambles and vines. completely at the first brightness. Stirp hearing the sap practicing its kiss. He did not sit long this time. Before the moved his trunk to block the rays but darkness came, he left. the flower never peeked out. Not then, nor that evening, nor ever again.

24 Bridgewater Review When he returned, the pan was He had not had anything to eat or drink In another place, Ulmus, the great elm, overturned. Something else seemed because he had waited for his guests. was now surrounded by the ironwoods. different. Things seemed to have rear- He approached a Saccharum and sipped The sugar maples were grouped around ranged themselves, he thought, but some syrup. It left a metallic taste in his the outside. Their boughs by Autumn he was not sure he remembered. His mouth. He looked up at a Carpinus. lit up like flaming swords. utensils were definitely not where he He saw that things were not the same. left them. There was a pile of earthen- All was still. A blue, earthenware cup Ward Heilman is Professor in the ware dishes, used and dirty as if marked rested on its side in the wet, green Department of Mathematics and in the by leaf prints. grass where, he was now sure, the Department of Computer Science. elm had stood.

May 2015 25 Silk Embroidered Front Board Actors

and flowers made their appearance at Exporting Exoticism: parties and luncheons thrown by well- to-do Americans. Goldfish appeared Captain Brinkley’s in bowls in American parlors and carp swam in Japanese-influenced ponds. Japan Described and Illustrated In American décor, everything from wallpaper to crockery to inkwells Dan Johnson and tea sets were embellished with y the end of the nineteenth century, Japan Japanese-derived designs. Gilbert and Sullivan’s comedy The Mikado; or The was on the fast track to modernity. Since Town of Titpitu opened in London’s 1855, when U.S. Navy Commodore Savoy Theatre in March 1885, but it B took only until August of that year Matthew Calbraith Perry’s arrival effectively ended its before it opened in New York’s Fifth self-imposed isolation, Japan embraced the technology Avenue Theatre, where it ran for almost of the age with fervor. Japan was quickly pulled into 300 performances. Likewise, Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan opened as a dizzying vortex of steel, steam, and beaver-skin a one-act play in New York in 1900. hats. By 1868, the Meiji era had sprung into existence and, increasingly, the old ways—epitomized by the now-outlawed samurai class—were tossed aside. Both railroads and electricity were introduced in the 1870s and with the defeat of Russia’s powerful navy in 1905, Japan became a force to be reckoned with.

Curiously, even as the turn-of-the-cen- Americans Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) tury Japanese discarded the old for the and John La Farge (1835-1910) and new, traditional hakama for stovepipe Briton Isabella Bird (1831-1904) were trousers, Americans became infatu- eagerly snatched up and consumed; silk Captain Francis Brinkley (1841-1912) ated with the ways of old Japan. The kimonos embroidered with dragons, from A History of the Japanese People (New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1915). exotic travel accounts of writers such as cranes and other symbolic creatures

26 Bridgewater Review Tattooed Postman House Boat

Subsequent editions of Japan Described and Illustrated can be found with paper Some of the limited editions were covers featuring simple decorations or in massive, 16.5 x 13-inch folio form. so costly that only a few well- Some of the limited editions were so heeled individuals and institutions costly that only a few well-heeled individuals and institutions such as librar- such as libraries and collector ies and collector societies could afford them. Japan Described and Illustrated was societies could afford them. reprinted in several runs, the largest being 1000 and the smallest 25. The smaller the edition, the more extrava- These superficially romantic portray- Navy. Brinkley married Yasuko gantly bedecked the volume. While als of the Japanese people and culture Tanaka, the daughter of a samurai, it remains uncertain who authored allowed Westerners to continue to spoke and wrote fluent Japanese, and all of the articles in the text, Japanese view Japan as a primitive culture, like was author of a successful two-volume scholar Kakuzo Okakura (author of The a fly encased in amber, unmoving Japanese/English dictionary. He owned Awakening of Japan [1904]) was identi- and unyielding. and edited the Japan Mail (which later fied as one of the writers. became the Japan Times), the most Americans consumed old Japan in other However, few Americans would have influential English-language newspa- ways, too, perhaps no more eloquently bought Japan Described and Illustrated for per of the day. Brinkley had the ear of than through the recounted exploits its prose. Instead, they were more likely the Meiji government and promoted a of Francis Brinkley (1841-1912), an to have bought it for its art, its sheer Japanese agenda overseas. Irish-born military officer who adopted opulence, the visual and tactile experi- Japan as his home country, living there Beginning in 1897, “Capt. F. Brinkley” ence it provided. While the subjects and supporting pro-Japanese causes for produced one of the most opulent of the book’s images were themselves more than 45 years. Born in County books of the era, a 10-volume set titled exotic, the volumes also demonstrated Meath and educated at Trinity College, Japan Described and Illustrated by the the state of the art of photography at he served as a military attaché to the Japanese Written By Eminent Authorities the turn of the twentieth century. British Embassy. In 1867, he moved to and Scholars. First published by the The unnumbered, cheaper paperboard Japan for good, becoming a military Boston-based J.B. Millet Company, the editions had two photographs and one advisor to the Meiji government and book was reprinted several times, each collotype, an image produced when a artillery instructor to the Imperial slightly different but always handsome. glass or metal plate was covered with

