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DIALOGUE, THE WOODROW WILSON CENTER, SUITE 704,901 D ST., SW WASHINGTON, DC 20024 SUMMER 1995 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 8 LEARNING FROM THE FIFTIES by Alan Ehrenhalt Many Americans long for the virtues of the 1950s-community, security, certainty. To retrieve them, they will have to reconsider their allegiance to other cherished values. 40 THECRISIS OF CONTEMPORARYSCIENCE Daniel J. Kevles David L. Goodstein J. Michael Bishop Science in America is in trouble. No longer assured of boundless federal support, scientists, our authors report, are also encountering redun- dancy in their ranks and hostility from a scientifically illiterate public.

30. The Death of Hume by Stephen Miller The philosopher's death in 1776 rekindled the debate, lasting to this day, over the link between morality and religion.

66. The Paradox of Yeltsin's Russia by S. Frederick Starr

100. From the Heart of the Heart Of the Former Yugoslavia by Ljiljana Smajlovic

114. How to Build a Suburb by Witold Rybczynski

DEPARTMENTS 2. Editor's Comment 127. Periodicals 4. At Issue 154. Research Reports 74. Current Books 156. Commentary 94. Poetry 160. From the Center Cover: Elementary school students perform a daily ritual of the 1950s, pledging allegiance to the flag. Printed in the U.S.A. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

USPS 346-670 AI',\ VOL. XIX NO. 3

TheWilson Quarterly (ISSN-0363-3276)is published in January (Winter),April (Spring),Jiily(Summer),and October (Autumn)by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions: one year, $24; two years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one near, $39; tzw wars, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: $7; outside U.S. and possessions, $8; selected back issues: $7, including postage and handling; outside

P.O. Box 420406, Palm ~oast,"~~32142-0406. (subscriber hot line: 1-800-829-5108.)~ostmaster: Send all address changes to The Wilson ~uarterl;~.~.B& 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32143-0406. Microfilm copies are available from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. U.S. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Saiidusky, Ohio 44870 (for information, call 1-800-221-3148). Editor: Jay Tolson Deputy Editor: Steven Lagerfeld Managing Editor: James H. Carman he Jefferson Lecture, sponsored annually by the Na- Senior Editor: Robert K. Landers tional Endowment for the Humanities, was delivered Literary Editor: James M. Morris this past May by the renowned architectural historian Associate Editor: Diantha Parker T Poetry Editor: Anthony Hecht Vincent Scully. It was a riveting master-class, alternately passionate and witty, but many in the audience noted the piquant Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano irony of the setting: the John F. Kennedy Center for the Per- Design Consultant: Tawney Harding forming Arts. The Center is a structure of formidable modernist Contributing Editors: Linda Colley, pretensions, and Scully's speech was, among other things, a Denis Donoghue, Max Holland, Walter devastating critique of the Modem Movement and its baleful Reich, Alan Ryan, Charles Townshend, influence on the fabric of American communities. Alan Wolfe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown Speaking with the self-deprecating wisdom of a lapsed Researchers: Genevieve E. Abravanel, modernist, Scully detailed the ways the great figures of the Jessica J. Cohen, Natalie C. Gill, movement, from Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright, elevated Robert G. Hargrove, Laura K. Smid originality above all concerns for physical and human context. Librarian: Zdenek V. David But as well as describing what the modernists did wrong, Editorial Advisers: K. Anthony Appiah, Scully pointed to the work of a younger generation of architects Mary B. Bullock, Robert Darnton, who have lately been reorienting their craft in encouraging Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding, ways. This generation, he noted, is respectful of historical Elizabeth Johns, Michael Lacey, John traditions and local architectural vernacular; it is mindful of R. Lampe, Jackson Lears, Robert human scale and the requirements of a healthy civic space. Litwak, Frank McConnell, Richard We at the WQ were gratified to hear Scully endorsing Rorty, Blair Ruble, Ann Sheffield, views that have frequently been expressed in our pages, in S. Frederick Starr, Joseph Tulchin some cases by the very architects he extolled. We point with Founding Editor: Peter Braestrup particular pride to the seminal essay, "The Second Coming of Publishing Director: Warren B. Syer the American Small Town," by the husband-wife team of Publisher: Kathy Read Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (Winter '92). An- Business Manager: Suzanne Napper other contributor on the built environment, Witold Rybczynski, Circulation Director: Rosalie Bruno returns in this issue with an essay from his forthcoming book Direct advertising inquiries to: on the distinctiveness of American urban and suburban design. Bob Rosen Kalish, Quigley & Rosen, Inc. In addition to its own strengths, Rybczynski's essay provides a 850 Seventh Avenue fitting companion to our cover story, "Learning from the New York, N.Y. 10019 Fifties," which considers other ways Americans might go TEL: (212) 399-9500 about repairing their communities. FAX: (212) 265-0986

WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, D.C. Charles Blitzer, Director Congress, The Director of the U.S. B. dark, William T.Coleman, Jr., Michael Samuel F. Wells, Jr., Deputy Director Information Agency, The Archivist of the D. DiGiacomo, Donald G. Drapkin, Dean W. Anderson, Deputy Director United States. Private Citizen Members: Raymond A. Guenter, Robert R. Harlin, for Planning and Management James A. Baker JII, Joseph A. Cari, Jr., Jean James A. Harmon, William A. Hewitt, L. Hennessey, Gertrude Himrnelfarb, James H. Higgins, Eric Hotung, Frances BOARD OF TRUSTEES Carol Iannone, Eli Jacobs, Paul Hae Park, Humphrey Howard, Donald M. Kendall, Joseph H. Hom, Chairman S. Dillon Ripley. Designated by the Christopher Kennan, Donald S. Lamm, Dwayne 0. Andreas, Vice Chairman President: Anthony Lake. Harold Levy, Plato Malozemoff, Edwin S. Ex Officio Members: The Secretary of Marks, Deryck C. Maughan, C. Peter State, The Secretary of Health & Human THE WILSON COUNCIL McColough, James D. McDonald, Martha Services, The Secretaryof Education, The Albert Abramson, J. Burchenal Ault, T. Muse, David Packard, L. Richardson Chairman of the National Endowment Charles F. Barber, William J. Baroody, Jr., Preyer, Robert L. Radin, Edward V. Regan, for the Humanities, The Secretaryof the Theodore C. Barreaux, Conrad Cafrik, Raja W. Sidawi, Ron Silver, William A. Smithsonian Institution, The Librarian of Edward W. Carter, Albert V. Casey, Peter Slaughter, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. The Wilson Center has published the Quarterly since 1976. It also publishes Wilson Center Press books, special reports, and a series of "scholars' uides" designed to help researchers find their wa through the vast archival riches of the nation's capital. All this is part of the ~ikon~enter'sspecial mission as thenation's unusua~"livingmemorial"to the 28thpresident of the United States. Congress established the Center in 1968 as an international institute for advanced study, "symbolizin and strengthening the fruitful relation between the world of learning and the world of public affairs."The Center opened in 1970 ungr its own presidentially appointed board of trustees, headed by former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. Chosen in open annual worldwide competitions, some50 Fellows at the Center carry out advanced research, write books, and join in discussions with other scholars, public officials, journalists, and business and labor leaders. The Center is housed in the original Smithsonian "castle" on the Mall. Financing comes from both private sources and an annual congressional appropriation.

2 WQ WINTER 1995 THEMIND OF DAVIDHUME A Companion to Book I of "A Treatise of Human Nature" OLIVERA. JOHNSON "This book will richly reward the attention not only of Hume scholars, but ofanyone interested in the history of modern philosophy and the history of ideas." - Robert H. Hurlbutt 111, author of Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $24.95

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Knowledge and Belief in America Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought Funding the American State, William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff, Editors 1941-1995 This volume unites the work of theologians, The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance historians, literary critics, and philosophers to W. Elliot Brownlee, Editor explore the interaction between Enlightenment In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of ideals and American religion. The essays explore scholars explores the history of American taxa- religion in the thinking of such representative tion and public finance since 1941 in an attempt figures as Edwards, Emerson, Lincoln, Santayana, to understand the political, social and economic Stevens and Eliot. forces that have shaped the current regime. Contributors: William M. Shea, Peter A. Huff,James Contributors: W Elliot Brownlee, Carolyn C. Jones, T. Kloppenberg, Giles Gunn, Mark A. Noll, Patrick W Edward D. Berkowitz, Herbert Stein, Julian Zelizer, Carey, Jacob Neusner, John E. Smith, Stanley Cavell, Cathie Jo Martin, C. Eugene Steuerle Andrew Delbanco, Henry Samuel Levinson, Denis Woodrow Wilson Center Press Series Donoghue, Schubert M. Ogden, David Tracy, Richard 55240-0 Hardback about $49.95 J. Bernstein Woodrow Wilson Center Press Series 5501 1-4 Hardback about $49.95

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 1001 1-421 1 are available to Woodrow Wilson Associates Call toll-free 800-872-7423. at a 20% discount. MasterCardMSA accepted. Prices subject to change. L The Edgy Decade

ow it has happened is something has a little more to recommend it than we have that only future historians will be been willing to recognize. able to explain: somehow we Indeed, elsewhere in this issue Alan have traveled halfway through the Ehrenhalt goes further, arguing that precisely current decade without giving it a name. The ab- those things that made the decade seem op- sence of such a tag line is, apparently, sorely felt. pressive, dull, and ordinary to some-its re- The editors of the mass-circulation USA Week- stricted menu of personal and consumer end recently held a "Name That Decade" contest, choices, its willingness to take direction from but the best that 700 respondents could come up authority-were two of its greatest virtues. with was "the Whiny '90s." To name a decade rather than let it name This business of naming decades is rela- itself is often to launch a pre-emptive rhetori- tively new. We've just left the Decade of Greed cal strike. If we really have just lived through behind, having already survived the Me De- the Decade of Greed, what's left to argue cade that preceded it. It makes you wonder about? I believe, however, that these last days why we bothered to give them separate of the 20th century have already named them- names. Before these twin decades of selfhood, selves. There is a word that runs through the with a few exceptions (the Roaring '20s), we American consciousness today like the end- were content to let decades speak less "omm" of the uber meditator, for themselves. so ubiquitous that we are only Decades used to be eponymous. barely aware of its presence. The Two words, "the 1960s," conjure up word is edge. We are living in the a larger world of allusions than the WQ Edgy Decade. entire text of the average modern "Edgy" has become the novel-sexual revolution, political upheaval, decade's adjective of choice. It is everywhere. general Dionysian riot, you name it. Need an an- Heaping praise on a novel in the New York tidote? Try "the 1950s." It was the thesis for Times recently, reviewer Michiko Kakutani which the '60s became the grand Hegelian an- saluted the writer's "idiosyncratic vision and tithesis. Or, to put it in lay terms, "the 1950s" is his ability to articulate that vision in wonder- a kind of verbal saltpeter. fully edgy, street-smart prose." The success of To agree on a name for a decade is to agree a new rock band is explained by a newspaper not on its meaning but on the rules of an in- critic in terms of the group's "edgy but ethe- terpretive game about the state of American real" sound. Edginess is apparently de rigueur culture. Thus, "the 1950s" once had the qual- in music: "Flutist To Bring Her Edgy, Progres- ity of an expletive, containing in a way that sive Sound To Town," promised a Houston even the most egregious swear word could Post headline recently. Edge is desirable even not intimations of all that is oppressive, dull, in children's entertainment. Casper, a movie and ordinary. Recently, however, the decade based on the old children's cartoon and comic has undergone an intellectual facelift. Nobody series, was panned the other day by a critic is suddenly claiming that we didn't settle who explained that it just wasn't edgy enough. down, move to Levittown, and raise a family Scholars might say that the term exerts a kind with Mom staying at home while Dad went off of edgemony over popular criticism. to work. The revisionists are not, in other The edge is the place to be. In Washington, words, contesting the essential character of the D.C., devotees of bondage, discipline, and decade. Nor are they mere sentimentalists. other quaint sexual endeavors gathered this They are saying that perhaps that character spring for a "Fetish Fest" at a nightclub called

4 WQSUMMER 1995 you-know-what. Edge is, if at all possible, the ness: even when it is good it is bad. Edgy may thing to be. It is the name of the guitarist of the be bold, unexpected, and exciting; it is also rock supergroup U2. disconcerting and unsettling. The edge is a Many of these examples are drawn from zone of instability. A culture cannot live for the Nexis on-line data base of news stories. long on the edge. Like the slacker, it must Anything on line is edgy. A search through eventually make some choices. Nexis turns up, for the first half of this year, That is exactly what our culture appears to nearly 100 stories headlined with the e-word. be doing. Staying true to the paradoxical (E-mail is edgy too.) Many of the headlines qualities of the edge, it is inching forward and refer to economic affairsÃ‘UDollaFluctuates looking back. Finding itself adrift and ill at Vs. Yen in Edgy Early Tokyo TradeM-which ease in earlier times, as Ehrenhalt writes, is appropriate since much of our current edgi- America has always renewed itself in just this ness derives from economic unease. way. Values and ideas that once seemed hope- "Edge" and "attitude" are the Two Horse- lessly out of date can in fact be renovated and men of the rising Generation X-although its restored. members insist that they have edge and atti- Thus that antediluvian quality, character, tude precisely because they are not rising but was the subject in May of a White House con- drifting in the backwash of the American ference bringing together (among others) Dream, scrambling for leftovers. Those with President Bill Clinton and conservative Re- the most edge and attitude, paradoxically, are publican William Bennett. Bennett has also those who have given up (at least temporarily) picked up the reins of a campaign against gra- on pursuit of the Dream: the "slackers." tuitous sex and violence in popular music that There are, however, larger reasons for was launched during the 1980s by Tipper America's edginess. We are living, after all, at Gore, the vice president's wife. Bennett's tar- the edge of the millennium-or actually two get is the corporate purveyors of popular millennia, if you consider that we are leaving music. one and entering another. In fact, such in-be- Personal responsibility and community re- tweenness or indeterminacy is the essence of sponsibility: these may be the Two Horsemen edginess. Call it fin de millennium confusion. of the era ahead. It's in music, surprisingly, And it is not only a millennium that we are where this can be glimpsed most clearly. Dis- leaving behind. We are postmodern, post- turbing as they are, gangsta rappers and Nine Cold War, and now, it appears, post-New Inch Nails are not what's most important (or Deal as well. But we are pre-We Don't Know even where most of the money is) in music. What. It's good to be on the (cutting) edge, but Jazz, that most American musical genre, is a little scary, too. It leaves you, well, edgy. now dominated by a legion of sparkling young Edge awareness has infiltrated every cor- musicians who have turned their backs on the ner of our consciousness. We increasingly live "free jazz" of the recent past in favor of the more and work, for example, in what we call edge rigorously ordered idioms of 1950s hard bop, a cities. They are new and exciting outposts on form that requires both tight ensemble playing the suburban frontier, but, as even their de- and creative individual improvisation. fenders (including this writer) admit, they are That seems a good analogy for what's also more than a little bland and homoge- wanted today, and it gives us reason to hope neous. They are not comfortable. that we are living not in a netherworld of in- This is one of the essential qualities of edgi- determinacy but at the edge of renewal.

WQ SUMMER 1995 5 Organize & Protect Your Copies of Wilson Quarterly

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Contemplating the turmoil and stress of the last three-and-a-half decades, many Americans idealize the easeful golden days of the 1950s. But as our author shows, the price of security and community may be higher than most Americans are now willing to pay.

BY ALAN EHRENHALT

ost of us in America believe a few simple propositions that seem so clear and self-evident they scarcely need to be said. Choice is a good thing in life, and the more of it we have, the happier we are. Authority is inherently suspect; nobody shouldM have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave. Sin isn't personal, it's social; individual human beings are creatures of the society they live in. Those ideas are the manifesto of an entire generation in America, the generation born in the baby boom years and now in its thirties and for- ties. They are powerful ideas. They all have the ring of truth. But in the past quarter-century, taken to excess, they have landed us in a great deal of trouble. The worship of choice has brought us a world in which nothing we choose seems good enough to be permanent, and we are unable to resist the endless pursuit of new selections-in work, in marriage, in front of the television set. The suspicion of authority has meant the erosion of standards of conduct and civility, visible most clearly in schools where teachers who dare to discipline pupils risk a profane response. The repudiation of sin has given us a collection of wrongdoers who insist that they are not responsible for their actions because they have been dealt bad cards in life. When we declare that there are no sinners, we are a step away from deciding that there is no such thing as right and wrong. We have grown fond of the saying that there is no free lunch, but we forget that it applies to moral as well as economic matters. Stable relationships, civil classrooms, safe streets-the ingredients of what we call com-

SUMMER 1995 munity-all come at a price. The price is rules, and people who can en- force them; limits on the choices we can make as individuals; and a willingness to accept the fact that there are bad people in the world, and sin in even the best of us. The price is not low, but the life it makes possible is no small achievement. Not all that long ago in America, we understood the implicit bargain, and most of us were willing to pay the price. What was it really like to live under the terms of that bargain? Would we ever want to do so again?

n 1975, after a long but singularly uneventful career in Illinois politics, a round-faced Chicago tavern owner named John G. Fary was rewarded with a promotion to Congress. On the night of his election, at age 64, he announced his agenda for everyone to hear. "I will go to Washington to help represent Mayor Daley," he declared. "For 21 years, I represented the mayor in the legislature, and he was always right." Richard J. Daley died the next year, but Fary soon discovered the same qualities of infallibility in Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House under whom he served. Over four congressional terms, Fary never cast a single vote against the Speaker's position on any issue of significance. From the leadership's point of view, he was an automatic yes. And that, in a sense, was his undoing. Faced with a difficult primary challenge from an aggressive Chicago alderman, Fary had little to talk about other than his legendary willingness to do whatever he was told. The Chicago newspapers made sport of him. "Fary's lackluster record,"

THE FIFTIES 9 one of them said, "forfeits his claim to a House seat." He was beaten badly and sent home to his tavern on the Southwest Side to ponder the troubling changes in modern political life. It was not an easy thing for him to understand. The one principle John Fary had stood for during 30 years in politics-obedience-had come into obvious disrepute. The legislator who simply followed the rules as they came down to him invited open ridicule as a mindless hack. No quality is less attractive in American politics these days than obedience-not foolishness or deceit or even blatant corruption. There is no one we are more scornful of than the office-holder who refuses to make choices for himself. There are bumper stickers all over Washington that say, in big block capital letters, QUESTION AUTHORITY. There are none that say LISTEN TO THE BOSS. John Fary made a career out of listening to the boss. Of course, he didn't have much alternative. In the Chicago politics of the 1950s, you could either be part of the machine, and entertain a realistic hope of holding office, or be against it, and have virtually no hope at all. Fary actually began as something of an upstart. In 1951, he ran in the 12th Ward as a challenger to the Swinarski family, which more or less dominated ward politics in alliance with other machine lieutenants. After that unsuccessful campaign, however, Fary made his accommodations to the system; he had no other choice. If Fary ever chafed at the rules of his constricted political world, he never did so in public. He seemed content voting with the leadership, gratified to be part of an ordered political system, content working behind the bar at his tavern when he was not practicing politics in Springfield or Washington. He didn't appear to give much thought to the possibilities of doing it any other way. When he achieved passage of the one notable legislative initiative of his long career, a state law legalizing bingo, he celebrated by inventing a new drink called "Bingo Bourbon" and serving it to his customers on the house.

n the years when John Fary was building a political career out of loyalty on the South Side of Chicago, Ernie Banks was making his baseball career on the North Side. From the day he joined the Chicago Cubs in the fall of 1953, Banks was special: skinny and not very powerful looking, he swung with his wrists and propelled line drives out of Wrigley Field with a speed that sometimes seemed hard to believe. The 1950s were a time of glory for Ernie Banks40 home runs year after year, two Most Valuable Player awards in a row, gushing praise on the sports page-and yet, in other ways, his rewards were meager. He played on a string of terrible Cubs teams, so he never came close to appearing in a World Series, and because the fans didn't buy many tickets,

Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, is the author of The United States of Ambition: Politicans, Power, and the Pursuit of Office (1991). This article is adapted from The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, which will be published this September by Basic Books. Copyright 0 1995 by Alan Ehrenhalt.

10 WQ SUMMER 1995 the Cubs weren't very generous about salaries. Compared with mediocre ballplayers today, Banks was woefully underpaid, even in the real-dollar terms of his time. In 1959, the year he recorded his second straight MVP season, the Cubs paid him $45,000. But Banks never considered leaving the Cubs and going to another team. He couldn't, because he was not a free agent. The Cubs owned him, and according to the baseball rules of the 1950s, his only options were to accept the contract they offered him or leave baseball altogether. Like John Fary, he really didn't have any choice. If Banks spent any time worrying about his limited choices, it didn't show. The Cubs were his team, they had lifted him out of the weedy fields of the Negro leagues, and he belonged with them. After a few years in Chicago, he became famous not only for his home runs but for his loyalty and enthusiasm. He loved to tell reporters about the "friendly confines" of Wrigley Field. Warming up before a doubleheader on a bright summer day, he would say two games weren't enough. "Let's play three!" Banks would exult.

'hat John Fary is to the present-day politician Ernie Banks is to the present-day ballplayer. You can compare him, for example, to Rickey Henderson, who in the last 15 years has stolen more bases than anyone in the history of the game. Henderson will be in the Hall of Fame someday, as Ernie Banks already is. Unlike Banks, however, he has been paid fabulous salaries, and the arrival of free agency has allowed him to jump from team to team in search of money and World Series appearances. And yet he has never seemed content with his situation. Everywhere he has played he has expressed his frustration with his contract, the team management, the fans, and even, sometimes, his own play. The market has made Rickey Henderson free, and it has made him rich. It just hasn't made him happy. The differences between Ernie Banks and Rickey Henderson are, of course, partly a matter of temperament. Some people are content by nature, and some are restless. In another sense, though, the two ballplayers are a metaphor for the changes in American life over the past 40 years. We live today in a time of profuse choice, with all the opportunity and disil- lusionment that it brings. Ernie Banks and John Fary lived in a world where choice was much more limited-where those in authority made decisions that the free market now throws open to endless individual re-examination. This observation applies not only to baseball and politics but to all of the important personal relationships in life. In an average year in the 1950s, the number of divorces in America was about 10 per 1,000 marriages- barely a third of what it was to become by 1980. This was not because divorce was impossible to obtain-although it was difficult in a few states- or because it made anyone an outcast in the community. It was because divorce was simply not on the menu of options for most people, no matter how difficult or stressful life might become. The couples of the 1950s got married on the assumption that it was their job to make things work the best way they could. Like Ernie Banks and John Fary, they played the hand they were dealt and refrained from agonizing over what might have been.

THE FIFTIES 11 People just stayed married in the 1950s, to their spouses, B WAGON TItWÃ‘WKU 8:00 @ MEDICÃ‘Dram to their political machines, to Bette Davit In "The Eliiabeth McQuwnw ~'HO",rn,ng!' A ma" who ,",?*red f,W" Story." Elizabeth McQuteney loins Seth leprosy rttum home. Richard BOOM. Adam' wagon train with a group of 0 HOBBY LOBBY-Wtaur their baseball teams. Corpora- lovely young girls as her charges. She teli the people of the train that sht n 0) U.S. MARSHALÃ‘Polic "Nttdltplnt: A man tells hli ""suspect- taking the girls wtit to begin a "girls' irq wife to pick up a briefcast for him tions also stayed married-to finldiing school." John Cast Bromfield, Paul Abbolt. Ellabeth McQuww Belle Davis m MR. ADAMS AND EVE ...... "International Anair." A" oriental wtw. the communities they grew up Seth Adam, ...... war* Bond count ...... Robert St.i"%> (ate vlillt a nwk set where Eve and Hawk, ...... Terry Wili0" Howad are working. Ida Luplno, with. Any one of a thousand W ...... Frank McGralh (B PLAY OF THE WEEK-Drama B MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY noBright" See Mwi.. 8 P.M. Ch. The O.A. lods a cniiade for a tut rtrip 13. fordetail). examples could illustrate this for teen-me Mt-rod drivers @TO BE ANNOUNCED 0 COURTOFLASTRESORT 8:30 @ MEN INTO SPACEÃ‘AdiBllur point, but one will do: the story "The Karl Hooft Case." On the basis of -water Tank Riicue." During 4" Carl" t"1"m"" b one woman. who Identified doto the moon, one of Colonel McCaute,', men >",?tita heart attack. of the Lennox Corporation and Thf calonel If warned that the man Will "ÃˆÃ survive a moon take-on and landing. its hometown, Marshalltown, Iowa. In 1895, David Lennox invented a new kind of steel fur-

charl" Atdma". nace and set up in business 0 0) 0ZIE AND HARRIET "~ho~eed~ G;~IS?- ~icktalks ~avea his frattrnlly brothers into skiw'ng a making them in Marshalltown. dince I" favor of a trip to the mountain}. As the years went by, his com- Rich sings "Th,,', All" and "You'll NÃˆ pany prospered as a manufacturer of boilers, and later, air conditioners. The Lennox Cor- poration became a reliable source of respectable factory jobs that enabled generations of blue-collar families to enjoy the comforts of middle-class life. Its managers helped with countless local fairs, fund drives, and school- building campaigns. Lennox probably could have improved its profit margins in the 1950s by moving to a place where labor was cheaper, but its leadership never thought of that. The company was married to Marshalltown. Eventually, though, Lennox did begin looking around. In the late 1970s it moved its corporate headquarters to Dallas, arguing that a small town in central Iowa was inconvenient for its executives to fly in and out of. The factory stayed where it was. In 1993, Lennox grew even more restless. It announced that it might have to close the Marshalltown plant altogether. Not because the company was losing money or facing any other sort of crisis, but just because the time had come to seek out the best opportunities. The fact that Marshalltown's very survival might depend on Lennox was of no consequence. "Strictly a business decision," the company vice president said. In the end, Marshalltown managed to keep Lennox-with what amounted to a bribe of $20 million in subsidies paid by a local government that badly needed the money, to a profitable corporation that really didn't. But the lesson is clear: long-standing relationships don't keep a factory open any more. "In terms of the morality of the situation," the mayor of Marshalltown said, "it's just a fact of life." There are, of course, technological reasons why companies have gotten wanderlust in the last couple of decades. Computers and telecommunications have made it possible to assemble products almost anywhere in

12 WQ SUMMER 1995 the world. But threatening to move a profitable company out of its historic home wasn't done in the 1950s mostly because it wasn't thinkable, in the same way that it wasn't thinkable to cancel employees' vacations or fire them at age 50 or 55 when their productivity began to decline. Those actions also would have improved the bottom line. But they were gross in- fringements on the enduring relationship between worker and manager that factory employment was supposed to be. Breaking up that arrangement was not on the menu of options.

f it is true to say of 1950s America that it was a world of limited choices, it is also fair to call it a world of lasting relationships. This was as true of commerce as it was of sports and politics, and it was nearly as true of the smallest commercial transactions as it was of the big ones. When John Fary was not busy at politics, he was the proprietor of the 3600 Club, at the corner of 36th Street and South Damen Avenue, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, where his father had run a tavern before him. Fary lived in an apartment above the bar and operated the place himself most of the time. There was a saloon like Fary's on virtually every block of his neighborhood during most of the years of his life. Each saloon was a sort of community center, a place where stockyards workers, factory workers, cops, and city patronage employees repaired at the end of the day to rest

THE FIFTIES 13 and to recycle their earnings back through the neighborhood. When it came to picking a saloon to patronize, these people actually had quite a bit of choice. Just within walking distance there were a dozen possibilities. Fary's own brother operated a similar establishment a couple of blocks away. But once a customer picked his bar, because he liked the smell of it or liked the people he found there, it was his. The market was not a factor. He didn't switch to another tavern because he heard that Hamm's was available on tap for five cents less. The residents of this neighborhood weren't hard-nosed consumers in the current sense. They had a different view of what was important in life.

t takes only the briefest of excursions back into the daily routine of an imaginary family in John Fary's neighborhood, circa 1957, to demonstrate that theirs was indeed a different sort of life altogether. From the meal that started off the morning, in which the selection ofI cereals was tiny and the bread was always white, to the recreation in the evening, provided by a TV set that received four stations, most of them carrying a western or a quiz show at any given moment, this family lived in a world where choice was highly limited and authority meant something it does not mean any more. It was a world for which Wonder Bread and black-and-white TV are appropriate symbols, and no room needed to be made for Pop Tarts or toaster strudel, the Nashville Network or CNN. If the breadwinner in this family drove to work in the morning, he almost certainly did it without the benefit of radio traffic commentators advising him on the best way to get there. One of the Chicago radio stations actually did institute a traffic alert feature in 1957, with a police officer hovering above the city in a helicopter, but most of the people who heard it were bewildered about what to do with the information. Wherever they were going, they had very few routes to choose from: the option of selecting the least congested freeway did not exist for most of them because the freeways themselves did not yet exist. They chose a city street and stayed on it until they reached their desti- nation. If it was slow, it was slow. Nor did this breadwinner have many choices, whether he worked in a factory or an office, about when to start the workday, when to take a break, or when to go to lunch. Those decisions, too, were out of the realm of choice for most employees in 1957, determined by the dictate of management or by the equally forceful strictures of habit. How to arrange the hours on the job was one of the many questions that the ordinary workers of the 1950s, white-collar and blue-collar alike, did not spend much time agonizing over. The wife of this breadwinner, if she did not have a job herself, was likely to devote a substantial portion of her day to shopping, banking, and the other routine tasks of household economic management. Like her husband, she faced relatively few personal decisions about where and how to do them. Chances are she took care of her finances at a place in the neighborhood, where she could deposit money, cash checks, and, at the end of the quarter, enjoy the satisfaction of recording a regular savings dividend. She knew the teller personally-the teller had been with the bank as long

14 WQ SUMMER 1995 as she had, if not longer. But it was also likely that she knew the manager as well, and perhaps the owner. Once she opened an account, there was no need to re-examine the issue, no reason to check on what the competing bank further down Ar- cher Avenue was offering for her money. They all offered about the same thing anyway. Shopping, in the same way, was based on associations that were, if not permanent, then at least stable for long periods of time. The grocer was a man with whom the family had a relationship; even if his store was a small "supermarket," shoppers tended to per- sonalize it: "I'm going down to Sam's for a minute," women told their children when they left in the afternoon to pick up a cartful of groceries. Because of fair-trade agreements and other economic regulations, the neighborhood grocery of 1957 was in fact rea- sonably competitive in price with the new megagroceries in the suburbs, but price was not the important issue. Day-to-day commerce was based on relationships-on habit, not on choice. If this Chicagoan had young children, there is a good chance she also spent part of her day on some school-related activity, volunteer- ing around the building or attending a meeting of the PTA. When it came to schools, her family likely faced one important decision: public or Catholic. Once that choice was made, however, few others remained. The idea of selecting the best possible school environment for one's children would have seemed foreign to these people; one lived within the boundaries of a district or a parish, and that determined where the children went to school. If St. Cecilia's or Thomas Edison wasn't quite as good as its counterpart a mile away (fairly improbable, given the uni- formity of the product)-well, that was life. It should not be necessary to belabor the question of how all these rituals have changed in the decades since then. Our daily lives today are monuments

THE FIFTIES 15 to selection and to making for ourselves decisions that someone above us used to make on our behalf. We breakfast on choice (sometimes on products literally named for it), take any of several alternative but equally frustrating routes to work, shop in stores whose clerks do not know us, bank in banks where we need to show identification after 20 years because the teller has been there two weeks, and come home to a TV that offers so many choices that the newspaper can't devise a grid to display them all.

n the past generation, we have moved whole areas of life, large and small, out of the realm of permanence and authority and into the realm of change and choice. We have gained the psychological freedom to ask ourselves at any moment not only whether we are eating theI right cereal but whether we are in the right neighborhood, the right job, the right relationship. This is, of course, in large measure a function of technology. Birth control pills created new social and sexual options for women; instantaneouscom- munication by computer made possible all the global options of the footloose corporation. And it is in part a function of simple affluence. Choices multiply in tandem with the dollars we have to invest in them. But our love affair with choice has not been driven solely by machines, and it has not been driven solely by money. The baby boom generation was seduced by the idea of choice in and of itself. Most of us continue to celebrate the explosion of choice and personal freedom in our time. There are few among us who are willing to say it is a bad bargain, or who mourn for the rigidities and constrictions of Ameri- can life in the 1950s. A remarkable number of us, however, do seem to mourn for something about that time. We talk nostalgically of the loyalties and lasting relationships that characterized those days: of the old neighborhoods with mom- and-pop storekeepers who knew us by name; of not having to lock the house at night because no one would think of entering it; of knowing that there would be a neighbor home, whatever the time of day or night, to help us out or take us in if we happened to be in trouble. There is a longing, among millions of Americans now reaching middle age, for a sense of community that they believe existed during their child- hoods and does not exist now. That is why there is a modern movement called communitarianism, and why it has attracted so many adherents and so much attention. "I want to live in a place again where I can walk down any street without being afraid," Hillary Rodham Clinton said shortly after becoming first lady. "I want to be able to take my daughter to a park at any time of day or night in the summer and remember what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid." Those sorts of feelings, and a nostalgia for the benefits of old-fashioned community life at the neighborhood level, are only growing stronger as the century draws to a close. The very word community has found a place, however fuzzy and impre- cise, all over the ideological spectrum of the present decade. On the Left, it is a code word for a more egalitarian society in which the oppressed of all col- ors are included and made the beneficiaries of a more generous social wel-

16 WQ SUMMER 1995 fare system that commits far more than the current amount to education, public health, and the eradication of poverty. On the Right, it signifies an emphasis on individual self-discipline that would replace the welfare state with a private rebirth of personal responsibility. In the middle, it seems to reflect a much simpler yearning for safety, stability, and a network of stable, reliable relationships. But the concept of community has been all over the pages of popular journalism and political discourse in the first half of the 1990s. Authority is something else again. It evokes no similar feelings of nostalgia. Few would dispute that it has eroded over the last generation. Walk into a large public high school in a typical middle-class suburb today, and you will see a principal who must spend huge portions of the school day having to cajole recalci- trant students, teachers, and staff into accepting direction that, a generation ago, they would have accepted unquestioningly just because the principal was the principal and they were subordinates. You will see teachers who risk a profane response if they dare criticize one of their pupils. Or consider the mainstream Protes- tant church. We haven't yet reached the . point where congregants curse their minister in the same way high school students curse their teachers, but if it is even a faintly liberal congre- gation, there is a good chance that the minister is no longer "Dr." but "Jim," or "Bob," or "Kate," or whatever diminutive his or her friends like to use. Putting ministers on a level with their congregations is one small step in the larger unraveling of authority. Authority and community have in fact unraveled together. But the demise of authority has brought out very few mourners. To most Ameri- cans of the baby boom generation, it will always be a word with sinister connotations, calling forth a rush of uncomfortable memories about the schools, churches, and families in which baby boomers grew up. Rebel- lion against those memories constituted the defining event of their generational lives. Wherever on the political spectrum this generation has

THE FIFTIES 17 landed, it has brought its suspicion of authority with it. "Authority," says P. J. O'Rourke, speaking for his baby boom cohorts loud and clear, "has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race." The suspicion of authority and the enshrinement of personal choice are everywhere in the American society of the 1990s. They extend beyond the routines of our individual lives into the debates we conduct on topics as diverse as school reform and corporate management.

f all the millions of words devoted in the past decade to the subject of educational change, hardly any have suggested improving the schools by putting the rod back in the teacher's hand or returning to a curriculum of required memorization and0 classroom drill. The center of the discussion is the concept of school choice: the right of families to decide for themselves which schools their children will attend. Many things may be said for and against the concept of school choice, but one point is clear enough-in education, as in virtually every other social enterprise, individual choice is the antithesis of authority. It is a replacement for it. Similarly, one can comb the shelves of a bookstore crowded with volumes on corporate management without coming across one that defends the old-fashioned pyramid in which orders come down from the chief executive, military-style, and descend intact to the lower reaches of the organization. There are corporations that still operate that way, but they are regarded as dinosaurs. Corporate hierarchies are out of fashion. The literature is all about constructing management out of webs rather than pyramids, about decentralizing the decision process, empowering people at all levels of the organization. The words "command and control" are the obscenities of present-day management writing. As they are, more broadly, in economic thinking. Five years ago, few Americans were familiar with the phrase "command economy." Now, virtually all of us know what it means. It is the definition of a society that fails because it attempts to make economic decisions by hierarchy rather than by the free choice of its individual citizens. It is the most broadly agreed-upon reason for the abject failure of world communism. The communist implosion both reinforced and seemed to validate our generational suspicions about hierarchy and authority in all their manifestations, foreign and domestic, the American CEOs and school principals of the 1950s almost as much as the dictators who made life miserable in countries throughout the world. What has happened in education and economics has also happened, not surprisingly, in the precincts of political thought. There has in fact been a discussion about authority among political philosophers during the past two decades, and its tone tells us something. It has been a debate in which scholars who profess to find at least some value in the concept have struggled to defend themselves against libertarian critics who question whether there is any such thing as legitimate authority at all, even for duly constituted democratic governments. "All authority is equally illegiti-

18 WQ SUMMER 1995 mate," the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff wrote in a landmark 1971 book, In Defense of Anarchy. "The primary obligation of man," Wolff argued, "is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled." It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the record of debate on this subject in the 20 years since has consisted largely of responses to Wolff, most of them rather tentative and half-hearted. Meanwhile, the revolt against the authority figures of the prior generation has spilled out all over American popular culture, into books and movies and television programs. A prime example (one of many) is Dead Poets Society, the 1987 film in which Robin Williams starred as an idealistic young prep school teacher of the 1950s who unwittingly brings on tragedy by challenging two monstrously evil authority figures: the school's headmaster and the father of its most talented drama student. The student commits suicide after the father orders him to give up acting and prepare for a medical career; the headmaster fires the teacher not only for leading the boy astray but for organizing a secret coterie of students who love art and literature and seek to study it outside the deadening rigidities of the school's official curriculum. The message is powerful: true community is a rare and fragile thing, and authority is its enemy. The one way to achieve true community is to question authority-to break the rules. The message of Dead Poets Society cuts across the normal ideological barriers of Left and Right, uniting the student Left of the 1960s and the Reagan conservatives of the 1980s. At its heart is a mortal fear of arbitrary rules and commands, of tyrannical fathers, headmasters, and bosses. E. J. Dionne made this clear in his 1991 book, Why Americans Hate Politics, quoting the 1970 lyrics of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: "Rules and regulations, who needs 'em/ Throw 'em out the door." That song was in fact a tirade against Richard J. Daley. But whether it was left or right hardly mattered. It was a song against authority. The words of such songs may have long since been forgotten by most of those who listened to them, but the tune is still in their heads, even as they have grown into affluence, respectability, and middle age. It expresses itself in the generational worship of personal choice-in speech, in sexual matters, in human relationships of every sort.

f there were an intellectual movement of authoritarians to match that of the communitarians, it would be the modern equivalent of a sub- versive group. The elites of the country, left and right alike, would regard them as highly dangerous. The America of the 1990s may beI a welter of confused values, but on one point we speak with unmis- takable clarity: we have become emancipated from social authority as we used to know it. We don't want the 1950s back. What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent. But there is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is

THE FIFTIES 19 preserved. Every dream we have about recreating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream in the end.

his is a lesson that people who call themselves conservatives sometimes seem determined not to learn. There are many on the Right who, while devoting themselves unquestioningly to the ide- T ology of the free market, individual rights, and personal choice, manage to betray their longing for old-fashioned community and a world of lasting relationships. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was one of them. His 1984 re-election campaign, built around a series of "Morning Again in America" TV commercials featuring stage-set small-town Main Streets of the sort Reagan strolled down in youth and in Hollywood, was a small to- ken of communitarian rhetoric in the midst of a decade of unraveling standards, both economic and moral. But when people tell us that markets and unlimited choice are good for communities and traditional values, the burden of proof is on them, not us. Once the pressures of the global market persuaded Lennox Corpora- tion that it had the moral freedom of choice to make air conditioners wherever in the world it wanted to, the bonds that had tied it to a small town in Iowa for nearly a century were breakable. Once McDonald's begins serving breakfast in a small community and siphoning off business from the Main Street cafe that always provided a morning social center, that cafe is very likely doomed. There is nothing we can do-or want to do, at any rate-that will stop McDonald's from serving breakfast. Once Wal-Mart turns up on the outskirts of town and undersells the local hardware and clothing stores, Main Street itself is in trouble. People do not want to destroy their historic town centers, but they are rarely willing to resist the siren call of cheaper light bulbs and underwear. It is the disruptiveness of the market that has taken away the neighborhood savings and loan, with its familiar veteran tellers, and set down in its place a branch of Citibank where no one has worked a month and where the oldest depositor has to slide his driver's license under the window. It is market power that has replaced the locally owned newspaper, in most of the cities in America, with a paper whose owner is a corporate executive far away and whose publisher is a middle manager stopping in town for a couple of years en route to a higher position at headquarters. In its defense, one can say that the global market onslaught of the last two

20 WQ SUMMER 1995 decades was technologically inevitable, or, more positively, that it is the best guarantor of individual freedom, and that individual freedom is the most important value for us to preserve. Or one can say that the market puts more dollars in the ordinary citizen's pocket, and that, after all, the bottom line should be the bottom line. But, in the end, there is no escap- ing the reality that the market is a force for disruption of existing relationships. To argue that markets are the true friend of community is an inver- sion of common sense. And to idealize markets and call oneself a conservative is to distort reality. What is true of market worship is true in a larger sense of personal choice, the even more precious emblem of the baby boom generation. While, like the authors of Dead Poets Society, we may wish to place community and unrestricted choice on the same side of the social ledger, the fact is that they do not belong together. Wal-Mart offers a bonanza of choice: acre upon acre of clothing and hardware, dishes and stationery, detergent and Christmas ornaments, the option of choosing from among dozens of models and manufacturers, a cornucopia that no Main Street store can compete with even if it can somehow compete on price. Such businesses are built not on choice but on custom, on the familiarity and the continuing relationship that buyer and seller create over a long period of time. The Main Street cafe owed its existence to the irrelevance of choice-to the fact that it was the one place in town to go in the morning. Perhaps that meant that the price of eggs or the incentive to cook them perfectly wasn't what it might have been under a more competitive arrangement. But its sheer staying power provided people with something intangible that many of them now realize was important. The standard argument against this idea is a simple one: when all is said and done, people are entitled to what they want. If they preferred the cafe or the hardware store on Main Street, they would drive Wal-Mart and the franchise restaurants out of business. If they vote with their stomachs to have breakfast at McDonald's, what business is it of a bunch of communitarian elitists to tell them they ought to go somewhere else for the sake of tradition?

his is a beguiling argument, hard to counter, and yet it is much too simple. People want all sorts of contradictory things. They want to smoke and be healthy, to bulldoze forests for lumber and still have the trees to look at, to have their taxes cut without los- ingT any government benefits. The fact that they want to buy their hardware at the lowest cost doesn't mean they want their downtown commercial district to fall apart. What they want is unlimited consumer choice and a stable, thriving downtown all at the same time. Unfortunately, such a combination is impossible. To worship choice and community together is to misunderstand what community is all about. Community means not subjecting every action in life to the burden of choice but rather accepting the familiar and reaping the psychological benefits of having one less calculation to make in the course of the day. It is about being Ernie Banks and playing for the Chi-

THE FIFTIES 21 cago Cubs for 20 years, or being John Fary and sticking with the Daley machine for life, or being one of John Fary's customers and sticking with his tavern at 36th and Damen year in and year out. It is being the Lennox Corpora- tion and knowing that Marshalltown, Iowa, will always be your home. It would be a pleasure to be a baseball fan today and not have to read every fall about a player who won the World Series for his team and is now jumping to another team that has dangled a juicier contract in front of him. It would be nice to have some of the old loyalty back-to be able to root for Ernie Banks instead of Rickey Henderson. But the stability of Ernie Banks's world depended precisely upon its limits. Restoration of a stable baseball world awaits the restoration of some form of authority over it- not, one hopes, the rigid wage slavery of the reserve clause, but some form of authority nevertheless. In baseball, as in much of the rest of life, that is the price of stability. The price is not low, but the benefit is not small. It would similarly be a pleasure to allow one's children to watch television or listen to radio without having to worry that they will be seeing or hearing obscenity, but here too the market has assumed a role that used to be occupied by network authority. Consider television in the 1950s. Certainly no one could plausibly claim that it was not in the grip of market forces. But beyond certain boundaries, the market simply did not operate. No doubt there would have been considerable viewer demand for a pornographic version of Some Like It Hot, or perhaps a version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in which Kirk Douglas was eaten alive in Cinemascope by the giant squid. Those things were absent from television in the 1950s not because no one would have watched them but because there were sanctions against their being shown. There was someone in a position of authority-in this case, a censor- who stepped in to overrule the market and declare that some things are too lurid, too violent, or too profane for a mass audience to see. It is in the absence of such authority that five-year-olds can conveniently watch MTV or listen to Howard Stern, and 12-year-olds can buy rap albums that glorify gangsterism, murder, and rape. It is a matter of free choice. Obscenity and violence sell, and we do not feel comfortable ordering anyone, even children, not to choose them. We are not yet willing to pay the price that decency in public entertainment will require. But if children are not to gorge themselves on violent entertainment, then it is an inconvenient fact that someone besides the children themselves must occupy a position of authority.

ome readers will no doubt object that I am portraying the 1950s as a premodern, precapitalist Eden. I am not that naive. Nobody who spends any time studying the period-nobody who lived through it-can entertain for long the notion that it was a time when people were insulated from market forces. The 1950s were the decade of tail fins, mass-produced suburban subdivisions, and the corruption of television quiz shows by greedy sponsors. The market was immensely powerful; it was the enemy that an entire generation of postwar social critics took aim against.