May 2015 27 Woman Writing Letters Women Enjoying a Garden with Electrically Powered Fountain

a gelatin and bichromate and exposed Japan, prior to the publication of Japan Illustrated are important and beauti- to light. But the most extravagant Described and Illustrated in 1897. Also ful examples of American publishing editions, issued in smaller and more included were three 8 x 11-inch hand- commercialism. But they also serve as expensive runs, were packed with just colored photographs of Japanese people reminders of or page holders in the long about everything Japanese Brinkley at their daily toils, recreations and rest, and complicated relationship that devel- could manage to fit between two along with landscape scenes. Several oped between America and Japan in the covers: brocaded silk boards, tasseled photographs depicted geishas in various past century and a half. Less than fifty silk hand-tied and uncut pages “bound stages of dishabille, which undoubtedly years after the Brinkley publications in the Japanese manner” (in each delighted Victorian voyeurs. were first sold, Japanese-American volume came a warning not to cut the Brinkley published several more edi- citizens were rounded up and placed in pages apart), mica-flecked endpapers, tions of his book in a smaller format as what were euphemistically described hand-painted end boards, ukiyo-e well as a follow-up offering, a two- as “relocation camps” during World prints, samples of lace and wallpaper volume set titled The Art of Japan, which War II. The face of the exotic had been patterns, and sundry other items. For was published in 1901. It is probably transformed into the face of the enemy. those who could afford the indulgence the scarcest of the Brinkley publica- Fear of Japan replaced fascination with (the 1000 Yedo [Tokyo] edition was tions. In the same year, Brinkley added it. After the war, Japanese goods were $40, or about $1,200 today, for a a treatment of China to Japan Described marked “Made in Occupied Japan.” 10-volume folio set), Japan Described and Illustrated and the set was expanded Americans had moved from peeping in and Illustrated by the Japanese was an to 12 volumes. In 1910, the last printing the windows to owning the house. armchair traveler’s delight. of this book came off the press. Today, Beyond accoutrements, deluxe edi- after a long period of neglect, Captain tions of the book featured collotypes Brinkley’s Japan Described and Illustrated of flowers and hand-colored albumin is again stirring interest among schol- photographs (made using egg whites ars and collectors of American fine art and salt to bind various chemicals to printing. While some sets can be found produce the paper print). Between silk- intact, others, sadly, have been broken covered boards lay a frontis collotype up so that the collotypes and photo- of a flower made by Kazumasa Ogawa graphs can be sold individually. (1860-1929). A pioneer in Japanese From the open editions which were photography and a printer, Ogawa Dan Johnson is Adjunct Professor printed without limit to the limited had published folios of collotypes of in the Department of English. editions sold by subscription, the vol- Geishas, flowers and the customs of umes of Brinkley’s Japan Described and

28 Bridgewater Review The pivot point for Shapiro is the place Contentious Compatibility where our ideals overlap inside and outside the gates, in our colleges and and the Common Good: universities, and in American democracy generally. This place is where The University as Servant and Americans share fundamental principles: the use of reason, the free play Critic in a Democracy of ideas and thought, and toleration of differing points of view. Shapiro Stephen J. Nelson believes that society’s support for n the occasion of his inauguration as president the servant and critic role “has been ultimately sustained by faith in ration- of the University of Michigan in April 1980, alism, faith in knowledge and science, Harold Shapiro chose as a title for his address and the resulting notion of human O progress” (112), all features that we “Critic and Servant: The Role of the University.” His see repeated in any appraisal of the choice was apt. Critic and servant concisely captures university’s historic foundations. the expectations that colleges and universities in The Delicate Balance of the America have borne over centuries. From the smallest University in a Democracy liberal arts colleges to the major research universities College presidents and other com like the institution Shapiro was about to lead, the mentators have debated at length the purposes of the university in its academy in America has shouldered this burden and relationship to American democracy performed these functions. and society. Understandably, they generally agree that the needs of The nation’s higher education institu- democracy have to be met; that the tions are supposed to uplift society and university, whether public or private, contribute in ways that will better the exists in part at the pleasure of society fortunes of citizens and the nation. At and the state. However, within that the same time, they are expected to overarching goal and expectation, criticize tradition, dogma, and the way a number of contentious, in some things are done, and to advocate for cases mutually exclusive, tensions necessary changes regardless of who or and controversies inevitably arise. what might be offended in the process. For example, to what degree is the uni- In his address, Shapiro asserted that versity an elitist institution, a gateway “[t]he relationship between the modern for those already at the top of society to university and society is very complex secure and entrench their positions of and fragile because of the university’s control, power, and influence in soci- dual role as society’s servant and as President of University of Michigan, Harold Shapiro (Photo credit: Andrew Sacks, The LIFE ety? Democracy and democratic values its critic.” As a servant, its function is Images Collection/Getty Images) are supposed to champion the common complicated by the fact that society’s man, equitable access, and the diversity current economic and cultural contexts That is a tall order. What makes it all that comes with those aspirations and are always changing. “On the other work? How is the complexity and fra- beliefs. James Burrill Angell, president hand, the university has a fundamen- gility of the university’s sway in society of the University of Michigan (1871- tal responsibility to criticize society’s navigated so that the critic and servant 1909), once described the university current arrangements and to construct, roles can be filled? How does all this as existing to provide an “uncommon entertain, and test alternative ways happen, particularly in a democracy education for the common man.” The of organizing society’s institutions, that at one and the same time argues for “common man,” regular folk and alternative approaches to understand- freedom of thought, individuality, and citizens, presumably have a meritocratic ing nature, and alternative visions of public engagement, all the while hav- shot at upward mobility and social- society’s values” (Shapiro, Tradition and ing to maintain itself and its public with economic success in a democracy. Change [1987], 112). an aura of security, safety, and stability?

May 2015 29 In addition, tensions between the By making students better university and the state heightened alarmingly in the 1960s. The triggers of critics—thoughtful and these tensions were essential American issues, arguments about the funda- compassionate, self-interested mental exercise of democracy—the and public-spirited—we will Vietnam War, racial discrimination and civil rights, equality and equal oppor- better serve today’s society tunity, women’s rights—and they were debated in the public square, on and and the one to come. off campus. To a great degree, the loudest of these debates took place on campus, and how Americans have always pursued Contemporary Realities: they were handled in the Ivory Towers democratic ideals in some measure and The University Confronts across the country became a focus of have been especially concerned about media inquiry and popular discus- the relationship between their institu- Society and the State sion. The debates came in the form of tions and society. What is considered American society confronted an protest, demonstrations, and teach-ins. democratic today may be different from unprecedented wave of revolution and Often, these events had the veneer of the times when Harvard was founded clamor in the 1960s and 1970s. Some academic inquiry, but in many cases in the early 1600s. But the emphasis on have characterized these times as new they were single-sided manifestos the concept of democracy in America and uniquely dramatic for the academy designed to promote one point of view remains remarkably consistent through- and society; but were the 1960s that against the government, its policies, and out the centuries since its first college much different from previous eras? its ties to the corporate and industrial was founded and given the challenges Federal financial support for America’s complex (especially those that were that different eras presented to it. colleges and universities increased instrumental to the military and to the The nation’s aspirations, especially significantly in the wake of World War war effort). In this unmistakable time as a democracy, have always been II. Governmental involvement in terms of crisis, lines were drawn between the experimental. Harvard scholar Louis of financial and budgetary support of academy and the nation and sides were Menand captured that quest in a March the university was a new thing. These taken. In some Americans’ minds, uni- 2013 piece in The New Yorker: “The dollars came in various forms: the GI versities had become sites of disturbing ‘Constitution is an experiment, as all Bill; investment in science, engineering radicalism, ironically protected by the life is an experiment’... That is what and technology spawned by the Cold same governments that sustained them. Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address; War and the arms and space races; and As a result, crucial differences devel- democracy is an experiment the goal of support for capital building projects oped in the relationship of the Ivory which is to keep the experiment going. and other financial assistance, includ- Tower to the surrounding society and The purpose of democracy is to enable ing greater aid packages for students. nation in the 1960s. Even in this envi- people to live democratically. That’s it. Increasing monetary ties between the ronment and with these pressures at its Democracy is not a means to something government and the academy created gates, the university was still applauded else; there is no higher good that we’re complex entanglements that grew by by many and encouraged in its role trying as a society to attain” (71). leaps and bounds throughout the 1950s as servant: producer of engineers and and continued into the mid-1960s. The academy in America is likewise an experiment, and the basis of its experiment is revealed in its relationship to the nation, to the Republic. Democracy, according to Menand, is the highest good that America can attain. Thus, as the university functions as the nation’s servant and critic, it shapes that aspiration through both its service and its criticism.

30 Bridgewater Review scientists who would help America win appropriated by forces either within or the Cold War and the Space Race; edu- outside its gates. The other is that only cators of the next generation of lawyers by sustaining vigilance against those and corporate leaders. At the same time, forces can the university uphold its Americans outside the academy had lit- fundamental principles and stature. tle tolerance for those in the university John Kemeny, president of Dartmouth who criticized and opposed the govern- College from 1970 to 1981, often ment, especially on issues of the war preached about a university that would and race, and for permitting transgres- fulfill this mission as critic and servant. sions against the norms of social and Throughout his tenure, he delivered cultural life in the form of unchecked insightful messages in annual opening carousing among students. convocation addresses. One of those The passage of time since the mid- talks came in the fall of 1978. Do not Dr. John G. Kemeny, Dartmouth College 1970s has resolved few if any of the “listen to the siren song of simplistic President (Photo credit: John G. White / The problems spawned by the 1960s. Today, Denver Post via Getty Images) solutions,” he admonished students, the politics of the American university faculty, and the Dartmouth commu- are more coarse, more tense, and more better than its current form. In essence, nity. “The world is complex, the world polarized than ever before. In the acad- he argues, we must rebalance and is frustrating, the world is very fasci- emy, numerous issues kicked off in the reintegrate the twin roles of critic and nating—take it as it is, do not live in a 1960s have persisted as problems and a servant that universities have ascribed fantasy world.” As a citizen of the uni- search for common ground is in danger to for so long. His formula is simple: versity and American society, he said, of failing. “A college should not be a haven from “Face the problems the world presents worldly contention, but a place where to you. And, above all, use your years These issues include affirmative action young people fight out among and at Dartmouth to prepare yourself for and matters of equity and access; diver- within themselves contending ideas of that day when you can help make this sity; continual reductions in federal and the meaningful life, and where they a better world” (Kemeny, Dartmouth state support and its financial implica- discover that self-interest need not be at Convocation Address, 1978). tions, even as U.S. citizens demand odds with concern for one another.” In increasing control and influence; esca- In public utterances only three years other words, by making students better lating expenses and tuition increases; apart, Kemeny and Shapiro, presidential critics—thoughtful and compassionate, battles over curriculum; an increasingly voices in the Ivory Tower, did much to self-interested and public-spirited—we complicated and interlocking nexus reclaim the territory of the university in will better serve today’s society and of government, corporate and busi- America and its dual roles as servant and the one to come. If that vision can be ness interests, and the degree of control critic. In doing so, they followed in a pulled off, as he maintains, the divi- they exert; and finally, the challenge long tradition of thinking that links the dends could be profound: “We owe it of upholding the ideals of liberty, free health of American democracy to the to posterity to preserve and protect this speech and academic freedom. proper functioning of its universities. institution. Democracy depends on it” Those who have followed and will fol- Today, these controversies and unsolved (Delbanco, College, [2012], 171). low in their footsteps must do likewise. issues are debated in a polarized and It has been about six decades since overwrought climate by a set of players the university in America became a who engage each other in a death grip. modern battleground of ideological Informing all of these issues is the con- controversy. The tribalism of those tinuing ideological struggle between debates weakened the democratic foun- Left and Right, liberals and conserva- dations of the academy and the nation. tives, those who use academic issues as They provide object lessons for those proxy battles for their agendas outside of us who care about the university in the gates of the academy. America. There are two of them. Acknowledging these threats, One is that the university must be Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco Stephen J. Nelson is Associate Professor in increasingly vigilant not to morph proposes an antidote to these forces the Educational Leadership Program and in into simply one more political or that, he argues, would remake the uni- the Department of Secondary Education and social tool that can easily be pushed or versity into something fundamentally Professional Programs.