22 WQ SUMMER 1995 In the 1950s, however, a whole array of social institutions still stood outside the grip of the market and provided ordinary people with a cushion against it. In the last generation, as sociologist Alan Wolfe and others have eloquently pointed out, that cushion has disappeared. The difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them. And the decisiveness of that triumph is written in the values that the baby boom generation has carried with it from youth on into middle age: the belief in individual choice and the suspicion of any authority that might interfere with it.

f course, there will be quite a few people to whom none of this makes any sense, people who believe that individual choice is the most important standard, period; that no society can ever get enough of it; that the problem in the last generation is not that0 we have abandoned authority but that there are still a few vestiges of it yet to be eradicated. Many of these people call themselves libertarians, and arguing with them is complicated by the fact that they are nearly always intelligent, interesting, and personally decent. Libertarian ideas are seductive and would be nearly impossible to challenge if one thing were true-if we lived in a world full of P. J. O'Rourkes, all of us bright and articulate and individualistic and wanting nothing more than the freedom to try all the choices and experiments that life has to offer and express our individuality in an endless series of new and creative ways. But this is the libertarian fallacy: the idea that the world is full of re- pressed libertarians waiting to be freed from the bondage of rules and authority. Perhaps, if they were right, life would be more interesting. But what they failed to notice, as they squirmed awkwardly through childhood in what seemed to them the straitjacket of school and family and church, is that most people are not like them. Most people want a chart to follow, and are not happy when they don't have one, or when having learned one as children, they later see people all around them ignoring it. While the legitimacy of any particular set of rules is a subject that philosophers will always debate, it nonetheless remains true, and in the end more important, that the uncharted life, the life of unrestricted choice and eroded authority, is one most ordinary people do not enjoy leading. There is no point in pretending that the 1950s were a happy time for everyone in America. For many, the price of the limited life was an im- possibly high one to pay. To have been an independent-minded alderman in the Daley machine, a professional baseball player treated unfairly by his team, a suburban housewife who yearned for a professional career, a black high school student dreaming of possibilities that were foreclosed to him, a gay man or woman forced to conduct a charade in public-to have been any of these things in the 1950s was to live a life that was difficult at best and tragic at worst. That is why so many of us still respond to the memory of those indignities by saying that nothing in the world could justify them.

THE FIFTIES 23 It is a powerful indictment; it is also a selective one. It is often said that history is written by the winners, but the truth is that the cultural images that come down to us as history are written, in large part, by the dissent- ers- by those whose strong feelings against life in a particular generation motivate them to become the novelists, playwrights, and social critics of the next, drawing inspiration from the injustices and hypocrisies of the time in which they grew up. We have learned much of what we know about family life in America in the 1950s from women who chafed under its restrictions, either as young, college-educated housewives who found it unfulfilling or as teenage girls secretly appalled by the prom-and-cheer- leader social milieu. Much of the image of American Catholic life in those years comes from the work of former Catholics who considered the church they grew up in not only authoritarian but destructive of their free choices and creative instincts. We remember the inconsistencies and absurdities of life a generation ago: the pious, skirt-chasing husbands, the martini- sneaking ministers, the sadistic gym teachers. I am not arguing with the accuracy of any of those individual memories. And yet, nearly lost to our collective indignation are the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last 30 years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working- class Catholic parish in a big city and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican 11, they don't tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they could have it back. For them, the erosion of both communityand authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

o be sure, America is full of people willing to remind us at every opportunity that the 1950s are not coming back. Ozzie and Harriet are dead, they like to say, offering an instant refutation to just about anyone who ventures to point out something good about theT social arrangements of a generation ago-conventional families, traditional neighborhoods, stabler patterns of work, school, politics, religion. All of these belong, it is said, to a world that no longer exists and cannot be retrieved. We have moved on. And of course they are right. If retrieving the values of the 1950s means recreating a world of men in fedora hats returning home at the end of the day to women beaming at them with apron and carpet sweeper, then it is indeed a foolish idea. But the real questions raised by our journey back to the 1950s are much more complicated, and they have nothing to do with Ozzie and Harriet or Leave

24 WQ SUMMER 1995 It to Beaver. They are questions like these: can we impose some controls on the chaos of individual choice that we have created in the decades since then? Can we develop a majority culture strong enough to tell its children that there are inappropriate ways to behave in a high school corridor, and that there are programs that eight-year-olds should not be free to watch on television? Is there a way to relearn the simple truth that there is sin in the world, and that part of our job in life is to resist its temptations? The quickest way of dealing with these questions is to say that the genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. Once people free themselves from rules and regulations, taste the temptations of choice, they will never return to a more-ordered world. Once they have been told they do not have to stay married-to their spouses, communities, careers, to any of the commitments that once were made for life-they will be on the loose forever. Once the global economy convinces corporations that there is no need for the personal and community loyalties they once prac- ticed, those loyalties are a dead letter. So we will be told many times in the years to come. But is it true? Is the only sequel to social disorder further disorder? There are other scenarios, if we do not mind making a leap to look for them. It is always dangerous to stack up decades one against the other, but it is remarkable how many of the laments and nostalgic reflections of the 1990s sound curiously like those of one particular time in the history of America in this century. They sound like the rhetoric of the 1920s. Seventy years ago, the best-selling book in America was Mark Sullivan's Our Times, a fond chronicle of everyday life before the Great War and a la- ment for the lost community of those years. "Preceding the Great War," Sullivan said, "the world had had a status-an equilibrium." Since then, the most prominent feature of social life for the average American had been "a discontent with the postwar commotion, the turbulence and unsettlement that surrounded him and fretted him; it was a wish for settled ways, for conditions that remained the same long enough to become familiar and dear, for

routine that remained set, for a world that 'stayed put.' " More than anything else, Sullivan believed, the eroding values of the 1920s had to do with technology-with the automobile and the methods of mass production that had transformed the American factory in the first quarter of the 20th century. So it is more than marginally interesting that the creator of those methods, Henry Ford, spent the 1920s mourning so-

THE FIFTIES 25 cia1 change as much as anyone. In 1926, he began the construction of Greenfield Village, a historic replica of the place where he had grown up, complete with gravel roads, gas lamps, and a country store. "I am trying in a small way," Ford explained, "to help America take a step . . . toward the saner and sweeter idea of life that prevailed in pre-war days." Ford believed that the pace of living had somehow accelerated beyond easy comprehension or control. So did millions of other people who were less responsible for the change than he was. "In our great cities," the fin- ancier Simon Straus worried early in the decade, "people break down in health or reach premature senility because of late hours, loss of sleep, fast pleasures, and headlong, nerve-racking methods of existence." The sense of debilitating change and collapsing rules was not simply an idea loose in the popular culture of the 1920s; it was central to the most sophisticated intellectual debate. Walter Lippmann talked about the "ac- ids of modernity" undermining traditional truths and authoritative standards. Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Modern Temper (1929), argued that science had broken life loose from any moral compass altogether. In the years since, historians who have studied the 1920s have struggled to come to terms with its palpable tension and longing for a simpler time. Two decades ago, Roderick Nash set out to write a new book about the period after World War I variously described as the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Jazz Age." He ended up with The Nervous Generation as his title. "The typical American in 1927 was nervous," he wrote in one chapter. "The values by which he ordered his life seemed in jeopardy of being swept away by the forces of growth and change and complexity." It was a point reminiscent of one made a few years earlier, by the historian William Leuchtenburg, in The Perils of Prosperity (1958). Two things about the 1920s stood out most clearly to Leuchtenburg: the loss of community and the loss of authority. "The metropolis had shattered the supremacy of the small town," Leuchtenburg wrote, "and life seemed infinitely more impersonal. It was proverbial that the apartment-house dweller did not know his neighbor. . . . In the American town of 1914, class lines, though not frozen, were unmistak- able. Each town had its old families. . . . The world they experienced was comprehensible. The people they saw were the people they knew. . . . Moral standards were set by the church and by the family. Parents were confident en- forcers of the moral code. By 1932, much of the sense of authority was gone."

t was easy to dismiss those who mourned the social losses of the 1920s by telling them that they were indulging in flights of nostalgic fantasy. The Great War was a social as well as a political watershed; the horse and buggy was gone, and so was the America it represented. AnyoneI who bothered to point to the communitarian virtues of life before the war ran the risk of being trumped by the all-purpose Ozzie and Harriet rejoinder: "Forget it. Those days are over." And they were, in the same sense that the 1950s are gone today. But nobody on either side of the argument had any clue as to what lay ahead in the two decades that would follow: extraordinary group effort and so-

26 WQ SUMMER 1995 cia1 cohesion in the face of the massive challenges of the Great Depression and another world war, back to back. The 1930s and '40s not only produced real communitarian values but generated real leaders and authority figures whose arrival appeared as unlikely in the individualist era of the 1920s as it does amid the individualism of the 1990s. It would be foolish to minimize the tensions and divisions that existed in America all through the Great Depression and war years, or to suggest that those years somehow represented a return to the innocence of the time before World War I. Still, it seems fair enough to say that, under the pressures of crisis, the country developed a sense of cohesion and structures of authority that seemed lost forever only a few years before. Of course, suggesting that community and authority tend to return in times of crisis may not be a very reassuring or relevant argument for the 1990s, a time when both depression and world war seem remote prospects. But could the moral erosion of the present time be, in its way, a crisis sufficient to rival war or economic collapse? And if so, might a swing back to older values be a plausible response? Perhaps that is not so farfetched.

here is an even more interesting case, if one is willing to cross the ocean to look for it. The year 1820 in England was a time of notorious disrespect for the very highest levels of authority. The king and queen were nationalT laughingstocks, exposed as such by a sensational divorce trial that documented the stupidity of both. The political system was distrusted as a cesspool of corruption, with seats in Parliament bought and sold at the constituency level by private wealth, and the Church of England was widely regarded as a bastion of clerical privilege rather than religious devotion. The cultural superstars were artists such as Byron and Shelley, notorious for their rejection of what they considered obsolete standards of family life and sexual morality: Byron boasted publicly of having slept with 200 women in two years, while Shelley was a wifeswapper and founder of a free love colony. The country was in the midst of a widespread and poorly concealed wave of opium addiction that was disabling some of its most promising talents. England's conservative social critics of that time lamented the disap- pearance of authority, community, and all the bonds that had made the place livable in the 18th century. "The ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence on each other," William Wordsworth wrote, "have with these 30 years either been greatly impaired or wholly dissolved." Wordsworth was referring to the 30 years since the events that trig- gered the French Revolution and launched a revolution in manners all over the Western world. To most thoughtful people, 1789 had been a watershed that set "modern times" off from an old regime that grew fainter and more remote with each passing year. To talk to them about a "return" to the arrangements that prevailed before 1789 would surely have struck them as an exercise in fantasy. Certainly few of them believed that, a generation later, England would

THE FIFTIES 27 be in the midst of a period famous to this day for its sexual prudery and obsessive concern with "family values," renowned for its national devotion to a frumpy, widowed queen, and marked by the reform and revital- ization of its religious establishment. Victorian England does not represent a re-enactment of any previous historical time; it merely serves as a reminder that there is a pendulum at work in the manners and values of a society, and that it can swing when no one expects it to. The year 1820 was separated by just three decades from the start of the French Revolution and the arrival of what was thought to be a permanent social transformation. In 1995, it is just three decades since the events of the mid-1960s, the social and moral equivalent of Bastille Day in our own lives. There is nothing farfetched about asking when the pendulum might begin to swing again. One needs to be even more politically careful talking about the England of Queen Victoria than about the America of Ozzie and Harriet. Anybody who refers to it in anything but the most caustic terms risks being labeled an advocate of censorship and sexual repression. But it is nonetheless true, and revealing, that in the past few years a growing number of scholars have suggested that the Victorians have something to tell us about our situation. '~ontem~latingourown society," the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in 1994, "we may be prepared to take a more appreciative view of Victorian moralism-of the 'Puritan ethic' of work, thrift, temperance, cleanliness; of the idea of 'respectability' that was as powerful among the working classes as among the middle classes." Himrnelfarb not only writes with approval of Victorian virtues; she comes close to suggesting that they will reappear sometime in the coming decades. "If in a period of rapid economic and social change, the Victorians showed a

substantial improvement in their 'condition' and 'disposition,' " she argues, "it may be that economic and social change do not necessarily result in personal and public disarray. If they could retain and even strengthen an ethos that had its roots in religion and tradition, it may be that we are not as con- strained by the material conditions of our time as we have thought." As Himmelfarb points out, the Victorian era did not witness any national slowdown in the pace of societal change. Its cohort lived through a time of enormous technological upheaval marked by the appearance of the railroad, telegraph, and camera, and the expansion of the British Empire into a worldwide colossus that made immense fortunes and transformed the economy at home.

hat can be said about the Victorians is not that they reversed the flow of social change but that they searched for anchors to help them cope with it, and that they found them in the familiar places: family, religion, and patriotism of the hokiest and most maudlin variety. And that also seems a fair thing to say about the 1950s in America. They were not years of stasis but of rapid and bewildering change: nuclear tension, population explosion, the creation of a new world in the suburbs, the sudden emergence of a prosperity and materialism that scarcely anyone

28 WQ SUMMER 1995 had expected. The people who lived through this change looked for anchors to help them cope with it all, and found them, however imperfectly, where people normally look for such things: at home, in church, in the rituals and pieties of patriotic excess. They found them in "togetherness" and the basement family room, in the Holy Name Society and the Green Donkeys Social Club, in Bishop Sheen and Walt Disney. It required some pretending-some hypocrisy, if you insist-but it served its purpose.

e are never going to return to the 1950s in America, any more than we are going to return to Victorian standards of morality. And we should not want to return to them. What is past is past. What we badly need to do, once our rebellion against thew 1950s has runits course, is to rebuild some anchors of stability to help us through times of equally unsettling change. For that to happen anytime soon, the generation that launched the rebellion will have to force itself to rethink some of the unexamined "truths" with which it has lived its entire adult life. It will have to recognize that privacy, individuality, and choice are not free goods, and that the society that places no restrictions on them pays a high price for that decision. It will have to retrieve the idea of authority from the dustbin to which it was confined by the 1960s deluge. The middle-aged communitarian who yearns, in the words of Hillary Clinton, to "do what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid," has no alternative but to develop a realism about the natural limits of life that most of the baby boomers have yet to demonstrate. There is a good chance that this will not happen. It is difficult enough for individuals to correct the misconceptions of their youth once they have reached middle age. For the largest single generation in American history to do this in the years remaining to it seems highly problematic. In that case, what really matters is what the next generation grows up believing-those who are children now, who are being raised by the cre- ators of the deluge. What will they think about community and authority, habit and choice, sin and virtue? This generation will come to adulthood in theearly years of the next century with an entirely different set of childhood and adolescent memories from the ones their parents absorbed. They will remember being bombarded with choices, and the ideology of choice as a good in itself; living in transient neighborhoods and broken and recombinant families in which no arrangement could be treated as permanent; having parents who feared to impose rules because rules might stifle their freedom and individuality. Will a generation raised that way be tempted to move, in its early adult years, toward a reimposition of order and stability, even at the risk of losing some of the choice and personal freedom its parents worshipped? To dismiss that idea out of hand is to show too little respect for the pendulum that oper- ates in the values of any society, and the natural desire of any generation to use it to correct the errors and excesses of the one that went before.

THE FIFTIES 29 A scholar once called the late 18th centu y an era of "competitive dying." The ability to die well, preferably with a few well-chosen words on one's lips, was widely seen as a measure of greatness. For the philosopher David flume, our author writes, death provided what many considered the ultimate test of his ideas.

BY STEPHEN MILLER

eventeen seventy-six was a momen- what role does religion play in promoting tous year in Great Britain: Edward morality and political stability? Johnson and Gibbon published volume one of Burke, who thought Smith had made too Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, much of Hume's deathbed composure, ar- Adams Smith's Wealth of Nations appeared, gued that religion played a major role in the American colonies declared their inde- encouraging moral behavior, though they pendence, and David Hume-called the did not say that there was a necessary con- Great Infidel because of his skeptical view nection between the two. By contrast, Smith of Christianity-died at the age of 65. and Gibbon, who admired Hume intensely The death of Hume may seem a minor and thought he had died the "death of a event in comparison with the others, but it philosopher," as Gibbon put it, downplayed was far from inconsequential. The circum- religion's role in promoting the moral life. stances surrounding Hume's tranquil and Somewhere in the middle was Boswell, who very pagan death (probably from colon can- attacked Hume's infidelity-that is, his cer) on August 25, as reported by his close skepticism toward traditional religion-yet friend Adam Smith, occasioned a contro- was haunted by the possibility that Hume versy that continued for at least a decade was right. and involved many of the leading writers of The story of Hume's death properly the age, including Smith and Gibbon, as begins in April 1776, when he composed a well as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, short autobiography, declaring that even and James Boswell. though he now reckoned upon "a speedy The controversy touched upon a ques- dissolution," he did not fear death. "Not- tion we continue to wrestle with today: withstanding the great decline of my

30 WQ SUMMER 1995 David Hume (171 1-1 776), by Louis Carrogis person. . . [I have] never suffered a these six months, has been visibly hastening moment's abatement of my spirits. . . . I me to my end. I see death approach gradu- possess the same ardor as ever in study, and ally, without any anxiety or regret." the same gayety in company." Hume also claimed that he had achieved a kind of se- n early May, Hume had asked his renity that came from being "detached," as friend Smith, a dozen years his junior, he put it, from life. In mid-August, a week to see to the publication of the autobi- before he died, the philosopher continued to ography as well as his Dialogues Con- insist that he was cheerful. To his friend the cerningI Natural Religion, a previously un- Comtesse de Boufflers, he wrote: "My dis- published book he had written in the 1750s temper is a diarrhoea, or disorder in my and lately had been busy revising. When bowels, which has been gradually under- Smith offered a noncommittal reply, Hume mining me these two years; but, within wrote to him again. Smith readily agreed to

HUME 31 publish the autobiography, promising that Smith also toned down an anti-Chris- he would "add a few lines to your account tian remark that Hume had made to him. of your own life," but he promised only to The older man had joked that perhaps he preserve the Dialogues. Finally, 10 days be- could persuade Charon to delay his passage fore he died, Hume amended his will to to the other world in order to give him more make other arrangements for getting his last time to rid the world of Christianity. "Good philosophical work into print. Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only ume was right about his fellow till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches Scot's reluctance to be associ- shut up, and the Clergy sent about their ated with the Dialogues. In a let- business; but Charon would reply, 0 you ter to Hume's publisher two loitering rogue; that wont happen these 200 weeks after the philosopher's death, Smith years; do you fancy I will give you a lease wrote: "I must, however, beg that his life for so long a time? Get into the boat this and those dialogues may not be published instant." In the published version, Smith has together; as I am resolved, for many rea- Hume say: "Have a little patience, good sons, to have no concern in the publication Charon: I have been endeavouring to open of those dialogues." Smith wished that the the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years book, "tho' finely written . . . had remained longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing in Manuscript to be communicated only to the downfal of some of the prevailing sys- a few people." tems of superstition." What explains Smith's reluctance? Per- haps he thought the strongly anti-Christian erhaps Smith changed Hume's re- Dialogues would hurt Hume's reputation. marks because he wanted the dy- But Hume was already widely regarded as ing man to be seen as serene, as anti-Christian. Perhaps Smith thought it someone no longer interested in at- would be impolitic to be associated with tacking Christianity. In his account of such a work. Or perhaps he found Hume's Hume's death, Smith belabored the point corrosive skepticism unpalatable. Whatever that Hume faced death cheerfully, mention- the reasons, Smith's own account of Hume's ing it five times. To back up his account he final days, published as a five-page letter to quoted Hume's doctor, who wrote to Smith the publisher in The Life of David Hume, Esq; a few days before his patient's death that Written by Himself (1777), reveals that Smith Hume "is quite free from anxiety, impa- himself did not want to be seen as anti-Chris- tience, or low spirits, and passes his time tian. In his original letter, he wrote: "Poor very well with the assistance of amusing David Hume is dying very fast, but with great books." Later, the physician recalled that cheerfulness and good humour and with during those final days the philosopher more real resignation to the necessary course "never dropped the smallest expression of of things, than any Whining Christian ever impatience; but when he had occasion to dyed with pretended resignation to the will of speak to the people about him, always did God." In the published version, the reference it with affection and tenderness." to whining Christians disappeared. In the last paragraph of his "well au-

Stephen Miller is the author of Special Interest Groups in American Politics (1984) and Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities (1985). His essays have appeared in many magazines, including the American Scholar, the Public Interest, and Partisan Review. He is completing a book entitled The Two Faces of Religion: Johnson, Hume, and Smith on the Utility of Religion. Copyright 0 1995 by Stephen Miller.

32 WQ SUMMER 199 5 thenticated account" of Hume's final days, Writing to Johnson two months after Smith stressed that Hume was an exem- Hume's autobiography was published, he plary human being. "Thus died our most was vitriolic: "Without doubt you have read excellent and never to be forgotten friend; what is called The Life of David Hume, writ- concerning whose philosophical opinions ten by himself, with the letter from Dr. men will, no doubt, judge variously . . . but Adam Smith subjoined to it. Is not this an concerning whose character and conduct age of daring effrontery?" Boswell said that there can scarce be a difference of opinion." both he and a friend-a professor of natu- Though Smith said that Hume possessed ral philosophy-thought "there was now an "the most extensive learning [and] the excellent opportunity for Dr. Johnson to greatest depth of thought," his main point step forth and attack Hume and Smith. He was that Hume should be admired as a man urged Johnson to "knock Hume's and of virtue regardless of what one thought of Smith's heads together, and make vain and his writings. He spoke of Hume's "good na- ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous. ture and good humour . . . without even the Would it not be worth your while to crush slightest tincture of malignity," and he such noxious weeds in the moral garden?" ended with a remark that recalls Plato's trib- ute to Socrates in the last sentence of the oswell had not always regarded Phaedo: "I have always considered him, both Smith and Hume as noxious in his lifetime and since his death, as ap- weeds. He once said that Smith, proaching nearly to the idea of a perfectly whose course in moral philosophy wise and virtuous man as perhaps the na- heB had taken while studying law at the Uni- ture of human frailty will permit." versity of Glasgow, was his favorite profes- This effort to depict Hume as an 18th- sor. Of Hume he had once said: "Were it not century Socrates seems to have gone for for his infidel writings, every body would naught. Many Christians were offended by love him. He is a plain, obliging, kind- accounts of Hume's pagan death. George hearted man." In early 1776, ~oshellhad Horne, president of Magdalen College, Ox- even considered writing a biography of ford, publicly denounced the autobiogra- Hume. (His famous biography of Johnson phy and Smith's letter in the name of "the then lay 15 years in the future.) In his letter people called Christians." The controversy to Johnson, Boswell did not mention that he continued for many years. In 1786, two had visited Hume seven weeks before his years after Johnson died, William Agutter death. "I asked him," Boswell wrote in his preached a sermon at Oxford entitled "On journal, "if the thought of annihilation never the Difference between the Deaths of the gave him any uneasiness. He said not the Righteous and the Wicked, Illustrated in the least." Hume also told his visitor that reli- Instance of Dr. Samuel Johnson and David gion had a bad effect on morality: "He then Hume, Esq." The attacks annoyed Smith, said flatly that the morality of every religion who complained to a friend that "a single, was bad . . . [and] that when he heard a man and as I thought, a very harmless Sheet of was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, paper, which I happened to write concern- though he had known some instances of ing the death of our late friend, Mr. Hume, very good men being religious." brought upon me 10 times more abuse than Hume's skepticism even in the face of the very violent attack I had made upon the death clearly unnerved Boswell. A few days whole commercial system of Great Britain after his visit, he wrote to Johnson's close in The Wealth of Nations]." friend Mrs. Thrale that "it has shocked me One of those who found Smith's ac- to think of his persisting in infidelity." Des- count offensive was Boswell (1740-95). perately trying to explain away Hume's

HUME 33 beliefs, Boswell said: "My notion is that he, send an angel to set him right." When by long study in one view, brought a stupor Boswell claimed that Hume wasn't worried upon his mind as to futurity. He had pored about his approaching end, Johnson re- upon the earth till he could not look up to sponded: "He lied. He had a vanity in be- heaven." This rationalization apparently ing thought easy." failed to bring Boswell lasting comfort. Five Francis Bacon almost two centuries ear- months later, he noted in his journal: "I saw lier had written that "men fear Death as death so staringly waiting for all the human children fear to go in the dark." He added, race, and had such a cloudy and dark pros- however, that this fear is easily mastered: pect beyond it that I was miserable as far as "there is no passion in the mind of man so I had animation. . . . I absolutely was re- weak, but it mates and masters the fear of duced to so wretched a state by my mental death." Johnson's point was similar. Hume disease that I had right and wrong and ev- mastered his fear of death because he was ery distinction confounded in my view." very much concerned about the world's Boswell knew that the only remedy for opinion of him. the acute melancholy that gripped him was a dose of Johnson. "I should like to hear Dr. ume's death preoccupied Bos- Johnson upon this," he had written in his well to such an extent that he letter to Mrs. Thrale. "What a blessing is it brought up the subject again- to have constant faith in the Christian rev- with Burke-in April 1778. In elation!" Long before, in 1769, Boswell had Boswell'sH journal for that year, there is the asked Johnson what he thought of Hume's following entry: "Talking of David Hume, claim that he did not fear death. Johnson, in Mr. Burke laughed at his life and at Smith's effect, said it was nonsense; everyone feared appendix, 'most virtuous,' etc." Burke told death. When Boswell asked him if "we Boswell that the description of Hume's final might fortify our minds for the approach of days "is said for the credit of their church, death," his great interlocutor replied: "No, and the members of no church use more art Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man for its credit." Burke was referring to the dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is era's influential deists and freethinkers, not of importance, it lasts so short a time. . . . who held that morality depends not on tra- A man knows it must be so, and submits. It ditional religion but on an innate moral will do him no good to whine." sense. Burke, like Johnson, thought too much had been made of Hume's tranquil n September 1777, roughly a year after death. "Here was a man at a great age, who Hume's death, Boswell brought up the had been preparing all along to die without subject again: "I told Dr. Johnson that showing fear, does it, and rout is made David Hume's persisting in his infidel- about it. Men in general die easily." ity,I when he was dying, shocked me much." Though Burke's and Johnson's re- Johnson, as Boswell reported the conversa- sponses to Hume's death were somewhat tion in his journal, professed puzzlement. different-Burke didn't think that men al- "Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume ways fear death-both thought Hume was owned he had never read the New Testa- not as detached as he claimed to have been. ment with attention. Here then was a man Even Gibbon, who deeply admired Hume, who had been at no pains to inquire into the said that his autobiography was tainted truth of religion, and had continually turned with vanity: "there we discover a true and his mind the other way. It was not to be ex- honorable nature, the naive vanity of a pected that the prospect of death would al- child, the independence of a philosopher, ter his way of thinking, unless God should and the courage of a dying man who loved

34 WQ SUMMER 1995 life without pining for it." Hume himself, in gain entry into the circle of Encyclopaedists, the last sentence of his autobiography, ad- where he befriended Denis Diderot and oth- mits that vanity may have played a part in ers. Hume also lived in London at three dif- "this funeral oration of myself." ferent times in his life, but only for relatively But what Burke and Johnson mainly short periods. He much preferred Paris and objected to in Hume was not his vain desire Edinburgh to the English capital, in no small to appear serene as he lay dying. It was his part because the London literary-intellec- unprincipled-to their minds-desire to tual world was dominated by Samuel strengthen the case for infidelity. Hume, JohnsonÃ‘U man of enthusiasm and anti- they thought, had an agenda: he wanted his quated notions," he once told Boswell. (In virtuous life and tranquil death to be proof the 18th century, enthusiasm was always a positive that morality has nothing to do pejorative term, often used to describe reli- with religious faith. gious fanatics. In his Dictionary, Johnson Hume also wanted to brand those who defined it as "a vain belief of private revela- attacked his writings as religious fanatics. In tion; a vain confidence of divine favour or the autobiography, he spoke sarcastically of communication.") the "zealots [who], we may well suppose, Despite Hume's profession of detach- would have been glad to invent and propa- ment, then, the autobiography should be gate any story to my disadvantage, but they seen as his Parthian shot at the world could never find any which they thought Johnson dominated, a world where Hume would wear the face of probability." Such was attacked in print by several well-known zealots, Hume thought, were chiefly to be writers and where he was frequently at- found in the strongly Anglican English lit- tacked by Johnson, albeit only in conversa- erary-intellectual world, a world he held in tion. Hume knew he was being attacked low regard. When Gibbon published the because Boswell often told him so. Boswell first volume of Decline and Fall, Hume wrote appeared to enjoy provoking Hume by to Smith that "I should never have expected mentioning what Johnson said about him- such an excellent Work from the Pen of an or provoking Johnson by bringing up Englishman. It is lamentable to consider Hume. "Hume I knew he [Johnson] would how much that Nation has declined in Lit- abuse," Boswell said in his notebook. In erature during our time." Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), In the autobiography, Hume did not Boswell could not bring himself to record attack England directly. Rather, he point- Johnson's gibes: "He added 'something much edly observed that there is a "real satisfac- too rough,' both as to Mr. Hume's head and tion in living at Paris from the great num- heart, which I suppress." ber of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which that city abounds." Hume ohnson never apologized for his at- spent many years living in France-in part tacks, telling Boswell that "when a because university posts in England and man voluntarily engages in an impor- Scotland were closed to him on account of tant controversy, he is to do all he can his religious views. He lived there in his lessen his antagonist, because author- twenties, when he was writing A Treatise of ity from personal respect has much weight Human Nature (1739-40), and in his fifties, with most people, and often more than rea- when in 1763 he was private secretary to the soning." British ambassador to France. During his Johnson's standard line about Hume second stay he was a famous writer, chiefly and infidels in general was that they were noted for his essays and his History of En- motivated by vanity, which prevented them gland (1754-62), so it was easy for him to from seeing the truth. Hume, he told

HUME 35 Boswell, was "a man who has so much con- ring with a carving of Socrates' head, ceit as to tell all mankind that they have thought of writing a "philosophic drama" been bubbled [i.e. deceived] for ages, and he on his death, and Jacques Louis David is the wise man who sees better than they." painted The Death of Socrates (1787). Gibbon, Johnson's reason for detesting Hume who was friendly with the philosophes was simple: he thought anyone who pro- when he lived in Paris in the mid-1760s, was moted impiety was unprincipled, if not nec- affected by this cult. In a footnote in the De- essarily personally immoral. He also cline and Fall, he implied that Socrates was viewed Hume as intellectually irrespon- a more heroic figure than Jesus, for "not a sible, claiming that he promoted impiety word of impatience or despair escaped from without ever having made a serious study the mouth of the dying philosopher." of Christianity. Johnson (and Burke as well) Even in England and the American felt, as Boswell put it in his journal, that colonies, where anti-Christian sentiment "Hume and other infidels . . . destroyed our was much weaker among artists and intel- principles and put nothing firm in their lectuals than in France, there was a vogue place." for paintings portraying the noble deaths of great men. The American painter Benjamin ohnson, like many 18th-century writ- West launched his career with a depiction ers, often discussed morality by refer- of the death of Socrates. After settling in ring to the passions. He agreed with London, he achieved his greatest popular Hume that the passions could not be success with The Death of General Wolfe suppressed, but unlike Hume he thought (1770), a heroic tableau showing the last Jthat they could best be regulated with the moments of the British officer who fell while help of traditional religion. He took a dim taking Quebec from the French in 1759. In view of the notion advanced by Hume and England, the cult of heroic virtue increas- other writers associated with the Scottish ingly centered on the deaths of great na- Enlightenment-especially Hume's mentor, tional figures rather than those of pagan phi- Francis Hutcheson-that morality stemmed losophers. from an innate moral sense or from what The interest in heroic deaths did not Hume called the "natural virtues." mean that most of the English embraced But Johnson was going against the cur- secular explanations of morality. Indeed, rent of an age that in various ways was seek- there was a religious revival of sorts in the ing to build morality on a foundation other 1750s, and by the 1770s deism was probably than religion. Morality, it was argued, a waning force. The Scottish poet, philoso- stemmed from the "natural" passion of be- pher, and essayist James Beattie was lion- nevolence or sympathy. It was also argued ized by the English literary world for his that in some people-an uncommon few- polemical tract, An Essay on the Nature and morality stemmed from an extraordinary Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Soph- self-command, from a stoic ability to control istry and Scepticism (1770). Johnson and one's passions, so that one could, for ex- Burke praised the book-Johnson saying ample, face impending death tranquilly. In that "Beattie has confuted Hume." The lat- mid-18th-century France, the anticlerical ter was irritated by all the praise heaped on philosophes often sang the praises of those Beattie, whom he called "that bigotted silly pagan philosophers-Socrates, Cato the Fellow." The English, Hume said, were "re- Younger, and Seneca-who chose martyr- lapsing into the deepest Stupidity, Chris- dom rather than compromise their virtue tianity, and ignorance." and integrity. There was a veritable cult of Thus, Hume was an angry man in the Socrates. Diderot, who owned an intaglio mid-1770sÃ‘angry above all, with English

36 WQ SUMMER 1995 The Death of Socrates (1787), by Jacq~~esLouis David.

"zealots" such as Johnson and other mem- cer11i;zgthe Principles of Morals (1751) that while bers of the London literary-intellectual many scientific questions had been resolved, world. The celebration of Beattie and the "men still dispute concerning the foundation attacks on his own work were proof to of their moral duties." In the autobiography Hume that religion was not only false but Hume ruminated about his character, but the harmful; it ruined one's mind because it autobiography of course is not a work of soured the "natural" affections and in- moral pl~ilosopl~y.Moreover, in the autobiog- flamed the passions. In 1768, he had told raphy Hume said he achieved a certain de- Boswell that "it required great goodness of tachment, but the central point of Hume's disposition to withstand the baleful effects moral philosophy is that such detachment is of Christianity." Hume hoped that both his impossible. One cannot escape the passions- autobiography and the testimony of those and trying to do so is a mistake. In the Enqziiry who saw him during his final days might at Hume criticized "the perpetual cant of Stoics least persuade some people that virtue had and Cynics concerning virtueu-meaning no connection with religious faith. their pretension to be "above" the passions. He also attacked "the whole train of f religious faith did not help Hume be- monkish virtues," such as celibacy, fasting, come a man of virtue-and Hume, by penance, and mortification. These mis- all accounts, was a virtuous man- guided efforts to suppress the natural pas- what did? What gave him such self-com- sions have, according to Hume, a terrible mand? Hume spent a lifetime pondering the effect: "they stupefy the understanding and springs of morality, noting in the E?zqi~ityCon- harden the heart, obscure the fancy and

HUME 37 sour the temper." passions, who argued that good-natured Yet, aside from the question of detach- people had no trouble being moral, were ment, the ideas about morality in Hume's misguided. "We can have no dependence autobiography are roughly similar to the upon that instinctive, that constitutional ideas he advanced in the Enquiry-the main goodness which is not founded upon prin- one being that virtue is "natural." To be ciple," he instructed Boswell. sure, Hume was aware that "natural" is a very difficult word to define, yet he used it hus the controversy surrounding frequently in the Enquiry and the autobiog- the death of Hume was not about raphy. In the latter, he said that his conduct whether Hume could be tranquil in stemmed mainly from his "natural temper," 1 the face of death-only Boswell a phrase he used twice. Hume also said he was preoccupied with this The was "a man of mild disposition, of com- controversy was about Hume's ideas: the mand of temper, of an open, social, and idea that morality was not tied to religion cheerful humor, capable of attach- and the idea that religion inflamed the pas- ment. . . and of great moderation in all my sions, turning people into zealots who passions." Hume's ability to regulate his formed violent factions that threatened po- passions, it seems, depended heavily on the litical stability. Johnson and Burke agreed luck of having been born with the right that religion could be a politically destabi- "natural" qualities. He was, as many 18th- lizing force. Johnson's description of the century writers would have put it, a "good- Puritan revolution in his Life of Butler (1781) natured" man. is as negative as Hume's description in his History of England. Yet he thought that on ohnson never attacked Hume in print, balance Christianity was a positive force. yet he took issue with the idea that mo- Smith, much as he admired Hume, rality is somehow "natural." He once thought his elder was wrong to attack tradi- said that "man's chief merit consists in tional religion so violently. He hoped that in esisting the impulses of his nature." Dis- the long run most people would embrace de- Jputing Rousseau's assertion that pity is a ism, or what he called "rational religion," but natural passion, for example, Johnson ar- he was willing to give traditional religion the gued that "Children are always cruel. . . . benefit of the doubt. It "affords . . . strong mo- Pity is acquired and improved by the culti- tives to the practice of virtue, and guards us vation of reason." by. . . powerful restraints from the tempta- Johnson believed that in a world where tions of vice," he observed in The Theory of religious principles were considered a Moral Sentiments (1759). smaller component of morality than "natu- Smith recognized that religion could be ral" feelings and tempers, an increasing a politically destabilizing force, but he was number of people would find it difficult to hopeful that religious zealotry could be con- govern their passions. Indeed, many would tained through a kind of free market ap- end up persuading themselves that they proach. "The interested and active zeal of were prisoners of their passions and that religious teachers can be dangerous and there was nothing they could do to control troublesome only where there is either but them. Johnson did not deny that people one sect tolerated in the society, or where possessed different tempers or dispositions, the whole of a large society is divided into but he thought that making so much of two or three great sects," he wrote in The one's temper or disposition eroded free will. Wealth of Nations. "But that zeal must be Being moral was hard work. Those who altogether innocent where the society is di- underestimated this struggle to control the vided into two or three hundred or perhaps

38 WQ SUMMER 1995 as many as a thousand small sects, of which precept will never prevail against senti- no one could be considerable enough to dis- ment; writing that edifies should arouse 'the turb the publick tranquillity." tear of compassion."' Oliver Goldsmith Late in his life, Gibbon also decided that wrote of one character in his Vicar of Wake- the good aspects of traditional religion out- field (1766) that his "greatest pleasure was weighed the bad. He was so shocked by the in doing good." A contemporary reviewer excesses of the French Revolution that he of Goldsmith's novel praised "the exem- sided with Burke, its most profound critic. plary manner in which it enforces the great "I can almost excuse his reverence for obligations of universal BENEVOLENCE: church establishments," Gibbon wrote in his the most amiable quality that can possibly autobiography. The situation in France, Gib- distinguish and adorn the WORTHY MAN bon thought, revealed that anticlericalism and the GOOD CHRISTIAN!" A person's could breed a fanaticism that was more sensibility-that is, his ability to feel dangerous than religious zealotry. strongly-often became the chief criterion in Hume's failure to persuade even Smith judging his character. and Gibbon, however, was not exactly Johnson's triumph, since Johnson's skepti- hus Johnson and Hume-the cism about "natural" morality fell upon reigning men of letters in late 18th- deaf ears. In the late 18th century, tradi- century England and Scotland and tional religion was powerfully influenced by the main protagonists in the great what many historians have called "the sen- debateT about religion, morality, and politi- timental revolutionn-a loose cluster of cal stability-were odd men out. Their ideas advanced by the Scottish moral-sense views were rejected by the mainstream of theorists, as well as by Rousseau, especially British thought: Johnson's because he op- in Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761). Man posed the age of sentiment, Hume's because was naturally good, in the new view, and he rejected traditional religion. Yet their the passion of benevolence was a strong ideas speak powerfully to questions we force in human beings. Morality was a func- loudly debate today: What are the foundation of strong feeling-a feeling that was tions of morality? Does religion inflame the pleasurable. passions or help to regulate them? More In the Sentimental Magazine, a journal than 200 years later we are still seeking an- published in the mid-1770s, a writer argued swers to the questions that were raised by that "moralists . . . must be sensible that the death of David Hume.

HUME 39

The Crisis of Contemporary Science

With the United States no longer engaged in war, hot or cold, American science is entering a new-and uncertain-age. The close relationship between science and government is being redefined. The exponential growth of the scientific enterprise is at an end. And science itself comes increasingly under attack. Our authors explain.

BY DANIEL J. KEVLES

ot many years ago in the tor Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, which is the United States, the special country's flagship machine, spitting out par- relationship between sci- ticles at one trillion electron volts. ence and government Enthusiasts of the SSC argued that it was seemed as permanent as essential to further progress in elementary an old-fashioned mar- particle physics. Not only would it guarantee riage. Whatever one partner requested, the the nation's strength in the field against all other was more than eager to provide. international competitors, but the technical In the early 1980s, for example, American innovations required to build the machine physicists in the field of high-energy particle for example, more powerful superconducting physics urged the Reagan administration to magnets-would yield industrial and medi- fund construction of a gargantuan high-en- cal dividends long into the future. In 1987, the ergy particle accelerator-the Superconduct- project won the support of the Reagan admin- ing Super Collider, commonly called the SSC. istration, and in 1989, Congress voted deci- In an underground, circular tunnel some 52 sively to fund construction of the machine- miles in circumference, two beams of protons it would be located in Waxahachie, Texas, would be accelerated in opposite directions, near Dallas-at a cost of $5.9 billion. each to an energy of 20 trillion electron volts. Then, astonishingly, just three years later, The huge subterranean donut would encircle the partnership faltered. In June 1992, the an area 160 times as great as that enclosed by House of Representatives voted to terminate the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelera- the SSC. The margin of defeat for the project

SCIENCE 41 was a hefty 51 votes. Scientists who supported on Medical Research also brought off several the Collider were stunned. Forty physicists, miracles, including the development of peni- including 21 Nobel laureates, expressed their cillin. shock and dismay in a letter to President With the war nearing its conclusion, it George Bush and House members, pointing seemed evident to many policymakers and out the SSC's importance to America's scien- scientists that for the sake of the nation's mili- tific prowess. The Bush administration and tary security, public health, and economic the Senate then came to the project's rescue. welfare, the federal government should sup- The next year, however, the House tried port programs of basic and applied scientific again, and this time it succeeded. In October research and training in academic institutions, 1993, the SSC died, a victim of the post-Cold the traditional source of new scientific knowl- War outlook. Senator Dave Durenberger (R.- edge and new scientists. The question was Minn.) explained the change in blunt terms: how to do so. Two fundamentally different "If we were engaged in a scientific competi- approaches competed for acceptance. tion with a global superpower like the former Soviet Union, and if this project would lead enator Harley M. Kilgore, a New Deal to an enhancement of our national security, Democrat from West Virginia and a then I would be willing to continue funding staunch ally of organized labor, fa- the project. But. . . we face no such threat." vored what could be called a "social Leading physicists were profoundly dis- welfare"s approach. Kilgore, a small-town law- mayed by the collider's demise. They vari- yer, National Guardsman, Legionnaire, Ma- ously declared that high-energy physics had son, and past Exalted Ruler of an Elks lodge, no future in the United States, that the coun- was quick to admit "utter, absolute igno- try was relinquishing its role as a scientific rance" of science and technology. However, leader, and that, as Roy Schwitters, the head during wartime hearings on ways of better of the project, remonstrated, "curiosity-driven mobilizing the nation's technological re- science is [now regarded as] somehow frivo- sources, he had learned a good deal about the lous and a luxury we can no longer afford." importance of science to the national interest. Some scientists, with a mixture of resentment Now, looking ahead to postwar America, he and regret, declared that the long-standing began to develop legislation that called for partnership between American science and federal research activities to be planned in ac- the federal government had come to an end. cordance with liberal social purposes such as In fact, it hadn't. But the alliance is being aiding small business, fostering pollution con- redefined. To understand what is happening, trol, and providing low-cost rural electrifica- it is necessary to go back to the partnership's tion. Kilgore also wanted at least part of the beginning. money in all scientific fields to be distributed During World War 11, civilian scientists geographically. And he urged federal support working under the auspices of the Office of of the social sciences, then widely regarded as Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) tools for distributing the benefits of science achieved military miracles. The physicists- and technology more equitably. who produced microwave radar, proximity Opposing Kilgore's social welfare notions fuses, solid-fuel rockets, and the atomic were Vannevar Bush, head of OSRD, and bomb-were the most conspicuous of the sci- most of America's high-level research scien- entists, but members of the OSRD Committee tists. The Massachusetts-born son of a minis-

Daniel J. Kevles is a professor of humanities at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1995,2nd ed.) and In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985). Copyright 0 1995 by Daniel }. Kevles.

42 WQ SUMMER 1995 ter, Bush (1890-1974) was a no-nonsense elec- mental knowledge and depleted the supply of trical engineer with a strong sense of public trained men and women able to generate it. service. He had spent most of his prewar ca- The welfare of the nation demanded the re- reer on the faculty of the Massachusetts Insti- plenishment and enlargement of its scientific tute of Technology, where the electrical engi- investment. But this had to be done in the neering curriculum emphasized training in right way-and that way, he was sure, was the basic sciences and the department stressed not Kilgore's. research. During his MIT years, he Partly to head off the senator, Bush

Interaction Halls The SSC would have accelerated two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light before they collided.

/ 7-'-

-sscProton Beams distinction for his own research, especially for the invention and development persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the differential analyzer, an early type of to ask him to prepare a report on postwar computer. He also played an influential role science policy. Bush delivered the report to in transforming MIT into a research-oriented President Harry S Truman in July 1945, out- institution at the vanguard of both high-tech lining a policy that, in its essentials, would engineering and basic science. ultimately prevail. Bush fully recognized the powerful inclination in America's "practical" culture to fos- ush's approach in Science-the End- ter the applications of knowledge rather than less Frontier, as the report was called, the advancement of knowledge as such. From could not have been more different the war effort, he also knew that advances in from Kilgore's: Unlike the senator, esoteric, seemingly impractical fields such as Bush gave no consideration to the social sci- nuclear physics and microbiology could lead ences, which he regarded as intellectually to the creation of powerful new weapons and shoddy, little more, indeed, than political pro- medical agents. In his view, the wartime pro- paganda masquerading as science. His report duction of such technological miracles as the also made no mention of the geographical dis- atomic bomb and penicillin had drawn tribution of research funds; Bush believed that heavily on the capital of basic science, and by funding should be distributed among the best doing so had retarded the growth of funda- investigators, wherever they were located.