May 2015 31 VOICES ON CAMPUS Linden MacIntyre On October 30, 2014, acclaimed Canadian journalist and award-winning novelist Linden MacIntyre visited BSU to deliver the Canadian Studies Program’s Distinguished Canadian Annual Address. Widely revered for his investigative work on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s signature weekly television newsmagazine The Fifth Estate, MacIntyre tackled a wide variety of controversial subjects from capital punishment to police ethics to terrorism over a 50-year career. His talk came only days after two separate home-grown terror episodes had taken place in Quebec and Ontario, when two recent converts to radical Islam attacked and killed Canadian soldiers Patrice Vincent and Nathan Cirillo. What follows is an excerpted version of MacIntyre’s address. or quite a while, I have been troubled by the inability or the unwillingness of the media, and TV in particular, to contribute much by way of F Photo Credit: cbc.ca understanding what “terrorism” really means. The word has become a political epithet. And it seems expression on the faces of a group of boys who were standing near me as we to justify any action in the cause of enhancing our watched the recovery of a dead family security. So all behavior designated by politicians from a little hut that had been blown up or cops as “terrorism” blends into a single, paranoid by the killers. The expression was one of cold, silent fury. And I remember impression. Terrorists are out to get us. They hate our thinking: this violence didn’t start here, freedom. They hate our prosperity, our lovely lifestyle. and it will not end here. This is part of a And they must be stopped, by any means. The mass continuum, an epic tragedy. That day I learned, as best I could, the media have proven more effective at spreading and what, the how, the when. And I was amplifying this unhelpful notion, often manufactured able to give a general impression of the to serve political agendas, than in confronting the why. The massacre was by a Christian militia group backed up by the Israeli most important part of the famous media equation, Army. The victims were Palestinian the “why.” When there is a crisis, we put most of the civilians—women, kids and old men. emphasis on the who, the what, the where, and the It was an act of revenge for atrocities by Palestinian fighters in a Christian when—all important details. But we avoid the why. village called Damour, south of Beirut, The why takes too much time and brain power. It gets which had been an act of revenge for atrocities by Christian fighters in a in the way of the news media imperative to be first. refugee camp called Karantina, which I remember the first time that I felt adjacent refugee camps called Sabra had been an act of revenge for an act overwhelmed by the why of a story that and Shatila. It was over by the time I of revenge, et cetera. The scale of the I was witnessing and trying to report got there, but I was able to cover the Sabra-Shatila Massacre was huge. on television. It was in late September gruesome aftermath. You can easily Estimates ranged from 800 to more 1982 in Beirut, Lebanon. I happened imagine the images, the stink, the flies, than 2,000… Certainly, all parties to be in the region for a story about and the carnage... It was worse than would now step back, see the absurdity the Palestinian diaspora when I was I expected. But there was one image of what they were involved in. But … dispatched to Beirut to cover a mas- that, for years afterward, I couldn’t they didn’t and the civil war went on sacre that had just occurred in two get out of my mind. It was a certain for 18 more years.

32 Bridgewater Review Terror and its Legacies Especially Canada. There’s a com- lot, one shot with an old hunting rifle placency in Canada bordering on as he stood on guard ceremonially at Unimaginable horror often produces smugness that we are immune from the National War Memorial in Ottawa. optimism. World War I, the “war to the violence of our time. Canada is Now, I’ve had experience with cover- end all wars,” the Holocaust, 9/11: a country [that was] founded on the ing violent conflict including terror- nothing like that could ever happen ideals of conciliation, compromise and ism, and not just Sabra and Shatila. again. And we always hope that the consensus. [W]e feel good about that… Twenty years ago, I helped prepare an optimists and the guardians of national compromise and common sense [have hour-long documentary called “Seeds security are right when they make that given] us a special role to play in world of Terror.” I’ve done provocative, even proclamation: “never again.” But I affairs. But times have changed... There speculative stories about the Bush wars suppose after years of experiencing the are now millions of Canadians whose in the Gulf in ’91 and ’03. I was part reality, I wouldn’t bet on it. And here’s lives have been scarred, directly or indi- of a team that documented the radi- why: the reality that I saw etched in the rectly, by violence. They are refugees calization of one of the 9/11 hijack- expressions on the faces of those boys and migrants from violent places. ers Ziad Jarrah who, until a couple at Sabra and Shatila. They would have Canada for 13 years has been at war in of years before September the 11th, known the dead people… They were Afghanistan and we recently signed on 2001, had been a drinking, dancing, witnesses and survivors, and perhaps easygoing party animal. I was part of a major examination of Islamist violence in Europe by the CBC and PBS When there is a crisis, we put Frontline, the Bombings in Madrid and London, and the phenomenon most of the emphasis on the who, called “home-grown terror.” [T]here isn’t anything theological about [this] the what, the where, and the modern phenomenon; it’s reactionary, a when—all important details. response to psychotic feelings of exclu- sion among people who are probably But we avoid the why. excluded because they are unbalanced and extreme by nature… [The home- grown acts in Canada were] not the beginning of an insurrection, but a the most profound and lasting conse- to a strange campaign of violence in crime; a crime that has become more quences of violence are the changes Iraq and Syria. We have been, and are, common but still an act of deviant that occur in the hearts and minds of part of a violent response to violence, behavior by a misfit. survivors. [They] would live in grief and we can’t expect not to be infected The violence we call terrorism is a and outrage, and would be altered by it. by the consequences. kind of invasive weed with roots deep Many of them driven mad by it. They [In Canada, in October 2014, twice in in the soil of history. Modern technol- would take the madness everywhere the space of three days] two crazy guys ogy creates the alarming possibility they went for the remainder of their killed two unsuspecting soldiers—one that these roots can now link up and lives and they would pass it on to their in a deliberate hit-and-run in a parking spread unpredictably, compromising children, and their children’s children. What I saw in the stern, young faces of those boys, most of them not much more than 12 years old, [was] a warn- [The boys] would take the ing signal: the consequences of violence migrate in time and space, and are felt madness everywhere they in distant places throughout time. And given the violence of the twentieth went for the remainder of their century… it isn’t hard to understand why so many bad things happen unex- lives and they would pass it pectedly in the new millennium and in on to their children, and their unlikely places, like Canada. children’s children.