SCIENCE 43 ter for a science-governmentpartnership that was to last for almost a half-century. Still, not everything went according to Bush's plan. By the time the National Science Foundation (NSF) was established in 1950, it had already been pre-empted in the medical area by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had been set up in "148 as an "umbrella" to cover the National Cancer In- stitute and the new National Heart Institute, and which now comprised five more research institutes, for a total of seven. In the military area, too, the National Science Foundation was vastly overshadowed. In his postwar science blueprint, Bush had not anticipated that the peace that fol- (He maintained, with considerable justifica- lowed World War I1 would soon turn into the tion, that most of the significant progress in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and commu- scientific field is generated by the most ca- nism. But he soon found that the imperatives pable practitioners, a relatively small group.) of that struggle would make national security And his report rejected the idea of targeting the predominant focus of federal policy for research to particular social or economic pur- scientific research and development (R&D). poses. Above all, Bush held that the social and Contrary to his plan, some 90 percent of fed- economic benefits of basic scientific research eral R&D funding would come not from the and training were best realized not by the di- National Science Foundation but from the rectives of politicians but by the mechanisms armed services, which were consolidated in of the free market, by private initiative. Fed- the Department of Defense in 1947, and from eral science policy, his report stressed, should the Atomic Energy Commission, which Con- be insulated from political control. gress established in 1946. (Although a civilian Bush proposed creation of a "National agency, the commission devoted its research Science Foundation" to serve as the flagship efforts overwhelmingly to the military uses of agency of basic research and training in all the atomic energy, especially the development of major areas of science, including those related nuclear, and then thermonuclear, weapons.) to medicine and the military. He staunchly With the outbreak of the Korean War in opposed military domination of science in 1950, the defense R&D budget more than peacetime, in part because he believed that quadrupled, to $3.1 billion in fiscal 1953. Some military influence in American life ought to be of it was spent on "basic" research, which, limited, but also because he thought that ci- while seemingly impractical, might unexpect- vilian scientists who were independent of edly pay enormous practical dividends (as re- military control (as they had been under search into the atomic nucleus had, in the OSRD) were better able to produce worth- form of the atomic bomb). Another portion while innovations, even for military purposes. went to basic defense research, that is, re- Released to the public on July 19,1945, search into phenomena closely related to mili- Bush's report became, as an OSRD staff mem- tary technologies. A larger amount of the ber remarked, "an instant smash hit," ap- money was devoted to "applied research, plauded in scores of editorials across the ideo- intended to produce a specific technology logical, partisan, and geographical spectrum. (such as an airplane). And the lion's share of Science-the Endless Frontier became the char- the R&D funds went for "development"-

44 WQ SUMMER 1995 turning a technological prototype into a fin- for science and technology rose with the tide, ished piece of hardware. reaching $16 million in 1956. The NSF sup- The terminology was loose; one sort of plied a small but significant supplement to the research could easily shade into another. But enormous patronage that the Defense Depart- whatever the labels, a lot more R&D was un- ment and the Atomic Energy Commission dertaken. By 1957, the demands of high-tech gave to the nation's universities for research national security-nuclear warheads, rockets and graduate training in physics, electronics, and missiles, antisubmarine warfare and con- aeronautics, computers, and myriad other tinental defense systems, and scientific man- branches of the physical and biological sci- power-had increased federal R&D expendi- ences and engineering. In 1955, the NIH bud- tures another 10 percent in constant dollars. get totaled $81 million and was climbing. Part High-tech industrial research increasingly of the money went to NIH laboratories in the became a ward of national security, with de- Washington, D.C., area, but at least one-third fense projects supplying an ever-larger frac- of it was devoted to research fellowships for tion-the portion crossed the 50 percent mark promising young biomedical scientists and for in 1956Ã‘o total expenditures for industrial basic and applied biomedical research con- research. ducted in universities and medical schools. As much as the federal government was he military gave lavish sums to large spending on science and technology-$3.9 research universities, supplying billion in fiscal 1957, or some five percent of them with roughly one-third of all the federal budget-widespread fears soon their federal R&D funds. Most of the developed that it was not enough. On Octo- restT came from the Atomic Energy Comrnis- ber 5,1957, Americans were shocked to learn sion and, to lesser extents, from the National that the Soviet Union had launched the Science Foundation, NIH, and the Depart- world's first artificial Earth satellite, a 184- ment of Agriculture. A sizable fraction of the pound capsule called Sputnik I. Then, 29 days military support went to basic research, later, Sputnik II, weighing more than 1,120 which, to quote a later Defense Department pounds, was sent aloft, packed with a maze directive, was recognized "as an integral part of scientific instruments and a live dog. The of programmed research committed to spe- two Sputniks revealed that the Soviets pos- cific military aims.'' sessed impressive rocket, guidance, and life- Typical of such activity was the Research support capabilities. After December 6, when Laboratory in Electronics at MIT, created to extend the basic microwave research that had been conducted there during the war. Sup- ported by the three armed services, the work was intended to accelerate the transfer of advanced atomic, molecular, solid-state, and microwave physics to engineering practice. The military also became the principal sup- porter of basic scientific research as such, particularly via the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which before the NSF was established had moved quickly to support the work of as- tronomers, chemists, physiologists, botanists, logicians, psychologists, computer scientists, and nuclear physicists, among others. Washington's nondefense R&D budget Vannevar Bush: a no-nonsense federal science policy

SCIENCE 45 the U.S. attempt to launch a satellite from would speed up protons to an energy twice Cape Canaveral fizzled in a cloud of brown- that of the most powerful proton accelera- ish-black smoke, American alarm at the Soviet tor in the U.S. budget. At the time, a pro- achievements increased. Much hand-wring- posal from Stanford University was pend- ing and self-flagellation ensued. The Ameri- ing at the Atomic Energy Commission for a can character was said to be materialistic and 10-billion-voltlinear accelerator that would flabby, and America was said to be lagging send electrons down a two-mile tunnel behind the Soviet Union in science and tech- through the hills near Palo Alto; it would nology. "Ten years from now the best scien- cost $100 million and be the most powerful tists in the world will be found in Russia," the electron accelerator in the world. In May physicist Edward Teller warned. 1959, President Eisenhower announced that The Eisenhower administration prompt- he would ask Congress for the money, de- ly established a new White House post of spe- claring that progress in this field was vitally cial assistant to the president for science and important to the nation. technology, and MIT president James R. Killian, Jr., was named to fill it. The federal t was not the intellectual content of the government undertook crash programs to field that was so critical. The more ener- improve high school science facilities and to getic the physical processes that were in- assist college students in critical scientific vestigated, the less they had to do with fields. In 1958, the National Aeronautics and theI world of nuclear or thermonuclear pro- Space Administration (NASA) was estab- cesses. As the physicist Robert Wilson said lished to oversee the nation's nonmilitary ac- when he testified in favor of constructing the tivities in space research and development. original Ferrnilab accelerator in the mid-1960s, "How much money would you need particle accelerators have nothing to do di- to . . . make us even with Russia . . . and prob- rectly with national defense. But the technolo- ably leap-frog them?" Representative James gies involved in building and operating accel- G. Fulton (R.-Penn.), asked NASA chief T. erators-such as high-speed electronics and Keith Glennan. "I want to be firstest with the data analysis-paid real-world dividends. mostest in space, and I just don't want to wait Most important, in terms of the Cold War, the for years." pursuit of high-energy physics provided na- That goal was not achieved overnight, but tional prestige and an insurance policy: if it didn't take long for federal R&D expendi- something important to national security un- tures to skyrocket. Between 1957 and 1967 expectedly emerged from the work, the they quadrupled, to some $16.5 billion a United States would have that knowledge year-about 11 percent of the federal bud- ahead of the Soviet Union. get-including more than $2 billion for basic For academic scientists, the quarter-cen- research. In part because of the high priority tury after World War I1 was a golden era. Not given to the space program and to biomedi- only was federal money freely available, but cal research (the NIH budget reached $400 their own professional judgment was given million in 1960 and $1.4 billion in 1967), the great weight in determining how it was spent. defense-related share of total federal R&D fell The partnership between science and govem- from three-fourths to a bit less than one-half. ment might have been dominated by the con- The Cold War competition kept the fed- cerns and agencies of national security, with eral dollars flowing for scientific projects the NSF given only a minor role to play, but that were deemed significant. In 1958, an the system still worked pretty much as Bush advisory panel of physicists pointed out had proposed. The Department of Defense that the Soviet Union proposed to build a paid attention to what leading academic sci- 50-billion-volt synchrotron, a machine that entists and engineers said was worth study-

46 WQ SUMMER 1995 ing, and grants and contracts went to the scientists and en- National R&D Funding gineers, and the colleges and universities, that were ad- Billions of constant 1987 dollars judged most capable-regardless of the resulting geo- Avera e annual rate of change graphical and institutional concentration of federal dollars. Without overt political control, the system produced 1.4 basic scientific and technological knowledge, as well as Total R&D trained technical manpower. 80 sources\ F--- The system proved ^-.' 60 - ' /----- highly fruitful, to say the least. e It yielded not only nuclear ~/:;~y-0-- ' "^\ / . weapons and intercontinental 40 -// - -- '- Federal sources //-- I-"--- missiles but jet planes, com- 0 puters, silicon chips, nuclear 20 -d#------F reactors, and Earth satellites for communications and sur- 0 veillance; chemotherapies for 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 '92 cancer and other medical Source: National Science Foundation, National Patterns of R6D Resources: 1992 marvels; advances in molecu- Since 1985,growth in the nation's total (inflation-adjusted) expenditures lar genetics, particle physics, on R&D has been slow, with federal funding declining in the early '90s. andplanetary science; and the landing of men on the moon, not to mention myriad consumer items and, ence policy, remarked that Senator Kilgore's indirectly, millions of jobs. American scien- "central notions are slipping up on us again." tists in this golden age received more than As the nation became more concerned three dozen Nobel Prizes, and the United with poverty, racial inequality, and urban States became the world's leading scientific decay, left-of-center critics turned a skeptical and technological nation, a mighty and domi- eye on federally supported science, particu- nant producer of scientific knowledge and larly its unresponsiveness to social problems high-tech goods. and its insulation from political scrutiny and Yet for all that, the system was, in truth, control. As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam not as free of "politics" as it seemed. The de- War escalated, the criticism turned into sear- cision to make national security the para- ing attacks on universities for allowing the mount consideration in research policy, the Defense Department to play so large a role in decision to allow scientists and engineers academic research and training, and on sci- wide latitude in their choice of research pro- ence and scientists for their close relationship grams, and the decision to leave it up to the with the military. free market to determine what to do with the resulting social and economic benefits-all he left-of-center critics had allies these were, in reality, political decisions and, among fiscal conservatives disas such, subject to change. tressed by the federal scientific In 1965, Harvard University political sci- enterprise's increasing absorption of entist Don K. Price, a respected analyst of sci- taxT dollars. While the federal budget had

SCIENCE 47 grown elevenfold since 1940, the R&D budget ing any research not directly related to a spe- had exploded some two-hundredfold, a rela- cific military purpose. Although the tive growth rate that was bound to draw the Mansfield amendment was dropped from the attention of budget hawks sooner or later. By military authorization bill the next year, the the late 1960~~a coalition of liberal and con- Pentagon took it lastingly to heart. servative critics had succeeded in bringing the Despite the inroads made by Kilgore-style geometric growth of federal spending for sci- social welfare-ism, the U.S. government re- ence to a halt. On college campuses and in the mained committed to the hard core of Bush's halls of Congress, the pressure grew to limit vision-to federal responsibility for basic sci- the military's role in academic research and entific research and training, to the involve- the scientific establishment's role in public ment of academic and industrial scientists in policy, and, above all, to subject the federal the policy process, and to the awarding of scientific system to greater control in the in- research funds only to the better investigators. terest of social welfare. Liberals worked to Science policymakers and advisers often man- shift R&D funds into areas they considered aged to interpret mandates for "practical" more socially useful, such as pollution control, research programs in such a way that basic and also sought to bring about a more equi- investigations were funded. For example, table social, institutional, and geographical war-on-cancer money paid for basic research distribution of R&D dollars. into the mechanisms that transform healthy President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was cells into malignant ones, and so sustained the intent on waging a "war" on poverty as well work that led J. Michael Bishop and Harold as the war in Vietnam, kept asking his sci- Varmus, at the University of California, San ence advisers what science had done for Francisco, to their Nobel Prizewinning dis- "grandma." He instructed the managers of covery of oncogenes. federal science to share the wealth and see about applying all the scientific knowledge evertheless, the disturbing already accumulated. LBJ's successor, Presi- trends in federal R&D policy dent Richard M. Nixon, also stressed the during the 1970s set off various seemingly practical. He favored technol- alarms. Some defense specialists ogy-the supersonic transport, the fast- contended that the reductions in Pentagon breeder reactor, and antiballistic missiles- spending, including that for R&D, were mak- over science, and considered the "war" on ing the United States militarily vulnerable. cancer more important than the advance- Other worried analysts pointed to the increas- ment of fundamental biology. ingly vigorous foreign competition, especially By the mid-1970s, the federal R&D bud- from Japan, that the United States faced in get had, in constant dollars, become 20 per- technological markets not only abroad but at cent smaller than what it had been in 1967. home. Corporate and academic leaders Moreover, environmental, energy, and health claimed that excessive government regulation research commanded a larger proportion of was choking industrial and academic science, the total outlay, while the space program's perhaps even threatening freedom of scientific share had been cut by half and the defense- and intellectual inquiry. related proportion had edged down further, By the late '70s, more and more people to 46 percent. In 1969, Senator Mike Mansfield were arguing that American military and eco- (D.-Mont.), a former professor of history and nomic security required an enlarged invest- political science who was eager to reduce the ment in R&D and a revival of scientific au- military's influence in academic life, had tonomy. The latter would be accomplished by slipped a section into the military authoriza- loosening the government's controls on re- tion bill prohibiting the Pentagon from financ- search it funded and by increasing the money

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In FW'S Financial Planner, you'll find better ways to lower your taxes and increase your returns through features covering everything from investing in art to 401(k) advice to estate planning. You'll also appreciate our hallmark Independent Appraisals (a regular feature) containing statistics and rankings of over 1,300 NYSE and ASE issues, and 800-plus OTC issues. Just fill out the attached postpaid card to receive your two free issues of FW. Read them, use them and evaluate them. If it's not for you, just return the invoice marked "cancel." You'll owe nothing and the free issues are yours to keep. But it's our bet that once you read FW, wild horses couldn't drag you away. If you agree, then pay just $19.95 and we'll send you 23 additional issues, 25 in all. That's 47% off the regular subscription price! So take advantage of the special offer by mailing the card today! Or for faster service, call 800-829-5916. obtained from alternative sources, particu- inserted into that of another organism-for larly industry. "Our engineering and scientific example, a bacterium or a mousewhere the base is disappearing," House Armed Services function of the gene could be studied, or a Committee chairman Melvin Price (D.-111.) valuable protein could be produced. Stanford warned. In the view of many experts, Business and the University of California jointly ob- Week reported, "the future health of the tained a patent on the technique, which they nation's economy . . . requires a much more licensed to biotechnology companies. Among benign environment for industrial R&D than the first to make use of it was Genentech, has existed over the past decade." which enjoyed a spectacular success on the stock market when it went public in 1980. s a result of the growing concerns, University patenting of the products of federal research expenditures basic research and their licensing into the grew during the Carter adminis- marketplace appeared to be advantageous to tration and further increased un- academic institutions, new high-tech busi- derA President Reagan. By the time work began nesses, and America's economic competitive- on the Superconducting Super Collider, fed- ness. In academia, however, there was wide- eral R&D expenditures (in constant dollars) spread apprehension that professorial in- were 20 percent higher than they had been at volvements with commercial firms would the predownturn peak, in 1967. The largest lead to unsavory exploitation of university share of the increase went to the Department resources and students, and might drive out of Defense, whose research programs in- research that had no market promise. Despite cluded semiconductors, optics, lasers, and in- all the worries, the incentives pulling aca- tegrated circuits. These were things that could demic biologists and their universities toward yield gratifying economic results as well as commercialization-big hits such as military ones. Similarly, between 1981 and Genentech-were too strong to resist. 1990, the NIH budget (in constant dollars) rose about 50 percent, two-thirds more than n the interest of generalizing the policies the increase in total federal outlays. And at the and practices that fostered the biotech- end of the 1980s, the government established nology industry, the federal government the Human Genome Project, which was esti- moved to encourage closer collaboration mated to cost $3 billion over 15 years. De- betweenI industry and researchers. In 1980, signed to map and sequence all the genes in Congress passed legislation to promote com- the human genome, the project would not mercial use of inventions arising from feder- only accelerate biomedical research but en- ally sponsored R&D at nonprofit institutions. large the nation's capacity in biotechnology. The new patent law made uniform across all Policymakers and biotechnologists con- government agencies what had been the prac- sidered biomedical research an important tice in some, including NIH-namely, to grant means of strengtheningthe nation's high-tech property rights in such inventions to institu- competitiveness. The emerging biotechnology tions that would seek patents on them and li- industry was founded on basic research that cense the rights in the market economy. Six the NIH had supported, particularly the in- years later, Congress passed a law to encour- vention of the technique of recombinant DNA age the commercial use of technologies de- during the 1970s by Herbert Boyer and vised in federal laboratories by, among other Stanley Cohen, of the University of California, things, authorizing government agencies or San Francisco, and Stanford University, re- their employees to license patents on such spectively. With recombinant DNA, a gene technologies to private industry. from one organism-say, a human being- Industry responded to the incentives for could be snipped from its native genome and academic collaboration, which were strength-

50 WQ SUMMER 1995 ened by university promises of often exclusive National Institutes of Health. patent-licensing arrangements with corpora- Science policy had also become politi- tions that supported campus research. Be- cized in a more profound sense: the allocation tween 1977 and 1986, industry patronage of of resources for R&D had been incorporated academic research grew more than fourfold, into the open, conventional political process increasing its share of expenditures for uni- and become subject to the play of competing versity R&D from around three percent to interest groups, especially in Congress. Before almost six percent. the late 1960s, the president and the federal In some respects, the shift in R&D policy bureaucracy had held the upper hand in most during the 1980s represented a revival of the areas of science and technology policymaking. fuller vision advanced in Science-the Endless They controlled the making of the budget, and Frontier. Vannevar Bush would have been they could marshal enormous technical exper- pleased by the resumption of vigorous sup- tise to back up their policy choices. port for basic research, the marked retreat from the socially purposeful R&D of the ut they lost that monopoly of power 1970s, and the renewed reliance on market when Congress became more asser- mechanisms as the primary means of translat- tive and acquired its own arsenal of ing scientific progress into public benefits. expertise on science and technology Federal R&D funds continued to be allocated (beyond the special subject of atomic energy). mainly to the better-qualified investigators Legislators hired capable staff members who and institutions rather than according to any were knowledgeable in such areas as space, principle of equity in geographical or institu- the environment, health, and defense, and tional distribution. And while the Pentagon's over time, individual lawmakers developed involvement in basic research had increased their own expertise in particular subjects. considerably, in the late 1980s the military Senators and House members also could turn supplied only about half the proportion that to the Congressional Budget Office for bud- it did in the mid-1950s and about the same getary analyses and to the Office of Technol- that it did in 1967. ogy Assessment for reports on topics ranging Yet federal science policy-starting in the from biotechnology to the effects of nuclear 1960s with the reappearance of the Kilgore war. approach of social welfare-ism-had also de- As the power to set science policy has parted from Bush's vision in important re- become diffused, more and more interest spects. It had become overtly politicized, not groups, such as environmentalists, feminists, in the sense that what might be thought or and AIDS activists, have become involved. published was subject to political test, but in For federal R&D, that has meant reduced at- the sense that-beginning with the Nixon tention to science for its own sake and more administration-the views of candidates for to science for social purposes, technological appointive advisory and administrativeposts innovation, regional development, and regu- on such controversial issues as antiballistic lation. Thanks to the enactment of laws to missile policy, the Vietnam War, and the Stra- strengthen environmental protection, occupa- tegic Defense Inititative were taken into ac- tional health and safety, public health and count. The Reagan administration applied medicine, and consumer protection, scientific tests of political allegiance to candidates for research has become more integral than ever appointment to scientific advisory panels, es- to regulatory policymaking. Congress also has pecially in the regulatory agencies. In the early been challenging the concentrated distribu- years of the administration of President Bush, tion of federal R&D funds, responding sym- similar tests on issues such as abortion report- pathetically to moves by have-not or have-less edly played a role in appointments to the institutions to circumvent the peer review

SCIENCE 51 process by legislating direct grants for the but for the sake of specific socioeconomic development of laboratory facilities to par- purposes ranging from industrial competi- ticular universities. tiveness to environmental management to the While scientists continue to enjoy intellec- battle against particular diseases. And the tual freedom, the new, open politicization of revised rules of operation make science sub- science policy has meant that the previously ject to "normal" political constraints, not the most powerful branches of the scientific com- least of them being the pressure to curb fed- munity-high-energy physics, for example eral spending. can no longer decisively determine which inquiries federal monies will stress. n the years ahead, private patrons-both The SuperconductingSuper Collider was industrial and philanthropic-may well largely done in by the shift to a greater shar- come to shoulder more of the cost of sci- ing of power between the executive and the entific research and training, as they did legislature in the making of science policy. beforeI World War 11. The Howard Hughes Made vulnerable by the end of the Cold War, Medical Institute, for example, currently sup- the SSC was forced to stand or fall on its do- ports roughly 10 percent of the basic biomedi- mestic political muscle. On that basis, its cal research in the United States. strength did not compare with the space Still, the federal government remains the station's, which, with a price tag more than country's most generous single patron of sci- twice that of the collider, had commitments of ence, providing in fiscal 1995 roughly $70 bil- some $8 billion in foreign financing, the heavy- lion for R&D, including 60 percent of all mon- weight support of the aerospace industry, and ies spent on academic research. If such lar- the reported creation of 75,000 jobs to its gesse is spent wisely-that is, if a reasonable credit. The vast majority of SSC procurement portion is devoted to basic research by the contracts had gone to only five states, includ- most capable scientists-the quality and vital- ing Texas, where some four times as much ity of American science will not necessarily money was spent as in second-ranked Califor- suffer. But the more it is recognized that the nia. Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R.- era of sustained exponential growth in science N.Y.), an unrelenting enemy of the collider, is over, the more difficult it may become for summarized with only slight exaggeration the wisdom to prevail. In the SSC controversy, political dynamic: "My colleagues will notice physicists outside the field of high-energy that the proponents of the SSC are from Texas, particle physics became involved and helped Texas, Texas, Texas, and Louisiana, and to kill the project. As the competition for fed- maybe someone from California. But my col- eral research dollars becomes more intense, leagues will also notice that the opponents scientists in all fields, as well as their host in- are. . . from all across the country." stitutions, are likely to get involved in politi- The death of the SSC signified not the end cal battles in the same way. of the partnership between science and gov- With the end of the Cold War, American ernment but rather a redirection of its aims science is no longer sacrosanct. Science is in and a revision of its operating rules. Now, the open political arena and scientists can no Senator Kilgore's social welfare approach, as longer remain above the fray. Instead, they much as Vannevar Bush's vision, is reflected will have to fight for federal tax dollars, like in the partnership's purpose: the advance- any other interest group. For them, and for sci- ment of knowledge not only for its own sake ence, it is a new era.

52 WQ SUMMER 1995 BY DAVID L. GOODSTEIN

n the beginning, roughly 10 billion in the United States. In each case, it pro- years ago according to modern cos- ceeded to grow at an astonishing mology, was the Big Bang. The uni- exponential rate. But while the universe verse has been expanding ever since. conceivably may expand forever, the expo- Whether it will keep doing so forever, we do nential enlargement of the scientific enter- not know. It may be-if the density of mat- prise is guaranteed to come to an end. ter in the universe is sufficiently great-that It is not that scientific knowledge must gravitational forces eventually will cause stop growing. On the contrary, if all goes well, the universe to stop expanding and then to it should continue to expand. But the growth start falling back in upon itself. If that oc- of the profession of science, the scientific en- curs, the universe will end in a cataclysmic terprise, is bound to reach certain limits. I event that cosmologists call the Big Crunch. contend that these limits have now been The history of modern science is some- reached. Many of my scientific colleagues what analogous. This science appeared on persist in the belief that the future will be like the scene almost three centuries ago in Eu- the past and are seeking to preserve the "so- rope and slightly more than a century ago cial structure" of sciencethe institutions and the patterns of education, research, and fund- NUMBER ing-that they have come to know so well. If I am right, they won't succeed. The Big Crunch is here (even if it is actually more like a large whimper than a big bang); indeed, in some fields it has already happened. In physics, it occurred about 25 years ago-and we physicists have been doing our best to avoid the implications ever since. We cannot continue to do so. We must address a question that has never even occurred to the cosmologists: what do you do after the Big Crunch? The situation can be illustrated by a graph. The upper curve-first published in a book called Science since Babylon (1961) by the historian Derek de Solla Price-shows, in Physic on a semilogarithmic scale, the cumulative number of scientific journals founded worldwide over the last three centuries. A straight line with a positive slope on this kind of graph means pure exponential 1700 1800 1900 2000 growth. If something is increasing that way, YEAR then the larger it gets, the faster it grows.

SCIENCE 53 Price's curve, he maintained, is a suitable 1930 the annual figure was about 100, and stand-in for any quantitative measure of the by 1970 it was about 1,000. By extrapolation, size of science. If so, then modern science there should be one million physics Ph.D.'s appears to have sprung into being around given out annually by the mid-21st century, 1700 (the Big Bang might have been the and there now should be about 10,000 publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia awarded per year. But this has not hap- in 1687) and thereafter expanded exponen- pened. Instead, we have the Big Crunch. tially, growing tenfold every 50 years. The Ph.D. growth stopped cold around Price predicted that this behavior could 1970, and the number awarded each year not go on forever-and, of course, he was has fluctuated around 1,000 ever since. In right. The straight line in the plot extrapo- other fields of science, the timing of the Big lates to one million journals by the millen- Crunch may be a bit different, but not the nium. But the number of scientific journals basic phenomenon. It is inevitable, and it in the world today, as we near the millen- has already begun to happen. nium, is a mere 40,000. Now, that does not mean that American science has ceased expanding since 1970. It hat is only one measure of what is has not. In fact, federal funding of scientific happening, but all the others tend research, in inflation-corrected (1987) dol- to agree. Consider, in particular, lars, doubled from about $30 billion in 1970 the number of scientists around. It to about $60 billion two decades later. And, hasT often been said that 90 percent of all the by no coincidence at all, the number of aca- scientists who have ever lived are alive to- demic researchers has also doubled, from day. That statement has been true for nearly about 100,000 to about 200,000. But this rate 300 years-but it cannot go on being true for of growth, controlled by the amount of very much longer. Even with the huge in- funding available, is too slow to allow re- crease in world population in this century, search professors to keep replicating them- only about one-twentieth of all the people selves at the same rate as in the past. who have ever lived are alive today. It is a If American science were in a steady simple mathematical fact that if scientists state condition, the average professor in a re- keep multiplying faster than people, there search university would need to produce only will soon be more scientists than there are one future research professor for the next gen- people. That seems very unlikely to happen. eration. Instead, the average professor, in the I have plotted, on the same scale as course of a typical 30-year career, turns out Price's curve, the number of Ph.D.'s in phys- about 15 students with doctorates-and most ics produced each year in the United States. such people want to be research professors. Like all other quantitative measures of sci- As the growth of science slowed in recent ence, this one behaves much like Price's decades, it did not take long for the smarter curve. The graph shows that science started students to realize that not everyone with a later in the United States than in Europe. Ph.D. could become a research professor. As The first Ph.D. in physics was awarded soon a result, the number of the best American stu- after the Civil War, around 1870. By the turn dents who went on to graduate school in sci- of the century, the number of doctorates in ence started to drop around 1970, and has physics awarded was about 10 per year; by been decreasing ever since.

David L. Goodstein is vice provost, professor of physics and applied physics, and the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of States of Matter (1985)and the host and creator of The Mechanical Universe, a PBS television series based on his physics lectures at Caltech. Copyright 0 1995 by David L. Goodstein.

54 WQ SUMMER 1995 Despite the decline, research professors have been turning out far more scientists than American universities can employ, indeed, far more scientists-now that the Cold War is over and now that the great corporations such as IBM and AT&T have decided to turn away from basic research- than the U.S. government, industry, and academe together can employ. How have the research professors pulled off this trick? The answer is actually rather simple. The golden age of American academic science-that is, the 1950s and '60s-produced genuine excellence and made Ameri- can universities the leaders of the world in scientific training and research. What Eu- rope once was for young scientists in America, America became for young scientists in the rest of the world. They sought to come to the United States, either to obtain an American doctorate or at least to spend a year or more in graduate or postdoctoral study. In short, foreign students have taken As this 1992 illustration suggests, leakage in the Ph.D. "pipeline" was widely seen as a major problem. the places of the missing American students and now constitute roughly half of the Ph.D. holders that American research professors phe can forever be deferred. Something like are turning out. that has happened in American research There was one other trick that the pro- universities. The good times ended forever fessors employed to ward off the effects of around 1970, but by importing foreign stu- the Big Crunch and pretend that it had not dents and employing newly anointed doc- occurred. They multiplied the number of tors of philosophy as temporary "post- postdoctoral research positions, thus creat- docs," the professors and the universities ing a kind of holding tank for young scien- have stretched time out, allowing them to tists that allowed them to put off the un- pretend that nothing important has pleasant confrontation with the job market changed, to think that they need only wait for three to six years, or in some cases even for the good times to return. Only the stu- longer. dents realize that they are falling into a black hole. ince I began with a cosmological In spite of all this, only a few years ago, analogy, let me now return to one. in the early 1990s, many leaders of Ameri- An unfortunate space traveler, fall- can science became alarmed that we might ing into a black hole, is utterly and not be producing enough scientists and en- irretrievably doomed, but that is obvious gineers for the future. The problem, they only to the space traveler. In the perception thought, lay with the "pipeline." This meta- of an outside observer hovering above the phor emerged, I believe, from the National "event horizon," the space traveler's time Science Foundation, which keeps careful slows down, so that it seems as if catastro- track of science work force statistics, and

SCIENCE 55 came to be widely accepted. At the moment arrives when a teacher-miner finds pipeline's entrance was said to be a torrent a potential peer, a real, if not yet gleaming, of youngsters, curious and eager to learn. gem. At that point, science education be- But as they moved on through the various comes, for the few involved, exhilarating grades of school, they somehow lost their and successful. eagerness and curiosity, and fewer and This alternative metaphor helps to ex- fewer youths showed any interest in sci- plain why, in all of the industrialized world, ence. The pipeline, in short, was leaking the United States has, simultaneously and badly, and as a result, there would not be paradoxically, both the best scientists and enough Ph.D.'s at the end of the line. The the most scientifically illiterate young leakage problem was seen as particularly people: America's educational system is severe with regard to women and minori- designed to produce precisely that result. ties. If America is to have all the scientists At the same time that American scientists, it will need in the future, we were warned, trained in American graduate schools, win the leaky pipeline must be fixed. Today, the more Nobel Prizes than the scientists of any fear of too few scientists has vanished from other country, and, indeed, than the scien- the scene, but the pipeline metaphor of sci- tists in most, if not all, of the other countries ence education persists. combined, the students in American schools I think the pipeline view of our situation invariably rank at or near the bottom of all is seriously flawed. The metaphor itself students from advanced nations in tests of leaks-beyond all repair. The purpose of scientific knowledge. America leads the American education is not to produce hold- world in science-and yet 95 percent of the ers of doctoral degrees in science or in any- American public is scientifically illiterate. thing else. The purpose is to create knowledgeable citizens of American democracy et us look a little closer at this min- who can contribute to their own and the ing-and-sorting operation that sci- common good. To regard such citizens as ence education is in America. It somehow deficient because they lack ad- begins in elementary school, but vanced degrees in science is silly, not to onlyL sluggishly and almost without con- mention insulting. Moreover, if American scious direction. Most elementary school education were a leaky pipeline and could teachers are poorly prepared to present be fixed, the problem that many scientists even the simplest lessons in scientific or still do not want to face would remain: what mathematical subjects. In many colleges, to do with the resulting flood of people with elementary education is the only major that advanced degrees in science. does not require even a single science A more realistic way of looking at course. Worse, it is said that many students American science education, as it is now who choose that major do so precisely to and has long been, is, I suggest, to view it avoid having to take a course in science. To as a mining-and-sorting operation designed the extent that that is true, elementary to discover and rescue diamonds in the school teachers are not merely ignorant of rough, ones capable of being cleaned and science but determined to remain ignorant. cut and polished into glittering gems, just That being so, they can hardly be expected like us, the existing scientists. Meanwhile, to encourage their students to take an inter- all the other human rocks and stones are in- est in science. Moreover, even those teach- differentlytossed aside in the course of the ers who did have some science courses in operation. Thus, science education at all lev- college are not likely to be well prepared to els is largely a dreary business, a burden to teach the subject. student and teacher alike-until the happy Thus, few elementary school pupils

56 WQ SUMMER 1995 Primary Employment of Scientists and Engineers

Scientists Engineers 373,860 74,783 Basic research Basic research

Applied research Applied research

Development Management, R&D Management~Develo~ment non-R&D Management, Management, R&D non-R&D Source: National Science Foundation, National Patterns of RSfD Resources: 1992

The main work of the 448,600 doctoral scientists and engineers in 1989 (43 percent more than in 1979): for 25 percent, teaching; for 17 percent, applied research; for 15 percent, basic research. come into contact with anyone who has sci- selves better teachers of a subject that had entific training, and many decide, long be- never been their first (or perhaps even their fore they have any way of knowing what second or third) love. Their greatest satis- science is about, that it is beyond their un- faction as physics teachers comes from- derstanding. Nevertheless, some students, guess what?-discovering those "diamonds a relative handful-usually those who do in the rough that can be sent on to college sense that they have unusual technical or for cutting and polishing into real physi- mathematical aptitudes-reach middle cists. school and then high school with their inter- That process is not completed in col- est in science intact. lege, of course. Mass higher education, es- There, the mining-and-sorting process sentially an American invention, has meant gets under way in earnest. Most of the that nearly everyone is educated, albeit 22,000 high schools in the United States of- rather poorly. The contrasting alternative in fer at least one course in physics. (Because Europe has been to educate a select few I have some firsthand knowledge of the rather well. But in the better U.S. graduate teaching of physics in high schools, I shall schools, elitism is rescued from the jaws of focus on that, but I am quite sure that what democracy. In about their second year of I have to say applies to other science sub- graduate school, the students (in physics, at jects as well.) There are only a few thousand least) finally catch up with their European trained and fully qualified high school phys- counterparts and thereafter are second to ics teachers in the United States, far fewer, none. obviously, than there are high schools. Most of the physics courses are taught by people merican education, for all its who in college majored in chemistry, biol- shortcomings and problems, ogy, mathematics, or-surprisingly often- was remarkably well suited to home economics (a subject that has fallen the era in which the scientific out of favor in recent years). These teachers enterprise was expanding exponentially. are, in many cases, marvelous human be- But after about 1970 and the Big Crunch, the ings who, for the sake of their students, gleaming gems produced at the end of the work extraordinarily hard to make them- vast mining-and-sorting operation were

SCIENCE 57 Science for Everyone?

What should an educated person know about science? In The Myth of Scientific Literacy (Rutgers University Press, 1995), Morris Skamos, a professor emeritus of physics at New York University and a past president of the National Science Teacher Association, contends that trying to make everyone scientifically literate is futile. Instead of offering general students the usual medley of scientific disciplines and asking them to memorize terminology and facts, educators, he says, need to provide students with a broad understanding of what science can-and cannot-accomplish.

he promise of a meaningful public lit- sensitive to the issue of Soviet competition in eracy in science is a myth. However space, and just when massive [National Sci- Tgood our intentions, we have tricked ence Foundation] support for precollege sci- ourselves into believing that what is being ence education was in its formative stage, fell done with science in our schools can lead to on deaf ears as the nation girded itself for a such literacy. The folly of this position is that far more ambitious role in science education, not only do we lack agreement as to the namely, to achieve in the educated public meaning of scientific literacy, but more seri- what had never before been accomplished- ously, we also lack any proven means of the intellectual state that came to be known achieving even the lowest level of science unas "scientific literacy." derstanding in our educated adult popula- While not clearly defined at the time (nor tion. . . . even now), this objective carried such a com- Testifying at a hearing of the Senate forting pedagogical feel that one could hardly Armed Services Committee in November challenge its premise, and for the next quar- 1957 (soon after Sputnik was launched), the ter-century the science education community physicist and hydrogen bomb expert Edward sought to [portray]virtually everything it did Teller likened the need for public support of as bringing us closer to the goal of scientific science to that of the arts. "Good drama," he literacy. It tried valiantly but it failed said, "can develop only in a country where badly. . . . there is a good audience. In a democracy, The science and engineering communi- particularly if the real sovereign, the people, ties, and our nation generally, would be bet- expresses lack of interest in a subject, then ter served by a society that, while perhaps il- that subject cannot flourish." Later in the literate in science in the formal academic hearing, giving his views on education in sense, at least is aware of what science is, how science for the nonscience student, he added: it works, and its horizons and limitations. . . . "The mass of our children should be given Teller was perfectly correct in his obser- something which may not be terribly strenu- vation that science must have an appreciative ous but should be interesting, stimulating, audience, meaning in these times a support- and amusing. They should be given science ive society, one that values science for its in- appreciation courses just as they are some- tellectual strength as well as . . . the technolo- times given music appreciation courses." gies it spawns. Without such support, science Teller's message of science appreciation, and technology . . . could both flounder, and coming at a time when the American public, the United States might indeed become a sec- and particularly the Congress, was highly ond-rate nation.

produced less often from American ore. kept the machinery humming. Research professors and their universities, That can't go on much longer. It is using ore imported from across the oceans, hardly likely that the American public,

58 WQ SUMMER 1995 when it apprehends the situation, will agree produce more future research professors? to keep pumping vast sums of federal and Of course, most are quite certain that the state money into scientific research in order world will need many more splendid to further the education and training of for- people just like themselves. Their main eign scientists. Sooner or later-and in motive, however, is a little less noble: today's post-Cold War environment, it is graduate students are a source of cheap la- bound to be sooner-we scientists must face bor. They teach undergraduates, thus free- up to the reality of the Big Crunch and learn ing the professors to concentrate on re- how to deal with it. search, and they also help the professors do their research. And the graduate students' hat will not be easy. In 1970, as a labor is indeed inexpensive: by their third young assistant professor of physics year, those in science are typically perform- at the California Institute of Technol- ing difficult, technically demanding work at ogy, I circulated a memo among my salaries lower than those received by most colleaguesT pointing out that exponential starting secretaries. growth could not be sustained and recom- The arrangement is very convenient for mending that Caltech set a dramatic example the research professors, but it and the min- by admitting fewer graduate students. My ing-and-sorting operation we call science faculty colleagues accepted my main argu- education in this country cannot go on as ment, but they had a different solution: every- they have in the past. The Big Crunch will one else should get out of the Ph.D. business, not allow it. For the new era of constraint, and Caltech should go on just as it was. At we will have to develop a radically differ- every other university where I've broached ent scientific "social structure," for both re- this subject, I've had precisely the same reac- search and education. That structure will tion: not that Caltech should go on as before, come about by evolution, not radical rede- but that the particular university I was visit- sign, because no one knows what form it ing should. will eventually take. One thing, however, is Harold Brown, who when I circulated clear: reform of science education must be my memo was president of Caltech (and part of our efforts to adapt the scientific who later served as U.S. secretary of de- enterprise to the changed conditions. fense), had a more creative solution to the problem: make a Ph.D. in physics a prereq- ure research in basic science does uisite for anyserious profession, just as clas- not reliably yield immediate profit. sical Latin and Greek once had been for the Hence, if it is to flourish, private British civil service. (He may have been in- support will never be enough. fluenced by the fact that he himself has a Public funds will continue to be essential. If Ph.D. in physics but never became a prac- that support from the public purse is to be ticing physicist.) forthcoming, there must be a broad politi- Brown was probably joking. But many cal consensus that basic science is a common scientists today seriously put forth a simi- good. It is a common good, for two reasons: lar solution. They are advising doctoral first, it helps to satisfy the human need to candidates on other careers they might pur- understand the universe we inhabit, and sue after earning the degree that certifies their second, it makes new technologies avail- competence to do scientific research. The little able. The world would be a very different matter of why they should become elaborately place without, for example, communica- trained to do something that they are not go- tions satellites or computers. But to get the ing to do is seldom brought up. public-in the absence of a war, hot or Why are research professors so eager to cold-to agree that basic science is worth

SCIENCE 59 substantial funding, we scientists are going tions. Perhaps conditions in the United States to have to do a much better job of education now are such that improvement along this line than we have in the past. It is no longer is possible. enough just to educate a scientific elite. Even if education can be reformed, Really teaching science to people who however, that will not be enough. Many of will never be scientists is not going to be the institutions of science that evolved easy. The frontiers of science are far re- and worked wonderfully during the long moved from most people's everyday expe- era of exponential growth are gradually rience. Unfortunately, we scientists so far breaking down in the new age of con- have not found a good way of bringing straint. For example, universities have people in large numbers along as "tourists" been the real entrepreneurs of science. on our scientific explorations. They raise or borrow funds to put up new laboratory buildings and hire tenured ut that leads me to a modest sug- professors to work in them, counting on gestion: perhaps, after all, there is the professors to bring in grants that will a reason to keep churning out pay off the university's investment. That people with Ph.D.'s in science. strategy is becoming suicidal, but many As I indicated before, roughly 20,000 universities seem not to have caught on U.S. high schools lack even one fully quali- yet. When they do catch on, or else go fied physics teacher. All of the people with belly up, who will build the laboratories physics Ph.D.'s who are now driving taxis of the future? Another example is peer re- could help to meet that need, and they view, long considered a pillar of the system. would be just a beginning. Anonymous peer review becomes a danger- However, let's be realistic. Before large ous game when the author and reviewer are numbers of people will be willing to obtain a locked in an intense competition for scarce Ph.D. in order to teach in high school, the con- resources. The conflict of interests seems to ditions under which American high school be obvious to everyone except those who teachers work will have to be substantially are currently running the system. But what improved. I am not speaking here primarily alternative is there to peer review? of money. After all, the salaries of beginning We scientists who came of age during schoolteachers today are almost competitive the 1950s and '60s must finally recognize with what postdoctoral fellows receive, and that the old era is gone and that, no matter experienced teachers earn salaries compa- what we do, it is not coming back. We are rable to what professors at many colleges get. in a new era now, and it is by no means cer- It would help, of course, if high school teach- tain that science as we have known it will ers were paid better, but that is not the main even survive. But if we are willing to face thing. The real problem is that schoolteachers the new realities and adapt to them, we may today are not given the professional respect, be able not only to rescue the scientific en- freedom, and responsibility that people who terprise but to give young Americans some- have earned Ph.D.'s tend to believe they de- thing that too many of them now do not serve. I have no blueprint for reform, but I see have: a basic knowledge of what science has no intrinsic reason why the prestige of thus far revealed about the world they will schoolteachingcannot be elevated. In Europe, inherit. If we can accomplish that, the era of schoolteachers are highly esteemed precisely constraint for science may turn out to be a because of their superior academic qualifica- new golden age.

60 WQ SUMMER 1995 BY J. MICHAEL BISHOP

e live in an age of scientific scientism-the belief that the methods of the triumph. Science has solved natural sciences are the only means of ob- many of nature's puzzles taining knowledge. And to the extent that and greatly enlarged human scientists have at times indulged in that be- knowledge.w And the fruits of scientific in- lief, they must shoulder some of the blame quiry have vastly improved human welfare. for the misapprehensions that some people Yet despite these proud achievements, sci- have about science. ence today is increasingly mistrusted and But science does have something inimi- under attack. table to offer humankind: it is, in the words Some of the opposition to science comes of physician-author Lewis Thomas, "the from familiar sources, including religious best way to learn how the world works." A zealots who relentlessly press for the man- postmodernist poet of my acquaintance datory teaching of creationism in the pub- complains that it is in the nature of science lic schools. It is discouraging to think that to break things apart, thereby destroying more than a century after the publication of the "mysterious whole." But we scientists Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), take things apart in order to understand the and 70 years after the Scopes trial drama- whole, to solve the mystery-an enterprise tized the issue, the same battles must still be that we regard as one of the great, ennobling fought. But fight them we must. tasks of humankind. Other antagonists of science are less familiar. Strange though it may seem, there is n the academic medical center where I within academe a school of thought that work, the efficacy and benefits of sci- considers science to be wholly fraudulent as ence are a daily reality. So when I first a way of knowing. According to these encountered the postmodernist view "postmodernists," the supposedly objective ofI science some years ago, I dismissed it as truths of science are in reality all "socially either a strategy for advancement in paro- constructed fictions," no more than "useful chial precincts of the academy or a display myths," and science itself is "politics by of ignorance. But now I am alarmed because other means." Anyone with a working the postmodernist cry has been joined, out- knowledge of science, anyone who looks at side the academy, by other strong voices the natural world with an honest eye, raised against science. should recognize all of this for what it is: Consider these lines from Viclav Havel, errant nonsense. the widely admired Czech writer and Science, of course, is not the exclusive statesman, who has vigorously expressed source of knowledge about human exist- his disenchantment with the ethos of science. Literature, art, philosophy, history, ence: "Modern rationalism and modern and religion all have their insights to offer science . . . now systematically leave [the into the human condition. To deny that is natural world] behind, deny it, degrade and

SCIENCE 61 defame it-and, of course, at the same time, The source of these dissatisfactions ap- colonize it." pears to be an exaggerated view of what Those are angry words, even if their science can do. For example, agitation precise meaning is elusive. And anger is evi- within Congress may induce the National dent, too, in Havel's main conclusion: "This Science Foundation to establish a center for era [of science and rationalism] has reached research on violence, but only the naive the end of its potential, the point beyond would expect a quick fix for that momen- which the abyss begins." tous problem. Three-quarters of a century Even some influential men who know after the death of the great German sociolo- science well and who have been good gist Max Weber (1864-1920), the social and friends to it in the past have joined in the behavioral sciences have yet to produce an chorus of criticism and doubt. Thanks in antidote for even one of the common social part to Havel's ruminations, Representative pathologies. The genesis of human behavior George E. Brown, Jr. (D.-Calif.), who was entails complexities that still lie beyond the trained as a physicist, reports that his faith grasp of human reason. in science has been shaken. He complains of what he calls a "knowledge paradox": an ritics such as Brown and Lamm expansion of fundamental knowledge ac- blame science for what are actu- companied by an increase in social prob- ally the failures of individuals or lems. He implies that it shouldn't be that society to use the knowledge that way, that as science progresses, the prob- sciencec has provided. The blame is mis- lems of society should diminish. And he placed. Science has produced the vaccines suggests that Congress and the "consum- required to control many childhood infec- ers" of scientific research may have to take tions in the United States, but our nation has more of a hand in determining how science failed to deploy properly those vaccines. is conducted, in what research gets funded. Science has sounded the alarm about acid A similar critique has been made by rain and its principal origins in automobile former Colorado governor Richard Lamm. emissions, but our society has not found the He claims no longer to believe that biomedi- political will to bridle the internal combus- cal research contributes to the improvement tion engine. Science has documented the of human health-a truly astonishing medical risks of addiction to tobacco, yet stance. To validate his skepticism, he pre- our federal government still spends large sents the example of the University of Colo- amounts of money subsidizing the tobacco rado Medical Center. It has done "little or industry. nothing," he complains, about increasing These critics also fail to understand that primary care, expanding medical coverage success in science cannot be dictated. The to the uninsured, dealing with various ad- progress of science is ultimately driven by dictions and dietary excesses, and control- feasibility. Science is the art of the possible, ling violence. As if biomedical research, or of the soluble, to recall a phrase from the even academic medical centers, had either late British immunologist and Nobel laure- the resources or the capabilities to do what ate Sir Peter Medawar. We seldom can force Lamm desires! nature's hand; usually, she must tip it for us.