May 2015 33 vulnerable minds, and that there is at any other time. And the mass media a predictable continuum from disil- play into this, it troubles me to say, lusionment to alienation to piety to because we become unwitting conduits fanaticism to murder. for the fear that spreads among us. We become political facilitators, transform- Fearism ing rational and conscientious individu- [We] are facing two insuperable realities als into reactionary units in a frightened each time we are faced with what we biomass. Given that, and the heat of now impulsively call terrorism. The the moment, people are screaming for first is that people tend not to want information, even if it’s just fantasy to do a lot of thinking in a crisis. We or gossip. The media will struggle to want information, and we want reas- oblige, and to make a lot of advertising surance that we are safe, that this is a money in the process. particular situation that can be attrib- In times of war, we necessarily accept uted to an evil individual or group, and the intolerable on a temporary basis. that the situation is under control and Conscription, censorship, rationing— exceptional. The second is a bit more emotional manipulation through sys- complex and it is pure speculation on Photo Credit: Caitlin Seddon temic propaganda, all sorts of stuff that my part…I came to the opinion…in would make Hobbes and Orwell grin the months after 9/11 that while that power. To advance an ideological and nod their heads in their respective project was without a doubt a terrorist thought becomes hard to resist. I don’t graveyards. But this normal phenom- attack in every sense, it revealed some- think it’s unduly speculative to suggest enon becomes an enduring problem thing terribly disturbing about public that when people are afraid, they are when we allow the imperatives of crisis vulnerability. I began to suspect in the inclined to suspend the admirable qual- to become embedded in our minds aftermath of 9/11 that the new laws and ity of skepticism. We are inclined to do and in our laws. Historically, as a crisis the security establishment, the orange what our leaders tell us to do in times of wanes, we seem to regain our senses and perspective. We should be very careful that the We have been, and are, part seeds of terror planted in a violent of a violent response to violence, century don’t blossom in the future as tentacles of tyranny... I have often in and we can’t expect not to be the course of my career as a reporter, a career that has exposed me to a lot infected by the consequences. of conflict, violence, and sometimes terror, been inspired by a line from the great American politician, Franklin Roosevelt. Everybody knows the and red alerts, the intolerable paranoia peril. People in positions of leadership line from Roosevelt’s First Inaugural in airports and other public places, that take on almost infallible qualities in a Address in 1933. It’s one of those simple the other side of the coin of terrorism is time of crisis. Anybody with a headset insights always worth remembering and a sinister reality called “fearism.” or a T-shirt or traffic pilon, a badge or repeating. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fearism is an impulse to take politi- gun or title becomes a figure of author- cal and commercial advantage of the ity… For politicians in a democracy, And I would add that the best circumstances created by an act of it’s awfully tempting to take advantage antidote for fear, the only antidote, terrorism: public confusion, volatile of this momentary suspension of our in fact, is reason. feelings of vulnerability, systemic fear. critical faculties, our instinct to become To consolidate that in that moment. followers, and to accept restrictions on To consolidate political and economic our freedom in the name of freedom, our willingness to buy into propositions that would be absurd and intolerable

34 Bridgewater Review suits, or schoolboy sports clothes and BOOK REVIEWS blazers, the ‘Chanel woman’ conjured the silhouette of the war’s millions of Fashioning Coco Chanel soldiers – the young men dying just out Sarah Wiggins of sight of the general population” (87). Unfortunately, as the book contin- Rhonda K. Garelick, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and ues, the figure of Chanel is lost to the the Pulse of History (New York: Random House, reader. Garelick structures individual chapters on Chanel’s romantic inter- 2014). ests, including the exiled Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, poet pectators are drawn to the grandeur of a Chanel Pierre Reverdy, the wealthy Duke of runway performance, captivated by the clothing Westminster, and French illustrator design, models, and theatrical staging. Embedded and nationalist, Paul Iribe. There is one S chapter dedicated to her female friend- in the drama of a Chanel show is the vision of its ships, in particular with society force, original founder, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883- Misia Sert, but the majority of writing focuses on her male companions. In her 1971). When we hear the term “Chanel,” we think of quest to discover what these relation- the Chanel suit, strings of pearls, the little black dress, ships “might offer beyond their anec- and basic, classic style. Individuals who look to Chanel dotal value,” Garelick outlines the lives of these men, their political convictions haute couture understand that a legacy exists behind and connections, and their influences the label, and we want to know the woman who can on Chanel. The result of these chapters be classified as one of the most influential fashion is a repetitive narration where the men reside in the foreground of the story designers of the twentieth century. while Chanel rests in the background

Rhonda Garelick takes up this task Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette in her biography, Mademoiselle: Coco Wore to the Revolution (2006), in which Chanel and the Pulse of History. In open- she invites the reader into the Queen’s ing her book, Garelick establishes that wardrobe and melds clothing into the “[a]lthough Chanel was born in rural fabric of French politics. Garelick’s poverty and raised in an orphanage analysis and narrative is not as compel- with little formal education, by the ling as Weber’s, though she achieves time she was thirty her name was a her goal when focusing on the First and household word in France… By 1930, Second World Wars. when Chanel was forty-seven, she The early stages of Chanel’s career employed 2,400 people and was worth coincided with the First World War, at least $15 million – close to $1 billion when active women turned to the in today’s currency” (xiv). The book more practical styles that she promoted. follows Chanel’s successful career, Chanel utilized jersey, a textile of the but Garelick wants to approach the masses, and converted it into desirable, designer’s life through an examination wearable clothing for the upper reaches of her relationship with politics and his- of society, while emphasizing thin tory, recognizing that “[w]hat remains bodies rather than prewar curvaceous- to be considered is how her work and ness. The war generated opportunities art themselves partook of European that enabled her business to prosper and and her design history comes through politics, and what her many intriguing its context offers the reader a tangible as something of an afterthought. love affairs might offer beyond their understanding of Chanel’s place in Garelick informs her readers that anecdotal value” (xvi). This approach history. “Thin, androgynous, simply Chanel was known to bend the truth is reminiscent of Caroline Weber’s dressed in striped naval-uniform-style of her own past, which indicates that

May 2015 35 the historian would need to proceed Throughout the book, Garelick For readers interested in design history, with caution when uncovering her emphasizes Chanel’s connections to the final chapter does not disappoint. story. However, Gabrielle Chanel men who were nationalistic and anti- The author takes the reader along the forged her own history and should be Semitic, and that Chanel shared those journey of Chanel’s return to fash- placed in the driver’s seat rather than sentiments. It was therefore no surprise ion after years of post-WWII exile in chauffeured from one lover to the next. to the reader that once the Nazi occu- Switzerland. We are led into her studio pation of Paris had been established, occupied by seamstresses and models, Chanel reemerges in the final chapters. Chanel returned to her home at the all directed by Chanel. In these years, Here, Garelick presents the notion of Ritz, a converted “Gestapo barracks” the United States embraced her brand “Chanelism,” in which “‘Chanel’ had (327), to reclaim her residence (though and American icons such as Jacqueline become a concept, a movement, a way she was demoted to smaller rooms) and Kennedy endorsed her style. Garelick of life, a vast constellation of visual live side by side with the ascendancy. shows how Chanel’s appeal came associations and references instantly The most distressing story revealed by full circle. Due to the sophistication recognizable to millions of women in Garelick involves the reminiscences and artistry of her designs, the public Europe and the United States” (251). of sisters Viviane Forrester and Lady was able to conveniently forget her The author compares Chanel’s aesthetic Christiane Françoise Swaythling, dark past. to fascist design principles surrounding whose aunt, Louise, was a Jewish symbols and uniforms, noting that the Today, we want to know the sordid details of her fascinating story along with the origins of her influence upon our material lives. Garelick empha- Garelick places all aspects of sizes just how prominent and lasting Chanel’s involvement with her artistic ideas remain. Many clothing articles that appear among us as the Nazis on the table, making everyday attire for women originated with Chanel seizing men’s clothes and the two chapters on fascism converting masculine forthrightness into feminine ease. As for the woman and the Second World War behind the runway spectacle, we are left contemplating an individual of the book’s pinnacle. immense artistic talent, controlling in nature, unlucky in love, and disturbing in her political associations and beliefs. Chanel logo appeared only one year woman relegated to a maid’s quar- Even after one digests this fine volume, after the swastika made its ominous ters. Stepping out of a chauffeured there is still more to contemplate about arrival in Nazi Germany. She explains car occupied by her Nazi boyfriend, this complex woman. How much she how the Nazis constructed attractive Chanel entered the unoccupied home was a product of her time or one who clothing that complemented the male of the sisters’ aunt and claimed some shaped her surroundings remains open body, and that Chanel applied their antique furniture in order to cash in on to debate. masculine chic to female clothing. the plunder. Chanel was also involved Her style offered women “an alternate in Nazi schemes, including an unsuc- route to the manipulations of fascism, cessful attempt to negotiate a settle- an ostensibly emancipatory worldview ment with Winston Churchill in 1943. that seemed an appealing antidote to Garelick places all aspects of Chanel’s constraining sexism and reactionary involvement with the Nazis on the politics, while achieving nonetheless table, making the two chapters on the psychological goals of fascism” fascism and the Second World War (295). Readers learn that the fascists the book’s pinnacle. Garelick holds uniformed a nation and Chanel Chanel fully responsible for her uniformed women around the world – actions, and, in doing so, she grants Sarah Wiggins is Associate Professor and that, unlike the Nazis, her popular- her historical agency. in the Department of History. ity survived.

36 Bridgewater Review nannies, grammar Nazis, and the What is Good Grammar? Gotcha! Gang,” who, in their “zeal to purify usage and safeguard the lan- Kathryn Evans guage,” have made it “difficult to think clearly about felicity in expression and Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking have muddied the task of explaining the st Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21 Century art of writing” (188). (New York: Viking, 2014). Addressing grammar mavens—and especially those who fear them—Pinker any English teachers and professors dread debunks many common miscon- meeting people in airplanes, those people ceptions about usage. He notes, for who, upon learning of our profession, instance, that the prohibition of split M infinitives is “the quintessential bogus either apologize for any grammatical errors they might rule… according to which Captain make or shut down completely, afraid to talk. Steven Kirk should not have said to boldly go where no man has gone before, but Pinker, in The Sense of Style, understands all too well rather to go boldly or boldly to go” (199). the judgment many of us fear. He reassures us that can His discussion of this “bogus rule’s” and may can be used interchangeably, that both like and origin is typical of his explanations of many usage conventions—and, taken such as are legitimate, that the passive voice is “unfairly together, these explanations provide a maligned” (132), and—perhaps most comfortingly— fascinating glimpse into how our rules that is “circling the drain” (242). came to exist and why so many of them whom shouldn’t, in fact, be rules. Pinker goes beyond reassurance, In conveying these concepts, Pinker however; he helps us see how usage sometimes goes into eyes-glaze-over patterns change over time and why detail, and, perhaps more troublesome, some conventions are worth observ- doesn’t acknowledge the scholarly ing while others aren’t. To this end, consensus that there is no such thing he draws on evidence such as eye- as “good writing.” He seems to ignore tracking experiments, judgments by scholars who agree that the effective- the 200-member Usage Panel from the ness of writing depends on how flexibly American Heritage Dictionary, historical authors adapt their writing to new accounts of how particular conventions purposes, audiences, and genres. arose, and ample examples of both Despite Pinker’s oversimplified view current and historical usage. of “good writing,” his informative and often surprising discussions of usage— In addition to discussing usage, Pinker the highlight of the book—are likely analyzes passages of “good writing” to to attract a variety of audiences. Pinker illustrate what makes them effective, envisions his audience as “aspiring discusses strategies for achieving coher- wordsmiths,” but his book may also ence, and gives advice on using syntax be of interest to experienced writers to avoid correct but convoluted prose. seeking to make their tacit knowledge He also, in an especially interesting explicit, professors writing for non- chapter, discusses “the curse of knowl- academic audiences, teachers hoping edge,” claiming that “the main cause of to help students write more effectively, incomprehensible prose is the difficulty For instance, Pinker explains (perhaps and “grammar mavens” wanting to of imagining what it’s like for someone overzealously) that the “very terms know why Pinker—a linguist and else not to know something that you ‘split infinitive’ and ‘split verb’ are cognitive scientist at Harvard—accuses know” (57). based on a thick-witted analogy to them of being “sticklers, pedants, Latin, in which it is impossible to split a peevers, snobs, snoots, nit-pickers, verb because it consists of a single word, traditionalists, language police, usage