J. Michael Bishop, is a University Professor of microbiology, immunology, biochemistry, and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He also is director of the G. W. Hooper Research Foundation at the university. He and a colleague, Harold Varmus, were awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Phvsiolom or Medicine fortheir discovery thit normal cells contain genes capable of becoming cancer genes. copyright 0 1995 by J. Michael Bishop.

62 WQ SUMMER 1995 Nor is it possible, especially in the early stages of research, to anticipate what benefits are likely to result. My own experience is a case in point. In 1911, Peyton Rous at the Rockefeller Insti- tute in New York City discovered a virus that causes cancer in chickens, a seemingly obscure observation. Yet 65 years later, that chicken virus was the vehicle by which Harold Varmus and I, and our colleagues, were able to uncover genes that are involved in the genesis of human cancer. The 'In layman's terms? I'm afraid 1 don't know any layman's terms." lesson of history is clear: the Even for educated members of the public, science is largely a mystery. lines of inquiry that may prove most fruitful to sci- ince are generally unpredictable. expectations, they are condemned by critics Biologist John Tyler Bonner has whim- who do not recognize the limits of science. sically recalled an exchange he had some Thus, playwright and AIDS activist Larry decades ago with the National Science Kramer bitterly complains that science has Foundation, which had given him a grant yet to produce a remedy for AIDS, placing for a research project. "After the first year, much of the blame on the National Institutes I wrote that things had not worked out very of Health (N1H)-"a research system that well-I had tried this, that, and the other by law demands compromise, rewards thing, and nothing had really happened. mediocrity and actually punishes initiative [The foundation] wrote back, saying, 'Don't and originality." worry about it-that is the way research goes sometimes. Maybe next year you will cannot imagine what law Kramer has have better luck.'" Alas, no scientist today in mind, and I cannot agree with his would think of writing such a report, and no description of what the NIH expects scientist today could imagine receiving such from its sponsored research. I have as- a reply. sisted the NIH with peer review for more The great successes of science have than 20 years. Its standards have always helped to create the exaggerated expectations been the same: it seeks work of the highest about what science can accomplish. Why has originality and demands rigor as well. I, for malaria not been eradicated by now? Why is one, have never knowingly punished initia- there still no cure for AIDS? Why is there not tive or originality, and I have never seen the a more effective vaccine for influenza? When agencies of the NIH do so. I realize with will there be a final remedy for the common sorrow that Mr. Kramer is unlikely to be- cold? When will we be able to produce energy lieve me. without waste? When will alchemy at last Biomedical research is one of the great convert quartz to gold? triumphs of human endeavor. It has un- When scientists fail to meet unrealistic earthed usable knowledge at a remarkable

SCIENCE 63 rate. It has brought us international leadership damaged gene responsible for the rare dis- in the battle against disease and the search for ease. Thus, the stage is set for the develop- understanding. I wonder how all this could ment of decisive clinical testing and effec- have been accomplished if we scientists did tive therapy (although the latter may be business in the way that Kramer and critics long in coming). like him claim that we do. If misapprehensions abound about what science can and cannot do, so do mis- he bitter outcry from AIDS activ- placed fears of its hazards. For more than ists over the past decade was ech- five years now, my employer, the Univer- oed in the 1992 film Lorenzo's Oil, sity of California, San Francisco, has waged which portrays medical scientists a costly battle for the right to perform bio- asT insensitive, close-minded, and self-serv- medical research in a residential area. For ing, and dismisses controlled studies of po- all intents and purposes, the university has tential remedies as a waste of precious time. lost. The opponents were our neighbors, The film is based on a true story, the case of who argued that we are dangerous beyond Lorenzo Odone, a child who suffers from a tolerance; that we exude toxic wastes, infec- rare hereditary disease that cripples many tious pathogens, and radioactivity; that we neurological functions and leads at an ago- put at risk the lives and limbs of all who nizing pace to death. come within reach-our own lives and Offered no hope by conventional medical limbs included, I suppose, a nuance that science, Lorenzo's desperate parents scoured seems lost on the opposition. One agitated the medical literature and turned up a pos- citizen suggested in a public forum that the sible remedy: the administration of two natu- manipulation of recombinant DNA at the ral oils known as erucic and oleic acid. In the university had engendered the AIDS virus; face of the skepticism of physicians and re- another declared on television her outrage search specialists, Lorenzo was given the oils that "those people are bringing DNA into and, in the estimation of his parents, ceased my neighborhood." to decline~perhapseven improved marginally. It was a courageous, determined, and esistance to science is born of even reasoned effort by the parents. (Mr. fear. Fear, in turn, is bred by ig- Odone has since received an honorary degree norance. And it is ignorance that from at least one university.) Whether it was is our deepest malady. The late effective is another matter. literary critic Lionel Trilling described the The movie portrays the treatment of difficulty well, in words that are even more Lorenzo as a success, with the heroic par- apposite now than when he wrote them: ents triumphant over the obstructionism of "Science in our day lies beyond the intellec- medical scientists. The film ends with a col- tual grasp of most [people]. . . . This lage of parents testifying that the oils had exclusion . . . from the mode of thought been used successfully to treat Lorenzo's which is habitually said to be the character- disease in their children. But it fails to istic achievement of the modern age . . . is a present any of the parents who have tried wound . . . to our intellectual self-es- the oils with bitter disappointment. And, of teem . . . a diminution of national possibil- course, all of this is only anecdotal informa- ity. . . a lessening of the social hope." tion. Properly controlled studies are still in The mass ignorance of science confronts progress. To date, they have not given much us daily. In recent international testing, U.S. cause for hope. high school students finished ninth in phys- Meanwhile, as if on cue, medical scien- ics among the top 12 nations, 11th in chem- tists have since succeeded in isolating the istry, and dead last in biology. Science is

64 WQ SUMMER 1995 poorly taught in most of our elementary and longer a common culture, what can we secondary schools, when it is taught at all. rightfully expect of the laity by way of un- Surveys of adult Americans indicate that derstanding? only a minority accepts evolution as an ex- Lionel Trilling knew where the problem planation for the origin of the human spe- lay in his time: "No successful method of cies. Many do not even know that the Earth instruction has been found. . . which can circles the Sun. In a recent committee hear- give a comprehension of science . . . to those ing, a prominent member of Congress be- students who are not professionally com- trayed his ignorance of how the prostate mitted to its mastery and especially england differs from the testes. Accountants, dowed to achieve it." And there the prob- laborers, lawyers, poets, politicians, and lem lies today: perplexing to our educators, even many physicians look upon science ignored by all but the most public-minded with bewilderment. of scientists, bewildering and vaguely dis- Do even we scientists understand one quieting to the general public. another? A few years ago, I read of a Rus- sian satellite that gathers solar light to pro- e scientists can no longer vide constant illumination of large areas of leave the problem to others. Siberia. "They are taking away the night," I Indeed, it has always been thought. "They are taking away the last ours to solve, and all of soci- moments of mystery. Is nothing sacred?" etyw is now paying for our neglect. As physi- But then I wondered what physicists must cist and historian of science Gerald Holton think of biologists' hopes to decipher the has said, modern men and women "who do entire human genome and perhaps recraft not know the basic facts that determine their it, ostensibly for the better. very existence, functioning, and surround- Writing an article about cancer genes for ings are living in a dream world . . . are, in Scientific American some years ago, I labored a very real sense, not sane. We mightily to make the text universally acces- [scientists] . . . should do what we can, or sible. I consulted students, journalists, laity of we shall be pushed out of the common cul- every stripe. When these consultants all had ture. The lab remains our workplace, but it approved, I sent the manuscript to a solid- must not become our hiding place." state physicist of considerable merit. A week The enterprise of science embodies a later, the manuscript came back with this great adventure: the quest for understand- comment: "I have read your paper and shown ing in a universe that the mathematician it around the staff here. No one understands Freeman Dyson once characterized as "in- much of it. What exactly is a gene?" finite in all directions, not only above us in Robert M. Hazen and James Trefil, au- the large but also below us in the small." We thors of The Sciences: An Integrated Approach of science have begun the quest well, by (1994), tell of 23 geophysicists who could building a method of ever-increasing not distinguish between DNA and RNA, power, a method that can illuminate all that and of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who is in the natural world. In consequence, we had never heard of plate tectonics. I have are admired but also feared, mistrusted, encountered biologists who thought string even despised. We offer hope for the future theory had something to do with pasta. We but also moral conflict and ambiguous may be amused by these examples; we choice. The price of science seems large, but should also be troubled. If science is no to reject science is to deny the future.

SCIENCE 65 Recent events in Russia raise fears that authoritarianism is making a comeback. OUTauthor finds that the danger is not an overly powerful state but an enfeebled one.

BY S. FREDERICK STARR

ussia today may be a new federation of 21 republics and 49 oblasts (regions), but it is still the legal successor to the Soviet Union! the most powerful and centralized state in history. While the passing of the communist regime has been widely celebrated! many observers fear that Russia's new leaders are resorting to the old top-down methods to crime wave, Foreign Minister Andrei prove that their state is just as much a great Kosyrev's ominous warnings about power as its predecessor. Russia's rights and its readiness to use The Russian army's blast-and-burn armed force in the so-called near assault on Grozny, Boris Yeltsin's power abroad-all of these have reminded the under the 1993 constitution to brush aside rest of the world that the Russian state can even popular opposition groups! the ag- be a mighty but blunt weapon. gressive response of the Ministry of Inter- Russia, in fact! appears to be bucking nal Affairs and police to the country's a global trend. In an era of devolution,

66 WQ SUMMER 1995 when country after country is cutting back Members of the National Salvation Front state functions in favor of private initia- detnonstrate against Boris Yeltsin's policies outside tive and civil societyl this land on the east- the Russian parliament building in August 1993. ern fringes of Europe seems to be headed in the opposite direction. In truth, howeverl something very dif- just cited seems to underscore the power ferent may be under way, something we in of the Russian state. But they also lend the West misperceive at our peril. The ba- themselves to an opposite conclusion: sic facts are not in dispute. Every instance namelyl that the Russian state is acting out

YELTSIN'S RUSSIA 67 of a sense of its own profound weakness. shows Moscow's plainclothes officers Much of the bluster and posturing shooting their way into a nest of gang- that we interpret as evidence of a resur- sters! or when it is rumored that the po- gent Russian statism in fact suggests the lice themselves are in collusion with inadequacy of the central institutions of criminals, it gives one pause. But this is the state. And strange to sayl this weak- only part of the picture. Underpaid and ness, more than the purported resurgence undermanned! the police forces are piti- of the Russian state! poses serious dangers fully unable to protect citizens and busi- to the United States and other democra- nesses from criminal elements. No won- cies. That is the great paradox of Russian der individual Russians and business life today. firms look elsewhere for security, even to organized criminal bands. o understand this paradox, we The weakness of the central govern- need to look more closely at the ment is no less apparent in the economy. evidence! beginning with military Over the past year, the government of T and security matters. However Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin suc- ruthless the Russian army's effort to pul- cessfu1Iy laid the foundations of monetary verize Grozny last winter! the campaign stabilization. Nevertheless, fiscal disci- revealed a state of utter breakdown in the pline weakened during the autumn of armed forces. Neither the commander in 1994! when the ruble lost and then re- chief in Moscow nor the regimental lead- gained a quarter of its value in the span of ers on the spot could develop a coherent a single day. Nor could the central gov- strategy or have their orders carried out ernment stem the illegal flight of tens of in the field. Coordination was nonexist- billions of dollars abroad! or compel its ent. None of this is surprising in an army repatriation. And the government's blun- that has had its procurement budget dering in Chechnya now promises to slashed by more than four-fifths and its throw the budget out of whack once more, troop level cut by more than half. But triggering a new round of inflation. these occurrences are strikingly at odds with the aspirations of the Red Army a rivatization of state industries has mere generation ago! or even those of the been a notable success. Indeed! no tsarist army of earlier times. republic of the former Soviet And what of the vaunted security sys- Union has moved more deci- tem! the heir of the KGB? Every day, one sively to turn over both large and small seems to read of new powers that have firms to private owners than Russia. But been ceded to the security organs. Yet for the government has yet to guarantee ba- all their power on paper! it was these fine sic property rights! including clear title to fellows who brought about the Chechnya land on privatized state firms. Agricul- disaster by making bold promises to clean tural privatization is limited to a few up the tiny region of the Caucasus in a thousand experimental farms and will not tidy, covert campaign. go further unless the government is able Nor does the national police force to face down a powerful collective-farm look any better. True, when our television lobby. So far it has not. And while a fledg-

S. Frederick Stairl a former director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, is the president of the Aspen Institute. His books includeMelnikov:Solo Architect in a Mass Society (1978), Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (1983), and Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Gottschalk (1994). Copyright 0 1995 by S. Frederick Starr.

68 WQ SUMMER 1995 ling stock market is booming, the govern- stabilization, and social welfare can be ment has so far failed to set up even a traced to severe shortages of money and minimal regulatory process or to secure human talent. Nor is it surprising that the the basic rights of shareholders. government's thirst for revenues and its Another major function of normal need for good people are closely related. governments is to establish a coherent From the Gorbachev years (1985-91) pattern of financial relations between the onward, Russians have successfully center and regions, among regions, and mounted what may be the biggest tax re- between businesses in the same or differ- volt in recent history. Indeed, the Soviet ent regions. Such matters are normally Union's end was brought about not by the defined in laws and regulations and are ringing words of orators or the exhorta- administered by courts and executive tions of pamphleteers but by the refusal of bodies. But to the extent that such institu- local and republic governments to turn tions exist in Russia, they perform ineffec- over tax money to the center. Even today, tively at best. millions of Russian citizens and many of To its credit, the Duma passed a new the new private firms find reasons for not civil code on November 30, 1994. Al- paying taxes to a democratically elected though it went into effect on January l, its government that most accept as legiti- enforcement is not assured. The central mate. government in Moscow has 'still not set up the kind of judicial structures-courts, a ut even if Russia's citizens and 10- modern bar, and a cadre of knowledge- cal governments were suddenly to able officials to make it all work-that display an eagerness to payl the could enable citizens to adjudicate con- B Moscow government would be flicts. Nor does the new civil code cover in no position to collect. Its version of the most property in land, which awaits a U.S. Internal Revenue Service is pathetic! new land code. with no adequate information on taxpay- With the fall of the Communist Party, ers, either individual or corporate, and Russian society emancipated itself from insufficient computerized systems for the pervasive regimentation and med- processing that information. As a result, dling of the old statist system. But even as barely a quarter of all taxes imposed from the state withdrew from such functions as Moscow are actually collected and turned censorship, .cradle-to-grave involvement over to pay for the normal functions of in citizens' life decisions, and oversight of government. And of all taxes collected at morals, it also drew back from many func- the local level last year, barely seven per- tions deemed essential by all modern so- cent went to cover the operations of the cieties. The provision of unemployment central government, down from a still- benefits, social security, and pensions for paltry nine percent the year before. The the elderly are among the many areas in rest went for the pet projects of the repub- which the Moscow government has lics, oblasts, and cities, which carry on as shown itself weak and ineffectual in re- if they were sovereign entities recognizing cent years. Add to this list the ability to few if any obligations to the country as a build and maintain roads, a postal service, whole or to its national government. and telecommunications, and the picture Unable to collect the taxes it levies, appears even bleaker. Schools are strug- Russia's central government resorts to gling and public universities are a mess. desperate measures. In April 1994 it re-es- Predictably, these problems of com- tablished the age-old state alcohol mo- munal and individual security, economic nopoly, which covered nearly half of the

YELTSIN'S RUSSIA 69 military budget under both tsars and com- than under Communist Party rule, if only missars. Knowing that foreign businesses because they are spending much of the are more punctilious than Russians about money that the central government needs in paying taxes, the central government also order to operate. The government's finan- imposes unusually heavy and often capri- cial infrastructure may be crumbling, but cious duties on foreign firms operating in scores of private banks are thriving. Thou- Russia. In other words, the Russian govern- sands of senior administrators who kept ment hits up whomever it can, regardless of Soviet-era trains running on time, both lit- the impact of such actions on society or the erally and figuratively, now work in private economy. Foreign businesses respond by firms that are turning handsome profits and scaling back their commitments in Russia- are able to lobby effectively in Moscow for or by canceling them altogether. policies favorable to their needs. The problem underlying the weakness of Russia's central apparatus of state ussians, like Americans, are ea- traces as much to people as to money. gerly cutting back the overgrown With the budget in shambles, the Russian structures of the central govern- government underpays its bloated staff. R ment in order to balance their The brightest civil servants read the por- country's budget. Like Americans, they tents a half-decade ago and began bailing are turning many functions back to local out for more lucrative pursuits in the pri- government. Yet even the most thorough- vate sector. Of those who stayed, many going decentralization and devolution, if engage in business on the side or in cor- they are to be effective, still require the rupt dealings. central government to perform certain es- Like the federal government in Wash- sential services. Self-managed regional ington, Russia's government has been governments and independently con- downsizing with a vengeance, but more trolled businesses cannot thrive without from desperation than from principle. central institutions of government, even if Since the most talented civil servants they are far smaller than, and different leave first, those left are invariably the from, those that existed under commu- ones with the least ability or initiative. For nism. Moreover, the relations among all the downsizing, there still remain these institutions must be clearly defined hordes of Russian functionaries, including and work smoothly. the thousands who staff Yeltsin's presi- The constitution introduced by Boris dential office. Yet the sheer number of Yeltsin in 1993 specifies the powers of the remaining bureaucrats cannot hide the various branches of government. (The fact that the Russian government today president, for example, appoints the lacks the cadre of capable and loyal civil prime minister, who is in turn approved servants that any normal state requires. by the legislature.) But by no means all of These include not just administrators and the constitution's precepts are applied in tax collectors but also teachers, the best of practice. Worse, many well-informed Rus- whom have been quitting in droves. sians expect yet another constitution to be adopted once the most destabilizing phase t cannot be denied that the travails of of the present transition is past. If this Russia's central government are to happens, basic questions about the core some extent offset by the great strides structures of government will be wide I that have been made by many new open once more. centers of power. Many of Russia's repub- Such ageless questions of political phi- lics and oblasts are doing far better today losophy are under constant debate in any

70 WQ SUMMER 1995 healthy democracy, including America's. all-embracing, and swift than nearly all the But in Russia, the inadequacy of the cen- other great revolutions of the modern era. tral government and its incapacity to meet National borders, form of government, the normal needs of society are so glaring structures of society, economic institutions, that millions see no need to wallow fur- the political system, and values all have ther in-theoretical debate. Instead they undergone significant changes, and have react, shouting for Russia's leaders to save done so not seriatim but simultaneously. Is the state from what appears to them as it any wonder that the country appears to breakdown and from the deep national be on the brink of chaos? Yet to future his- humiliation to which such disorder and torians it will be clear that the process is recklessness give rise. more rational than it now seems, and that Many in the West dismiss the noisy it can be divided into two phases. demands of Russia's nationalists as the Up to now, the main thrust of the new primitive rantings of people unable to ad- Russian revolution has been negative. It just to the realities of a postcommunist has dismantled and stripped away the world. While the views of self-styled "re- entire system under which Russians lived formers" enjoy respectful coverage in the for three-quarters of a century. The first Western press, the nationalists' appeals wave of destruction pulverized the Soviet for a strong Russian state are virtually empire into 15 new countries. It also equated with the desire for an authoritar- pounded the Communist Party, which ian or even fascist regime. was forced to give up its monopoly of Reformers in both the West and Rus- power and then to disband. Successive sia call for a stronger civil society in which waves dismantled the regulation of prices rules are imposed by law and government and the entire structure of state control is reduced to the status of one institution over the economy. They also brought among many in an open society of free about the denationalization of thousands citizens. The prescription is sound, but re- of state-owned industries, including large formers make a leap of logic when they parts of the military-industrial complex conclude that strengthening the central and the state's chief hard currency earner, institution of Russia's government will energy. Moscow also ceded control of inevitably lead the country away from a dozens of functions to regional govern- civil society and back to authoritarianism. ments, including housing and most social It is true that many of those seeking to welfare. So thoroughgoing was this latter strengthen the central government in Moscow process that many reasonable observers would like also to roll back civil liberties, re- who can in no sense be considered Rus- impose state control of the economy, and even sian chauvinists feel that Yeltsin gave re-establish a unitary, centralized state in the away far too many central prerogatives in former territory of the Soviet Union. How- the negotiations leading up to the March ever, if one strips away such bombast and the 1992 Federation Treaty on which the new psychology of victimhood that it feeds upon, constitution is based. there remains a quite reasonable demand that should be familiar to any citizen in a demo- ven as this initial, negative phase cratic country, namely, for normal central in- of Russia's revolution was pro- stitutions that work. Surely, this is not only ceeding, the first signs of a second, compatible with the idea of civil society but positive phase began to appear. essential to its realization. While old institutions were still being de- For the last six years, Russia has been in stroyed, new ones began to be constructed: the midst of a revolution far more massive, the presidency, a bicameral legislature, pri-

YELTSIN'S RUSSIA 71 lic sector, even as he allowed further dismantling of the old system through state-owned massive privatization. As of this writing, Rus- sia is still "between two shores," with the destructive phase of its revolution now far advanced but the constructive phase still at an early point. Pessimists both SHEIN MOSCOW TIMES in Russia and abroad argue Mntscnw that this phase will proceed no further, and that the most likely course for Russia will be an atavistic return to vate businesses, and an independent social authoritarianism. Scanning Russia's politi- sector. The simultaneous processes of de- cal landscape, they are quick to detect in any struction and construction have raised a effort to consolidate the central institutions noisy and bewildering cacophony. of government a move in this direction. A parallel to the present situation can be Some, with claims of clairvoyance that found in the 1850s, when Russians began dis- would humble Merlin the Magician, even mantling the system of serfdom that had kept assert that a shift toward authoritarian rule 90 percent of the population in bondage. The is inevitable. Never mind that the future job could not be done all at once, of course, will be shaped by decisions and forces and as a result the country for many years largely unknowable today. The faith of these seemed caught between two worlds. As the doomsayers is as hard to shake as the faith writer Alexander Herzen put it a century and of those who foretell the apocalypse. Mean- a half ago, tsarist Russia had struck out from while, life goes on. one shore of a river but had not yet reached Given the unprecedented scale of the the other. Meanwhile, to those with no sense revolution under way in Russia, it is re- of the larger movement under way, the coun- markable that more blood has not been try indeed seemed in a state of utter confu- shed. Millions of people who gained their sion. Only by the end of the 19th century did identity through the old regime have good Russia emerge, briefly, as a relatively prosper- cause for anger now. However, sheer fa- ous semicapitalist country. tigue at the scale of suffering imposed by Lenin, Stalin, and their successors has similar state of transition has caused such people to moderate their prevailed during the last three natural desire to vent frustrations. Then years. To provide some sem- too, the constructive phase of the revolu- blance of order amid the ep- tion has already brought benefits to mil- ochal changes, Yeltsin sought extensive lions, and particularly to members of the presidential powers of decree under the rising generation, most of whom have constitution that was drafted in 1993. As placed their hopes on the emergence of part of the same strategy, Prime Minister what they call a "normal" government, Chernomyrdin focused his attention on economy, and society in their country. the reform and development of the pub- The rapid rise and fall of the blowhard

72 WQ SUMMER 1995 Vladimir Zhirinovsky attests to the funda- tering its aid on whatever "projects" hap- mental health and good sense of the Rus- pen to be in fashion among consulting sian polity down to the midpoint of 1995. firms along the Capital Beltway, should Whatever Russia's success to date, concentrate on building up the govern- though, the financial, political, and psy- ment infrastructures that are essential to chological crisis brought on by the war in open societies. These include laws, police, Chechnya reveals starkly how fragile the and a judicial apparatus, which together new order remains. If the ability of the provide security to individuals; the regu- Moscow government to carry out basic latory bodies and courts that assure the social functions is further impaired by the sanctity of contracts; and the administra- need to divert massive funds to rebuild- tive and social organs that address the ing the military and to emergency relief in population's education and basic welfare. Chechnya, that basic good sense could be Above all, this rebuilding requires at- overwhelmed by a wave of disoriented tention to the budgetary practices that as- demagogues eager to mask the central sure fiscal stability and, no less, to those government's failures through aggressive unexciting but essential agencies that col- actions at home and bullying abroad. lect the taxes necessary to pay for all of these core functions. In this fragile period he reality of Russia in 1995 is that of transition, the perils of an underfunded it is undergoverned. And an under- and underperforming central government governed Russia is dangerous in Russia are enormous. Until this condi- Tboth to itself and to others. The tion of undergovernment is addressed, world's democracies should take heed of progress toward an open and free society this. The United States, rather than scat- will be slow, if it occurs at all.

YELTSIN'S RUSSIA 73 CURRENTBOOKS

Two Reports from Greeneland

THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE, Volume most troubled spots of our troubled age, 11: 1939-1955. By Norman Sherry. Viking. 672 and Greene himself, indefatigable wanderer pp. $34.95 and sometime secret agent, knew them all GRAHAM GREENE: The Enemy Within. By intimately. He is a figure whose biography Michael Shelden. Random House. 442 pp. $25 should enthrall at least as much as his work. Alas, that's not the case with these two t seems certain by now that the work of new offerings by Norman Sherry and Graham Greene (1904-91) is, after that Michael Shelden. They are both disappoint- Iof Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, ing and both more than faintly annoying- the last expression of what F. R. Leavis once indeed, disappointing and annoying in called the "great tradition" of the British complementary ways. Sherry's biography is novel. a studiously awestruck piece of hagio- Surely, no other storyteller of the period graphy; Sheldenls, a bitter, elbow-nudging managed to be at once as popular and as expose. I begin with Sherry, whose sins are respected by "serious" readers, in the grand (as Dante would say) of excessive rather manner of the Victorian novelists. (It was a than deficient charity. point of pride for Greene that a distant cousin had been that consummate enter- reene appointed Sherry, a distin- tainer, Robert Louis Stevenson.) No writer .guished Conrad scholar, his official of comparable genius concentrated as biographer in 1975. Given access to fiercely on the craft of narrative and repre- letters and journals, entre to personal inter- sentation, eschewing the involuted experi- views, and lettres de credit for surviving old ments of the modernists. friends, Sherry embarked on a 20-year (and Some feel that Greene's traditional ap- counting) quest to understand Greene and proach is unremarkable, coming as it does present him to the world. The first volume after such works as James Joyce's Ulysses. of The Life of Graham Greene appeared in Yet no one else so caught-or was so caught 1989, and the second, covering the years by-the spirit of paradox that both pro- 1939-1955, this year. A third, presumably fi- tected and undermined the modern temper nal, volume is still to come-if Sherry lasts, between the rise of the Third Reich and the that is, for he has turned the writing of the evaporation of the Soviet Union. (The pe- biography into a one-man, personal-best lit- riod coincided almost exactly with the years erary endurance contest. One is both im- of Greene's flourishing.) He was a Catholic pressed and distressed by his substitution whose strongest novels were disapproved of athletics for judgment. The dauntless of by the Vatican, and who liked to call him- Sherry has visited most of the venues famil- self, in later years, a "Catholic atheist"; an iar to his quarry. He relates with pride how avowed leftist contemptuous of the bland- he caught dysentery in the same Mexican ness of socialism and fascinated with the village Greene did while writing The Power intricacies of realpolitik; an eloquent analyst and the Glory (1939). He has suffered ma- of love and fidelity who could also detail the laria, temporary blindness, and all manner awful compulsions of betrayal. of unpleasantness on Greene's trail. Thank The locales of Greene's fiction-from God, one thinks, he didn't choose Malcolm Central Europe to Africa, Mexico, Cuba, Lowry or William S. Burroughs as a subject. Haiti, and Vietnam-include some of the This is biography by total immersion.

74 WQ SUMMER 1995 Sherry's hunger to share the Greene expe- masterpiece, Brighton Rock: rience is equaled only by his diligence in walking every blind alley of the man's life. Some readers . . . cherish the author's One begins to wonder if there are any let- works as noble political and religious ters, journals, or trivialities he doesn't quote. statements; they recommend him for The net effect is like living in a house where Catholic literary awards, the Jerusa- lem Prize, the Nobel Prize. . . . And everything is painted red: all details are all the time they refuse to listen to the equally significant, so none is really salient. record. They do not hear-or do not Sherry should have studied his man's own want to hear-the anti-Semitism, the talent for concision and judicious observation. anti-Catholicism,the misogyny, or the Nevertheless, this second volume of the many jokes made at their expense. biography is better than the first, mainly because Greene published his greatest This litany of offenses is partial. Among books, including The Power and the Glory and the other things readers do not want to The End of the Affair (1951), between 1939 hear-which Shelden hears quite clearly- and 1955. These years span the failure of his are the homosexuality, pederasty, drug ad- marriage; the great, consuming affair of his diction, and probable high treason. Robert life with the brilliant Louis Stevenson's Catherine Walston; cousin would have and his growing ob- been amused: Sherry session with the finds him a troubled moral ambiguities of but kindly Dr. Jekyll; the Cold War world. Shelden sees only the Sherry performs a abominable Mr. Hyde. real service in limning I hesitate to ac- both the macro- and cuse Shelden, who microhistorical con- has done a very good text of Greene's gol- book on George Or- den decades. well, of the worst There is a worse kind of literary naive- way to write a biogra- te, mistaking the tale phy than to be in awe for the teller (as if the of your subject, and author of Richard III that is to dislike him. were himself a nihilis- Michael Shelden's tic, infanticidal sche- Graham Greene: The mer); but he forces Enemy Within seems one's hand. Greene is written out of a variant of that worst of feel- no more one of his characters than Milton ings, unrequited love. "When I began work is Satan. And while Shelden repeatedly cites on this biography," Shelden says, "I in- "interviews" and "conversations" with peo- tended it to be an affectionate portrait of a ple who can verify or at least support sus- novelist who deserved all the prizes the picions of Greene's sneaky dealings, his ref- world could give him.. . . But.. .I kept erences provide only the vaguest, most uncovering unpleasant facts, and my under- marshmallowy indications of who these standing of Greene's life and art gradually people actually are. changed." "Gradually," perhaps; "changed," Shelden was specifically denied access for certain. Here, at length, is the conclusion to Greene's estate, and it seems that much to Shelden's discussion of Greene's 1938 of his critical apparatus is either borrowed

BOOKS 75 from Sherry's authoritative book or is wish- and never blushed to admit it. The man's ful thinking. Scobie, the tormented hero of morals may have been questionable. But it The Heart of the Matter (1948), believes him- is more likely that he wrote about self guilty of a mortal sin and is led to com- whoremasters, addicts, traitors, and permit suicide out of his deep desire to serve verts because, as writers from Dostoevsky God and do good. The action evokes the to Auden to Mailer have known, such fig- quite serious problem of what Kierkegaard, ures-especially the double agent-are apt in Fear and Trembling, called "the teleologi- metaphors for the jumbled morality of our cal suspension of the ethical." Yet Shelden age. "Our interest's on the dangerous edge sees the book as yet another instance of the of things," says Robert Browning in a poem writer's melodramatic posturing, and cites Greene loved to quote. Orwell's prim review as back-up. "Unlike The Enemy Within, as it builds up steam, Orwell," he sniffs, "[Greenel was not trying progresses from distaste to malice to what- to make the world a better place. He was ever is on the other side of malice. Why all engaged in a private dance with sin." this studied outrage? Yes, the "real" Gra- Greene was a friend and colleague of ham Greene got a kick out of espionage, the master spy Kim Philby. To his cost and liked drink and opium, had numerous af- honor, he defended their friendship even fairs, and enjoyed prostitutes. These were after Philby's scandalous defection to Mos- open secrets, despite Shelden's constant cow, and he wrote a controversial introduc- harping on his man's duplicity. Greene was tion to Philby's memoir, My Private War. a stern, complex moralist in his fiction but Asked late in life what he would have done a sensualist in real life. had he known his friend was a traitor, And yet, for all its unfairness, I can't Greene replied that he probably would have help thinking that Greene would have en- given him a week to get out of the country, joyed Shelden's book more than Sherry's. then turned him in. For Sherry, this story is Greene had an appetite for scandal, and a bi- a sad, honest reflection by one old man on ographer such as Shelden, who gets the scan- a friend who has terribly erred. For Shelden, dal of every novel, is a much more compelling however, it is proof-contrary to the find- companion than the bland, wide-eyed Sherry. ings of British intelligence (MI 5), whose agents interviewed Greene extensively- hat is missing from both books, that the writer may have known his friend however, is the principal gift a was a double agent and kept silent for the w literary biography should de- sheer perverse joy of vicarious treason. liver: a formula for mapping the chaos of the Shelden is intrigued by Greene's fasci- life onto the achieved order of the work. nation with espionage and declares that the This is what Maynard Mack did with writer's family "had no shortage of spies." Alexander Pope, Leon Edel with Henry At various points, he suggests that Greene James, and Richard Ellmann with Joyce, spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s or- Yeats, and Wilde. Someday Greene's prince contradictorily-that he used his loudly may come, but not yet. Until then, the "real proclaimed leftist sentiments in the '50s and life" rests in a handful of imperishable tales, '60s to cover his MI 5 activities while trav- crafted, passionate, ironic, and holy. Not a eling to Moscow, Kenya, and Haiti. Yet bad resting place, that. again, Shelden's strongest sources for these assertions seem to be Greene's novels them- -Frank D. McConnell, a former Wilson selves. Greene did serve as an intelligence Center Fellow, is professor of English at agent during World War 11, as did virtually the University of California, Santa Bar- every smart person the British could recruit, bara.

76 WQ SUMMER 1995 What Kind of Bootstraps?

ONE BY ONE FROM THE INSIDE OUT: the reconnection with Christianity that has Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsi- brought him to a new state of spiritual bility inAmerica. By Glenn C. Loury. Free grace. Press. 332 pp. $25 These private facts, made public in part through Loury's all-too-brief period of can- lenn Loury has lived an amazing didacy for high public office, are bound to life, and the resulting temptation to be in the background of every response to Ginterpret his life rather than his these essays. For in them he addresses the work is almost irresistible. Loury himself crisis of the black ghetto, and his authority heightens the temptation by ending his book to speak of the necessity for moral reform of essays on "race and responsibility in in the life of the drug abuser, the unwed America" with a very intimate epilogue father, and the unfaithful husband derives, exploring his experience of being "born in some measure, whether he likes it or not, again": "Because of this encounter with from the fact that he can say, "I am the man, Jesus Christ, the death and vacancy, the I suffered, I was there." emptiness of my life, has been relieved." His The pathos of Loury's public tragedy and final paragraphs offer a personal testimony private triumph has another unavoidable con- to the truth of the Gospel: "I know prima- sequence: it raises the stakes in criticizing his rily, and I affirm this truth to you, on the work. Don't kick a man when he's down, we basis of what I have witnessed in my own say. But it's not much more attractive to kick life. This knowledge of God's unconditional a man who has just gotten up. love for humankind provides moral Still, I think we should resist the temp- grounding for my work in cultural justice tation to take Loury's life as an emblem of and racial reconciliation, economics, and anything, least of all the state of black social justice." America. He is an extraordinary indi- Loury, a professor of economics at Bos- vidual-a man of prodigious intellectual ton University, had enjoyed great secular gifts, in particular-and we will learn more success: "I had reached the pinnacle of my from engaging with his ideas than from profession. When I went to Washington, reading his life. If we must face the question people in the halls of power knew my name. of Loury's life at the start, it is so that, in the I had research grants. I had prestige." The end, we can put it aside. oblique remark reminds us that, in March 1987, President Ronald Reagan had nomi- he ruling idea developed in these es- nated him-a child of Chicago's South Side, says is that black Americans should born to a black, solidly working-class fam- Theed the call of Booker T. Washing- ily in 1948-to be deputy secretary of the ton (1856-1915) and act in their own com- U.S. Department of Education. His public munities to address the crisis of values in fall from secular grace began when he with- the ghetto by "religious, civic, and volun- drew his name from consideration a few tary efforts of all sorts." This is what Loury days before assault charges were filed calls the "inside game," and its players are against him by his mistress. Drug charges the black community and its leaders. In- followed in November. In early 1988, Loury stead of debating what actions the govern- checked himself into McLean Hospital in ment should take to help black people, black Belmont, Massachusetts, to start drug re- leaders should be guiding them to their own habilitation. There he was helped to begin salvation. Self-help, not state intervention,

BOOKS 77 should be the primary focus. as Loury puts the matter in deliberately old- Loury admits that Washington's call for fashioned 1anguage~"comportthemselves" such a focus may have been mistaken in its in a more dignified way. own day. Then there was still the task of Persuading Americans generally to at- undoing the work of Jim Crow segregation, tend to the problems of the most disadvan- and Loury is clear that black Americans taged is the object of what Loury calls the were right to insist on equality under the "outside game," and his critique of the civil Constitution. But the civil rights war is rights leadership is both that they have largely won, he thinks, and simply insisting played this game badly and that it has led that America still owes a debt to black them to ignore the essential "inside game." people is both undignified and politically counterproductive. oral reform, the objective of the It is undignified, Loury thinks, because inside game, "is not a task for the the gesture of petition keeps black Ameri- M state in our liberal society," cans in the subordinate position that has its Loury argues, but requires instead, "reli- roots in slavery; it is counterproductive be- gious, civic, and voluntary efforts of all cause the behavior of some young black sorts." It is such skepticism about state men and women-the latter irresponsibly action that makes Loury an American con- giving birth to children they cannot afford servative. Yet Loury's opposition to cur- because the former do not face their respon- rent civil rights policy-and to affirmative sibilities as fathers, preferring to live lives action in particular-is unlike that of of violent crime-has alienated many white many conservatives. It is not based on the Americans. So too has the failure of black idea that America's debt to black people political leaders to condemn this behavior. has been paid; nor is it rooted in the no- Loury believes, with Washington, that black tion that anti-black racial discrimination is Americans have to earn from the rest of the gone (though he does think its persistence country "honor, respect, equal stand- is exaggerated by the black political leading. . . and worthiness as subjects of na- ership). Rather, Loury believes that affir- tional concern." mative action hurts black Americans more than it helps them. o far, so conservative. But Loury also Loury's opposition to much affirmative insists that the state does have a role action-in particular, preferential hiring of in helping to deal with black poverty: blacks-is not driven by what drives those s"Medical care for the poor, education in the many (mostly white) conservatives who rail inner city, job training for welfare mothers, against "reverse discrimination." His worry discipline for criminally offending youths, is not that affirmative action is unfair to funding for improvement of community white men but that it is ultimately bad for infrastructure and for housing, nutrition for blacks, and for the worst-off blacks particu- infants, drug treatment for addicts seeking larly. When Loury argues that welfare is help-all of these and more require the pro- bad for the poor, it is clear that he is not just vision of public funds and are essential to another guy who will use any argument, fair black progress." The rub is that, to get these or foul, to reduce his taxes. desperately needed services funded, there Loury is unmistakably a "race man": an has to be a public will to pay for them. And African American who is deeply-and, in that can be created, Loury argues, only if the end, unapologetically-preoccupied Americans generally believe that the black with the well-being of black people, espe- poor deserve their help. To persuade white cially those who are trapped by poverty and Americans of this black Americans must- by crime. In the prologue, he writes:

78 WQ SUMMER 1995 Who am I, then? Foremost, I am a But he also develops a novel argument child of God.. .I am a husband, a to the effect that holding blacks to lower father, a son, a teacher, an intellec- standards than whites reduces the incen- tual, a Christian, a citizen. In none of tives for black self-improvement, thus per- these roles is my race irrelevant, but versely making belief in black under- neither can racial identity alone provide much guidance for my quest to achievement a self-fulfilling prophecy. discharge these responsibilities ad- Loury is at pains to insist that "this discus- equately. sion is theoretical," denying that he has evidence of its significance in the real world. But the cool tone here is a little mislead- Yet because he devotes an appendix of 15 ing. "Not irrelevant" doesn't quite capture pages-about the length of some of the how central racial identification is in chapters, and much longer than most of the Loury's life. What captures it better is his book reviews-to these ideas, we are pre- subsequent confession that he was worried sumably to take them seriously. when his middle-class, suburban son took To be sure, no one can deny that affir- up hockey, a "white man's game." "My mative action has negative effects. The ques- aversion to my son's involvement ...was tion, though, is whether they outweigh the rooted in my own sense of identity as a positive ones. And that can be addressed black American man who grew up when only by someone who seeks to measure and where I did." I rather suspect that evenhandedly what affirmative action Loury would go along with another of achieves as well. Spending 15 pages on a Booker T. Washington's sentiments: "From confessedly "theoretical" objection (how- any point of view, I had rather be what I am, ever elegantly developed) in an essay that a member of the Negro race, than be able to doesn't say much about what good affirma- claim membership with the most favored of tive action has done leaves one suspecting any other race." That remark has the kind of that Loury's discussion is not the fair- grand, dignified sense of self that Loury minded exploration of the issues we so des- wants to see in the children of the ghetto. perately need. And he wants them to be helped to live lives that merit that self-respect. he claim that blacks would be better The claim that affirmative action has off, on average, if racial preferences bad effects is, of course, familiar. There is Twere abolished tomorrow strikes me the self-doubt of some beneficiaries of affir- as wildly implausible. But Loury's view mative action, made familiar by Shelby would trouble me less if he had more plau- Steele and Stephen Carter (whose books are sible things to say about what policies reviewed here by Loury). There is the anger should replace affirmative action. He cor- of white Americans, the legitimacy of whose rectly insists that it is not "enough merely "competing interests" is ignored, Loury to be right about liberals having been says, by the "entitlement-oriented" rhetoric wrong." He recognizes that we cannot just of affirmative action's defenders. There is abolish affirmative action, reduce welfare, the fact that the major black beneficiaries of and leave the ghetto to its own devices. Yet affirmative action have been middle and the solution he does see-the "inside upper-middle class, with little trickle down gameu-is addressed to a recovery of val- to the black working poor. There is the way ues within black communities, a recovery affirmative action encourages everyone to that he believes must begin "one by one, think of other people not as individuals but from the inside out," a consummation that as members of races. Loury makes these would best be advanced, he clearly thinks, points strongly and carefully. by the revival of Christian faith.

BOOKS 79 Loury does not seek to promote this find policies that will be more successful course as a matter of government policy. than past efforts have been. Still, nothing Indeed, in his discussion of the work of he says persuades me that we cannot do Stephen Carter, he defends-against better, or that racial and gender prefer- Carter-a fairly tough separation of church ences will not continue to be a useful (if and state. He insists, like a good liberal, that minor) part of the policy mix. The failures public policies should be defended by ap- of government action are grounds for bet- peal to secular principle. One can invoke ter action, not for the abandonment of the moral principles that are rooted in religious task. And the continuing challenge of experience and conviction in Loury's pub- Glenn Loury-the smart, morally engaged lic sphere, but one cannot invoke the reli- race man-is more a spur than an impedi- gious grounds themselves. It follows that ment to that enterprise. public policy can play only a secondary role even in the worldly salvation of the truly -Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of disadvantaged. Afro-American studies and philosophy If Loury's conclusions seem a little at Harvard University. His most re- thin, his skepticism about the value of cent book is Another Death in Venice government action challenges liberals to (1 995).