May 2015 37 such as amare, ‘to love.’ But in English, Pinker also debunks the common belief purportedly gender-neutral he, includ- the so-called infinitive . . . consists of that the pronoun he is gender-neutral ing “She and Louis had a game—who two words, not one” (229). Pinker goes and that using a singular they instead could find the ugliest photograph of on to quote several experts, including is incorrect. Quoting a 2013 press himself” (257). Theodore Bernstein, who notes that release, he tells us that Obama said, Pinker concedes that the singular they “There is nothing wrong with splitting “No American should ever live under a is less accepted today than in centuries an infinitive . . . except that eighteenth- cloud of suspicion just because of what past, but he claims we’re in the midst and nineteenth-century grammarians, they look like” (255). (Note that “No of a historical change. He suggests that, for one reason or another, frowned American” is singular, while “they” if we’re confronted by a reader who is on it” (199). is typically seen as plural.) Obama, unhappy with our use of a singular they, we should “tell them that Jane Austen and I think it’s fine” (261). Despite Pinker’s oversimplified Despite his own views on usage, Pinker recognizes the complexity of the view of “good writing,” his choices writers must make. He notes, for instance, that using a singular they informative and often surprising can be dangerous because readers may discussions of usage—the think the writer made an error. In the end, he wisely notes that a variety of highlight of the book—are likely considerations should inform writers’ choices, telling us that “a writer must to attract a variety of audiences. critically evaluate claims of correct- ness, discount the dubious ones, and make choices which inevitably trade off conflicting values” (300). Because Pinker is similarly passionate (and Pinker points out, did not write because of the choices writers must make at sometimes judgmental) when he of what he looks like or because of what he every turn, writing is hard, but Pinker’s condemns the notion that we shouldn’t or she looks like. Pinker’s advocacy of the debunking of so many rigid rules just end sentences with prepositions. This singular they (258) is further buttressed made it a little easier. prohibition, he explains, “persists only by its appearance in Shakespeare, among know-it-alls who have never Chaucer, the King James Bible, Swift, opened a dictionary or style manual to Byron, Thackeray, Wharton, Shaw, check. There is nothing, repeat noth- and Auden (258). Citing scholar Henry ing, wrong with Who are you look- Churchyard, Pinker notes that Jane ing at? or . . . It’s you she’s thinking of ” Austen used the singular they 87 times (220). The preposition pseudo-rule, in her work (258). he informs us, was invented by poet Pinker provides a number of reasons John Dryden based on a “silly analogy” that the pronoun he does not ade- with Latin in an attempt to show that quately represent both sexes. He cites Ben Jonson was an inferior poet (220). experiments demonstrating that when Kathryn Evans is Associate Professor in Pinker quotes Mark Liberman’s apt people read the word he, they typically the English Department and Director of remark, “It’s a shame that Jonson had assume that the writer intended to refer BSU’s Writing Studio. been dead for 35 years at the time, since only to males, and he summarizes an he would otherwise have challenged experiment demonstrating that “sex- Dryden to a duel, and saved subsequent ist usage… stops readers in their tracks generations a lot of grief” (220-221). and distracts them from the writer’s message” (258). Pinker offers several examples illustrating the fallacy of the

38 Bridgewater Review combining “globe-spanning ambi- Will the Real Henry Kissinger tions” with “the insecurities of the par- venu” (55). The Middle East supplies Please Stand Up? the “stern landscape [from which] have issued conquerors and prophets holding Leonid Heretz aloft banners of universal aspirations” (96). China is the Middle Kingdom, Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin viewing itself as the center of a “univer- Press, 2014). sal hierarchy” (213). India, secure in its “timeless matrix,” measures the com- onsider the design of the cover of Henry ings and goings of empires and epochs Kissinger’s most recent book. How many “against the perspective of the infinite” individuals’ names could stand up to a (193). America is characterized by an C irresistible combination of pragmatism placement and juxtaposition like that? Thanks to and idealism. half a century of promotion, Henry Kissinger’s Most of what Kissinger writes about the can. Blurbs on the back of the book remind us of contemporary scene would be familiar to anyone who follows the news. His the author’s “intimate firsthand knowledge” of recommendations are also unremark- the high and mighty, his ability to offer “incisive able, although he does throw in bits strategic analysis” spanning continents and centuries of his trademark Machiavellianism (for example, he suggests dumping and, not least, his role in shaping foreign policy and responsibility for Afghanistan on that international relations. “No one can lay claim to so country’s neighbors). In recent years, much influence … over the past 50 years,” according Kissinger has positioned himself as the godfather (in the intellectual rather to the authoritative Financial Times. It is no secret that than the organized crime sense) of the Kissinger is getting on in years, so we might hope that ‘realist’ school of foreign policy, which argues for restraint and against the World Order is his political testament, a place where he militant interventionism of the neocon- finally tells the inside story of why things are the way servative and ‘humanitarian’ factions. they are, and how they might be fixed.

Fittingly enough for the man who is the world wars, and that happened just credited with bringing Realpolitik to the before it was imperfectly established in rubes, Kissinger begins with a lengthy the rest of the world during decoloniza- disquisition on the grand old European tion. According to Kissinger, the chal- system of Richelieu (“sophisticated lenge and tragedy of our times is that and ruthless”) and Bismarck (“master there is no international order, and “if manipulator of the balance of power”). order cannot be achieved by consensus While most of the world has had too or imposed by force, it will be wrought, much order (empires with universal at disastrous and dehumanizing cost, claims) or too little (authorities inca- from the experience of chaos” (129). pable of exercising control beyond the To those who have forgotten (or never local level), Europe for a time had the took) their old-fashioned Western Civ optimal order: mutually recognized or International Relations courses, all sovereign states that enjoyed unchal- of this might sound rather profound, as lenged control over their own territo- might Kissinger’s observations about ries and pursued secular, defined goals the essential characteristics of the differ- through rational diplomacy and limited ent parts of the world beyond Europe: warfare. Regrettably, the European Russia, ominously (or is it comi- system drove itself into the ground in cally?) styling itself the Third Rome,

May 2015 39 Unfortunately, there is little of this monotone when I read “[H]istory pun- Another aphorism that suggests itself: Kissingerian realism in World Order, and ishes strategic frivolity sooner or later” “A statesman never plays it straight.” most of the book reads like the op-ed (80). We are no longer in the realm of Kissinger gets very murky and unchar- pages of the Wall Street Journal or the “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac,” acteristically self-effacing when he Washington Post. This is particularly but that would be a lot to expect of a comes to the Nixon and Ford adminis- true of the treatment of America’s role. 91-year old. trations, the only time when he Kissinger raises hopes that he will offer actually had any power. This is Inspired by this example, I will try a realist critique of U.S. policy when how he deals with the invasion of my own hand at maxim-making: “A he gives Woodrow Wilson credit for Cambodia and the escalation of statesman is not a pedant.” World Order bequeathing “to the twentieth centu- bombing in North Vietnam (which is shot through with sloppy quotation ry’s decisive power an elevated foreign are nowhere mentioned explicitly): and even contains factual errors. To policy doctrine unmoored from a sense “The military actions that President cite only two of them: first, Kissinger of history or geopolitics” (269). Instead, Nixon ordered, and that as his National helps us appreciate the role of the Saudi he provides a reverent apology for suc- Security Advisor I supported, together king by likening it to that of the Holy cessive U.S. administrations, justifying with the policy of diplomatic flex Roman Emperor in his capacity as virtually all of the major decisions made ibility, brought about a settlement “Defender of the Faith.” That honor- up to the invasions and occupations in 1973” (301). ific belongs, of course, to the English of Afghanistan and Iraq (but not the monarch, and does not illuminate It would seem that Henry Kissinger is ‘nation-building’ that followed), and Middle Eastern affairs in the slightest. not yet ready to give up his secrets, at showing that Wilsonianism is actually Elsewhere, we learn that Eugene of least not in a setting where an obscure a good thing because it has inspired Savoy led a European army that saved college professor might get at them. Americans to achieve even more than Vienna and Europe from the Turks in they would have otherwise. 1683. Prince Eugene of Savoy, King By way of consolation, the book is full Jan Sobieski of Poland—what differ- of Kissingerian aphorisms struggling to ence does it make? The confusion is be born. “For nations, history plays the very roughly equivalent to saying that role that character confers on human George Patton and not John Pershing beings” (167) and “[I]n international led the American Expeditionary Force affairs, a reputation for reliability is a to France in World War I. It would more important asset than demonstra- not matter that much if these were the tions of tactical cleverness” (73) are just memoirs of a practical politician who two of many. Kissinger was on TV a makes no pretense of intellectualism, Leonid Heretz is Professor in the lot when I was a child, so I can see his but Kissinger bases his authority on Department of History. deadpan expression and hear his grave a stereotypically Central European erudition and precision.

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40 Bridgewater Review Readers Respond to BR, VoL. 33, No. 2 (November 2014)

That article [by William Hanna] about the prisoner of war camp in Taunton, mainly Italian prisoners and how they became friends with the local Italian population… was so fascinating. My girlfriend’s mother is Italian and she had a cousin who married one of the people in the Italian part of the prison. He was allowed to go out on weekends and visit with families in Brockton. At the end of the war, a whole bunch of marriages resulted from the visitations that they were allowed to do. That story is so incredibly wonderful. I loved it and my friends did too. They were just so amazed… because they actually have some part of it in their lives. Gayle Engstli, Grangeville, Idaho Thoroughly enjoyed the [Editor’s Notebook] in the most recent Bridgewater Review. I’ve been re- reading, Where Men Win Glory, about Pat Tillman, who left the NFL to enlist in the Army following 9/11, and the mythic narrative shaped and cultivated by the Pentagon during his service and the subsequent cover-up of his death by friendly fire. I often worry that Veterans Day in the U.S has devolved into a hollow, almost Hallmark holiday, in that it now serves primarily as a commercially-driven enterprise. As such it was quite nice reading something on the subject without the need for cynical lenses. Conor McKeon, Boston I enjoyed [Stephen Kaczmarek’s] article on fracking. The people of southern [New Jersey] had the same dilemma. Milkweed, Great River Preserve (Photograph by Karen Callan) They had great paying jobs but the chemical waste was killing people... Read the book Toms River and you can get the complete story of how a German chemical company which left Germany because it polluted the Danube came to pristine South Jersey and did the same thing without any care for the people. Just plain profit! Gerardo Tempesta, Harwichport Bridgewater Review Nonprofit Org. Bridgewater State University U.S. Postage 131 Summer Street PAID Bridgewater, MA 02325 Augusta, ME Permit No. 121

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