Rebirth of a Nation

THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION: The The book under review will not do New Nationalism and the Fourth American much to restore Lind's relations with his Revolution. By Michael Lind. 300 pp. Free former colleagues on the right. But his Press. $23 newfound liberal friends may find much to disagree with as well, especially his tren- ichael Lind is a renegade among chant critique of affirmative action. No American political thinkers, as in- matter whose ox he gores, though, Lind has dependent in his reflections upon produced a highly original polemic, flawed the state of the nation as his fellow exa an C. and uneven but always provocative. Wright Mills was in his earlier readings of Lind's manifesto, calling for "a third American society. Lind, who recently be- way between laissez-faire capitalism and came a senior editor of the New Republic af- unworkable socialism," quite consciously ter a brief stint at Harper's, has even created follows the model of Herbert Croly's Prom- something of a stir among the intellectuals ise of American Life (1909), the influential by publishing two scathing critiques of con- progressive blueprint for an activist na- servatives and conservatism in Dissent and tional government. Like Croly, he offers a the New York Review of Books. To some this reinterpretation of American history, divid- was treason, or at least apostasy, for Lind in ing the nation's political past into "three an even earlier incarnation was executive republics," or regimes-Anglo-America, editor of the National Interest, the foreign Euro-America, and Multicultural America. policy journal founded by neoconservative After describing each, he posits a desirable Irving Kristol. fourth regime, the "Trans-American Melt-

80 WQ SUMMER 1995 ing Pot," which Lind hopes his manifesto will help usher in. Explicit in this fourth republic, in a way clearly reminiscent of Croly's book, is a revised and democratized version of Alexander Hamil- ton's program for a powerful national government. At the heart of Lind's argument, as the names of the four republics suggest, is the notion that America, like other nations, has a national culture that binds its citizens together. Here Lind rejects the view of Croly and others who have argued that America is unique "conqueror of Mexico." Among the culture- among states in owing its coherence to a founders Lind includes Governor John set of core beliefs or ideas. And while he Winthrop, Sir William Penn, and Frederick echoes the arguments against American Douglass. Such individuals, Lind argues, exceptionalism recently made by National founded the nation (in the territorial and, Review editors John O'Sullivan and Peter especially, cultural sense) before the nation- Brimelow, he builds his case on a subtler, state was fully consolidated under a pow- more persuasive understanding of Ameri- erful federal government. can culture that acknowledges its diverse There are many virtues in Lind's rebut- elements and allows for its syncretic tal of the exceptionalists' perspective on growth. So, for example, Lind quite American history. It reinforces the view of rightly puts the history of black Ameri- many recent scholars that most immigrants cans at the center of the American expe- were not drawn to America by its laws or rience, a positioning that would not sit too political ideals. Most came for economic well with O'Sullivan and Brimelow, who gain, and many intended to return to their emphasize America's British heritage. native countries. Those who remained, (While Lind joins them in arguing for however, became assimilated into a distinc- greatly restricted immigration, he does so tively American culture even as they added on strictly economic grounds.) elements of their own heritages to the sim- Rejecting the interpretation of the mering pot. exceptionalists, Lind invokes America's cultural traditions as the basis of his nation- et Lind's interpretation can also lead alist credo, which he calls "liberal national- to problems. One is an unnecessar- ism." Consequently, he de-emphasizes the Y ily strident stance that posits di- role of the Founders-including Washing- chotomies where none may exist. For ex- ton, Madison, and even Hamilton-in favor ample, many conservatives who subscribe of "the conquerors of the national home- to the exceptionalist view are nevertheless land" and "the culture-founders." Among highly concerned about recent cultural the former, Lind includes General Sam changes in contemporary America, includ- Houston, "hero of the Texas war of inde- ing multiculturalism and multilingualism. pendence," and General Winfield Scott, In other words, the two interpretations cited

BOOKS 81 by Lind do not appear to be mutually exclu- and Hispanics, along with the absolute sive. Yet Lind never bothers to address this majority of the poor who are white, into possibility. the larger society.'' What is perhaps most impressive nother problem with Lind's brand about Lind's case is that, despite his con- of nationalism, particularly his demnation of the group-rights logic of af- A emphasis on conquest and territo- firmative action, he does not subscribe to rial expansion, is that it leaves black and the trendy view that America is breaking Mexican Americans in a very difficult up into feuding racial and ethnic groups. situation. If these (along with Native Far from it. Lind is too attuned to the ab- Americans) are in fact nothing more than sorptive power of our national culture to the conquered peoples of North America, accept such scenarios. But if Lind is not not unlike those brought to heel by other concerned about Balkanization, he is very nation-states, are they not then relegated much alarmed by what he calls to the victim status that some of their Brazilianization, by which he means the leaders claim for them? If so, are these emergence of a rigid social hierarchy groups not entitled to the affirmative ac- based roughly on color. tion programs that Lind is so critical of- Confronted by economic forces exac- and that he would like to see eclipsed by erbating class barriers and political forces a revived class-based politics? undermining class-based politics, Lind Despite this problem, the strongest advocates an activist, interventionist wel- part of Lind's argument is without doubt fare state. In characteristically high- his critique of affirmative action, the de- handed fashion, he declares the debate fining policy of Multicultural America surrounding the culture of poverty and its grievance-group politics. The es- "overn-in favor of those who argue that sence of his argument is that affirmative culture is indeed the decisive factor. Ar- action is the cynical response of a white guing for "maximum feasible paternal- elite, what Lind refers to as the ism," Lind endorses proposals such as "overclass," eager to buy social peace by those by James Q. Wilson calling for or- co-opting racial-minority leaders. Resur- phanages and boarding schools for ghetto recting sometimes-forgotten history, Lind youth. He also insists on the need to "re- correctly points out that affirmative ac- vitalize the public school system" by tion, as applied to trade unions, got an equalizing education expenditures and important boost from the Nixon adminis- "imposing statewide and national stan- tration. In the same vein, he points to the dards," though he is skeptical of voucher racial gerrymandering resulting from the and choice schemes. Voting Rights Act of 1965 and advanced under Republican and Democratic admin- ut Lind is hardly prepared to stop istrations alike. there. He favors curtailing the entry Though not entirely original, Lind's Bof unskilled immigrants as part of a argument here is forceful and persuasive, "social market contract" to restore the liv- particularly when he points out that affir- ing standards of American workers. In- mative action has helped white elites- cluded in this contract would be a "social conservative and liberal-respond to mi- tariff" designed to "deter American em- nority demands without undertaking ployers in some industries from responding "the dramatic reforms of American gov- to rising wages in a tight American labor ernment and business that are necessary market by transferring production abroad." to integrate working-class and poor blacks Lind also proposes to substitute progressive

82 WQ SUMMER 1995 income and consumption taxes for payroll would do further hurt to the less affluent, levies to finance Social Security and other for whom the political process would be all social benefits. the more complicated-unless drastically Lind urges his readers not to get too simplified by the emotional appeals of me- caught up in the details of such proposals dia demagogues. and instead to focus on his overall point that reducing class barriers should take prece- s for Lind's hopes for a more ratio- dence over affirmative action tokenism. nal and substantive class-based Even so, many of his proposals seem dubi- A politics, these too could founder ous economically, though evaluating them on a nasty, media-fed brawl between the is frankly beyond my competence and, I haves and the have-nots. What Lind com- would wager, Lind's as well. pletely overlooks is that the last time our Lind gets into even more trouble with politics was more class based, under the proposals for political reform. Convinced that New Deal, we had much stronger locally we now live in a campaign-finance driven based institutions-including churches, "plutocracy," he argues for the "separation of political parties, and labor unions-that check and state" and calls for the prohibition not only articulated and organized inter- of paid political advertising and the subse- ests but did so in ways that linked citizens quent provision of free informational public- to the process through everyday, face-to- service notices in the print and electronic face relationships. Such mediating struc- media. He also calls for European-style tures and the vital role they play in mak- multiparty democracy and proposes that U.S. ing politics comprehensible to ordinary senators be elected by proportional represen- Americans are completely left out of tation in national elections every four years, Lind's analysis. concurrent with the presidential election. For all his iconoclasm, then, Lind falls Lind's goal here is to eliminate the fac- into the same trap that snares many contem- tors "that are alienating an ever-growing porary writers and intellectuals. Preoccu- number of Americans from the political pro- pied with overarching historical themes and cess." His concern is surely on target, yet the contemporary value conflicts, the chattering remedies he proposes would just as surely classes give short shrift to the messy and exacerbate the problem. For the national- sometimes arcane details of the institutions ized, mass democracy he envisions would that make society work. Nevertheless, at a almost certainly be dominated by the media time when political and policy debates seem (whether free or not) whose biases have al- increasingly locked into boring set pieces, ready helped alienate millions of Americans Lind deserves credit for attempting to break from politics. But even more to the point, the molds. He has written a book that, even the minor parties that get increased clout when wrong-headed, challenges and stimu- under proportional representation would lates in a realm where predictable cant is the compete for media attention and thereby norm. increase the stridency of our politics. Fi- nally, it is particularly ironic, given Lind's -Peter Skerry, a Wilson Center Fellow, is concern with the class bias of today's poli- the author of Mexican Americans: The tics, that his proposals in all likelihood Ambivalent Minority (1993).

BOOKS 83 History

HOW "NATIVES" THINK: About Captain Cook, For Example. By Marshall Sahlins. Univ. of Chicago. 318 pp. $24.95

Captain James Cook, the famed 18th-century British navigator, came ashore on the island of Hawaii in January 1779 and died there the following month at age 51. That much is indisput- able. What happened between his arrival and his death, however, has become the subject of intense debate between two noted contemporary Obeyesekere's theory, for all the critical acclaim anthropologists, Marshall Sahlms of the Univer- it has received, is "undermined by reason, his- sity of Chicago and Gananath Obeyesekere of torical evidence, and the ethnography of West- Princeton University. Their fight is not just about ern culture." If these seem like strong charges, what occurred more than 200 years ago in Ha- they are aimed at a formidable ideology. waii. It goes to the heart of a continuing debate Obeyesekere wants to defend the Hawaiians about the ability of anthropologists working in against the ethnocentric forces of the West, but the Western tradition to understand other cul- he does so, Sahlins maintains, by practicing a tures. Sahlins argues for the plausibility of mod- "symmetrical and inverse ethnocentrism": Ha- ern anthropological inquiry in the face of a waiians are accordingly "endowed with the creeping political correctness that threatens to highest form of Western mentality, while West- silence the very "natives" it ostensibly seeks to ern scholars slavishly repeat the irrational be- defend. He insists that there is a way to look at liefs of their ancestors." other cultures objectively that need not become Sahlins is a careful prosecutor, and his some- the kind of "imperialistic" anthropology he has times trying detours into such matters as the been accused of practicing. Hawaiian lunar calendar are important to the Obeyesekere fired the first shot in The Apo- argument. He wittily dismantles Obeyesekere's theosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in case, accusing him of taking a "scholarlier-than- the Pacific (1992).He argued against the long-ac- thou-attitude" and of creating a "pidgin anthro- cepted view advanced by Sahhns and others that pology." There is a sporting thrill to this unusual the Hawaiians believed Cook to be an incarna- (because public) bloodletting in the academy, tion of the god Lono. (The captain's appearance but the fight is likely to continue well beyond coincided with an important annual religious Sahlins's round-two punch. festival.) The idea that the Hawaiians took Cook for a god was, in Obeyesekere's view, a contriv- ance of imperialist ideology, a myth "fundamen- MONSIEUR D'EON IS A WOMAN: A Tale tally based on the Western idea of the redoubt- of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade. able European who is a god to savage peoples." By Gary Kates. Basic Books. 363 pp. $25 He offered a different interpretation: Cook was not received as Lono but was installed honorifi- Spies tend to have more complicated inner lives cally as a taboo chief and deified only after his than the rest of us. What sort of person chooses untimely death at native hands. to live an uprooted existence, change identities How Natives Think is Sahlins's response, a at great risk, and deceive friends, family, and compelling and thorough, if occasionally plod- lovers on a routine basis? As Kates demonstrates ding, indictment of Obeyesekere's scholarship in his absorbing study of the 18th-century (shoddy) and political agenda (misguided).Apo- Chevalier &Eon, spies in the past were every bit theosis, Sahlins claims, is "a veritable manual of as complex as their modern counterparts. sophistical and historiographicalfallacies," and Charles &Eon de Beaumont was born in 1728

84 WQ SUMMER 1995 to a family of lesser Burgundian nobility. By his Women, &Eon believed, were spiritually supe- mid-thirties, this workaholic bachelor was a cap- rior to men. tain of the elite corps of Dragoons and had re- Kates will not convince every reader that ceived from Louis XV the coveted Cross of Saint- Chevalier &Eon was the man of (feminist) prin- Louis for distinguished diplomatic service in ciple he depicts. Intent on removing d'Eon's Russia and England. But while pursuing the story from the realm of pathology, Kates makes French crown's official policies abroad, &Eon his transformation seem implausibly rational. also worked as a spy furthering a clandestine But this does not detract from his lively, novel- agenda to put a Frenchman on the Polish throne istic account of an extraordinary lifwrfrom a and to undermine English domestic politics. wonderful tour of the politics and culture of When financial tensions escalated between the 18th-centuryEurope. chevalier and his "handlers" in the 1760s, this model civil servant's career began to come apart. D'Eon threatened to blackmail the French gov- THE END OF REFORM: New Deal Liberal- ernment, and to show he was serious, he pub- ism in Recession and War. By Alan Brinkley. lished a collection of highly confidential docu- Knopf. 371 pp. $27.50 ments. Ordered to return to France, he refused. But none of this accounts for &Eon's lasting Between its beginnings in the early 1930s and the notoriety. In 1770 a rumor circulated in London end of World War IS, New Deal liberalism un- that &Eon was actually a woman; soon the wild derwent a fundamental change. Its principal speculation led to heavy betting. In 1772 &Eon architects, including Franklin D. Roosevelt him- and a French official confirmed the startling self, gradually backed away from trying to deal "truth that the chevalier was really a chevaliere. with difficult issues of wealth, class, and eco- Mademoiselle &Eon lived for another four de- nomic power, with consequences for American cades in England and France, only to stun the liberalism that persist to the present day. world once more upon her death in 1810: exami- Brinkley, a historian at Columbia Univer- nation of the corpse indisputably proved that sity, tells how powerful external forces-the she was a man after all. recession of 1937-38, the growth of organized D'Eon was one of the most talked-about char- labor, World War II-deflected the New Deal- acters in 18th-centuryEurope, and his story has ers from their original plans to restructure been told before. But at a time when gender- American society and its troubled economy. bending tales such as M. Butterfly and The Cy- By the end of World War 11, he writes, "New ing Game have enjoyed great success, this re- Dealers so transformed their vision of politi- opening of the &Eon dossier was inevitable. cal economy that it no longer bore any direct Kates, a history professor at Trinity University relation to the progressive traditions that had in Texas, tackles the central question head-on: originally informed their efforts." why would an 18th-century man choose to jeop- Although few New Dealers were ever actu- ardize his status by passing for half his life as a ally hostile to capitalism, they all believed that member of the "lesser" sex? something was wrong with it and that govern- Kates's answer is likely to be controversial: ment should find a way to set it right. But the d'Eon, he insists, was neither a transvestite nor consensus of the early Depression yielded, a transsexual. None of his abundant autobio- says Brinkley, to "a set of liberal ideas essen- graphical writings suggest that &Eon made a tially reconciled to the existing structure of the fetish of women's clothes or was ill at ease with economy and committed to using the state to his male body. Kates uses these works and compensate for capitalism's inevitable flaws." d'Eonls library (he owned at least 60 books re- New Dealers replaced their zeal for a fundamen- lating to the nature and status of women) to ar- tal overhaul of the economy with a much less gue that &Eon's decision to live as a woman was forceful "regulatory impulse." The Justice an intellectual one, an early form of feminism Department's Antitrust Division under Thur- later bolstered by his revived religious faith. man Arnold did not attempt to eradicate busi-

BOOKS 85 ness monopoly but sought merely to contain it. fourth century B.c.,the most important mem- Just as World War I had put an end to the bers of the Greek population lived. These Progressive Era, so World War I1 dealt a blow essential "other Greeks" were family farmers. to the New Deal's early ambitions. The rise of Hanson contends that a new form of agrari- fascism made Americans wary of granting more anism took hold in Greece sometime around power and control to the central government. 700 B.c.,spurred by the growing population's And though the war did spur increased govern- need for a larger food supply. Central to this ment involvement in the economy, it also pro- change was the emergence of the small farm, moted greater cooperation between Washington rarely larger than 20 acres in size but worked and the American business community. The ex- to the limits of productivity by its indepen- perience of the war forced New Deal reformers dent owner. Over time, such owners coalesced to acknowledge their own limitations. "By the as a class and became powerful enough to dic- end of the war they had disabused themselves tate Greek military of the notion that all problems could be helped by fundamental cures," Brinkley concludes. "In- stead, they had more modest goals: protecting consumers and encouraging mass consumption, and using fiscal policies and social welfare innovations to find the road to prosperity." fundamentals Brinkley admits that a certain measure of Western civiliza present-mindedness spurred his investigation: tion, Hanson ar- he wanted to understand why contemporary gues, originated in the agricultural practices American liberalism, with its focus on indi- of the polis: private ownership of land, free vidual rights and group entitlements rather than choice in economic activity, an economic on the national well-being, has strayed so far mentality to improve productivity, constitu- from its New Deal roots. Historians frown upon tional government based on local represen- drawing contemporary lessons from their work, tation, the subservience of military organiza- but Brinkley's book does provide a cautionary tion to civilian political control, notions of tale when powerful forces in Washington speak egalitarianism and equality of property hold- blithely once again about fundamentally ing, and private ownership of arms. "Agrari- reordering government and society. an pragmatism," he writes, "not intellectual contemplation, farmers, not philosophers, 'other' Greeks, not the small cadre of refined THE OTHER GREEKS: The Family Farm and minds who have always comprised the stuff the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. By of Classics, were responsible for the creation Victor Davis Hanson. Free Press. 541 pp. $28 of Western civilization." The startling modernity of Hanson's list sig- What other Greeks? Who among these inge- nals his larger purpose. He would have us see nious folk have escaped the confines of an old America through his elaborate Greek prism: the popular tradition? The ancient Greeks were traditional-agrarian-values on which this urban and urbane, curious and cantankerous, country was founded are disappearing along wrote poems and plays and philosophy, ex- with the American family farm, and we are slip- celled at mathematics and sculpture and archi- ping into our own Hellenistic age of desultory, tecture, and invented democracy. Hanson, a untethered pandemonium. Six generations of classicist at California State University, Hanson's family have worked a ranch in Califor- Fresno, does not entirely dismiss this tradi- nia. When he complains of the farmer's increas- tional view but sees it as myopic and partial. ing marginalization or describes the hardship of TOunderstand Greece in its days of glory, he making a life on the land, whether in ancient argues, we must look beyond the cities to the Greece or 20th-century America, he writes from countryside, where, from the eighth to the experience.

86 WQ SUMMER 1995 Compelling as his book is, Hanson's the- woman's land, between or eliding genders." sis about the influence of agrarianism on By identifying with this ambiguously sexed Greek culture is not entirely persuasive. He Silenus, Rubens evokes "a desire-a male de- makes large claims, on behalf of Greece and sire perhaps-for the merging with a woman America both, and his evidence does not al- that was essential to him in the making of art." ways lend them convincing weight. Those Earlier, Alpers describes the development ancient playwrights and poets and philoso- of a French taste for Rubens's art in the 18th phers and sculptors are not so easily dimin- century as opposed to the art of Nicolas ished, nor is the vast impersonality of contem- Poussin (1594-1665). Rubens was a virtuoso in porary American agribusiness self-evidently the use of color, and his work was thought menacing. The world moves through cycles of feminine, while Poussin, who excelled in line change, impossible to resist, as the Greeks and design, evoked a male world of significant themselves knew all too well. Still, there is action. Alpers regards this 18th-century criti- truth to be seen from Hanson's altered cal "engendering" as odd and arbitrary, and perspective, even if it is not the whole truth. it was indeed soon subject to reversal (i.e. Rubens became "masculine"). Yet it seems no more arbitrary than her own fashionable but Arts & Letters implausible rendering of a Rubens for our gender-obsessed age: the artist who needed to THE MAKING OF RUBENS. By Svetlana get in touch with his feminine side. Alpers. Yale. 178 pp. $30 Alpers contends that "the making of Ru- ben~is not only a matter of circumstances, or Why would a male painter in the Western tra- of the viewing of his art, it is also a matter of dition represent flesh as Peter Paul Rubens his own activity as a painter." The statement (1577-1640) does in his great picture The is remarkable for what it implies about the Drunken Silenus? Alpers, an art historian at the state of art-historical criticism in the academy University of California, Berkeley, asks the these days. The painter's "own activityu-his question in the last of this handsome volume's vision, his genius, the pictures, for goodness' three tenuously linked essays. It's a reasonable sake, which once would have been self-evi- question, apart from that worrisome "male," to ask of a painter as flesh-absorbed as Rubens. But Alpers's answer is something else again: "I think it has something to do with the problem of male generativity. How are men to be creative, to make pictures, for example, when giving birth is the prerogative of women?" (Do we lack evidence that men, some of them painters, have coped with their disadvantage through the ages?) Silenus is a mythical figure from Virgil's sixth Eclogue who must be tied up before he will sing to his captors. He makes his possession by others, his disempowerment, his surrender of masculinity, the condition of his creativity. So too, writes Alpers, did Rubens seek access to a potent, ecstatic mode of creating and to a feminine kind of surrender. Alpers views the body of the drunken Silenus as neither clearly male nor clearly female. It exists rather "in a curious no man's and no

BOOKS 87 dently primary-needs to have its claims as- in perpetuating what is at least partly a myth: serted against historical, ideological, and so- that they are, in fact, in control. Within the cial externalities. parameters of their own currencies, they still To the extent that Alpers means to argue manage the money supply (by increasing or the importance of Rubens's innate creative reducing banking system reserves) and short- impulses-whether masculine, feminine, or term interest rates (by raising or lowering the modishly mixed-her project is significant. rates financial institutions must pay to borrow Rubens and his individual genius, not from their central banks). But central bankers Flanders or politics or posterity, made have less power to affect global exchange Rubens. But oh for a bit more Poussinian clar- rates. To influence the foreign exchange value ity of line in the argument. of the dollar, for example, the Federal Reserve needs the cooperation of the president and Congress on fiscal policy-something the Fed Contemporay Affairs only rarely secures. Solomon recounts instance after instance in THE CONFIDENCE GAME: How which many of the central bankers' threats- Unelected Central Bankers Are Governing to each other, to governments, to market the Changed Global Economy. By Steven speculators-were at least partially empty. Solomon. Simon &' Schusfer. 606 pp. $30 But for the last 15 years, their bluffs have seldom been called, and the confidence game has Solomon's book couldn't be more timely. largely worked. The question, though, is how Since the end of 1994, the U.S. dollar has plum- much longer their luck can continue. meted nearly 20 percent against the Japanese The answer depends largely on how much yen and 15 percent against the German longer Americans are willing to give deutschemark. Such volatility is one of the unelected officials so much power over the hallmarks of today's anarchic global economy: nation's-and, indeed, the world's-econ- trillions of dollars of stateless capital slosh omy. Though the subtitle of his book suggests around the world every day, beyond the con- otherwise, Solomon argues that central bank- trol, and sometimes even the comprehension, ers are the heroes of the new stateless of government officials and central bankers. economy. The independence of central bank- How did the world's economy expand so ers needs to be strengthened, he says, rather rapidly into this vast, stateless swirl? Solo- than weakened. Elected officials are the "bad mon, formerly a reporter for Forbes, cites sev- guys" of his story. Either they don't under- eral causes: the 1970s breakdown of the stand the complexities of the global economy, Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, or they do and nevertheless pursue bad policy new communications technologies that allow for political gain. In either case, Solomon be- for instantaneous, worldwide trading 24 lieves, elected officials cannot be trusted with hours a day, and marketplace innovations that managing their nations' money supplies or permit relatively small investors to control their currencies. huge sums of money. Amid such changes, cen- But central bankers have weaknesses as tral bankers in Europe and Japan, as well as well. For one, Solomon says, they lack a coher- the United States, have worked diligently to ent theoretical model for dealing with eco- prevent global economic crises. Remarkably, nomic reality. Indeed, according to many of they have often succeeded-as in their han- the central bankers Solomon interviewed, they dling of the debt crises of less-developed have no idea what that "reality" is. No one, for countries in the early 1980s, and their quick example, knows at any given time whether the response to the 1987 stock market crash. dollar is fairly valued. Was it overvalued rela- Unfortunately, central bankers appear to tive to the yen and mark in late 1994, and fairly have more power than they actually possess. valued now? Or was it fairly valued then, and Their effectiveness,according to Solomon, lies undervalued now? There is nothing even ap-

88 WQ SUMMER 1995 proaching a consensus on this question among leaders plowed enough money back into so-called experts. Mexico City to keep its residents and party If central bankers can't fully comprehend constituents loyal, or at least acquiescent. But all of what's going on in the global economy, when the PRI could no longer guarantee pros- neither can any of the rest of us. That's the perity or congenial conditions in the city, important, if unsettling, message of this book. Davis claims, grassroots opposition flared. Davis's history helps to explain both the poverty and the political opposition now so URBAN LEVIATHAN: Mexico City in the evident in the other regions of Mexico, nota- Twentieth Century. By Diane E. Davis. bly Chiapas, where outright rebellion erupted Temple. 391 pp. $24.95 in 1994. If Mexico's current woes have many causes, Davis's account sheds valuable light In 1940,1.7 million people lived in metropoli- on why the endangered PRI is now courting tan Mexico City; today it is home to more than rural populations, advocating regional devel- 16 million. What was once a charming city opment, and scrambling to compensate for with a leisurely air has become, in the words decades of provincial neglect. of the writer Octavio Paz, "a monstrous in- flated head, crushing the frail body that holds it up." What went wrong? Why has the devel- IN RETROSPECT: The Tragedy and opment of Mexico City proceeded so disas- Lessons of Vietnam. By Robert S. McNamara trously? And what have been the conse- with Brian VanDeMark. Random House. quences of its unchecked growth for the politi- 414 pp. $27.50 cal and economic well-being of the nation? Davis, a sociologist at the New School for So- Last spring, after almost three decades of reti- cial Research, provides disturbing answers. cence, Robert McNamara finally issued his While many observers blame Mexico's cur- version of what went on in the highest govern- rent crisis on corrupt and power-hungry poli- ment circles during the Vietnam War. Predict- ticians in the party that has ruled for more ably, the former secretary of defense drew hot than 60 years, the Partido Revolucionario criticism from many quarters for his admis- Institucional (PRI), Davis links it to the physi- sion that he remained at the Pentagon even cal concentration of social, political, and eco- after developing grave doubts about the pros- nomic resources in Mexico City, the country's ecution of that badly conceived war. Read capital and geographic center. According to carefully, however, his memoir is less a mea Davis, the PRI lavished its attention on Mexico culpa, as advertised, than an often artful shar- City, to the exclusion of other regions, in or- ing of the blame ("We were wrong") with the der to secure the loyalty of its sizable popula- Joint Chiefs of Staff and his former colleagues tion (today, about 20 percent of all Mexicans). in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This strategy led to the state's long-standing Nevertheless, to the abundant historical litera- protection of an uncompetitive class of ture he adds a useful, albeit truncated, Mexico City industrialists, who produced pri- chronicle of high-level obfuscation and strate- marily for local consumption rather than for gic confusion during 1961-68, the years of export. Their loyalty to the party was re- growing U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia. warded with hefty state subsidies. As the United States sought to "contain" Moreover, Davis maintains, the PRI's pre- Sino-Soviet expansionism, both Kennedy and occupation with social and economic forces Johnson feared being accused at home of "los- within Mexico City led it to forgo competitive ing" South Vietnam to the tenacious men in democratic politics and to rely on a pact with Hanoi. Johnson wanted to "win," but at the urban labor (based mainly in Mexico City), lowest possible political cost lest he lose his urban industrialists, and the urban middle Great Society programs. That meant no con- classes. The system worked so long as party gressional declaration of war, no mobilization

BOOKS 89 of the reserves, no risky U.S. offensive strat- civilian and military, were available but un- egy in Indochina. The press and Congress ini- heeded. tially backed LBJ's approach. So did The supermanager who came to the Penta- McNamara. gon from the Ford Motor Company is most con- But the cost kept mounting: first, step-by- vincing when he illuminates the crucial leader- step expansion of the bombing of North Viet- ship failure: neither Kennedy nor Johnson ever nam, then the landing of marines to protect the wanted to confront what "winning" or "getting bomber bases in the South, then more US. out" might truly require, just as McNamara him- troops (eventually 549,000) to beat back the self failed to confront the awful consequences of local Viet Cong and the infiltrating North Viet- his private doubt and public silence. namese regular forces. Soon, the conflict became an endless "body count" war. By Decem- ber 1965, only nine months after the marines Philosophy & Religion landed, McNamara writes, he was convinced that no US. military victory was feasible. GOD: A Biography. By Jack Miles. Knopf. 446 Thereafter, the secretary of defense became the pp. $27.50 prime in-house advocate of intermittent bombing pauses and (illusory) peace diplo- Clear the couch: it's God's turn for a 50-minute macy, and resisted the Joint Chiefs' requests session. Jack Miles's "biography" of God is an for more bombing. Privately, he lamented the ingenious conceit spun out to dizzying, and war with Robert Kennedy, LBJ's rival. Pub- somewhat wearying, length. The author pro- licly, he hailed allied "progress" in South Viet- poses "a consciously postcritical or postmodern nam. Finally, LBJ tapped him to head the reintegration of mythic, fictional, and historical World Bank and McNamara left the Pentagon elements in the Bible so as to allow the charac- in February 1968. "I don't know whether I re- ter of God to stand forth more clearly from the signed or was fired," he writes. work of which he is the protagonist." Miles, a McNamara may have intended his memoir former Jesuit now on the editorial board of the as a rebuttal to an unflattering 1993 biography Los Angeles Times, treats God as if he were a fig- by Deborah Shapley. But his narrative often ure like Hamlet: it is his action and inaction, reads as if it were cobbled together. For example, presence and absence, silence and speech that McNamara says General William Westmore- drive the Biblical narrative. land, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, had "no The God on Miles's couch is explicitly not the alternative," given Washington's constraints, to God of faith. This is a God of literary life, not waging a war of attrition; then, oddly, he quotes ordinary life, let alone eternal life. He is profli- Westmoreland's critics at greater length. gate with personalities-more faces than Eve, McNamara seldom analyzes either the fewer than Sybil-and you can read his ups and Indochina battlefield or the major war-fighting downs in the chapter headings: "creator," "de- issues raised by the U.S. military. He brushes by stroyer," "creator/destroyer" (God's conflicted), the Communists' surprise 1968 Tet offensive, the "liberator," "lawgiver,'"'liege,''- - "executioner," last crisis of his tenure. He ig "wife" (yes), "counselor," "fiend," nores the sacrifices (more than "sleeper." Indeed, God is some- 300,000 dead) of the South thing of an existential basket Vietnamese and implic- case who needs to define itly blames lackluster elf entirely through Saigon leaders for action with his crea- America's difficulties. He disingenuously lays He's powerful enough high-level ignorance about in the beginning to create the Vietnam to a lack of U.S. ex- universe, but he's also at a perts when in fact many experts, child's stage of emotional devel-

90 WQ SUMMER 1995 opment, with neither a past nor a social life, ment and as a member of the education fac- unlike those lucky Greek gods on Olympus. He ulty-but among the larger public. This was labors toward emotional maturity, unaware of an extraordinary achievement for a philoso- his own intentions until humankind helps him pher, the more so for one such as Dewey, discover them. Miles locates the climax of his who was not an easy or engaging writer and tale in the Book of Job, where God is finally so whose beliefs, if fully understood, might not flummoxed by his dealings with Job, the human have been expected to win wide acceptance being who forces him to confront his inner de- among Americans. Born in Burlington, Ver- mon ("a dragon goddess of destruction"), that mont, and raised a Congregationalist, he he falls silent for the rest of the Bible. He doesn't lost his faith in his early twenties. But he grow old so much as simply subside. continued throughout his life to use the lan- Miles does his best to keep aloft the balloon guage of religion-of "faith" and "belief" in of his conceit, but it begins to lose air before democracy, the common man, and educa- the official landing. You hear the hiss when he tion-to argue for a worldview that was resorts to filler such as "God sometimes be- squarely at odds with religion and deci- comes a part of the landscape rather than one sively rejected the supernatural. of the dramatis personae because his character Dewey called his mature philosophy "ex- has stabilized for a while." Read instead: "The perimentalism" (the graceless word says a Bible is in the way of my theory." In the end, lot about the foursquare philosopher). there's no getting around all those disparate "What he meant," writes Ryan, a professor books that make up the ~ook;composed by of politics at Princeton University, in this many hands for different purposes over hun- splendid new contribution to the ongoing dreds of years and arranged in a couple of fi- reappraisal of Dewey's thought, "was that nal orders-of which only one, the Hebrew, the truth, or more broadly the value, of any serves Miles's reading. belief or statement about the world is to be "The unity of the Bible," Miles insists, "was measured in experience. He was insistent not imposed by clever editing after the fact. It that a thoroughgoing naturalism was the rests ultimately on the singularity of the only intellectually respectable philosophy, Bible's protagonist, the One God, the monos the only approach to life, education, ethics, tkeos of monotheism." Nevertheless, the ab- and politics that offered a hope of progress." sence of a final authorial hand, such as shaped Above all, Dewey wanted the world to be the received Iliad or put Hamlet through his governed by "intelligent action." The words paces, may leave a theorizing critic as winded were meant to suggest an agenda of in- as his readers. The Lord awaits his Boswell formed-by science especially-and ener- still, but he's' found a Joyce Brothers and a getic purpose. And he wanted to make the Cleanth Brooks in the meantime. scientific attitude consistent with religious, artistic, and ethical attitudes, as part of a process of trying to understand and bring JOHN DEWEY AND THE HIGH TIDE OF order to the world. AMERICAN LIBERALISM. By Alan Ryan. Not everyone was persuaded. Ryan notes Norton. 416 pp. $30 that Dewey has always had two kinds of readers. One group, in which Ryan situates Philosophy once mattered in America, or at himself, "has seen him as trying to unite the least one philosopher did. John Dewey was religious conviction that the world is a 92 years old when he died in 1952, and for meaningful unity with a secular 20th-cen- more than 60 of those years he found an at- tury faith in the scientific analysis of both tentive and responsive audience not just nature and humanity." The second group among his fellow academics-he was asso- takes him for "an aggressive rationalist, ciated with Columbia University from 1905 someone who expects 'science' to drive out until his death, in the philosophy depart- faith, and a contributor to the 20th century's

BOOKS 91 obsession with rational social management." Science & Technology Dewey was out of favor with his fellow philosophers when he died, for his approach FIRE IN THE MIND: Science, Faith, and the was regarded as old-fashioned. Now he is Search for Order. By George Johnson. Knopf. being read again by philosophers and politi- 357 pp. $27.50 cal theorists who worry about the state of contemporary liberal democracy and speak "There are few places on earth that so many of a new communitarianism. Ryan's respect- people have claimed as holy and where so many ful but not reverent book is, in fact, the third people see the world in different ways." New major work on the philosopher to appear in York Times science writer George Johnson is recent years. The others, which Ryan ac- speaking of the desert and mountains surround- knowledges and praises even while observing Santa Fe, New Mexico. A rich mix of peoples ing that "their" Dewey is often not "his," are make their home here, from descendants of the Robert Westbrook's John Dewey and Ameri- native Anasazi, who left behind their puzzling can Democracy (1991), "a distinguished intel- runes scratched into the rocks, to the Hermanos lectual biography," and Steven Rockefeller's Penitentes, a Catholic brotherhood whose mem- John Dewey (1991), "truer to Dewey's philo- bers regularly perform a rite of self-flagellation sophical and religious concerns." in order to recall the sufferings of Christ. Both Taking readers through 100 years of groups were profoundly influenced by American intellectual life, Ryan locates Coronado's Spanish legions, and later by Yanqui Dewey's politics at the heart of the 20th expansionists sweeping down from the north. century's attempt to articulate a "new liber- The land remains a magnet. At Trinity Site, alism" that allows for individual freedom 150 miles to the south, scientists detonated the even as it acknowledges the regulatory role world's first nuclear device; at the nearby Santa of the state in working to improve the life of Fe Institute, Big Thinkers still ponder the Big the national community. In this, Ryan's po- Questions, including whether the universe is sition is orthodox and at odds with governed by some underlying order. Westbrook's, who portrays a more radical, Johnson observes that the people from these socialist inclination in Dewey. Ryan's Brit- different cultures, sciences, philosophies, and ish background allows him to see Dewey as religions all share common ground. He cannot more than simply an American figure-to help wondering whether they might, in some recognize how he was influenced by British larger sense, share Common Ground as well. philosophers and to place him in a larger Could there be strands hidden within their var- world context, as a "modern" and a "North ied tenets that, when woven together, might American." yield a tapestry explaining the origins of the uni- Dewey's religious views leave Ryan, like verse? Johnson is adept at adding the proper many before him, a bit baffled. He com- touches of local color and telling detail, but his plains that "Dewey wants the social value of task proves elusive. Time and again he follows religious belief without being willing to pay strands to the end only to find them circling back the epistemological price for it." Yet he ac- to where he began. Thus, he describes experi- knowledges as well that Dewey was "a vi- ments occurring at the "edge of chaos" and re- sionary of the here and now" who could "in- marks that "science, the art of compressing data, fuse" the present with "a kind of transcen- turns its gaze back on itself and finds, surprise, dent glow" that overcame the vagueness of that the very ability to gather and compress data his message and won widespread convic- is fundamental. . . . Driven to spin our gossamer tion. Ryan's book should help the man he webs, we can't help but put ourselves, the spi- calls "the century's most influential ders, at the very center." preacher of a creed for liberals, reformers, Indeed, says Johnson, humanity is "be- schoolteachers, and democrats" find an at- queathed by nature with this marvelous drive to tentive new audience. find order," and this desire sometimes leads us

92 WQ SUMMER 1995 to see patterns that may not be there. When the Virginia (1787) to refute the view of a French mysteries overwhelm our weak minds, our re- naturalist who had declared that all plant and ligions invoke a Great Designer, and the age-old animal life would degenerate in the inferior struggle by scientists and spiritualists to explain natural conditions of the New World. the unexplainable continues. Cohen tellingly points the science toward the Yet what else can we do but seek and ques- politics. In America, the rational, empirical, and tion? Science, after all, has looked into the future apparently successful methods of the one in- and seen our eventual doom, if not by fire then spired the practical optimism of the other. In by ice. Eternally hopeful nonetheless, we launch 1786, Benjamin Franklin justified the new probes into space beyond the reaches of our country's halting political progress by arguing most powerful telescopes and send as our em- that "we are, I think, in the right Road of Im- issary Johann Sebastian Bach on a compact disc. provement, for we are making Experiments." But for Johnson, "expecting galactic neighbors But Jefferson and Franklin held their duty to recognize our signals as signals" may be the to politics above scientific inquiry. When ultimate exercise in wishful thinking. In the end, Franklin abandoned his own experiments to he can do little more than offer up a kind of respond to public crises, he wrote, "Had New- prayer to the pursuit of knowledge, even if all ton been Pilot but of a single common Ship, we are constructing are "Towers of Babel that the finest of his discoveries would scarce have reach higher and higher above the plains." excused or atoned for his abandoning the Helm one hour in Time of Dangern-particularly, Franklin added, "if she had carried the SCIENCE AND THE FOUNDING FA- Fate of the Commonwealth." THERS: Science in the Political Thought of In his Principia (1687), Isaac Newton pro- Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison. By claimed the three laws of motion to be self- I. Bernard Cohen. Norton. 368 pp. $25 evident truths, though previously they had been evident to no one. Jefferson admired Not since Theodore Roosevelt, who gave a bi- Newton and hung his portrait at Monticello. ology lecture at Oxford University, has there When he wrote in the Declaration of Indepen- been a U.S. president with a serious claim to dence that certain "Truths" were "self-evi- competence in experimental science. What a dent," we can hear the echo, and perhaps sur- change from the intellectual temperament of the mise that he too was referring to hypotheses- first presidents, for whom science was an inte- human equality and unalienable rights-of gral part of their lives. They were, after all, men which many were unpersuaded. of the 18th century, and, in the Age of Reason, Cohen argues that Jefferson invoked reason found no higher expression than in sci- Newton's authority only by analogy, and that ence. As Cohen, a professor emeritus of the his- neither he nor Franklin believed there were ex- tory of science at Harvard University, shows, act scientific laws for society as there were for the "the sciences served as a font of analogies and natural world. He refutes Woodrow Wilson's metaphors as well as a means of transferring to assertion that the Constitution should be inter- the realms of political discourse some reflections preted as a reflection of Newtonian principles of the value system of the sciences." about forces in balance that produce some per- Cohen fills his book with entertaining an- fect adjustment. Rather, he says, "science in gen- ecdotes about the Founding Fathers' scientific eral and the Newtonian philosophy in particu- doings. James Madison made detailed lar served to provide acceptable metaphors for measurements of the organs of the female discussion or argument." But Americans are for- weasel (the mole too), and Thomas Jefferson tunate that the nation's Founders went to school published the data in his Notes on the State of on such metaphors.

BOOKS 93 POETRY STARB

Selected and introduced by Anthony Hecht

nce upon a time, there was a poetry entrepreneur-cum-antholo- , gist named Oscar Williams who was the maker and breaker of the budding careers of young poets by dint of his powers to include or exclude them from his Little Treasury series of Ameri- can or Modern Poetry collections. To be included was to be noticed by the major book publishers and in due course to find one's way to a published volume of one's own. To be denied that recognition was bad enough, but to be "dropped," to have Oscar's Oscar contemptuously taken away, was like being consigned to a special poetic oblivion. This terrible fate befell the brilliantly gifted George Starbuck, whose bravura technique probably has no match among English-language poets of this century. It was not for any incompetence that he was dismissed from Williams's pantheon. It was instead because of what Williams belatedly discovered in a Star-buck poem that he had included in a previous anthology. The poem was called "A Tapestry For Bayeux," and it was about intricate naval operations during World War n. Composed, dauntingly, in dactylic monometer (three syllables to a line, with the accent always on the first), the poem consisted of a dozen 13-hestanzas and had a needlework complexity even at first or second reading. The wrath of the anthologist was provoked when someone eventually showed him that, along with its other complications, Starbuck's poem was an acrostic, with the initial letters of the first 78 of its 156 lines spelling out:

Oscar Williams fills a need but a Monkey Ward catalog is softer and gives you something to read.

For all the charm of such a tour de force, simple considerations of length prevent its presentation here. Nor is there room for a double-dactylic poem 124 lines long; nor for a book-length poem entitled "Talkin' B.A. Blues; the Life and a Couple of Deaths of Ed Teashack; or How I Discovered B.U., Met God,~andBecame an International Figure"; nor for the remarkable "The Sad Ballad of the Fifteen Consecutive Rhymes"; nor for a poem called ''The Staunch Maid and the Extraterrestrial Trekkie," subtitled "hommages Julia Child." This last begins, "Stand back stand back, Thou blob of jelly./ Do not attack/ A maid so true./ I didn't pack/ My Schiaparelli/ To hit the sack/ With a thang like you," and continues four stanzas later, "You shall not lack/ For mortadelle./ You shall not lack/ For pate-2-choux./ You shall have aq-/ Uavit quenelle/ Mit sukiyak-/ I au fondue." There are 14 stanzas in all, observing the same rhyme scheme and form throughout. Starbuck's work is not confined to high jinks and hilarity. He has writ-

94 WQ SUMMER 1995 ten some of the most mordant comments on society's flaws and international blunders to be found in contemporary poetry. Of these, "Just a Little Old Song" is a powerful indictment of southern gentility, while "Of Late" seems to me, after many years of reading very bad poems of moral outrage on the topic, certainly the best poem to be written by an American about the Vietnam conflict. Nevertheless, it is for the astonishing fertility of his wit; his easy traffic with vernacular parlance, regional speech, and idiomatic and demotic melting-pot American; his effortless technique in such forms as the ballade, the clerihew, and the double-dactyl; and his general cheerfulness and lively intelligence that Starbuck is to be read, and is likely to be remembered.

is Who's Who entry tells us that Starbuck was born June 15,1931, in Columbus, Ohio, studied at the California Institute of Tech- nology (his early aptitudes were in science and mathematics), Berkeley, Chicago, and Harvard. He spent two years in the armedH forces and a year at the American Academy in Rome, has been married three times, and is the father of five children. One catches glimpses of the man himself in the memoirs, letters, and photographs of New England literary life in the late 1950s and afterward. For example, there is a celebrated photograph of Robert Frost at Bread Loaf in 1959, resting against a huge boulder in the midst of a mown field and holding forth to a reverent group of aspiring young poets, including Starbuck and Anne Sexton, crouched on the ground before him. For a few years, Starbuck, while working as an editor at Houghton Mifflin, was also a student in Robert Lowell's poet's workshop at Boston University; his fellow students included Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The strenuous demands of those classes would be followed by the three younger poets' ritual postmortem and "unwinding" over martinis at the Ritz. Anne Sexton would usually drive them there, and she would daringly park in the hotel's loading zone with the breezy assurance that "it's all right because we're here to get loaded." In the course of time, Starbuck himself became a member of the English Department at BU, and his lively presence in the literary life of Boston is affectionately recorded by Peter Davison in The Fading Smile (1994). The phrase light verse is often employed dismissively or contemptuously, though in our more private and honest moments we usually confess to an admiration for poets whose gifts are of this kind. Some of the very best light verse has been written by the likes of Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, Ken- neth Koch, Howard Moss, Helen Bevington, Phyllis McGinley, Morris Bishop, Ogden Nash, and W. H. Auden, not to mention Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, and Noel Coward, or, for that matter, Byron, Thomas Hood, and Thomas Hardy. Once you begin seriously to compose a list of admirable writers of light verse, you find yourself rounding all sorts of unexpected turns, and coming upon, for example, A. E. Housman. George Starbuck should certainly be numbered among that remarkable company.

POETRY 95 What Works Working Habits

(An admired ko-an of the Zen Buddhists goes as Federico Garcia Lorca follows: There is a livegoose in a bottle. How does one remove the goose without hurting it or damaging the used to uncork a bottle? An admired answer is: Behold, I have done it! bottle or two of wine John Holmes's poem "Poetry Defined" settled the whenever the duende dwindled for a line. matter thus. in its last lines: James Joyce I put it in with my words. would have preferred a choice I took it out the same way. of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany's, And what worked with these Can work with any words I say.) but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games of how much can we pyramid upon a I had a lovely bottle, bottle-blue given donne. in color with a heavy bottle-shape. It filled my kitchen table (window too) Little Dylan Thomas as round, as fine, as dusty as a grape, didn't keep his promise but not as edible. to stay out of Milk Wood. Reading my friend He tried to drown the fact as best he could. John Holmes's poem "Poetry Defined; or a Short Course in Goose-Bottling by Mind- Anna Akhmatova Over-Matter,'' I smiled: I saw an end Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war to certain problems. Yes, a goose would serve. cognac de champagne. "So much for you, little brandy. Do svidanya." Laying out axe and pot, steeling my nerve, T. S. Eliot "Doggone, I've put this goose in this-here bottle," used to belly it I said. And it worked: there she was-a beaut! all up to the nearest bar, white and afraid. Now: then make for a correlative objective in his car. "There she is!" I cried. Thunk went the fatted shoulders. Well, she tried. Proust There she is!" Thunk. "THERE she is!" used What the heck, to they came out, goose and bottle, neck and neck too. each time. Seizing the pot-lid, Thwack! My eyes buzzed as the blue-green bits like sizzling flies diamond-drilled them. Oh, if words could show them: fires, flares, rockets, the works! There was a poem! (spent like a wish, of course, after one use) Said but here, Kind Reader, here is our bruised goose. Agatha Christie to E. Phillips Oppenheim, "Who is this Hemingway, Stockholm Who is this Proust?

Rabindranath Tagore Who is this Vladimir Made flowers bloom where there were none before. Whatchamacallum, this "If s my green thumb," he said, "and with my tan thumb Neopostrealist I do stuff like the Indian National Anthem." Rabble?" she groused.

96 WQ SUMMER 1995 Of Late

"Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card" and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.

And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen. In your office you were informed. Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle. So far nothing turns up.

Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed. No tip-off. No release. Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes. Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists. Pity the press photographers, not called.

Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said all that there is to say in that language. Twice what is said in yours. It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself. Twigs for Lore Segal

Ludwig van Beethoven Slept often and ate often, Combed seldom and cared less, Said Causing his friends considerable distress.

J. Alfred Prufrock to Baron von Richthofen Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Urped often and hicked often. "What ever happened to His friends knew what to do. Senlin, ought-nine?'' They would sneak up behind him and go Boo.

"One with the passion for Michelangelo Orientalia?" Could not be his Mummsy's daddy, so "Rather." "Lost track of him." He had to become Italy's "Pity." "Design." Praxiteles.

POETRY 97 Translations from the English Out in the Cold (for Arthur Freeman) All day today the seagulls cried. Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes All day they cried, if not because of you, then not at least because I asked them to. The heat's on the hooker. I've got enough poor bastards on my side; Drop's on the lam. I'm not a Greek, I can be satisfied Cops got Booker. to share a chorus with the shrill sea mew Who give a damn? without pretending it's an interview with souls plucked from the shipwrecked as The Kid's been had they died. But not me yet. Dad's in his pad. I've got enough cold company: the guys No sweat. you used to tell me how you used to see before I came along and you got wise. Margaret Are You Drug Where are they now, in what capacity- those dear, well-meant, unsatisfactory Cool it Mag. approximations of the eventual me? Sure it's a drag With all that green flaked out. Next thing you know they'll be changing the color of bread.

But look, Chick, Why panic? Sevennyeighty years, we'll all be dead.

Roll with it, Kid. I did. Give it the old benefit of the doubt.

I mean leaves Late Late Schmeaves. You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself? Where tomahawks flash in the powwow and tommyguns deepen the hubbub and panzers patrol, is the horror I live without sleep for the love of,

Boston whose A-bombs respond to the tom-tom, whose halberds react to the ack-ack, Mr. Paul Verlaine? while I, as if slugged with a dumdum, We've come to fix your clerihew again. sit back and sit back and sit back No no no no, inoi je m'appelle Verlaine. Sure buddy, and I'm Richard Henry Dana. until the last gunman is drawn on, last murderous rustler druv loco, last prisoncamp commandant spat at, and somehow, and poco a poco,

the bottles are gone from the sixpack, sensation is gone from the buttocks, Old Glory dissolves into static, the box is a box is a box.

98 WQ SUMMER 1995 The Well-Trained English Critic Ballade of the Surveys the American Scene Mislaid Worksheet (for Bernard Weinberg) 'Poetic theory in America is at present in an extremely curious state, resembling that of England during the Barons' Wars rather than that of a healthy democracy or Where are the notes I made last year well-rim autocracy. It is not even a decent civil war . . ." On the flip side of a popcorn package -Thorn Gunn in Yale Review Toward my perennial sacrilege Upon the Muse: another near- Sometimes I feel like a fodderless cannon Translation of Villon? But where On one of those midwestern courthouse lawns Is Harlow? Where is Norma Tallmadge? Fiercely contested for by boys of ten and Norma Jean Baker? Norma Shearer? Topped by a brevet general in bronze. What tantalizing curve or cleavage-? Water under the bridge. Hallucination, naturally: no Era without its war, and this has its, Back to my dog-eared Dictionnaire. Roundabout somewhere, some imbroglio, Back to my Fowler's English Usage. Even if only run by starts and fits. But where is Mrs. Average American? Remember her- Limber me up again, somebody. Smiling at her discoverer In with the charges! To the touch-hole! Wham! The census-man-a Personage Elevate me, ignite me, let one ruddy At last? And Carole Lombard, where Side or the other taste the thing I am! Is she? And Mrs. Calvin Coolidge? Water under the bridge. This pale palaver, this mish-mash of factions: How can you find employment in? war Where are the powers I bargain for: Of private sorties and guerrilla actions? The Archimedean leverage Maddening! Maddening! It chokes the bore! To raise at least my own dead language Up? 0 Edmund Spenser, where Great God why was I tempered of pure In the wildern woods of verbiage sheffield Hath woned wended, and whither yore? Unless to belch and fulminate and reek? And oomph, and eld, and yesteryear? Never in England would I be so stifled. And Bernhardt's voice, and Bernhardt's carriage? Name me the nearest caitiff: let me speak! Water under the bridge. Lenvoi

A thousand scattered cans of footage Turning in unison yellower, A piece of French Literature, And this, a petty pilferage On both, are yours awhile, and are Water under the bridge.

All poems reprinted from the Argot Merchant Disaster by George Starbuck. Copyright 0 1960,1961, 1962,1963,1964,1965,1966,1970,1978,1981, and 1982 by George Starbuck. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Company.

POETRY 99 HEARTOF THE

Bosnia has become a synonym, along with Beirut, Somalia, and Rwanda, of murderous conflict and political anarchy. The tragedy of this Balkan nation, a Sarajevo-born journalist explains, cannot be understood apart from the larger story of Yugoslavia's unraveling.

BY LJILJANA SMAJLOVIC

ears before the thousand-day siege began, my Sarajevo neighbors and I played a waiting game with war. It was not going to confound us. We had taken a long, hard look at every possible scenario of Yugoslavia's violent breakup. Our amateur analysis invariably showed that we, the residents of Albanska Street, had nothing to fear. WeY lived right across from the brand-new Military Hospital. It was an in- dispensable facility. And we reassured one another that it would provide unconstrained services to all sides. The war, after all, was going to be in the country, not in the city. In Sarajevo, the wounded would be treated and political treaties would be negotiated. And if things went from bad to worse, the women and children could always seek refuge in the nearby Marshal Tito army barracks. Our hopes died a very sudden death. As it turned out, my neighborhood became one of the most perilous places in the city. The hospital was pounded, the Marshal Tito barracks were devastated, and the street around the corner soon came to be called Sniper Alley. In May 1992, a month after war broke out and the siege of Sarajevo began, a Serb shell struck my apartment building, removing part of the wall and vastly enlarging my bedroom window. Fortunately, I was then living and working in Brussels, where I'd gone the previous September to open a bureau for my newspaper,

100 WQ SUMMER 1995 Sarajevo, 1994: buildings symbolizing old Bosnia, including the parliament, are favored targets.

Oslobodjenje. Around the same time my apartment was hit, I received a telephone call from a Muslim woman-my neighbor, my colleague, and my best friend. Hearing artillery fire in the background, 1 advised her to leave her apartment. "You're crazy," she exclaimed. "If it's hit I have to be here to put out the fire." That was the first real indication that I was on the sidelines, where I have remained uneasily throughout the war. Three months after that con- versation I left Brussels for Belgrade, becoming a refugee from the war in which my former neighbors, friends, and relatives were killing each other. We had once thought that only the zealots would fight, not nice people like us. We had badly miscalculated. Not only did barricades go up in the city-they also went up in our hearts and minds. The war divided us. But today, living temporarily in the United States, I am repeatedly told that the fratricide raging throughout my native land is not, in reality, a civil war. Conventional wisdom in the West, shared by editorial writers and

BOSNIA 101 scholars alike, holds that the "real causes" ethnicities) with a brutality that made their of Bosnia and Herzegovina's destruction Nazi masters wince. The Serb royalist originated on the outside-that it was "not Chetniks slaughtered Muslim civilians, Serb internal tensions but neighboring states" Partisans, and Croats whenever they could that ripped the country apart and that, left lay their hands on them. The Partisan Serbs, alone, Bosnia might have lived in peace. A Muslims, Croats, Montenegrins, Jews, and number of respectable historians have Gypsies simultaneously fought Nazis, turned out volumes asserting that there is Ustashes, and Chetniks. no historical precedent for ethnic or religious clashes among Bosnia's three peoples. hen I grew too old to listen to According to such wisdom, nothing I re- heroic tales, I remained un- member is in reality as I remember it. der the strong impression My earliest memories go back to my that memories of World War first home in Sarajevo, an old building left I1w fueled Serb fears of being separated from over from the Austro-Hungarian occupa- the bulk of the Serbian nation. (The fascist In- tion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, located on dependent State of Croatia killed hundreds of a street, Vase Miskina, that has since be- thousands of Orthodox Serbs in its program come notorious as the site of one of the to exterminate a third, deport a third, and con- bloodiest episodes of the war, the bread- vert a third to Catholicism.) I also believed queue massacre that killed a score of people that the memory of the River Drina running in May 1992. At Vase Miskina 13,I grew up red with Muslim blood after the Chetnik mason a diet of heroic tales and bitter memories. sacres in 1942 added to Muslim fears of being The South Slavs, I learned, had had the bad abandoned by Croats and left alone in a Yu- luck to build their house in the middle of a goslavia dominated by Serbs. busy road. As a result, they were prosely- Yet in a much-praised book, Bosnia-A tized by three religions (Islam, Roman Ca- Short History (1994), British journalist and tholicism, and Orthodox Christianity), fell historian Noel Malcolm insists that this is under the rule of two powerful empires simply an "episode of violence," an "excep- (Ottoman and Habsburg), and later suffered tion," "an aberration," and that generations occupation by the Nazis. In Bosnia and have grown up without "personal memo- Herzegovina, Serbs, Muslims, and Croats ries" of the fighting. Moreover, Malcolm lived together under foreign rule for centu- claims, "these animosities were not perma- ries, inhabitants of a backwater province on nently built into the psyches of the people" the periphery of empires. because "for most of the period after 1878, the different religious or ethnic communi- n every tale we were told, my friends ties in Bosnia lived peacefully together." and I had to wade through blood. True, I belonged to a generation that Seven major German offensives racked grew up without a personal recollection of Yugoslavia during World War 11. Five civil war. My mother had fought with the ofI them were fought in the Bosnian moun- Partisans in the Eighth Krajina Brigade in tains, along with two or three concomitant Bosnia for four years, but to my chagrin she civil wars. The fascist Croat Ustashes set up would never talk about her experience. Oth- a puppet state in Bosnia and slaughtered ers of my generation made their parents' Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Partisans (of all stories their own. Not long before Yugo-

Ljiljana Smajlovic, a current Wilson Center Fellow, is a former correspondent for the Sarajevo daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, and now writes for the Belgrade independent weekly, Vreme. Copyright 63 1995 by Ljiljana Sinajlovic.

102 WQ SUMMER 1995 slavia's breakup, a strapping Serb colleague jected the label "civil war" outright, know- whose village near Sarajevo was purged ing that no Western power would want to early in World War 11, 10 years before he intercede in an internal affair. So the conflict was born, reminisced about the horror as if had to be depicted as an outside aggression, he had been there: "Ljiljana, you just and here the Serbs were of tremendous wouldn't believe it. Two little Croats, no help. The initial role of the Yugoslav taller than you-here," holding his hand People's Army (JNA) and obvious support approximately five feet above the ground, from Serbia for the rebellious Serbs in "led 80 men away to their deaths. To the Bosnia provided ample ammunition for peasants, those little guys were the state, those who argued that the war in Bosnia and you did what the state told you to do. was an "external aggression." When Bos- Serbs will never again live as a minority in nian Croats attacked their Muslim allies in someone else's state." the spring of 1993, the definition of the con- When I left Sarajevo in 1991, Bosnia and flict was quickly amended. Now the Bosnian Herzegovina, slightly smaller than West government was pronounced the victim of Virginia but every bit as mountainous, had aggression from both neighboring Serbia and a population of 4.3 million people-44 per- Croatia. Out of three native Bosnian groups, cent Muslim, 31 percent Serb, and 17 per- two became "external" aggressors: the cent Croat. It was still a federal republic in Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats. Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia was rapidly dis- With the best intentions, Western jour- integrating. Of six original republics, only nalists and scholars presented the Bosnian Serbia and Montenegro remained fully com- question as a deceptively simple di- mitted to the federation. Slovenia and chotomy: the Bosnian conflict either derived Croatia had already proclaimed their inde- from internal tensions or was caused by pendence, and Macedonia had announced neighboring states (Serbia and Croatia). Not its intention to do the same. The three surprisingly, the commentators came up Bosnian ethnic nations and their coalition with a deceptively clear answer: "neighbor- government were bitterly divided over the ing states." future of Bosnia. Serbs wanted to remain in Unfortunately, the question itself was Yugoslavia, together with other Serbs from wrong. The dichotomy, specious at best, is Serbia and Montenegro; Muslims wanted of no use whatsoever in illuminating the an independent, sovereign state; Croats Bosnian tragedy. were more than happy to follow the Mus- lims out of the federation. A bloody war he Bosnian conflict is an eminently began in April 1992, after the European Yugoslav conflict. Bosnia's iden- Community and the United States recog- tity was so intricately linked to that nized Bosnia's sovereignty and the Serbs of the neighboring republics that it besieged Sarajevo. wasT indivisible from Yugoslavia's as a At the same time, a war of words and whole. Out of six former republics, Bosnia ideas erupted. At stake were the hearts and was the one created most truly in minds of the Western world. By the time I Yugoslavia's image, a fragile amalgam of arrived in Washington in the late summer faiths, nationalities, dialects, and histories. of 1994, that particular war was long over. It was Yugoslavia writ small, trying doggedly The Bosnian government of Alija Izetbe- to imitate and outshine its model. The lines govic had won it. No contest. that separated what was "internal" and The first battle of that war had been purely Bosnian from what was "external" but fought over the definition of the conflict. still Yugoslav were hopelessly blurred. Supporters of the Bosnian government re- But even scholars are confused-or at

BOSNIA 103 least ambivalent-on this point. In a volume nic groups, almost all of Yugoslavia's ten- of essays edited by Mark Pinson, The Muslims sions at once became Bosnia's as well. No of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1994), historian John Bosnian issue during the last 50 years would Fine of the University of Michigan refers to the fit the current Western "internal tensions/ three nationalities of Bosnia as "Yugoslavs of neighboring states" dichotomy. And the all ethnic groups." Urging Bosnia's Serbs and present war is no exception. Croats to abandon their excess ethnic baggage A few months before the Bosnian war (the Muslims presumably have none, being by erupted, a well-known intellectual and op- implication the only pure Bosnians), he coun- position politician from newly independent sels "Yugoslavs" to "see that the true interest Croatia, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, asked the of their respective nationalities is represented right question: "Isn't Bosnia being de- by the Bosnian cause." stroyed by those who fear the answer to the In dispensing political advice to following question: if life together is pos- "Yugoslavs," Fine makes two curiously con- sible in Bosnia, why was it not possible in tradictory references to Yugoslavia itself. Yugoslavia? Isn't Bosnia being destroyed by First, he claims that "Bosnians" have no rea- those who fear that preserving the Yugoslav son to feel nostalgic about Yugoslavia be- model of existence in Bosnia would prove cause Yugoslavia "was in fact a greater we might have all lived differently than our Serbia." Then he suggests that Serbs and violent breakup suggests?" Croats should return to the spirit of bratstvo- jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) that was "Yugoslavia's salvation 50 years ago." So Fine leaves us wondering: was Yugoslavia a Greater Serbian nightmare or the means to henever I hear that, "left fraternal salvation? alone," Bosnia might have John Fine is not the first to tell Bosnian lived in peace, I think of my Serbs and Croats that they should rid them- last home in Saraievo, a six- selves of surplus ethnic identification. wstory apartment building on a small street Bosnian purification was attempted once two blocks east of the Holiday Inn and before, under the Austro-Hungarian policy within 100 meters of Ali-Pasha's and Magri- of Benjamin Kallay, the empire's finance bija mosques, St. Joseph's Catholic Church, minister from 1882 to 1903. Kallay devel- and the Parliament, where the Communist oped the idea of Bosnian nationhood in an Party once routinely held "historic" plenary effort to induce Serbs and Croats in Bosnia sessions of its Central Committee. From to renounce their "other" identities. This where my window used to be, you no unhappy experiment ended in the blood- longer see the minaret of the Magribija. It shed of World War I. was blown off by a high-explosive Serb Yugoslavia was born in the wake of that shell. war. During its existence first as part of the Had we been left alone, we tenants of Kingdom and then as a republic in the Fed- Albanska 15 surely would not have started eral Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia a war. Yet my neighbors are now fighting in had few problems exclusively its own. Any- three different armies, some as "aggres- thing that happened to Serbs, Croats, and sors,"others as "heroic defenders." Muslims living elsewhere in Yugoslavia re- We had all seemed perfectly decent verberated dramatically among Bosnia's people before the war broke out: quiet, unas- Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Since precious suming, hardworking. We were doctors, little ever happened in Yugoslavia that did teachers, journalists, electricians, secretaries, not involve the country's three largest eth- housewives, and pensioners, the Yugoslav

104 WQ SUMMER 1995 Albanska 15, the author's former apartment building, and the surrounding portion of Sarajevo. version of lower- and upper-middle-class of Bosnia. It was part of a whole and could no townspeople. Back then, I would never have more be left alone by the "sum of its parts" guessed who among us would come to be than Bosnia could isolate itself from the Yu- identified by Western journalists as "aggres- goslavia it had belonged to for 70 years. sors." A few might have stood accused of alcohol abuse or perhaps an illicit affair or two. erbs, Croats, and Muslims, we had But none would have been accused of being all dreaded the breakup of Yugosla- bad people~oreven of being bad neighbors, via. We certainly never imagined for that matter. that the country could fall apart Unaware of a horrific future, we shared neatly at the seams, as western leader; ap- small daily pleasures, such as tiny cups of parently thought it could. Or hoped it potent Turkish coffee on the roof of the would, sometimes against their better judg- building, where women and children some- ment. Warren Zimmermann, Washington's times retreated in summer months to hang last ambassador to Yugoslavia, confesses in laundry and enjoy the view of the city-a a recent issue of Foreign Affairs that he and valley city of some 500,000 people. And we everyone at the U.S. embassy knew that "no shared more than pleasures. When a breakup of Yugoslavia could happen pe- neighbor's daughter was diagnosed with a acefully." Bosnia's president Alija Izetbego- brain tumor, we all chipped in to help the vie knew so as well. Zimmerman quotes family handle the cost of an operation in him as saying that the survival of Yugosla- Zurich. (The Yugoslav health-care system via was "essential to Bosnia's survival," and paid for the operation; we picked up the bill that "Bosnia [would] be destroyed" if only for a few Western toys.) We cried and Croatia went. Zimmermann deems Izetbe- commiserated with the parents and later govic's subsequent decision to seek inde- cheered the child's recovery. pendence for Bosnia a "disastrous political We were what you would call "good mistake," a "miscalculation" and a "double- neighbors." But our building did not exist in game." Yet he fails to explain why he ad- a vacuum. It went to war along with the rest vised his own government to compound

BOSNIA 105 Izetbegovic's "disastrous mistake" by rec- People's Army: first, that it lay down its guns ognizing Bosnia's independence. and let Croatia secede, and second, that it al- At Albanska 15, the prospect of Yugo- low Bosnian conscripts to go home. slavia's dissolution conjured up images that The second demonstration was a ri- were anything but orderly. It would be like poste to the first. Those of my neighbors "the dismantling of a Scud missile in a pro- who took part in it carried a blue, white, and vincial autoshop," as my friend Miroslav red Yugoslav flag with a red star in the Jankovic, a journalist from an all-Serb vil- middle. They cheered the army's efforts to lage on the outskirts of Sarajevo, observed. prevent secession and to protect their Serb We toasted his metaphor and joked about brethren in Croatia. his "ethnically clean" suburb, back in pre- As a journalist, I went to both demon- war days when such jesting was still accept- strations and died a little each time. able among secular, liberal Sarajevans. In Washington today, I find it amusing When the dismantling began in earnest, that the currently fashionable Western view Jankovicupgraded his metaphor: Yugoslavia, of prewar Bosnia-an island of ethnic har- he said, had burst into shrapnel, a fragment mony and political bliss in a sea of Yugoslav of which-Bosnia-was a carbon copy of the turmoil-reminds me so much of the com- blown-away original. He wrote this two munist myth of Bosnia. months before the West recognized this tiny That pretty picture is precisely the one piece of metaphoric shrapnel as a sovereign that Bosnia's rigid, doctrinaire communist nation. leadership tried so hard to project. The party On April 6,1992, the European Commu- elite carefully nurtured the image of Bosnia as nity's Council of Ministers unanimously rec- the bedrock of Yugoslav communism-the ognized Bosnia, determining that the former secure home of brotherhood, unity, and ideo- Yugoslav republic had met all the interna- logical purity. Our political education glori- tional requirements for becoming an indepen- fied two things: the Yugoslav fatherland and dent nation. My fellow Bosnian Serbs soon the Yugoslav road to socialism. blasted my building with mortar shells from Our leaders' loyalty to those sacrosanct the hills surrounding the city. But that's not values was anecdotal. At political rallies when things really began. they repeated, ad nauseum, that Bosnia was neither Serb, nor Croat, nor Muslim, but n the year preceding the war, my rather Serb and Croat and Muslim. So often neighbors and I still drank coffee to- was this repeated that the "neither-nor re- gether and watched our children play public" came to be Bosnia's derisive nick- in the courtyard. But when the martial name in select political circles. musicI sounded, we all heard different When borders among the six Yugoslav drummers. In the first week of September republics were drawn at the end of World 1991, tenants from my building showed up War 11, Bosnia's strongman, Djuro Pucar, an on the front steps of the nearby Parliament ethnic Serb, foolishly turned down his com- building to participate in two different an- rades-in-arms' offer of an Adriatic port for tiwar demonstrations. War was raging in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatia between Yugoslav army units allied Josip Broz Tito had just rebuked those with the local Serb populace on one side, who had criticized the Communist Party's de- and Croatian forces on the other. cision to create the republic of Bosnia and Her- Those of my neighbors who went to the zegovina as a separate federal unit on the first demonstration stood under bright green grounds that it meant splitting Serbia in two: moon-and-crescent Muslim party flags and "Serbia is part of Yugoslavia, and we do not demanded two things from the Yugoslav intend to create within Yugoslavia states that

106 WQ SUMMER 1995 will go to war against each other. If Bosnia and did not flirt with political enemies. Herzegovina has equal rights, if [the people They enjoyed Tito's full confidence, but of Bosnia] have their own federal unit, then the people paid for it in the currency of po- we have not torn Serbia apart but created litical freedom. Bosnian society professed happy Serbs in Bosnia instead. The same goes disdain for political rights such as freedom for Croats and Muslims. [Borders between re- of speech. It gave priority to "higher ideals" publics] are merely administrative borders. I such as brotherhood and unity. Bosnia will have no borders in Yugoslavia that will criminally prosecuted what other regions in divide our peoples: I want borders that will Yugoslavia commonly tolerated. (Alija Izet- bind them together." begovic was sentenced to nine years in jail in 1983 for writing a privately printed "Is- osnia was poor and underdevel- lamic Declaration.") oped, but it put Yugoslavia's de- When tolerance of dissidents became velopment before its own. Djuro fashionable throughout Yugoslavia during Pucar was so fiercely devoted to the the 1980s, Bosnia developed its own strain commonB good and Yugoslavia's centralized of the dissident virus. We privately referred economy that he became a joke in postwar to it as "spitting over the neighbors' fence." Belgrade: it was said that he once mailed back Some of our dissidents, discreetly cultivated part of Bosnia's share of federal funds, ear- by the regime, excelled in righteous indig- marking the sum for "those -republics who nation over ideological aberrations spied in could find better use for the money." Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Pristina. Occa- This was far from standard bureaucratic sional nationalist outbreaks in Bosnia were practice, even at the height of communist soli- diagnosed as "imported nationalism." darity in the heady days of postwar euphoria. Bosnia's assignment in the Yugoslav But there was a price to pay for excessive idealism. Before they knew it, Bosnians were supplying the market with cheap labor and raw materials, much as they had under Habsburg colonial rule. Rumor has it that even Tito laughed at a popular joke: Yugoslav laws are cooked up in Ljubljana, written in Zagreb, promulgated in Belgrade, and applied (only) in Sarajevo. In the 1960s, the Yugoslav Communist Party set out to rectify such federal inequi- ties. Selling cheap lumber to Slovenia and buying back expensive furniture was no longer deemed an acceptable mode of Yugoslav patriotism. But as party bureaucrats loosened their grip on the economy, they tightened their hold on political power in Bosnia. When a new generation of party leaders had their little fling with liberalism in the 1970s, Tito purged the politburos of Ljubljana, Belgrade, and Zagreb. He had no such work cut out for him in Sarajevo- Bosnia's hard-liners had kept their house in Throughout the war in Bosnia, the Sarajevo daily order. They were drab and humorless and newspaper, Oslobodjenje, has continued to publish.

BOSNIA 107 Federation was to be its guardian, the vent Bosnia from going where Yugoslavia keeper of the "holy grail" of brotherhood was headed-into oblivion. They saw the dis- and unity. It wasn't a self-appointed role. solution of Yugoslavia as a historic opportu- Bosnia's communist leadership did not nity to create their first state. adopt the watchdog attitude simply to in- But first they had to reinvent history. To gratiate itself with Tito (who always wel- do so they went back 900 years, claiming comed new justifications for tight commu- descent from Bosnia's first medieval king- nist control and the need for national unity). dom. Yugoslavia they reduced to a speck of Nor was it motivated exclusively by the historical dust; it had been around for a leadership's desire to rule Bosnia with an mere seven decades. Muslim leader iron hand. Bosnia's mission in Yugoslavia Izetbegovic even professed inability to dis- was to prove that Yugoslavia itself was a cern any relevance Yugoslavia might still good and workable idea, that all nations have for Bosnia. The latter, after all, had could live under one roof, in harmony and existed far longer than Yugoslavia and was peace. If there had been no Bosnia, Tito by no means bound to follow Yugoslavia would have had to invent one. onto the trash heap of history. The Muslims, self-proclaimed heirs to Bosnia's venerable osnia assured Yugoslavia's sur- tradition of tolerance and coexistence, vival by providing the "ultimate would in no way permit it. solution" to the Serb-Croat con- Izetbegovic retained some of the flavor flict-or so Yugoslavia's leaders of the old communist rhetoric, minus the presumed. Their presumption remained un- ideology. Once again, political will declared spoken because it implied that Bosnia would Bosnia to be a multiethnic, multicultural exist only as long as it was an effective barrier Garden of Eden. Bosnia's new political pa- against Serb or Croat separatism. Bosnia had trons, postcommunist ethnic Muslims, went long been the apple of discord between Serbs even further than their predecessors. They and Croats. The Communists gambled that claimed that Bosnia had been a land of un- neither Serbia nor Croatia would ever embark interrupted religious and ethnic bliss for no on the path to secession if there was no chance less than nine centuries. The horrible fratri- of dividing Bosnia. They gambled that both cide of Serbs, Muslims, and Croats during nations would prefer to stay put in Yugosla- World War I1 was only an inconsequential via rather than risk abandoning their Serb or aberration, another speck of historical dust. Croat compatriots in Bosnia (along with the This historical revisionism was hotly real estate). contested around many dinner tables in The Communists were bad gamblers. Sarajevo, including my own at Albanska 15. When Yugoslavia began to destroy itself after Many of my friends and neighbors, not all Tito's death in 1980, the Serbs and Croats in of them Muslim, were only too happy to Bosnia watched first with fascination and then open their minds to this new school of with horror. They were quick to exhibit syrnp- thought: exit the short, bloody history of toms of an old Balkan ailment: the "ethnic Bosnia as our parents knew it, enter timeless minority syndrome." But in their fears of be- harmony and peace. If this was the way out ing cut off from their respective motherlands, of the Yugoslav morass and an alternative they could not expect much sympathy from to civil war, it seemed perfectly reasonable the Bosnian Muslims, who had their own to replace Bosnian writer Ivo Andric's fa- problems. While Serbs and Croats looked mous image of Bosnia as a dread "land of longingly toward Serbia and Croatia, Mus- hate" with an image of peaceful coexistence. lims, suffering from the anxiety of a "stateless But we all knew that this pretty picture, nation," turned inward and resolved to pre- freshly painted, served a specific political

108 WQ SUMMER 1995 purpose, as had all the other pretty pictures Franjo, a retired railway worker with bad we had been asked to treasure during the lungs and a weak heart, smoked incessantly communist years. And not everyone was and always had a special bottle of home- willing to buy it. made wineÃ‘1'no quite the same as the one Late one night in February 1991, my we sampled the week beforef'-that he next-door neighbors and I watched a live wanted me to taste. After my son went to telecast of a session of Bosnia's Parliament, sleep at night, we would sip wine at their our favorite pastime in those feverish politi- kitchen table and talk politics. Franjo's wife, cal times. Members of Bosnia's ruling coa- Lucija, dropped in daily. She came for a lition of three ethnic political parties (Serb, quick chat over a cup of coffee, often bring- Croat, and Muslim) were locked in a bitter ing her own sugar cube with her. I kept only dispute over the sovereignty of Bosnia. A loose sugar and she drank her Turkish cof- Serb member of Parliament warned that fee the Bosnian way, melting the cube in her Serbs would never acquiesce to an indepen- mouth before taking a sip. dent Bosnia and issued a threat. "The sov- Our conversations never faltered, despite ereign of your sovereign state would never the abuse our ethnic leaders heaped on one make it past the Gavrilo Princip Bridge," he another, even after Franjo came to feel that declared, referring to the structure named "my" Serb Yugoslav Army had invaded "his" after the young Bosnian Serb nationalist Croatia. Whether hero or assassin, Gavrilo who assassinated Archduke Franz Princip would have to rest in peace as far as Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in 1914. we were concerned. We were civilized people and good neighbors in Albanska 15. But we y neighbors and I were out- could not dodge the war. raged at the brazen vulgarity Less than 48 hours after that volatile of the threat. In other coun- exchange in Parliament, someone attacked tries, people watch football the plaque honoring Gavrilo Princip's gamesM the way we watched political ses- world-transforming act. The words "Latin sions-keenly, boisterously, querulously. Bridge" were sprayed on the wall of the We grew quiet as a Muslim member of Par- Museum of Young Bosnia (the secret orga- liament took the podium. He retorted that nization Princip had belonged to) above the in a sovereign Bosnia the Princip Bridge spot where the teenage assassin's steps were would no longer bear the name of a terror- set in the pavement, defacing the inscrip- ist. It wouldbe given its old appellation, tion: "FROM THIS SPOT ON JUNE 28, Latin Bridge, in recognition of the predomi- 1914, GAVRILO PRINCIP, WITH HIS nantly Croatian character of the neighbor- SHOT, EXPRESSED THE PEOPLE'S PRO- hood at the turn of the century. It should TEST AGAINST TYRANNY AND THE never have been named after the Serb mur- CENTURIES-LONG YEARNING OF OUR derer in the first place, he insisted. PEOPLES FOR PEACE." Again, I was loudly indignant, until I realized that my neighbors' mannerly as- sent was chiefly motivated by sympathy for my feelings. I discovered in my own home that night that one person's hero is, indeed, y first home on Vase Miskina another person's terrorist. Street was only a few blocks My next-door neighbors were an eld- away from the Princip Bridge erly Croatian couple, the most gentle, in Bascarsija, the old Turkish warm-hearted, unassuming people I have quarter.M The apartment building in which ever had the luck to share living space with. my family shared a flat with another couple

BOSNIA 109 and their daughter, as was customary in the present-day Bosnia he was speaking of, the years of postwar austerity, had a most illus- one I grew up in, was not King Tvrtko's trious tenant. Ivo Kranjcevic was a Croat medieval creation. It was a far more mod- member of Young Bosnia and had taken ern invention. The historian Maria part in the assassination plot. He had served Todorova has noted that the motif of his prison term with Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo as a multicultural paradise is a fa- Theresienstadt, a military prison under the vorite one in current journalism: "It was in Habsburgs and a concentration camp under this paradise, of course, that the fatal shots the Nazis. It is now Terezin, a small town in of Gavrilo Princip signalled the outbreak of the Czech Republic. the First World War and prompted John Gunther to write in his immensely popular rs. Kranjcevic was kind Inside Europe (1936), 'It is an intolerable af- enough to give me French les- front to human and political nature that sons in 1963, when I was these two wretched and unhappy little seven years old, in exchange countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and forM the pittance my parents could afford. do, have quarrels that cause world wars. The elderly couple was not privileged in Some 150,000 young Americans died be- any way. Or so I suspected, noticing that my cause of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked father used various excuses to bring a kilo primitive village, Sarajevo.'" of fruit or some such small thing to our "It is an irony," observed Todorova at neighbors on the fourth floor. I was an avid a recent conference, "to read the paragraph listener to adult political conversations from about the 'mud-caked primitive village' in an early age, and I overheard the very dig- light of today's eulogies about Sarajevo as nified Mr. Kranjcevic tell my father, "You the beautiful cosmopolitan urban quintes- Communists believe that the world began sence. It must have become this under the with you." My father was an ex-Partisan barbarous rule, first of the independent and an amateur historian. Having Mr. South Slav monarchy and especially under Kranjcevic as a neighbor was, to him, like the Yugoslav Communists, while it had living next door to history. been a loathsome village under the enlight- Unlike Princip, Ivo Kranjcevic survived ened rule of the Habsburgs, which they had Theresienstadt. According to him, Princip inherited from the Ottomans." was overjoyed to find himself occupying the same prison cell that formerly held Hadzi arajevo has many true stories to tell Lojo, the legendary Muslim resistance of urban tolerance, ethnic harmony, leader at the beginning of the Austro-Hun- and religious diversity. But the garian occupation of Bosnia and Sarajevo way of talking politics is Herzegovina in 1878. Princip told Ivo special.s It's a peculiar skill, and most Kranjcevic that he was delighted that Sarajevans shared it. We were artisans of the "Austria's last Bosnian prisoner was in the ambiguous statement, masters of the illu- same cell as her first one." He was soon sive metaphor, craftsmen of equivocal atti- right. Young Gavrilo died and, shortly tudes. thereafter, so did the Austro-Hungarian As war neared, we spoke of "them" an Empire. awful lot. "They" were our leaders, and we Alija Izetbegovic's image of Bosnia as a were careful to give no names, for fear of country that had existed before Yugoslavia accidentally omitting political leaders of our and would continue to exist after Yugosla- own ethnic groups. We affected to be angry via was perfectly legitimate and, to a certain at all of them and publicly assumed the degree, historically accurate. But the posture of innocent victims. We loved all

110 WQ SUMMER 1995 peoples and nationalities equally and meant census profile: nearly 40 percent of the seats no harm, but terrible leaders were taking us for the Muslim Party, close to 30 percent for down the path of destruction against our the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), and al- will and better judgment. Zavadjaju narod most 17 percent for the Croat Democratic ("They set us against one another") was Union (HDZ). "our" verdict on "them." It was hardly hypocrisy, for no one was still think many voters were unim- a dupe. Not the second time around, any- pressed by Bosnian Serb leader Rado- way. I had fallen for the artful Sarajevo van Karadzic, Izetbegovic, or their street discourse back in 1990, prior to the Croat counterpart Stjepan Kljuic. They first free multiparty elections. That was simplyI acted out of the fear that even if they when we all took turns ridiculing newly withheld their vote from a Karadzic, their created ethnic parties and their uninspiring Muslim neighbor would still give his vote leaders, who acted as though we could not to an Izetbegovic. In the end, they were tell the difference between our ethnic ori- afraid of weakening their own nation in the gins and our political affiliations. And we hour presaging the ultimate confrontation. acted as though this could happen only in Their leaders also shared a common rural areas-after all, what did the peasants interest: defeating the Communists at the know?-or perhaps in some of the less eth- polls. And for this they needed one an- nically mixed suburbs. other. Karadzic, Izetbegovic, and Kljuic In the social circle I frequented, not a promised Bosnians that, if elected, they single soul professed the intention to vote would mend what the Communists had for the "nationalists." The Muslim Party of broken. In the days leading to the election, Democratic Action (SDA) had shown itself they never missed an opportunity to be capable of attracting 200,000 people at a photographed with their arms around one campaign rally in Velika Kladusa in north- another. The leaders, through their re- western Bosnia. At an earlier Sarajevo rally, spective ethnic parties, would legitimize fewer than 5,000 people had shown up. A healthy ethnic feelings that the Commu- liberal, multiethnic, and secular Reformist nists had stifled. Pride without prejudice Party was all the rage in our city, to judge was now the message. There was, of by the huge campaign rally turnouts and by course, no talk of war. the way people talked. The Reformists But two months into the ethnic parties' packed the stadium that the Muslims were hypocritical coalition, near-anarchy pre- unable to fill.'~imilarl~,the Socialist Demo- vailed. Three national platforms converged cratic Party (the renamed Communist at a crossroads, and there were no stop Party) drew huge crowds. signs. Power grabbing, not power sharing, But the morning after the elections, I abounded. Parliament was paralyzed. The found out that even my own neighborhood Serbs established "autonomous" provinces in the heart of sophisticated, secular across Bosnia, while the predominantly Sarajevo, a municipality called "Center," Croat region of western Herzegovina set up had voted strictly along ethnic lines, help- its own monetary system, based on the ing to elect a pack of nationalists in a land- Croatian dinar. A year before war broke out slide. The Reformist Party captured less Bosnia was, in effect, partitioned. The au- than 10 percent of the vote, about the same thority of the central government in share that was garnered by the Socialists. I Sarajevo extended only to the city's limits. fared poorly, having split my vote between Serb-dominated Banjaluka in northwestern the two parties. The November 1990 elec- Bosnia, for instance, refused to send tax tion results strikingly resembled the 1991 monies to the government in Sarajevo. Mus-

BOSNIA 111 one of our photographers captured a few members of the ruling Muslim party washing their feet in the sink-a ritual called abdest that precedes prayer. This was the first time the ritual had been performed in the Parliament building, but what I heard and reported as news others interpreted as disrespect. Much earlier, before the election, my newspaper had asked Alija Izetbegovic whether he considered him- lim-dominated Zenica in central Bosnia re- self the leader of a classical political party fused to send army conscripts to the JNA. or a religious movement. In my column on Croat Listica, in western Herzegovina, re- the abdest episode, I quoted his ambiguous fused to allow army convoys to pass reply: "Neither one. This is a Muslim Party, through its territory. which strongly resembles the people it is re- Finally, in June 1991 in Visegrad, on the cruited from. It is a religious people." River Drina in eastern Bosnia, Muslims Borrowing an argument from Hannah demonstrated in front of the police station, Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), I stopping all traffic because a Muslim motor- observed that the communist regime had ist had been detained. Two days later, Serbs long depended on the silent consent of the did the same when the three Serb policemen unorganized masses, the neutral supporters who had detained the Muslim motorist who had never been interested in politics were suspended. By that time Karadzic, because they felt that no parties existed to Izetbegovic, and Kljuic were openly snarl- champion their interests. Under the direc- ing at one another-only six months after tion of Bosnia's ethnic parties, the silent they assumed power. majority had suddenly shed its apathy and Their hostility spilled over into the voiced its anger. I pointed out that the other streets and mahalas (in Turkish, "city quar- two ruling parties, Serb and Croat, were ters") of Sarajevo. The first time I felt it also strongly oriented toward history, tra- ripple through my own neighborhood was dition/ and their ancestors' religions. in February 1991. My newspaper was To my dismay, a rather dense political locked in a bitter struggle with the Izet- column became, overnight, a dubious sen- begovic government over editorial control, sation; it seemed that everyone in town had and I already had a reputation for writing either read it or at least heard about it. Un- stories that tweaked the sensibilities of lead- fortunately, most Muslims thought it gratu- ing politicians. But nothing prepared me for itously anti-Muslim. The reference to abdest the outrage that followed my account of was considered unduly provocative. I had what I saw as a bizarre incident in Bosnia's breached the first law of Sarajevo's Parliament. multiethnic coexistence: do not offend thy It took place in the men's restroom. neighbor. The resentment did not subside There was a recess at noon to allow Muslim after several Muslim politicians pointed out members to observe the prayer ritual, and that prayer rituals should more properly be

112 WQ SUMMER 1995 observed in one of Sarajevo's hundred cellar, fearing bombardment. Her husband, mosques, several of which were close upon Franjo, was still alive when American jour- the Parliament building. The uproar contin- nalist friends last visited my old apartment ued even after Izetbegovic's Muslim Party building. He never joined Lucija in the cel- discontinued the practice of Parliament lar. He was too frail to walk up and down prayer altogether. I was not to be forgiven the stairs. During the shelling, he sat quietly for using the feet-washing episode as a sym- alone in a stairwell in the dim light of an oil bol of the new political era in Sarajevo. This lamp. was my first inkling that secular Sarajevo Many of my other neighbors are dis- was not as secular as I had once thought. persed, living in different cities in several In America, 1buy newspapers and his- countries. The little girl who recovered from tory books uniformly reflecting rosy images the brain tumor is in Hamburg with her Serb of prewar Bosnia peddled by the old com- father and Croat mother. The Serb family that munist regime and its first freely elected marched off proudly with the red-star flag to one. There is no warning to consumers that demonstrate in support of Yugoslavia in Sep- these goods present anything short of his- tember 1991, a few days after Muslims had torical truth. They tell me that if my neigh- demonstrated against the army, has split up bors and relatives are fighting each other in and scattered. The mother and two children the land of their birth, this does not yet are refugees in Serbia. The father would not mean that they are waging a civil war. Rob- leave his infirm sister and aged mother and ert Donia and John Fine, in Bosnia and remains trapped in Sarajevo~threeinadvert- Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (1994), ent statistics in the column of "loyal Serbs" designate as "chauvinists" those who that the Bosnian government and Western would depict the present conflict as an eth- journalists cite to demonstrate the popularity nic one. To speak of Serbs against Muslims of the Bosnian "multicultural" and "is a dreadful and misleading distortion," "multiethnic" government. They, and many Fine writes in one chapter, "Medieval and Sarajevo Serbs like them, obviously are not Ottoman Roots of Modern Bosnia." friends or acquaintances of John Fine, who wrote, "Most of the Sarajevo Serbs I know are y mind full of such "distor- still in the city, in favor of Izetbegovic's gov- tions," I think back to my ernment.'' apartment building, Alban- The last member of the small, tightly ska 15. After thousands of knit group of childhood friends from Serb shells fell on predominantly Muslim Albanska 15, my half-Muslim, half-Serb son, Sarajevo, Princip Bridge was in fact re- is currently in Washington, blissfully un- named Latin Bridge. My neighbor Lucija aware of his dual Sarajevo nature-part died of illness, privation, cold, and misery "aggressor," part "heroic defenderu-a during the first year of the war. She spent "neither-nor" from the heart of the heart of most evenings and some of her days in the the former Yugoslavia.

BOSNIA 113 How TO

BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

ven its defendersE concede that the modern American suburb has many shortcomings. An antidote may be found in the ideas of the nation's earliest suburban pioneers.

When the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier visited New York City in 1935, he found it strange that many of the academics, profes- sionals, and businesspeople he met did not live in the city but in the suburbs. This was manned the factories lived there. unheard of in Paris, where most people who Suburbs in the New World were differ- worked in the city lived in the city. There ent-not industrial but residential, and not were outlying towns such as Auteuil, proletarian but professional and manage- Boulogne-sur-Seine, and Neuilly where rial-and one senses grudging admiration as some rich Parisians built villas, including a Le Corbusier describes the American subur- few designed by Le Corbusier himself, but ban landscape with its generous, unfenced in the 1930s not many middle-class people lots and its green amplitude.Always attracted owned the cars needed to commute to such to technology, he was impressed by the com- distant locations. To most Parisians, les fortable trains that linked Connecticut to banlieues (the suburbs) referred chiefly to the Manhattan and made the leisurely suburban dreary industrial districts that ringed the way of life possible. But there is an underly- city like a sooty pall. Only workers who ing sarcasm in his description of the suburban

114 WQ SUMMER 1995 commute: "After a stimulating cocktail they Nezu Jersey's 19th-century Llewellyn Park is a [the commuters] pass through the golden prototype of many postwar American suburbs. portals of Grand Central Terminal into a Pull- Unfortunately, zuitk its gated entrance, social homogeneity, and exclusively residential character, man which takes them to their car; after a ride it is also in many ways a model of what not to build. along charming country roads they enter the quiet and delightful living rooms of their colonial style houses." convinced that the city of tomorrow would The notion of a decentralized city ran be a concentrated vertical city, not exactly counter to all of Le Corbusier's urban theo- Manhattan, but a version of Manhattan nev- ries, and he would have none of it. In When ertheless. the Cathedrals Were White (1935), the He was wrong. The historian Fernand chronicle of his American visit, he roundly Braudel once observed that the French visi- condemned the concept of suburban living, tors to 19th-century northern England, hor-

SUBURBS 115 rified at the ugly, jerrybuilt factories and traces the origin of the first suburban com- crowded mill towns, could not have munities around Boston to 1820, and dreamed that it was precisely Manchester Rutgers University historian Robert and Glasgow, not London, that were the Fishman dates the first West Philadelphia harbingers of the new industrial-age cities suburbs, which were reached by horse- soon to spring up in France and all over drawn omnibus, to the 1840s. Europe. In 1935, when Le Corbusier saw the By the time of Le Corbusier's visit, sub- houses of the American suburbs, he could urban living was a well-established fact of not imagine that it was they, and not the American life: one out of six Americans towers of Manhattan, that were the precur- lived in the suburbs. These outlying areas sor of the postindustrial urban future. were growing rapidly. Of the six million Le Corbusier was too caught up in his new homes built between 1922 and '29, own urban theories to stop and ask, Why more than half were single-family houses, are their cities like that? Had he asked, he and most were in the suburbs. More signifi- might have found that the different form of cantly, suburbs were growing faster than American cities represented a long-standing cities. Between 1860 and 1920, the number desire on the part of their inhabitants for a of people living in urban areas had indifferent way of life. creased from only 20 percent of the population to more than half, but by the 1930s

I nlike Parisian workers, Ameri- and '40s, the rate of urban growth slowed cans lived in suburbs by choice to almost zero. The use of streetcars and and had been doing so for more buses, a good indicator of urbanization, than 100 years. The architec- peaked in the mid-1920s and fell thereafter. tural historians Christopher Tunnard and One of the most urbane cities in America, Henry Hope Reed date the earliest New Boston, started losing population as early as York suburbs to 1814, when a ferry service 1930. In the entry on Chicago in its 1949 for commuters was started between Man- edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica noted hattan and Brooklyn, and New Yorkers who that the decade 1930-40 had seen the small- could not afford a house in the good parts est increase in population in the city's his- of Manhattan settled in suburban Brooklyn tory, and added that "the rate of regional Heights. Soon, the commuters ventured far- growth about the city seems to be increas- ther. Landscape historian John Stilgoe ing as the rate of strictly urban growth de- quotes the editor and writer Nathaniel clines." By 1950, New York City, Chicago, Parker Willis, who complained in 1840 that Philadelphia, and many smaller cities had "there is a suburban look and character all stopped growing. The metropolitan re- about all the villages on the Hudson which gions surrounding these cities were vigor- seem out of place among such scenery. They ous even before 1950, but that year is prob- are suburbs; in fact, steam [Willis was refer- ably as good as any to mark the end-or, ring to the steamboats that linked the vil- more accurately, the beginning of the end- lages to Manhattan] has destroyed the dis- of traditional concentrated cities. tance between them and the city." Similar One reason why it is not easy to iden- patterns were unfolding in other cities. tify clearly what has happened and is hap- Henry Binford of Northwestern University pening to cities is that urban terminology is

------Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Home: A Short History of an Idea (1987), Waiting for the Weekend (1991), and Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture (1993). This essay is drawn from his new book, City Life, to be published in September by Scribner. Copyright @ 1995 by Witold Rybczynski.

116 WQ SUMMER 1995 very inaccurate. Terms such as city and sub- one leaves Manhattan, is composed of many urb are used as if they represent polarities. neighborhoods in which houses with front In fact, they are often only polemical catego- gardens and backyards line the streets. ries: depending on your point of view, ei- Most American cities grew-and grow, at ther bad (dangerous, polluted, concrete) cit- least in the West and Southwest-by annex- ies and good (safe, healthy, green) suburbs, ing surrounding towns and villages, hence or good (diverse, dense, stimulating) cities producing urban areas that include neighbor- and bad (homogeneous, sprawling, dull) hoods that are suburban, even rural, in char- suburbs. The reality is more complicated. acter. Houston and Minneapolis annexed entire counties and created an apparently ike bourgeois or capitalist, suburb is anomalous hybrid: bucolic outer suburbs in- one of those words that are diffi- side the city limits. Some annexed suburbs, cult to use in a precise discussion such as New York's Queens and Staten Island, because they describe something maintained a suburban atmosphere; others thatL has become a stereotype. And like most were physically transformed and grew denser stereotypes, suburb is composed of cliches. For and are now indistinguishable from the rest example, compared with urban housing, sub- of the city. Suburbs were not always inte- urban housing is held to be monotonous, al- grated into the adjacent central city. Academic though urban tenements and industrial-age enclaves such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, rowhouses are equally standardized and re- and Berkeley, California, started as suburban petitive. Another cliche holds that suburban villages and developed into small, indepen- areas are rich, white, and white-collar. While dent cities without losing their small-town, this was true of the first suburbs, suburban suburban character. Brooklyn, by contrast, areas have grown to include a variety of in- was already the third-largest city in the comes, classes, and, increasingly, ethnic and United States when it was annexed by New racial groups. (One manifestation of this York City in 1898. growing diversity is the appearance of ethnic restaurants and food stores in suburban he Connecticut suburbs that Le malls.) Indeed, it is the cities that are more Corbusier described were the off- likely to be homogeneous, containing more spring of what John Stilgoe has than their representative share of the poor, of characterized as "borderlands": blacks, and of Hispanics. 19th-centuryresidential enclaves typically one Only in a legal sense is the difference or two hours outside the city that were cher- between urban and suburban clear: every- ished for their semirural character and their thing inside the city limits is urban, and sylvan surroundings. Stilgoe makes the point everything outside is suburban. On the that the "women and men who established ground, there is often little distinction in the these communities understood more by com- physical appearance of urban and suburban muting and county than train schedules and neighborhoods or the life they contain. Of pastures," and what drove them was a search course, there is a marked contrast between for better, healthier, more restorative sur- crowded inner city neighborhoods and the roundings than were available in the city. outer suburbs, where large houses stand on They were not simply leaving the city for the one-acre lots, but these are the two ex- country but rather creating a new way of life tremes. In most cities-especially those that contained elements of both. newer cities that grew in the postwar pe- But trains were expensive, and less riod-urbanites live in houses, mow lawns, wealthy commuters relied on horse-drawn drive cars, and shop at malls, just like their rail cars, which were pulled on tracks and suburban neighbors. Even New York, once were later replaced by electrified streetcars.

SUBURBS 117 Stilgoe deplores the kind of dense inner sity of buildings was generally lower-and suburbs that sprouted along streetcar lines, while their location and character were sub- where people lived "without the joys of urban, their residents' way of life was urban. genuine city life and without the pleasures The presence of suburban elements in of borderland residence." This judgment cities such as Berkeley or in urban neighbor- may be too bleak. Another Harvard histo- hoods such as Jamaica Plain is a reminder, rian, Alexander von Hoffman, argues in as the architect Robert A. M. Stern points Local Attachments (1994) that the evolution out, that the suburb is defined by neither lo- of Jamaica Plain in Boston demonstrates cation nor legalities alone. "The suburb that streetcar suburbs could provide some is . . . a state of mind based on imagery and of the advantages of city life. By 1850, this symbolism," he writes. "Suburbia's curving farming community had grown large roads and tended lawns, its houses with enough to incorporate itself as a separate pitched roofs, shuttered windows, and co- town of about 2,700 people. Over the next lonial or otherwise elaborated doorways all two decades the town grew, chiefly as a re- speak of communities which value the tra- sult of the arrival of middle- and upper- dition of the family, pride of ownership and class commuters, who traveled by horse- rural life." Stern also suggests that as long drawn rail car from Boston. In 1873, the as the image-not necessarily the reality- townspeople voted for annexation by the of a freestanding house on a tree-lined street City of Boston, a change that promised jobs, is maintained, the suburban ideal can be ap- development, and growth. Growth did plied in a wide variety of situations, an ob- come, fueled by inexpensive electric street- servation that explains the surprisingly rich cars and later by the railroad, and at the diversity of suburbs. turn of the century the population had Suburban growth in America was the mushroomed to almost 33,000, the equiva- result of coincidences. First, there was the lent of a small city. availability of land. Then there was the pressure of the growth of the commercial down- 'as Jamaica Plain merely a town, which engulfed the traditional down- residential appendage to town residential neighborhoods of the rich Boston? Von Hoffman pre- and the middle class. There was transpor- sents compelling evidence to tation-the railroad (which in many cases the contrary. The railroad did bring upper- was already in place) and the streetcar. middle-class commuters, but it also brought Above all, there were businessmen who had factories; people commuted out of the area the resources and the vision to undertake but also into it (much as they do in contem- the task of creating new communities. porary "edge cities"). "During the second The first comprehensively designed half of the 19th century, Jamaica Plain ma- suburban residential development was tured from a fringe district to a heteroge- Llewellyn Park, in West Orange, New Jer- neous city neighborhood, a type of urban sey, begun in 1853 by a young, successful area that heretofore has not been generally Manhattan merchant, Llewellyn S. Haskell. recognized," he writes. "It evolved into a Haskell intended his project, which he local urban community, not as an isolated called a "villa park," to be a healthy and or segmented district, but as part of the picturesque alternative for New Yorkers larger growth patterns of Boston." Such who wanted ready access to the city, about outer-city neighborhoods, unknown in Eu- 12 miles away. Llewellyn Park attracted rope, were physically different from their enterprising individuals; its most famous inner city counterparts-instead of tene- resident was probably Thomas Alva Edison, ments there were small houses, and the den- who lived there for more than 40 years and

118 WQ SUMMER 1995 established his laboratory nearby. For ordi- founded in 1869 as one of the first Long Is- nary folks, however, the high cost of commut- land suburbs, was Italianate; at Short Hills, ing to New York and the price of the gener- another New Jersey development, the soci- ous lots were prohibitive. Llewellyn Park was ety architects McKim, Mead, and White exclusively residential; no industrial, com- were commissioned to design a model mercial; or retail uses were allowed. Deed home in the English cottage style. restrictions included rules about architecture The entire development of Llewellyn and landscaping-fences, for example, were Park, including the nature preserve and the banned. Such enforced homogeneity became streets, was treated as private property, and the pattern for many of the early suburbs. public access was restricted by a peripheral Moreover, developers used their own discre- fence and a gatehouse-which also became tion to ensure that the new home owners were common practice. This type of exclusive socially acceptable. enclave represents one branch of the suburban tradition. In its contemporary guise, the askell's architect, Alexander exclusive enclave has become a new kind of Davis, did not simply subdi- town, comprised uniquely of private vide the 400-acre parcel of homes, socially homogeneous, and pri- mountainous terrain on Eagle vately governed. The chief legal vehicle of RidgeH into building lots. He carefully manipu- the enclave is the home owners' association lated the landscape to produce a natural ex- (also pioneered at Llewellyn Park), which perience. He heightened the illusion of a vir- enforces the rules established by the origi- gin forest by leaving a heavily planted 50-acre nal property developer and administers the nature preserve, cleft by a ravine, in the cen- commonly owned landscaped areas. Over ter of the development. Today, the visitor to time, the amenities of such enclaves have Llewellyn Park is impressed not only by the come to include not only gardens but recre- terrain and the planting-Haskell spent more ation areas such as golf courses, tennis courts, than $100,000 on landscaping-but by the ro- riding paths, and swimming pools. The home mantic appearance of the houses themselves. owners' associations administer common ser- Their Gothic, Swiss chalet, and Italianate vices such as garbage collection, road main- styles were chosen not for their cultural con- tenance, and policing-in other words, many notations but simply for their pleasing aspect. if not all of the functions normally carried out The skillful Davis was the author of by municipal governments. Rural Residences (18381, a popular book of house patterns for architects and builders. hese types of communities, called His ideas were influenced by his friend and Common Interest Developments, frequent collaborator, Andrew Jackson have proven very popular with Downing, whose Cottage Residences (1842) developers and buyers alike. Ac- and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) cordingT to Evan McKenzie of the University were the most widely read books on domes- of Illinois at Chicago, there are currently tic design of the period. Downing recom- some 130,000 such developments in the mended that houses be designed in an ir- United States, housing about 30 million regular, picturesque manner; the rambling people, or 12 percent of the population. architecture was to be augmented by natu- McKenzie estimates that by the year 2000 as ralistic landscaping and informal street lay- many as 30 percent of Americans will be liv- outs. This approach became the hallmark of ing in some form of community association. all early American suburban developments, If McKenzie is correct in suggesting that although the actual architectural styles var- Common Interest Developments "are not ied. The preferred style in Garden City, only the present but the future of American

SUBURBS 119 housing," the further development of en- crowding and squalor of Victorian industrial claves is likely to accentuate the existing cities. They would be surrounded by inequalities between rich and poor commu- greenbelts to preserve the countryside and nities. That would be a shame, because the would include industry and commerce to exclusive enclave is only one model avail- provide employment to their inhabitants. able to suburban developers. Howard acquired a wide popular follow- The Anglo-American garden suburb rep- ing. In 1899, a group of British industrialists, resents a very different ideal. In America, its businessmen, and social reformers formed antecedents were developments such as Riv- the Garden City Association and in rela- erside, on the outskirts of Chicago, planned by tively short order marshaled the resources Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in to start building the first garden city. 1869. Nine miles from the Loop on the Founded in 1904 in Hertfordshire, some Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Olmsted 30 miles from London, Letchworth Garden transformed 1,600 acres of farmland into a City was an ambitious undertaking that beautiful park-like setting. The landscape ap- encompassed almost 4,000 acres and was proach is similar to that in Llewellyn Park intended to house 30,000 people. Howard (Olmsted, too, planted thousands of trees), had written nothing about the actual design but Riverside had no gates, and its scale was of the proposed city, but the plan devised truly urban. It also had a commercial town by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, two center. Today, the graceful streets display the young architects who were members of the soundness of Olmsted's vision. Chicago was association, became a model for all later ideal for suburban development since it had garden suburbs. Unwin and Parker came up a ready-made commuter system in placethe with a loose, villagelike layout, and for the railroad. The 1880s saw many similar upper- buildings they adopted an informal domes- and upper-middle-class suburbs-Winnetka, tic style loosely based on the traditional ar- Highland Park, Lake Forest-stretching as far chitecture of British country towns. Al- as 30 miles from the Loop. though Letchworth incorporated Howard's novel ideas about urbanism, to most people he British branch of the garden sub- it looked comfortably familiar. urb tradition originated in an urban Letchworth was followed by a second movement that was analogous to garden city: Hampstead Garden Suburb. As but different from the City Beautiful. the name suggests, it was not a true city but InT 1898, Ebenezer Howard, an English court a suburb, located a short subway ride from stenographer inspired by the American Ed- London. The developer of Hampstead was ward Bellamy's best-selling futuristic novel, Henrietta Barnett, a friend of the famous Looking Backward (1888), published a book containing a working blueprint for a new kind of city. In Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow), Howard elaborately explained how to build completely new, economically self-sufficient communities. These "garden cities" would be planned at a relatively low density to avoid the over- Hat71psfead Garden Suburb

120 WQ SUMMER 1995 housing reformer Octavia Hill and a social Unwin's part to capture some of the charm activist herself. Barnett saw the new suburb of the traditional country towns he so loved. as an opportunity to offer working-class The housing groups, designed by Unwin Londoners an alternative to the crowded and Parker and by the notable Arts and inner city. Accordingly, Hampstead incor- Crafts practitioner M. H. Baillie Scott, were porated housing for people in various in- based on English vernacular architecture. come brackets and included rental cottages Edwin Lutyens planned the town center in and flats affordable to clerks and artisans. a more formal manner, with a large rectan- (Barnett was unable, however, to realize her gular green flanked by two churches and a dream of rehousing slum dwellers.) housing terrace, all designed in masterful With Letchworth under his belt, Unwin, fashion by himself. one of the most talented urban designers of Hampstead has been called "the jewel in the period, produced in Hampstead a plan the suburban crown." It is one of the most of great sophistication and subtlety. It incor- beautifully designed suburbs of the period- porated a picturesque street layout, exten- indeed, of any period-and influenced subur- sive landscaping in the residential areas, a ban developers everywhere, especially in the range of innovative housing types, and a United States. One of these developers was compact town center. The site covered more George Woodward of Chestnut Hill, an out- than 300 acres, and at an average density of lying neighborhood of Philadelphia. eight houses per acre-about half the density of a typical inner city neighborhood- n 1873, Woodward's father-in-law, there was plenty of parkland and other Henry Howard Houston, a successful open space. Nevertheless, compared to Philadelphia businessman, acquired many later suburbs, Hampstead was more than 3,000 acres along the scenic densely peopled. The Long Island suburban WissahickonI Creek, in and around Chestnut communities built by William Levitt after Hill. Eleven years later, Houston persuaded World War 11, for example, usually had a the Pennsylvania Railroad (of which he was density of about four houses per acre, and a director) to build a spur line through his many contemporary suburban develop- property, linking Chestnut Hill to the city. He ments average less than that. then began an ambitious effort to fashion a Unwin's plan was neither a simple grid new suburban community by constructing a nor a Beaux-Arts diagram but rather a com- large hotel; for recreation, he created a lake for plex composition that took advantage of canoeing and an arboretum for promenading; topography and natural features. There was for worship, a church. He also deeded land to variety in the road system: avenues, side the Philadelphia Cricket Club (which moved streets, cul-de-sacs, and service lanes were from downtown) and convinced the manag- all integrated into the plan. "It was not ers of the annual Philadelphia Horse Show to deemed enough that a road should serve as relocate the event to Chestnut Hill. The last a means of communication from one place two moves were motivated not by philan- to another," said Unwin, "it was also de- thropy but by business. Houston wanted to sired that it should offer some dignity of attract Philadelphia socialites to his real-es- approach to important buildings, and be a tate venture, and he succeeded. He built pleasant way for the passer-by." about 100 houses for predominantly upper- This comprehensive planning was class families. based on the visual and spatial experience When Houston died in 1895, Wood- of a place. It was similar to Olmsted's ap- ward took over the direction of the family proach but distinctly more urban; business. He displayed a not-uncommon Hampstead was a conscious attempt on characteristic of turn-of-the-century subur-

SUBURBS 121 ban developers: a blend of entrepreneurship houses. Woodward also pioneered the use and idealism. A physician by training, of quadriplexes consisting of four dwellings Woodward was a reformer, progressive arranged in a cruciform plan, sharing a cen- politician, and state senator, and also presi- tral core. Between 1910 and 1930, Woodward dent of Philadelphia's Octavia Hill Associa- commissioned about 180 houses. He sent his tion. Following the example of the British young architects-H. Louis Duhring, Robert reformer, the association engaged in build- Rodes McGoodwin, and Edmund Gilchrist- ing and rehabilitating low-rent housing and to England and France to study traditional model tenements for workers. Although a architecture; as a result, Chestnut Hill ac- businessman, Woodward regarded Chest- quired several picturesque streets composed nut Hill as more than merely a real estate of Cotswold-style cottages as well as a group venture. His ideas about architecture were of eight houses, known locally as the French inspired by both John Ruskin (Octavia Hill's Village, designed by McGoodwin in the mentor) and the English poet, craftsman, Norman style. and utopian socialist William Morris. Many The houses built by Woodward, includ- of the Woodward houses are in the Arts and ing smaller dwellings for young families as Crafts style. All are characterized by solid, well as the large houses, were not sold but honest construction and good craftsman- rented. (He.did sell individual lots to people ship. Woodward was also familiar with the wishing to build their own houses.) This as- Garden City movement and with projects sured a high degree of conformity with such as Hampstead Garden Suburb. Woodward's architectural ideals. But no ef- One of the design issues that Unwin had fort was made to physically separate the de- addressed in Hampstead was the formation velopment from the surrounding neighbor- of a town composed uniquely of small, de- hood. It had no gates-it was not an exclusive tached houses. "So long as we are confined enclave. Access to the parks was unrestricted,, to the endless multiplication of careful and the streets were all public thoroughfares. fenced in villas, and rows of cottages toeing In fact, it was not easy to tell exactly which the same building line, each with its little parts of Chestnut Hill the Woodwards garden securely railed, reminding one of a owned. Moreover, the neighborhood encom- cattle-pen, the result is bound to be monoto- passed various income groups, including a nous and devoid of beauty," he had written. large Italian community composed mainly of Unwin's solution was to group individual the families of masons who had been attracted houses into terraces, picturesque clusters, to the area by the Woodward construction and large quadrangles or courts. This cre- projects (which were all built using local ated larger common spaces, as well as a stone), as well as other artisans, domestic ser- variety of house types and building forms vants, and local shopkeepers. along the street. A small group of houses Houston and Woodward were unable served by a narrow driveway instead of a to innovate in the street planning of Chest- wide road also saved money and land. nut Hill. They had to adhere to the layout established earlier by the city of Philadel- he houses Woodward built in phia, a continuation of William Penn's Chestnut Hill included terraces of downtown grid. The regularity was some- rowhouses surrounding land- what relieved by the rolling topography of scaped courts, clusters of houses Chestnut Hill and by the ragged edge of whoseT freestanding character was disguised nearby Fairmount Park, as well as by sev- by connecting stone walls and outbuildings, eral angled roads dating from the colonial and interesting groups of attached cottages era, but it was not the sort of plan that the that produced the visual effect of larger builders of garden suburbs preferred.

122 WQ SUMMER 1995 Woodward did introduce an Unwinesque, appeared in all parts of the continent. Coun- crescent-shaped group of houses that try Club District, in Kansas City, Missouri, flanked a public green, and he created a which was founded in 1907, grew over the public park, but his design for a formal ap- next three decades and finally encompassed proach road was never implemented. more than 4,000 acres. Shaker Heights, in Cleveland, developed into one of America's or a fully realized planned garden most beautiful garden suburbs. Forest Hills suburb in the United States, one Gardens, 15 minutes by rail from Manhattan, must turn to the village of Marie- was the American suburb that most re- mont, built in the 1920s on the out- sembled Hampstead. Lake Forest, north of skirtsF of Cincinnati overlooking the Ohio Chicago, included an exemplary market River. Like Chestnut Hill, Mariemont was the square, forerunner of the regional shopping work of an enlightened developer, Mary M. center. In Montreal, the Canadian National Emery, who wanted to create a model com- Railway commissioned Frederick Todd in munity that would demonstrate the value of 1910 to plan the Town of Mount Royal, a gar- modern (that is, Garden City) planning ideas. den suburb linked to downtown by CNR In 1914, she engaged John Nolen, a Philadel- tracks. A few years later, Todd was hired by phia native and an experienced planner and the Canadian Pacific Railway to design the architect who had been active in the City Town of Leaside, just outside Toronto. This Beautiful movement. Starting from scratch on suburban boom was caused by the increased 420 acres, Nolen created a formal town cen- congestion of traditional urban neighbor- ter focused on a village green and bisected by hoods, which encouraged people who could a boulevarded avenue, with streets radiating afford it to seek alternatives, and by the ad- out into the village. The plan is an extraordi- vent of automobile ownership that, especially narily subtle exercise in axial formalism com- after 1920, made outlying areas accessible and bined with a very relaxed form of grid plan- freed developers from dependence on rail- ning, which is all the more impressive when road companies. Above all, there was the in- one appreciates that this is among the first nate attraction of the garden suburbs them- suburbs planned expressly for the automo- selves. bile. Nolen provided space for on-street park- Whereas most people today equate sub- ing and rear lanes giving access to garages. Emery intended Marie- mont to be an affordable community, and it included a variety of lot sizes as well as low-rise apartment buildings and commercial buildings with flats above stores. The housing was designed by several architects of national stature. The development of Chestnut Hill and Mariemont coincided with a general increase in suburban construction that lasted about The design of Yorlcsl~ipVillage, wit11 a reg~ilar11ierarcIzy of stwets 1910 to 1930. Garden suburbs organized around a town center, was typical of the garden suburb.

SUBURBS 123 Palos Verdes outside Los An- geles, and Coral Gables near Miami, have become synony- mous with wealth. The architectural and urbanistic qualities of the garden suburbs made them particularly attractive-and in the long run drove up real estate values. But as the example of Chestnut Hill shows, these places were by no means elitist. Nor were they always middle class. Garden suburb planning was used in public housing and in developments for the working class. In 1918, shortly before the end of World War I, the New York Shipbuilding Company of Camden, New Jersey, built Yorkship Village, a community of about 1,000 dwellings intended for its workers. The Five versions of the Cape Cod were sold at Levittown on Long Island. The plan of Yorkship, designed community had few town-like qualities, but the houses had features that by Electus D. Litchfield, a evoked the small town: shutters, picket railings, cross-and-bible doors. New York City architect, bears some resemblance to urban development with negligent planning Mariemont's: there is a square green in the and incompetent design, the earliest garden center, flanked by shops with flats above. suburbs were distinguished precisely by the Two diagonal avenues lead from the green sophistication of their layouts and the quality to a boulevard, where a streetcar line con- of their architecture. What is impressive is the nected Yorkship with Camden. Most of the consistency of this quality. This was as true in dwellings are tiny rowhouses arranged in North America as it was in Britain. A small small terraces. The plan, which includes a group of exceptional planners-Elbert Peets, system of rear service lanes, is carefully de- the Olmsted brothers, Nolen, Todd-set the signed to avoid long, unobstructed vistas and example, and others followed. It is also strik- to create a sense of intimacy through pleasant, ing how many talented architects worked in closed spaces. the garden suburbs. Good planning and Yorkship Village (now known as imaginative architecture made the garden Fairview) has survived intact. It continues to suburbs popular with the buying public, but be a solid community still close to its blue- more important, they also assured their lon- collar roots. The small houses are well tended, gevity. Like Chestnut Hill and Mariemont, all shops still surround the shaded village green, the garden suburbs of the 1910s and '20s have and there is an active community association. remained attractive places to live. Some, such It's hard not to credit Litchfield's careful plan- as River Oaks in Houston, Beverly Hills and ning, whose human qualities are still evident,

124 WQ SUMMER 1995 with the vitality of this community, which their planning. It's almost as if a sort of am- exists in the city of Camden, a sad example of nesia set in and the garden suburb was forgot- urban decay and devastation. ten. There were several reasons for this shift. The postwar suburbs were marketed chiefly he period from 1900 to 1930 is a on the basis of low price, and the selling price largely forgotten chapter in the his- of houses was kept affordable by reducing tory of the American suburb. The overhead costs. Developers quickly realized early garden suburbs of this era dis- that they could dispense with the niceties of playT none of the cliches of later suburban plan- architectural design and urban planning with- ning. They were clearly intended to offer a out harming sales. green alternative to the city, but their developers understood that town planning was an cale also differentiated the postwar important tool in achieving their aims. suburban developments: they were Compared with contemporary subur- huge. Railroad and streetcar sub- ban developments, the garden suburbs urbs had to be compact since were paragons of urban design. Instead of people still walked a great deal; automobile confusing layouts of cul-de-sacs, there were suburbs could spread out-and starting in carefully planned hierarchies of avenues the late 1940s, they did. One of the most and streets interspersed with parks and famous, Levittown on Long Island, eventu- squares. Instead of the ubiquitous bunga- ally housed about 80,000 people; the second low, there was variety: rowhouse terraces, Levittown, outside Philadelphia, had about clusters, twins, and courts, as well as free- 60,000 residents. Compared with the garden standing cottages and villas. suburbs, these were really small cities: the By the 1920s, the automobile had to be second Levittown included light industry, accounted for, and it was integrated in office buildings, 10 elementary schools, two subtle ways: instead of lines of garage doors high schools, recreation areas, swimming on the street, there were service lanes and pools, and about 18 churches. Size was an garages at the end of backyard gardens; to important ingredient in the economic suc- prevent high-speed traffic, secondary roads cess of these subdivisions, since it was by were kept relatively narrow. mass-producing the houses (on site, not in Above all, the garden suburbs were less factories) that the Levitt brothers in 1949 spread out. Instead of one-story ranch were able to market a four-room Cape Cod houses, homes had two or three floors; in- cottage for $7,990. (Thanks to the GI Bill of stead of being set back behind large front Rights, no down payment was required, lawns, houses were often close to the street. and the low monthly charges were actually Small lots produced compact neighbor- cheaper than the rent for a comparable city hoods in which, despite the automobile, one apartment.) Although it was small-750 could walk to the store, to school, or to the square feet-the two-bedroom house in- park. The garden suburb designers did not cluded an unfinished attic and such ameni- think of their work as an alternative to the ties as underfloor radiant heating, a fire- city-still less as antiurban-but rather as a place, and a Bendix washing machine. part of the long tradition of city building. This achievement was made possible by Suburban construction slowed down standardizing house construction. What is during the Great Depression and did not re- less obvious is that the urban planning was sume until after World War 11. The postwar also standardized. The basis for the new mode suburbs were different from their predeces- of planning was the individual lot for a de- sors, however. They came to be called subdi- tached house (virtuallythe only kind of hous- visions-aptly so, for little artistry went into ing available in the postwar suburb) and the

SUBURBS 125 out prominent architects and planners. In order to save money, they preferred to use either stock plans or in-house architects. In any case; by 1945 the planners and architects of Unwin and Nolen's day were either dead or retired, and the suc- ceeding generation of architects had no interest in suburban housing. These architects were caught up in international modernism, and when they did design housing, it was more likely to be publicly funded shelter for low-income people, such as the infamous Cabrini-Green project in Chicago. As for city planners, they had moved away from physical design altogether, preferring to concern themselves with statistical and policy analysis. The undiscriminat- ing buyers must bear some of the blame for the bland subdivision as Some developers and designers are trying to revive various pre- well, but the the architectural profes- World War II models of suburb building. One product of the trend sion and professional schools' depar- is the new town of Ke~~tlands,in Gaithersbt~rg,Maryland. ture from the design of suburbs and suburban housing after 1930 contrib- need to handle car traffic. High-speed ar- uted greatly to this decline in quality. terial roads cut the developments into The failure of the postwar subdivisions large blocks, which were further subdi- was, paradoxically, a result of their great vided by feeder roads usually culminating commercial success. The making of sub- in cul-de-sacs around which the lots were urbs, which had been an honorable branch clustered. There was nothing resembling of town planning, became simply a way of a public center. Schools, recreation facili- marketing individual houses. By concen- ties, and shopping centers were scattered trating entirely on making houses afford- throughout the development-large able, the developers overlooked the chief buildings surrounded by parking lots. It lesson of the 1920s garden suburbs: subdi- was assumed that people would drive visions should consist not only of private from place to place, and indeed, the low dwellings but also of public spaces where density of the postwar suburb (with pre- citizens can feel that they are part of a larger dominantly one-story houses on large community. Suburbs are located outside the lots) made walking impractical. traditional city, but that does not mean that Unlike the builders of garden suburbs, they cannot be urban, too. Civic art belongs the subdivision developers did not seek in the suburbs just as much as in the cities.

126 WQ SUMMER 1995 THEPERIODICAL OBSERVER Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

Affirmative Action: A Symbol under Siege A Survey of Recent Articles

t was never supposed to be permanent, it far more than any other group, and 46 percent and after some 30 years the time may have of all black children live in poverty." Icome for government "affirmative action" Affirmative action has increased the presence to cease. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D.- of minorities in the professions and at some cor- Conn.), upon assuming the chairmanship of porations, universities, and public agencies, the moderate Democratic Leadership Council observes Princeton University sociologist Paul earlier this year, expressed the now-wide- Starr in the journal he coedits, the American Pros- spread view: racial and gender preferences are pect (Winter 1992). But this "genuine positive "patently unfair." benefit. . . has not come without cost." It has California is taking the lead in the dismantle- fueled white racism, and even its beneficiaries ment. Governor Pete Wilson recently ordered have been hurt by that. scores of state affirmative action programs cur- For blacks, the loss of affirmative action "will tailed or eliminated, and a proposition to pro- be more symbolic than substantive," Wycliff hibit the state from discriminating in its employ- says. "To be sure, affirmative action has ment, contracting, and school admissions is ex- wrought some genuine successes-I count my pected to be on the ballot next year. In Washing- own education and career among them. But ton, President Bill Clinton, prodded by Repub- overall, in terms of bringing black people to lican victories at the polls, has ordered a review parity with whites, it has not overwhelmed." of federal affirmative action programs. In the view of Roger Wilkins, a professor of To Don Wycliff, editorial page editor of the history at George Mason University, however, Chicago Tribune, affirmative action "looks like a affirmative action "has done wonderful things goner." Although he says that "not happily, but for the United States by enlarging opportunity resignedly," he writes in Comrnonzueal (May 19, and developing and utilizing a far broader ar- 1995), he has long been somewhat troubled by ray of the skills available in the American popu- affirmative action. "It really can foster doubt about the legitimacy of the achievements of those it's meant to benefit-not just in the minds of white males, but also in the minds of the blacks, women, or other beneficiaries." Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character (19901, has been making that same point for years. Writing on the Nezu York Times op-ed page (Mar. 1,1995), he contends that affirmative action "has always been what might be called iconographic public policy-policy that ostensibly exists to solve a social problem but actually functions as an icon for the self-image people hope to gain by supporting the policy." White supporters feel virtuous, blacks empowered. The uncomfortable reality, Steele says, "can be seen in two remarkable facts: middle-class white women have benefited from

PERIODICALS 127 lation than in the past. It has not outlived its action "a bad idea, whose weaknesses become usefulness." apparent" when one looks at how it would op- Some aspects do need to be reconsidered and erate in government contracting (already "af- even, in certain cases, abandoned, Wilkins conflicted by dissembling and fraud"), employ- cedes in the Nation (Mar. 27,1995). "It is not a ment, and college admissions. For example, quota program, and those cases where rigid notes Glazer, there already is "a huge and ex- numbers are used (except under a court or ad- pensive system of federal loans and grants, ministrative order after a specific finding of dis- supplemented by state programs and individual crimination) are a bastardization of an otherwise institutional scholarships," to enable the irnpov- highly beneficial set of public policies." erished to go to college. For blacks, making tu- But it may be too late for such tinkering. ition payments is not the biggest challenge. "The When, beginning in the 1970s, the concept of problem African-Americans face in entering in- affirmative action was expanded beyond blacks stitutions of higher education is performance, to cover women and various ethnic groups, sup- and performance is affected by poverty," Glazer port for it was bound to be undermined, Don says. Improving performance requires efforts Wycliff says, because that expansion diluted targeted at blacks. Class-based affirmative ac- "the sense that this was an obligation to justice. tion, he says, would amount to turning away Remember, affirmative action (at least as origi- from the problem. nally conceived) was about compensation- reparation?-for disadvantages stemming from f President Clinton wants to salvage some- massive, unique, and undisputed historical thing from affirmative action, Rosen sug- wrongs. In this society, those criteria qualify two Igests, "he will have to eliminate most of groups: African-Americans and Native Ameri- the mandatory racial preferences that the fed- cans. Any others are a stretch." eral government now administers." But that The way to rescue affirmative action now, would enable him to make "a crucial distinc- suggests author Richard Kahlenberg in the tion." Federally mandated affirmative action New Republic (Apr. 3,19951, is "to base prefer- "puts the U.S. government in the business of ences, in education, entry-level employment, classifying its citizens by race and gender," and public contracting, on class, not race." and is more offensive to the ideal of equal citi- Others, however, beginning with that zenship than private affirmative action, taken magazine's legal affairs editor, Jeffrey Rosen, voluntarily by employers. have been quick to criticize the idea. Class- For all the flaws of affirmative action, "at based affirmative action would be "perverse," its heart is a reality that cannot be wished Rosen asserts in the New Republic (May 8, away," says Glazer, a longtime critic. "This is 1995). He cites a College Board survey: in the distinctive condition of American blacks, 1992, the average combined SAT score for scarred by a history of oppression no other black students whose parents earned more group, save American Indians, can match." than $70,000 a year was 854 (out of a possible Affirmative action may be little more than 1,600),25 points lower than the average SAT a symbol for blacks, but it is a symbol. While for white students whose parents earned less it "has done precious little to ameliorate" the than $20,000. "This statistic," Rosen says, "fa- problems it was intended to address, Glazer tally undermines the premise that disadvan- fears "that African-Americans will see the tage is a useful proxy for race; and it suggests abandonment of affirmative action for them as that need-based preferences, honestly applied, a terrible rejection by an indifferent and hos- would replace middle-class black students tile society." At the very least, he concludes, with lower-class white students." volunfary affirmative action-which colleges Nathan Glazer, the noted Harvard University and universities, major corporations, and sociologist and author of Affirmative Discrimina- many cities could be counted on to maintain, tion (19751, agrees. Writing in the Wall Street Jour- even in the absence of federal regulations- nal (Apr. 5,1995), he calls class-based affirmative should be encouraged.

128 WQ SUMMER 1995 POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

Tom Paine's of course, a writing one." He was, Wood says, Place in Histo y "America's first modern intellectual." He mingled with Washington, Jefferson, and "Disturbing the Peace" by Gordon S. Wood, in The Lafayette, but was seen as "a man without a New York Review of Books (June 8,1995), 250 West 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10107. home and even without a country." Paine tried to turn the perceived defect He was the author of Common Sense (1776), into a virtue, Wood says, becoming "quite the most influential pamphlet of the Ameri- literally a citizen of the world." He returned can Revolution, and of other stirring works, to Europe in 1787. "After being hounded out including an essay that famously began: of England for writing the Rights of Man "These are the times that try men's souls." [1791-921, Paine fled to France," where he He labored in behalf of liberty and the spent 10 months in prison during the Terror American Revolution "with as much effort of the French Revolution. Although he came as any man living," no less an authority than back to America to live in 1802, the United Thomas Jefferson recalled in 1801. And yet States to him was not home, only a symbol. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) never won a This tribune of the people was out of step place in the pantheon of America's Found- with popular religious beliefs, observes ing Fathers. Wood. Critics attacked him as a "'lying, His religious views are often held to blame, drunken, brutal infidel.'" Paine was allowed but Wood, a historian at Brown University and to die in obscurity, with most of the revolu- author of The Radicalism of the American Revolu- tionary leaders wanting to forget that they had tion (1991), is skeptical. In The Age of Reason ever known him. Americans since have acted (1794), Paine attacked Christianity and orthodox as if they felt the same way. religion, Wood notes, but he also set forth "his deistic belief in God the creator and harmonizer of the world." His deism was not very different from that of Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. Yet no one would dream of calling them what Theodore Roosevelt called Paine: a "filthy little atheist." Wood argues that the real source of Paine's poor standing was the character of the 18th-century social order. Like most of the Founding Fathers, he was not born a gentleman. But unlike them, he "was never quite able to shed his lowly origins as the son of a corset maker and the effects of all his years of living in poverty and obscurity, close to the bottom of English society." He arrived in America only 14 months before Common Sense appeared. Franklin, by contrast, was a self-made man who retired at age 42 from his printing business to live the life of a "gentleman." And public life was only one of his gentlemanly pursuits. Paine was a rootless critic of society who knew "only one kind of life," as he said in 1779, "and that is a thinking one, and America's "first intellectual," in an 18th-century engraving

PERIODICALS 129 Rejecting the a now-famous metaphor of politics as "men 'Vision Thing' sail[ing] a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchor- TheOakeshottian President: George Bush and the Politics of the Present" by Dean C. Hammer, in age, neither starting-place nor appointed desti- Presidential Studies ~uarkrly(Spring 1995), 208 East nation. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources The presidency of George Bush remains a of a traditional manner of behavior in order to puzzle. Time magazine summed it up in January make a friend of every hostile occasion." 1991, when it named the 41st president "Men of A better description of Bush's approach to the Year": a double image of him was splashed politics would be hard to find, Hammer sug- on the cover as if to say, "George Bush, bold gests. It meant eschewing what Bush called leader of the crusade against Saddam Hussein, "the vision thing" in favor of incremental meet George Bush, curiously inert domestic change, traditional practices, and the accep- political leader." The political scientists are al- tance of life's inevitable untidiness. Describ- ready inventing labels for Bush: "guardian ing his school-reform agenda in 1991, for ex- president," "hierarchist," and so on. Hammer, ample, Bush presented no master plan but one of their brethren at Franklin and Marshall stressed its "voluntary," "open-end[ed]," and College, has a new one. Bush, he believes, was "local" character. Even his boldest moves fit an "Oakeshottian" president. the Oakeshottian mold. His call for a "new Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) was a conser- world order" may have sounded like a vative British political philosopher who of- Wilsonian trumpet blast, but in fact, Hammer fered his diagnosis of the modern political believes, all Bush had in mind was a restora- disease in the title of his most famous book: tion of order, plain and simple. Operation Rationalism in Politics (1962). "For Oakeshott," Desert Storm sprang from a similar motive. Hammer explains, "Rationalism is born of a So total was Bush's immersion in the Oake- post-Renaissance belief in the authority of rea- shottian way that he was unable even to mimic son and a confidence in the attainability a "vision thing" during the 1992 presidential through political engineering of the perfect- campaign. Trust me to keep the ship afloat, he ibility of human conduct and condition." said to the voters. The voters, however, pre- Against this vision, Oakeshott counterposed ferred tales of safe harbors in distant lands.

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

A Tale of Two tington, agree. "Classic Chinese Confucianism and its derivatives in Korea, Vietnam, Confucianisms Singapore, Taiwan, and (in diluted fashion) Japan," he has written, "emphasized the "Confucianism and Democracy" by Francis Fukuyama, in Jo~~rnnlof Democracy (Apr. 1995), 1101 group over the individual, authority over lib- 15th St. N.W., Ste. 802, Washington, D.C. 20005. erty, and responsibilities over rights." Fukuyama, a senior researcher at the Singapore's former prime minister Lee Kuan RAND Corporation in Washington, sees Yew and others argue that Western-style lib- things somewhat differently. Although tradi- eral democracy is incompatible with traditional Chinese Confucianism, which took tional Confucianism. Many in the West, such shape long after Confucius (551479 B.c.)and as Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Hun- held sway in China for 2,000 years, justified a

130 WQ SUMMER 1995 hierarchical political system culminating in An Ounce of Prevention? the emperor, its essential feature was its stress "Alchemy for a New World Order" by Stephen John on the family as the basic building block of Stedman, in Foreign Affairs (May-June 1995),58 East society. The moral obligations of family life 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. took precedence over all others, including obligations to the emperor. This was not true "Preventive diplomacy" and "conflict preven- in Japan, notes Fukuyama, where Chinese tion" are the latest enthusiasms among the for- Confucianism was modified after being im- eign policy cognoscenti, and numerous weighty ported in the 17th century so that one's duties studies are promised. It seems that whatever the to the emperor were deemed superior. disaster, whether anarchy in Somalia, civil war Huntington's general characterization of Con- in the former Yugoslavia, or genocide in fucianism holds much more true for Japanese Rwanda, some analysts believe that early diplo- than Chinese Confucianism, Fukuyama says. matic intervention could have prevented it at "Yet it is Japan, rather than China, that has little cost. Thus, in the Balkans, U.S. Secretary of been democratic for the past 45 years." State Warren Christopher has asserted, "the Paradoxically, he argues, the weaker Chi- West has missed repeated opportunities to en- nese deference to authority created a greater gage in early and effective ways that might have need for an authoritarian political system: prevented the conflict from deepening." All the "Precisely because state authority is less re- prevention chatter is largely wishful thinking, spected in China, the danger of social chaos contends Stedman, a professor of African stud- emerging in the absence of an overt, repres- ies and comparative politics at Johns Hopkins' sive state structure is greater there than in Ja- School of Advanced International Studies. pan." The stress on political authoritarianism Heading off bloodshed in Somalia, Bosnia, or in Singapore and other Southeast Asian states Rwanda, he says, "would have involved sub- may also be less a reflection of their "self-dis- stantial risk and great cost. The cheapness of cipline-as they would have outsiders be- intervention depends on what actions will be lieve-than of their rather low level of spon- necessary to deter the parties in a conflict from taneous citizenship and corresponding fear of using violence (or more violence) to resolve it." coming apart." Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, Serbian The most important difference between president Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb Confucian culture and the West's Christian leader Radovan Karadzic, Angolan rebel leader and democratic culture, Fukuyama says, has Jonas Savimbi, and genocidal factions such as to do with the latter's regard for the indi- the presidential guard in Rwanda "decided on vidual, for human rights, and for the indi- civil war," Stedman points out, "because they vidual conscience as the ultimate source of thought they could prevail militarily and that authority. "This, it is safe to say, does not have the international community was powerless to a counterpart in any Confucian society." stop them. If they had faced an early interna- Nevertheless, Fukuyama says, the thesis tional willingness to use massive force, then that economic development gives rise to po- their calculations might have been different." If litical liberalization has been bolstered in re- the threat worked, the cost would have been cent decades-and nowhere more so than in slight. But if it did not, "then only the use of force Asia. Confucian societies such as Japan and with the risk of prolonged involvement in a civil South Korea "have been able to accommodate war" could work. a greater degree of political participation and Stedman is equally critical of the theory of individual liberty than Singapore without "conflict prevention," which suggests that for- compromising their own fundamental cul- eign aid can be used to eradicate the putative tural values, and Taiwan is moving rapidly in roots of strife, including poverty, environmen- the same direction. I see no reason why tal degradation, and overpopulation. Between Singapore should not be able to follow this 1992 and '94, the United States gave aid to path." Rwanda to improve governance, strengthen

PERIODICALS 131 democratic organizations, train market entre- The Hiroshima Debate preneurs, and increase farm productivity. The Hutu genocidal assault on the Tutsis there, "The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb by Robert James Maddox, in American however, had little to do with living condi- Heritage (May-June 1995), Forbes Building, 60 Fifth tions. It "was chosen, planned, and directed by Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011; "Hiroshima: Historians individuals who did not want to cede power," Reassess" by Gar Alperovitz, in Foreign Policy (Summer 1995), Carnegie Endowment for Interna- writes Stedman. tional Peace, 2400 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. "Absent well-defined interests, clear goals, 20037-1153. and prudent judgment about acceptable costs and risks," he concludes, "policies of preven- As the recent rows over the Smithsonian tive diplomacy and conflict prevention simply Institution's planned Enola Gay exhibit and the mean that one founders early in a crisis in- U.S. Postal Service's mushroom-cloud post- stead of later." age stamp demonstrate, President Harry S

132 WQ SUMMER 1995 Truman's decision to drop an atomic bomb on Kyushu, followed by that of the main island Hiroshima on August 6,1945, and a second of Honshu (as the chiefs proposed), would one on Nagasaki three days later, can still stir cost 40,000 dead, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 controversy. missing in action. "The notion that 193,500 an- Revisionist critics such as Alperovitz, au- ticipated casualties were too insignificant to thor of Atomic Diplomacy (1965), contend that have caused Truman to resort to atomic U.S. leaders failed to explore other alterna- bombs might seem bizarre to anyone other tives and may even have used the bombs than an academic," Maddox observes. In any mainly with an eye to making the postwar case, he says, subsequent Japanese troop Soviet Union "more manageable," not to de- buildups on Kyushu made those spring esti- feat a Japan already on the verge of surren- mates irrelevant. der. Maddox, a historian at Pennsylvania By August 6, he says, intercepts of Japanese State University, believes that the revision- military communications indicated that there ists are all wet. The militarists in control of were 560,000 troops in southern Kyushu, some Japan's government intended to fight to the 210,000 more than had been assumed in the bitter end, he argues, and Truman "acted for spring (and 340,000 short of the roughly the reason he said he did: to end a bloody 900,000 troops actually there). A July 31 as- war that would have become far bloodier sessment of medical needs-unmentioned by had invasion [of Japan's home islands] Alperovitz-estimated that total U.S. battle proved necessary." and nonbattle casualties might run as high as Much of the recent debate has focused on 394,859 for the Kyushu operation alone. That estimates of American casualties in an inva- figure, moreover, did not include those killed sion. Truman in his memoirs claimed that outright (who would not require medical at- 500,000 American lives would have been lost. tention). Critics have assailed that and similar state- Some historians concede that the first bomb ments by other officials as gross exaggera- might have been necessary but condemn the tions. Alperovitz, who updates his familiar dropping of the second as needless. "The critique in Foreign Policy, asserts that U.S. mili- record shows otherwise," Maddox says. As tary planning documents-as shown in recent American officials predicted, Japanese hard- studies such as John Ray Skates's Invasion of liners minimized the significance of Japan (1994)-indicate that a November 1945 invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu would have cost between 20,000 and 26,000 American lives. "In the unlikely event that a subsequent full-scale invasion had been mounted in 1946," Alperovitz writes, "the maximum estimate found in such documents was 46,000." In their effort to minimize the number of U.S. casualties an invasion would have en- tailed, Maddox notes, revisionist critics have often cited a spring 1945 report prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It Preface to Hiroshima: Taking Iwo Jima (above) in March 1945 cost 6,000 concluded that an invasion of U.S. dead and 20,000 wounded; on Okinawa, U.S. casualties neared 50,000.

PERIODICALS 133 Hiroshima. The Japanese minister of war, for insisted on such lenient peace terms that mod- example, at first refused even to admit that the erates knew there was no sense even transmit- weapon used at Hiroshima was an atomic ting them to the United States," Maddox bomb. "Even after both bombs had fallen and writes. Only after the intercession of Emperor Russia entered the war, Japanese militants Hirohito did Japan finally surrender.

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

The Retail Revolution manufacturer 'push,' is becoming a demand chain driven by consumer 'pull,' " Reid writes. "Change at the Check-out" by Michael Reid, in The "Retailers have won control over distribution Economist (Mar. 4,1995),25 St. James St., London, not just because they decide the price at which England SWlA 1HG. goods are sold, but also because both individual shops and retail companies have become much The retail business once seemed fairly simple: bigger and more efficient. They are able to buy the humble merchant chose from the goods in bulk and to reap economies of scale, mainly available from manufacturers and wholesal- thanks to advances in transport and, more re- ers, then offered the array to his customers, at cently, in information technology." prices largely determined by the manufactur- Using sophisticated computer systems, ers. Not any more, reports the Economist's retailers can now find out right away "what Reid. "In the past 15 years, retailing has under- they are selling in each of hundreds of gone a many-sided revolution from which it stores, how much money they are making has emerged as a leader in business innova- on each sale and, increasingly, who their tion and the management of complexity. Top customers are," Reid notes. No longer must retail firms are now run by polished profes- a retail firm keep stock that may not sell or sionals" and exercise enormous sway over run out of items customers want. Exploiting both manufacturers and consumers. their closeness to the customers, retailers Retail firms have grown, first at home, have passed the devilish risk of maintaining more and more abroad, into some of the larg- inventories to manufacturers. est companies on earth. The Wal-Mart dis- Growth has been accompanied by concen- count chain, launched in 1962 when founder tration. The gap between the front-running Sam Walton opened a store in Rogers, Arkan- retailers and the rest has widened. America's sas, is now the world's biggest retailer, ahead top 70 nonfood retailers accounted for well of Metro, a diversified German chain. Wal- over half of total sales of general merchandise, Mart, with more than 2,500 stores, had re- clothing, and furniture in 1993, a 10 percent ceipts of more than $67 billion in 1993, mak- increase over their share a decade earlier. ing it, in terms of sales, the fourth largest Bankruptcies in U.S. retailing have gone up American company. (If it sustains its rapid sharply during the 1990s. growth, by 2000 the firm may be the largest "As most of the easy pickings have gone, company in the world.) Today, Wal-Mart's large American retailers now find they can sales revenues outstrip those of its main sup- gain market share only at each other's ex- pliers. Similarly, each of Europe's top half- pense," Reid observes. And increased compe- dozen food retailers has greater sales than any tition is not retailers' only worry: "What if of the Continent's food manufacturers except new technology allows their customers to dis- Nestle and Unilever. pense with stores altogether? What if consum- "The traditional supply chain, powered by ers find they can do their shopping from

134 WQ SUMMER 1995 home?" In short, there just might be another conditions actually were worse. Pursuing this retail revolution on the horizon. line of thought, the Rutgers researchers exam- ined tluee surveys in which union and nonunion employees worked together. A 1986 survey of 188 public-sector employ- The Myth of the ees in an "agency shop" (in which workers ~iserableUnion Worker must pay a fee about equal to union dues but do not have to join the union) and a 1980 sur- 'A Re-examination of the Relationship between vey of 1,578 federal workers who operated in Union Membership and Job Satisfaction" by Michael E. Gordon and Angelo S. DeNisi, in Industrial and an "open shop" (in which neither union mem- Labor Relations Review (Jan. 1995), 201 ILR Research bership nor dues are required as a condition Bldg., Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853-3901. of employment) produced the same result: no connection between job satisfaction and union Are union members more unhappy with their membership. So did a 1989-90 survey of 721 jobs than others are? Economist Richard Free- Rutgers professors, of whom about 64 percent man in 1978 found that union members were belonged to the local chapter of the American less happy but were also less inclined to leave Association of University Professors. their jobs. He saw that as a strength: through It is true, Gordon and DeNisi acknowl- contract negotiations and grievance procedures, edge, that unions generally do try to bring union workers were able to express their discon- worker discontents to the fore during an tents and improve their working lives. Non- organizing campaign. Once they have been union workers' main option was to quit. Most chosen to represent workers, however, they later research has supported Freeman's findings. have every incentive to make workers hap- Gordon and DeNisi, of Rutgers University's pier with better wages and working condi- School of Business and Institute of Management tions. Studies of both private- and public- and Labor Relations, respectively, object that the sector unions, the authors point out, have earlier research was based on national surveys shown "that workers who were most satis- and did not adequately take into account the fied with their jobs also tended to be most possibility that the union members' working satisfied with their union."

SOCIETY

Welfare Cowboys others mainly want, argues Hess, a writer af- filiated with the Foundation for Research on "Storm over the Rockies" by Karl Hess, Jr., in Reason (June 1995), 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Ste. 400, Los Economics and the Environment in Bozeman, Angeles, Calif. 90034-6064. Montana, is to keep "federal lands . . . safe for ranchers and ranching." The sagebrush rebels in the American West The 28,000 public-land ranchers, Hess who oppose wetlands regulation and higher points out, do not object to "the myriad pro- grazing fees and who imagine themselves at grams and subsidies [through which] the fed- war with the federal government (or did at eral government has made sure that cattle stay least before the sobering tragedy of the Okla- king on the western range." (Little more than homa City bombing) conveniently overlook one-third of the West is in private hands, and their own extensive reliance on that same gov- the federal government lays claim to most of ernment. What these ranchers, miners, and the rest.) For decades, Washington has paid

PERIODICALS 135 trappers about $30 million a year "to purge A Role Model Fallacy? the western range of wolves, bears, cougars, "Following in Her Footsteps? Faculty Gender Composi- and coyotes that prey on domestic livestock." tion and Women's Choices of College Majors" by Brandice J. Canes and Harvey S. Rosen, inlndustrial and Federal dams on western rivers supply Labor Relations Review (Apr. 19951,201 ILR Research ranches with plentiful subsidized water, even Bldg., Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.14853-3901. in times .of drought. "A more massive subsidy to both private- It is conventional wisdom in academe these and public-land ranchers," Hess says, is pro- days that if there were more women teach- vided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's ing science, engineering, and mathematics, emergency feed program, which pays ranch- then more female undergraduates would ers half the cost of hay and grain to keep their decide to major in those subjects. This idea herds alive during the worst droughts. In re- has had consequences. Colleges are trying to cent years, he says, the program has become hire more female professors, for example, "an entitlement program for dry years and and the National Science Foundation has wet.. . . Nevada ranchers, the most vocal of awarded grants for women scientists and sagebrush rebels and the most intent on kick- engineers to serve as visiting professors. But ing Uncle Sam out of the West, receive on av- the conventional wisdom may well be in- erage $18,000 per year for every man and valid, contend Rosen, an economist at woman in the program." The program not Princeton University, and Canes, a graduate only costs the taxpayers as much as $500 mil- student at Stanford University. lion a year but also encouragesovergrazing- Examining data from the 1970s and '80s which means less grass produced next year from Princeton, the University of Michigan, and -greater need for drought- relief. "But as long as government payments for emergency feed grow as fast as the grass Don't Hound 'Deadbeat Dads' disappears," Hess notes, "ranchers can stay in business, Liberals and conservatives alike now seem to favor extract- and even make a profit." ing child support from the "deadbeat dads" of children The West's real war, Hess whose mothers are on welfare. Writing in the American Spec- contends, is with itself. "The tator (June 1995), George Gilder, author of Wealth and Pov- West, paradoxically, is the erty (19811, spies a pitfall. most urbanized region of the nation. It has a sparse and Because of the promotion of early sexual activity through tele- tiny rural population; Ne- vision, films, sex education, and the welfare stated attack- vada, for example, has 90 ing the constraints of chastity and female modesty-the girls percent of its population in of the welfare culture are widely promiscuous from the age of its three major urban cen- 14, whether black or white. Many black youths, in particular, ters." While the ranchers can be linked as DNA dads to some ghetto child or other. Thus cling to their government the threat of garnishment makes officialemployment a treach- privileges and subsidies, erous arena for inner-city men. They can never know when western environmentalists, their paychecks will be devastated by a huge lien, representing sportsmen, and outdoor en- years of support payments for some unknown child (or even for thusiasts have other uses in a known child who has long received payments off the books). mind for the region's vast ex- Like all welfare crackdowns focusing on desirable activity- panses of public lands. The honest work, savings, and tax payments-the DNA-Dad pro- latest sagebrush rebellion, grams will destroy marriages and forcibly drive men out of the Hess says, may turn out to be official economy into crime and other underground work. subsidized ranching's "last hurrah."

136 WQ SUMMER 1995 A Republic of Meddlers?

In Society (May-June 1995), Charles Edgley, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, and Dennis Brissett, who teachers behavioral science at the University of Min- nesota Medical School at Duluth, decry the latest national pastime.

There was a time long ago when the phrase "it's good people do for each other. The alternative none of your business" meant something. Not to meddling is now more often seen as an apa- any more. A boorish and persistent army of thetic, uncaring, isolated disregard for others meddlers, equipped with righteous indignation symbolized by those tragic instances in which and a formidable array of theories and technolo- cries for help go unheard or unanswered. . . . gies, has made almost everyone's business its An even more pernicious dimension is, how- own. Meddling in the lives of others is now the ever, at the nub of meddling. It is that meddling republic's most visible obsession. Examples are is done so impertinently. It is tlze meddler's im- everywhere-from national crusades against pudent arrogance, effrontery, and audacious bad habits such as drinking, smoking, and gum- presumptive understanding of the meddlee that bling to the efforts of a group in Woodbury, makes meddling so different from most other Minnesota, to create a "fragrance-free" work forms of human association. Meddlers neither environment where workers are insulated not approve nor indulge the meddlee's behavior. At only from the disgusting stench of tobacco the same time, they presume to understand- smoke but also from tlze aroma of perfumes, or at least claim to be in possession of an un- shampoos, and aftershave lotion as well. . . . In derstanding of how to understand-not just the Takoma Park, Maryland, a group of "concerned behavior but the self, relationships, and entire citizens" tried to ban outdoor grills and lawn life of the meddlee. In short, it is the meddlers' mowers, spawning a coz~ntermoveineizt that wholesale, 'know-it-all arrogation of the calls itself "pro-choice" on the question of char- meddlee that makes meddling the bane of coal and Toros. . . . modern civilization. In the process, differ- Obviously, not all this meddling is bad. In ences between tlze meddler and meddlee be- fact, the consequences of meddling, at least in come inequalities, establishing the moral, terms of zulzat the meddler wishes to accomplish, intellectual, and psychological superiority of may be quite positive. But whether meddlesome the meddler. As Alida Brill [author of interventions succeed or not (and there always Nobody's Business: Paradoxes of Privacy seems a way to make them seem successful), a (1990)l has observed, "privacy invasions are deeper concern is the attitude of meddling that virtually always justified for a higher moral has become so prevalent in our society. Increas- purpose or public pod or for a nobler moti- ingly, it seems, people are stampeded into be- vation than privacy protection." So if is little lieving, with very little reflection and much zuonder that people take such pride in being cocksure arrogance about the matter, that med- meddlers. It just may be the last bastion of so- dling and being meddled with are cultural vir- cially sanctioned snobbery in an egalitarian tues; indeed, that they are the hallmark of what society.

and Whittier College, Canes and Rosen found ample, 19 percent of the English professors that female students did tend to cluster in de- were female, as were 50 percent of the gradu- partments with larger numbers of female pro- ating English majors. But coincidence is not fessors. In an average year at Princeton, for ex- causality. Those female English majors may

PERIODICALS 137 have had other reasons for picking the field. people and needed no timetables." If same-sex role models are an important By 1810, the invention of interchangeable factor in such decisions, then an increase in parts had ushered in an era of mass-produced female professors in a department should clocks. Peddlers on horseback roamed the boost the number of women majoring in the mid-Hudson Valley, selling the new time- subject. .But Canes and Rosen found no evi- pieces. "The Yankee pedlars, with their dence that this happened. At Princeton, an wooden clocks, are renowned,"wrote the En- increase of 10 percentage points in the pro- glish author Harriet Martineau in 1837. These portion of female faculty members in a de- men, in her view, were "great benefactors to partment resulted in perhaps a half-point society: for, be their clocks what they may, rise in the department's percentage of fe- they make the country people as well off as the male undergraduates. inhabitants of towns, in the matter of knowing Of course, the absence of evidence does not time." prove that professorial role models are not im- "People owned timepieces before time portant. But Canes and Rosen suggest that owned people," Bruegel writes. Initially, the some skepticism is in order. It may be that in clocks and watches were prized as "objects of selecting a major (or career), undergraduates refinement," not as tools for what we now call mainly take the measure of their own capabili- time management, he notes. Athens merchant ties and situations. John Smith's gold watch, valued at $25 when he died in 1810, reflected his social distinction. A gold watch, observed the author of an 1833 Before Time Was Money

" 'Time That Can Be Relied Upon.' The Evolution of Time Consciousness in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1790-1860" by Martin Bruegel, in Journal of Social History (Spring 1995), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

Harvard's David S. Landes, the author of Revolution in Time (1983), and other scholars have maintained that it was only when railroads penetrated the countryside that rural Americans in the 19th century became conscious of time as something precisely measured by clocks rather than by the sun and the seasons. Bruegel, a historian at Cornell Uni- versity, contends that in New York's rural Hudson Valley, the change came before the railroads, with the introduction of clocks. When the 19th century began, the agricultural economy of the mid-Hudson Valley required little in the way of timing, Bruegel says. 'The vast majority of exchanges were confined to the neighborhood, where time was an abundant resource." Occasional trips to the landings on the Hudson River to deliver produce for the New York City market "called for some planning and arrangements, but the This 1816 pillar-and-scroll timepiece, made in coordination of these journeys involved few Connecticut, was one of thefirst mass-produced clocks.

138 WQ SUMMER 1995 article in the Rural Repository, a magazine pub- tuality became more and more common in lished in Hudson, "combines embellishment business and agriculture. Time "increasingly and utility in happy proportions [and] is usu- became a public preoccupation in mid- ally considered a very valuable appendage to Hudson Valley towns," Bruegel says. "[In] an the gentleman." What a watch did for an in- economy whose division of labor was grow- dividual, a public clock did for a village or ing more complex, clocks and watches served town. A New Yorker who visited Catskill to organize the processes of production and during the 1820s was much impressed when distribution and to open the community out- he beheld a church steeple with "an excellent ward." toned bell" and next to it, "a town By midcentury, the valley's inhabitants had clock . . . which strikes the hours regularly." acquired "a new sense of time," Bruegel says. As the prices of clocks and watches fell, It no longer seemed, as it had when the cen- their snob appeal diminished. By the 1820s, a tury began, "an abundant resource that suf- majority of rural households in the valley had fered squandering." Instead, as novel mea- clocks or watches, and their utility as time- sures of productivity came into use, time be- pieces was becoming paramount. Comments came "a scarce [resource] that required about the importance of timeliness and punc- husbanding."

PRESS & MEDIA

The End of week to eight, are signed by the writer "for the editorial board," and sometimes are even rebutted, in a feature called "Both Sides." The newspaper's impersonal institu- "Climbing Down from the Ivorv Tower" bv Tudith sheppard, in American ~ournalisbReview (May 1995), tional voice is no longer heard. Syndicated 8701 Adelphi Rd., Adelphi, Md. 20783. columnists have been cut back. More space is given over to readers' letters and to longer The loss of authority evident in so many pieces by local people that "are solicited, American institutions seems finally to have polished, and sometimes virtually ghost- reached that stronghold of certitude, the written" by the "interactive editors," ac- newspaper editorial page. "Lately there's been cording to Sheppard, a former newspaper a real sense of self-doubt that's crept up on reporter who teaches journalism at Auburn many editorial boards," says Jane Eisner, edi- University. torial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Few newspapers have gone as far as "We're questioning whether it's right to take Spokane's, but many have moved in that di- stands and speak in one voice." rection. "Today," Jay Bookman, an editor at At the Spokane [Washington] Spokesman- the Atlanta Constitution, has written, "the Review, editors have ceased questioning: editorial page (at this and other papers) is they've muzzled themselves. "We took our more a debating society than a pulpit. . . . space to 'be God' and gave [readers] the Editorials are no longer meant to be the fi- space. Less God space, more people space." nal word on a subject; part of their purpose So says Rebecca Nappi, a former USA Today now is to set the agenda for further debate." political reporter (who says she hates poli- 'But will editors who are so acutely at- tics) who is now an editorial board member tuned to readers remain independent and an "interactive editor" at the Spokesman- enough to take unpopular editorial stands?" Review. Editorials have been cut from 13 a asks Sheppard. "Most great moments in

PERIODICALS 139 American editorial page history rose out of the Lexington [Mississippi] Advertiser, crusad- opposition to majority points of view." In- ing at great personal and financial risk, helped deed, more than once, courageous editors turn the tide against segregation in the South. have helped alter the course of history. Dur- That is not a tradition, Sheppard suggests, to ing the 1950s, the Atlanta Constitution's be abandoned lightly in the name of letting the Ralph McGill and Hazel Brannon Smith of people speak.

Mencken as Newsman

Like Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Stephen Crane, and Carl Sandburg, among others, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) began his writing career at a newspaper. Unlike them, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., an emeritus professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, observes in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1995), Mencken remained a newspaperman all his working life.

It certainly wasn't because of a passion for condition, whether social, political,. . covering the news, as such. He soon tired of intellectual, or moral; and that-as did most of the young men and women who wrote for newspapers en route to i literary careers. He ceased to take satisfaction in getting out a daily paper, did not wish to direct news coverage, lay out pages, write headlines, battle the composing room. From about 1908 onward Mencken was a commen- tator, not a reporter, and for the remainder of his days on earth it was the expression of his opinion, not the gathering of news, that con- thing and anybody appearing to menace cerned him. that control. He remained a newspaperman because he Such needs existed not in separation but liked to sound off, to make a noise. In that re- in creative relation to and as part and parcel spect he did not, in one sense, differ from any of each other. For Mencken, however, their other person who has written for a living, combined thrust meant that he couldn't cut whether fiction or fact, prose or poetry. . . . loose from his role as a newspaper colum- But there were particular compulsions at nist-not even in the 1920s when the Ameri- work within him that made it vital that he do can Mercury was in full flower and he was his sounding-off in newsprint. . . . These were: happily battling prohibitionists, book and (1) the need to demonstrate that although magazine censors, anti-evolutionists, Ameri- possessing intense artistic leanings he was no can Legionnaires, the British Empire, Calvin dreamy esthete but an eminently practical Coolidge, chiropractors, believers in Chris- and worldly-wise fellow; tian Endeavor, and all other Right Thinking (2) the need and wish to smite self-righ- people everywhere. Each Monday his [Balti- teous authority-figures; morel Evening Sun column kept the animals (3) the need to insist upon the absolute fu- stirred up and reasserted his presence on the tility of any attempt to ameliorate the human home front.

140 WQ SUMMER 1995 Substance Abuse cance in the 1994 elections. Why? One reason, speculates Eastland, "Thank You, God, for Newt Gingrich" by Carl M. Cannon, and "The New Congress & the Old Media" editor of Forbes MediaCritic, was simply lack by Terry Eastland, in Forbes MediaCritic (Spring 1995), of familiarity with the players and politics P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921. inside the Republican Party. After decades of Democratic control of Congress (except for the "Today," anchorman Tom Brokaw an- six years during the 1980s when the GOP held nounced, introducing a story on the NBC the Senate), journalists were not in the habit of evening news last September 27, "GOP con- taking pronouncements by members of the gressional candidates were summoned to minority party very seriously. As Steven V. Washington and given a battle plan. However, Roberts of U.S. News said in an election post- as NBC's Lisa Myers tells us tonight, it is long mortem, "the press treated the Republicans on promises but short on sound premises." with the same disdain for many years that the And that's the way it was for the main- Democrats treated the Republicans: they stream news media last fall, argues Cannon, didn't pay much attention to them." The press, who covers the White House for the Baltimore however, does follow the election returns, and Sun. The national news media gave short it has become very attentive. In fact, Eastland shrift to the House Republicans' now-famous notes, "after the election, news organizations "Contract with America" and thus missed the hustled to do in-depth pieces on the contract." story of what the elections of 1994 were all Washington journalists can be counted on about: a choice between two competing vi- to educate themselves about the Senate and sions of government. House Republicans, Eastland believes, and "USA Today, in an advance story on Sep- their reporting will be more accurate as a re- tember 27, quoted none of the 367 Republicans sult. He is less confident that, in covering who would sign the contract," Cannon notes, the 104th Congress, the press will overcome "but did report the White House view that the what conservatives have long seen as its lib- contract was a 'gimmick' that would cut So- eral bias. An even greater obstacle to fair, cial Security and Medicare and shower tax balanced, and comprehensive coverage may cuts on the rich." The Boston Globe the next day be the news media's inclination to be relent- quoted three Democrats-including the White lessly negative and to relish conflict for its House chief of staff, who called the contract "a own sake. Cannon suggests that perhaps fraud1'-but no Republicans. In general, Can- journalists should consider offering their non says, the press served up the Democratic own contract with America: "It could in- version of the GOP contract and failed to exclude a promise to look beyond the spin for plore the document's contents or its signifi- the substance."

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

The Future of sure to experience before long a head-on col- Priestly Celibacy lision between two cherished traditions: eucharistic worship and mandatory celibacy for "Numbers Don't Lie" by Richard A. Schoenherr, in Coininonzoeal (Apr.7,1995), 15 Dutch St., New York, priests. So argues Schoenherr, a sociologist at N.Y. 10038. the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ever since the Second Vatican Council If demography is destiny, then the Roman (1962-65), the supply of ordained priests in the Catholic Church in America seems almost United States has been shrinking. From about

PERIODICALS 141 1,000 a year in the late 1960s, ordinations fell tinued to grow, from roughly 45 million in to roughly 500 annually during the '80s, before 1965 to some 70 million today. "High fertility climbing back to about 600 a year in the early rates of Catholic families and the steady immi- '90s. What little encouragement might be gration of Asian and Hispanic Catholics ac- taken from that increase, Schoenherr notes, is count for most of the growth," Schoenherr dimmed by the fact that the number of Catho- says. For every active priest in 2005, there are lic seminarians in the final years of study be- expected to be 2,200 lay Catholics-twice the fore ordination has been decreasing steadily, number in 1975. from 8,325 in 1966 to 3,416 in 1993. The shortage of priests has been mitigated Compounding the problem of dwindling by greater lay participation in the Mass, enlistments is the chronic defection of young Schoenherr observes. "Lay people now help priests from the active ministry. Although plan the liturgy [and] actively participate by nowhere near as bad as it was in the early reciting prayers, singing hymns, reading the 1970s, when 95 percent of newly ordained Scripture passages, serving at the altar, even priests were needed to fill vacancies created preaching homilies, and distributing Com- by resignation rather than death or retirement, munion." But priests are still required "to pre- the hemorrhaging continues. Today, four out side over sacramental celebrations, princi- of 10 newly ordained priests must fill such pally the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass." vacancies-and the other six are not enough Eventually, the church may be forced to limit to replace all the older priests who have re- the frequency of such rites. tired or died. In the coming years, as the many Study after study in recent decades has con- priests ordained during the 1950s and '60s cluded that mandatory celibacy, a require- reach the end of their careers, Schoenherr ment for Catholic priests since the 12th cen- points out, "natural attrition rates will begin tury, is at the root of the church's problems in to soar and the already limited supply of ac- recruiting and retaining priests. "The full tive priests will precipitously dwindle." weight of history and social change," Schoen- Meanwhile, he notes, membership in the herr concludes, "is turning against male celi- Catholic Church in the United States has con- bate exclusivity in the Catholic priesthood."

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

The Mystery of were doubled." Plausible, notes Schwenk, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology The Double Tongue at the University of Connecticut-except for "The Serpent's Tongue" by Kurt Schwenk, in Natural the fact that snakes have no taste buds. Early- Histor11 (Apr. 1995), American Museum of Natural 20th-century scientists believed that the deli- h is tor^, central Park West at 79th St., New York, N.Y. 10024. cately forked organ helped to give snakes a sense of fine touch. But the serpents' frequent Everyone knows that some humans employ a flicking of their tongues into the empty air forked tongue to get around inconvenient suggested that that wasn't the answer, either. truths, but why do snakes have forked During the 1920s and '30s, experimenters in tongues? Germany and the United States found some Aristotle imagined that the fork in their important clues. They discovered that when a tongues gave snakes "a twofold pleasure from snake flicks its tongue, it picks up chemical savors, their gustatory sensation being as it particles and brings them into its mouth. The

142 WQ SUMMER 1995 PC Science "Science by Quota" by Sally L. Satel, in The New Republic (Feb. 27,1995), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washing- ton, D.C. 20036.

In a 1993 measure that President Clinton signed into law, Congress required the Na- tional Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop guidelines to ensure that women and minorities are included as subjects in clinical research. "The seemingly laudable goal is to compensate for years of actual and perceived underrepresentation," says Satel, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, but the likely result will be fewer A venomous African Bush Viper flicks its forked medical breakthroughs. tongue, picking up chemical particles in the air. "Wholesale inclusion of minority groups, defined as black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Is- lander, and American Indian/Alaskan native, particles then are somehow delivered to two makes little sense," Sate1 says, "unless there's tiny, bulb-shaped structures-the vomero- a specific reason to expect that different nasal organs-that lie side by side in the groups will respond differently to particular snake's snout, just above the roof of the treatments." Usually, there isn't-yet whole- mouth. Some German researchers "suggested sale inclusion is what the new policy de- that the slender tips of the forked tongue must mands. Most investigators probably will have be inserted into the openings of the "to search far and wide for minority research [vomeronasal organs], delivering scent par- subjects," she says, and including them in ticles directly." This hypothesis eventually adequate numbers will make the clinical stud- became dogma and can still be found in some ies many times larger and far more expensive. textbooks. But the evidence contradicts it. "How the policy will affect NIH's allocation Snakes can deliver chemical particles to the of its coveted award budget remains to be vomeronasal organs even after their tongue seen," Sate1 says. "But, if priority goes to tips are surgically removed. Pads on the floor costly 'inclusive' projects, the agency clearly of the mouth probably make the delivery. will be funding fewer studies." Hence, fewer So what is the function of the double medical breakthroughs. tongue? Scientists in recent years have found The NIH guidelines do allow exemptions the answer: it is used to follow scent trails. By from the inclusion rule when the particular spreading the tongue tips far apart as they disease under study is largely confined to a touch the ground, snakes (and fork-tongued specific minority group (as sickle cell anemia, lizards) are able to sample scent particles from for example, is to blacks). But few diseases two different points; they then can compare limit themselves so neatly. the strength of the chemicals on each side and Sate1 sees a better way to satisfy the desire follow the stronger scent. This ability is espe- for inclusion. Congress "should encourage the cially useful for following pheromone trails NIH to fund more projects designed explicitly left by prey or potential mates. For both ven- to investigate whether group differences in omous and nonvenomous snakes, Schwenk response to certain medical therapies actually says, the forked tongue is vitally important: exist." And it should let each of the 21 insti- "In many ways, the tongue and the tremen- tutes within the NIH "devote a certain per- dously sensitive vomeronasal system it serves centage (based on demographic representa- are the essence of being a snake." tion, perhaps) of its budget to minority-related

PERIODICALS 143 health problems." This approach might turn clubs with names such as "Masters of Decep- "politically correct science into scientifically tion" and "Legion of Doom" and reveled in correct policy." their superiority over the slow-footed "Estab- lishment" whose computer systems they so easily penetrated. A popular 1983 movie, War Games, portrayed young hackers as high-IQ From Hackers superheroes. To Crackers Improved security measures and the threat of imprisonment, not to mention advancing "Hackers Taking a Byte Out of Computer Crime" by age, brought the heyday of relatively innocent Wade Roush, in Technology Review (Apr. 1995), Bldg. W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139. hacking to an end. But the volume of computer intrusions is apparently growing, says During the 1970s and '80s, rebellious young Roush, a reporter for Science. As more and "hackers" found it thrilling to break into cor- more people have gotten on the Internet, the porate and academic computer systems and exclusive appeal of hacking has diminished, commit electronic mischief. They formed but the number of truly malicious hackers-

144 WQ SUMMER 1995 "crackers," in the jargon-seems to have in- ington, D.C., for example, investigators asked creased. a young hacker who had pleaded guilty to The Pittsburgh-based Computer Emer- breaking into a Pentagon computer system to gency Response Team-formed in 1988 after attack as many Air Force systems as he could. an Internet "worm" (a self-replicating pro- Within 15 seconds, he broke into the same gram) clogged academic computer systems Pentagon computer system he had penetrated throughout the nation-received reports of before, and during the next three weeks, he got about 130 intrusions in 1990,800 in 1992, and into more than 200 Air Force computer sys- 2,300 last year. According to a 1992 study, the tems. The Air Force then tried to patch the number of intrusions in U.S. workplace com- holes in its computer security. puters more than doubled between 1989 and "Nervous about exposing themselves to 1991, from 339,000 to 684,000. In 42 percent of roving data thieves, many corporations are the cases studied, the intruders altered or de- refusing to join their local networks to the stroyed data or software, at a cost of $82 mil- Internet," Roush reports, "while others are lion in 1989 and $164 million in 1991. spending millions installing 'firewallsT- In "the battle for safety and order in the gatekeeping computers that filter out all but digital realm," Roush says, law enforcement a few authorized forms of data exchange." agencies and information security specialists Necessary though they may be, such security have begun to turn to hackers and ex-hackers measures seem to dim one of the bright prom- for help. At Boiling Air Force Base in Wash- ises of the Internet: easy access to information.

ARTS & LETTERS

Slumming with and Marx Brothers movies. "One of Eliot's T. S. Eliot lasting enthusiasms," Chinitz writes, "was for detective fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle to 'T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide" by David Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler." Chinitz, in PMLA (Mar. 1995), Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York, N.Y. 10003- In a 1927 essay, he deplored the gulf that had 6981. opened between "high literature and "popular" fiction, warning "serious" writers that the T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), one of the high priests craving for melodrama "is perennial and must of literary modernism, is often seen as the fas- be satisfied" and that dull literature is tidious and austere hero of a struggle to de- doomed. "Fine art," he argued in a 1923 re- fend high art from the masses. Although Eliot view, "is the refinement, not the antithesis, of in later life was more inclined to assume that popular art." role, observes Chinitz, an English professor at Eliot, however, did have a "modernist an- Loyola University, in Chicago, he was at- tagonism toward the middle class," the author tracted all his life to "low" culture and even notes. In a 1922 essay, he complained that "the argued during the 1920s that all valid art must respectable mob, the decent middle-class be rooted in the popular. mob," had taken over high culture and made The poet's biographers, Chinitz notes, have it averse to "adventure and experiment." Eliot made it clear that he was a fan of comic strips, saw the arts of the lower class, especially the boxing, street slang, melodrama, vaudeville, music hall, as an ally in the struggle against sensational news stories (especially about gentility. He wanted; Chinitz says, "to wrest murders), the music of Broadway and Tin Pan art away from 'the respectable mob' to reunite

Alley, bawdy comedy, crossword puzzles, it with 'the people.' "

PERIODICALS 145 very different, Chinitz points out. And so, perhaps, would have the literary high culture of the decades that followed.

A Critique of Pure Bile 'Ckline: The Problem" by Renee Winegarten, in The American Scholar (Spring 1995), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. Among the literati, French novelist Celine (18941961) is seen as a great writer ("a very great writer," according to Philip Roth). The claim, contends Winegarten, author of Writers and Revolution (1974), raises the question of what literary "greatness" really is. Born Louis Ferdinand Destouches in the lower-class Paris suburb of Courbevoie, Celine adopted everyday working-class speech for his literary purposes. From his first and best novel, Journey to the End of Night (1932), Winegarten observes, he deliberately set out "to break the classical, rational mode of the French literary language, freely manipulating it and creating new words of his own, transforming the vulgar tongue into a powerful instrument of mocking challenge to con- vention and hypocrisy. This is the sphere in which his influence has been the most marked and enduring." The major themes of Celine's works, Winegarten notes, are present in that first novel, in the wartime and African episodes of the "journey toward death" of his alter ego, Ferdinand Bardamu, and in his next novel, Death on the Installment Plan (1936), about a nightmarish childhood. "For Celine, the supreme truth is death, or more specifi- After the 1920s, Eliot increasingly turned to cally, 'my own death.' Christianity, Catholi- drama, rather than poetry, "as a way of bridg- cism, religion itself, together with optimis- ing the cultural divide." Still, in his poetry up tic illusions, such as progress and 'the through The Hollow Men (1925), Chinitz says, American way of life' (to which would later "popular culture was significant as both influ- be added Soviet 'utopia'), are smoke ence and subject." In the original version of his screens, futile attempts to conceal this bitter most famous poem, Eliot drew extensively on truth." Celine was also a vile anti-Semite, popular song, including the lyrics from a whose oeuvre includes "three notorious George M. Cohan show. Had fellow poet Ezra hate-filled anti-Semitic tomes": Trifles for a Mas- Pound not persuaded Eliot to delete most of sacre (1937), School for Corpses (19381, and A Pretty the references to contemporary popular cul- Pickle (1941). A staunch admirer of Adolph ture, The Waste Land (1922) would have looked Hitler, Celine was unfazed by revelations after

146 WQ SUMMER 1995 World War I1 about the Nazi Final Solution. promote appreciation of art-and become Celine's admirers, such as Frederic Vitoux, embroiled in controversy. In the case of the author of Ckline: A Biography (1988), see the American Art-Union, founded in New York writer's style "as a kind of grace that somehow City in 1839, the storm proved fatal. redeems all." But does it? Winegarten asks. The Art-Union, writes Klein, a historian at "Can this steady outpouring of bile, this the University of California, San Diego, "rep- blinkered self-righteousness and self-concern, resented a particular adaptation of a general this unwavering baseness and nihilism be ac- transatlantic phenomenon. Early European art counted great? Where are the moments of joy unions sought to liberate artists from depen- in nature, the counterweight of decency, the dence on private patrons while enlisting art in deeds of supererogation that can be found in the reformation of public life. Rather than common experience? In an age when such serving the pleasure of the few, art would fos- French writers as Malraux, Montherlant, [and] ter moral improvement among the many." Camus were seeking a ground for humanism The American organization added a patriotic and human values, Celine stands aloof." dimension, aiming to create "an uplifted, unified sense of national identity." In return for $5 a year, the nonprofit Art- Union offered subscribers its publications, at Art Attacks least one engraving, and a chance to win a "Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: work of art in the lottery it sponsored. With The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union" by the subscription funds, the union bought Rachel N. Klein, in The Journal of American History paintings by American artists and displayed (Mar. 1995), 1125 East Atwater Ave., Bloomington, Ind. 47401-3701. them in its gallery; then, at the end of each year, it distributed the art works by lottery to The National Endowment for the Arts is not the subscribers. the first institution to aid American artists, By the late 1840s, the Art-Union boasted

The popularity of the American Art-Union public gallery is evident in this 1849 depiction.

PERIODICALS 147 some 19,000 subscribers, a slight majority of for expending "[its] means in a most prodigal them from New York State, and had become manner on some half-dozen or so of pet art- the primary market for American paintings ists" while refusing to give "even a crumb for (other than portraits). During its existence, the others." union bought 2,481 works of art from more The "penny press," particularly James Gor- than 300 American artists; in its heyday, from don Bennett's New York Herald, became the 1847 through 1851, it purchased an average of Art-Union's principal antagonist. Purporting almost 400 paintings a year. The union helped to speak for the "public" (and amplifying the to support many artists associated with the grievances of disgruntled artists), the penny Hudson River school, as well as genre paint- press "reviled the alleged duplicity of the ers such as George Caleb Bingham, noted for managers" and insisted that the Art-Union his representations of Midwestern river life. "promoted private, selfish interests." Manag- But the Art-Union came under attack from ers, the Herald charged, "were manipulating several quarters. Expressing the view of the the lottery in their own interest." genteel press, Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor With critics attacking the Art-Union's lot- of the Home Journal, contended that true artis- tery, the New York Supreme Court ruled it tic taste was the property of only the enlight- illegal in 1852, effectively killing the organiza- ened few. Willis scorned the union's manag- tion. The Art-Union's fall "signaled a decisive ers as "'mere tradesmen' whose lack of dis- change in the patronage and exhibition of crimination and inadequate appreciation of American art," Klein concludes. Henceforth, quality demoralized art and artists," Klein she says, in such institutions as the writes. Metropolitian Museum of Art, the emphasis Many artists shared Willis's view. In 1851, would be less on educating the broad public a year the union passed over his landscapes, than on preserving the best art for the enlight- Thomas Doughty denounced the organization ened few.

OTHER NATIONS

Adieu, Quebec? A Survey of Recent Articles

or more than three decades, the threat- that basis; nor can a political union." ened secession of Quebec has disturbed "Because the rest of Canada is no longer pre- FCanada's domestic tranquillity. With a pared to make concessions to appease Quebec," referendum promised for later this year, the Canadian media magnate Conrad Black points issue may be settled once and-if not for all, out in Foreign Affairs (Mar.-Apr. 19951, "Quebec at least for a long time. will finally have to decide whether it really "From the early 1960s," David J. Bercuson, a wishes to be part of Canada or not." historian at the University of Calgary, writes in Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau, whose Current Histon/ (Mar. 1995), "the Canadian fed- separatist Parti Qu6b6cois narrowly won the eration has been akin to a marriage in which one provincial election last fall and pledged to partner has his or her bags perpetually packed hold a referendum on independence this year, in the vestibule, in full sight of the other partner, said in April that a spring vote, which had as a constant reminder of how tenuous the mar- been widely anticipated, would be too riage really is. No marriage can go forward on "hasty." Instead, he announced, "We've de-

148 WQ SUMMER 1995 cided to convene Quebecers for their moment speaking Canadians to make compromises on of truth this fall." political principles that they believe constitute The postponement may have been the essence of being Canadian." prompted by opinion surveys, which seldom The first effort, led by Progressive Conser- have shown support for secession among vative (Tory) prime minister Brian Mulroney, Quebecers (about 12 percent of whom are pri- culminated in the Meech Lake Accord of 1987, marily English-speaking) running higher than which proclaimed Quebec "a distinct society 45 percent. In 1980, when an earlier Parti within Canada." But the accord failed by mid- Qukbkcois government- held a referendum on "sovereignty association" (i.e., political sovereignty juxtaposed with economic association with Canada), 60 percent of Que- becers voted against it. (Al- though a bare majority of Francophones voted yes, Anglophones overwhelmingly voted no.) Within days of that non vote, observes Thomas G. Barnes, a historian at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, writing in an issue of the An- nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Mar. 1995) devoted to Canada, Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau informed the 10 provincial premiers that he intended, via Parlia- ment, to push ahead with plans to "patriate the Consti- tution" (make Canada fully independent of Great Britain). The resulting constitution, with an elaborate Charter of Rights and Freedoms, took effect in 1982, although Que- bec-which was given little it did not already haverefused to ratify it. In the years since, David Bercuson observes, two major efforts have been made "to square the circle-to reconcile the mounting demands of French Quebeccers to create a nation within a nation, and the growing refusal of English-

PERIODICALS 149 A Diptheria Outbreak in the Former Soviet Union

Source: World Health Organization In what may be a sign of growing chaos, a diptheria epidemic broke out in the former Soviet Union in 1990 and has been rapidly spreading since then. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (Mar. 17,1995,) says that cases jumped from 839 in 1989 to 47,802 last year, when 1,746 persons died.

1990 to get the required unanimous consent of not sufficiently increase their province's sta- all 10 Canadian provinces, thanks to Manitoba tus and powers-voted against it. and Newfoundland. The second effort "to square the circle" re- his failure sealed the fate of Mulroney sulted in the Charlottetown Accord of August and his party, says Thomas Barnes. "A 1992, which reiterated Quebec's distinctive- Tyear later, under a new leader-. . . the ness but also addressed a host of other issues, Tories went down to the most stunning defeat such as western Canada's demands for insti- in Canadian political history." They won only tutional reform. The agreement was endorsed two seats in the 295-member Parliament-a by Mulroney and the federal government, the staggering loss of 151 seats. The Liberals, un- three major federal parties, the 10 provincial der Jean Chrbtien, returned to power, and the premiers, the leaders of the Northwest and role of Official Opposition was taken, aston- Yukon territories, and the leaders of the main ishingly, by Lucien Bouchard's pro-indepen- "aboriginal" peoples (Indians and Eskimos)- dence Bloc Qubbbcois, formed after the Meech by everybody, in short, except the voters. In an Lake debacle. October 1992 referendum on the accord, 54 "Instead of engendering unity," David percent of Canadians-including a majority of Bercuson points out, "the constant constitutional Quebecers, who evidently thought that it did tinkering between 1982 and 1992 created greater

150 WQ SUMMER 1995 disunity, as expectations were raised and the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989 de- dashed, and then raised and dashed again." The clared the law forbidding the use of English continuing failure to resolve the matter lessened on public signs unconstitutional, Quebec Canadians' faith in their leaders. "Worse, it has used a loophole in the Canadian Charter of produced government by bribery, under which Rights and Freedoms to re-enact the original Ottawa has continually attempted to purchase language law. "English-speaking Canadians the loyalty of Quebecers." Between 1970 and were outraged," observes David Bercuson. 1990, by University of Calgary economist Rob- Canada today is a country of two funda- ert Mansell's estimate, Ottawa poured over $160 mentally different worldviews, Bercuson says. billion more into Quebec than it took out in tax ''English-speaking Canadians conceive of revenues. Canada as a nation of individual citizens who Ottawa also gave greater recognition to the are equal before the law-regardless of the French language and tried to counter the no- language their forbears spoke-and who live tion that this was mainly a Quebec matter. The in a federation of provinces with equal consti- Official Languages Act of 1969 designated tutional status." But French-speaking Quebec- both French and English official languages of ers "view Canada as a nation of collectivities Canada and "decreed that federal government defined primarily by language," and think services should be provided in either lan- Quebec "needs special powers to defend itself guage in the capital and throughout the and cannot be subject to the dictates of insti- country wherever there was 'sufficient de- tutions representing the collective power of mand,'" Dale Thomson, a political scientist the Englisl~."' Compromise between these at McGill University in Montreal, notes in worldviews is no longer possible, he believes. the Annals. The act also provided for federal "Most Canadians agree that the process of financial support for second-language edu- having a plebiscite on the future of Canada cation. Quebec, however, took the view that conducted in Quebec alone every 10 to 15 the French language was the basis of its years must stop," Conrad Black says. "distinct society," and that therefore, French What happens next is up to the Quebecers, and English could not have equal standing Joseph Jockel of the Washington-based Center in the province. Under the 1977 Charter of for Strategic and International Studies con- the French Language, only the French ver- cludes. English Canada, he says in the Annals, sion of government documents was to be is presenting Quebec with a choice: "the cur- legally binding, and public signs, wit11 only rent constitutional arrangements, take them or rare exceptions, were to be in French. When leave them."

on the threshold of a full-fledged scientific and China's Stillborn industrial revolution. Yet it failed to cross that Industrial Revolution threshold-and when progress in the West accelerated after the 17th century, China "The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolu- lagged further and further behind. Left unre- tion Did Not Originate in China" by Justin Yifu Lin, in Economic Development and Cultural Change (Jan. solved was the question of why it was unable 1995), 1130 East 59th St., Chicago, 111. 60637. to keep its early lead. A widely accepted explanation among Until the last few centuries, the eminent Brit- many scl~olars-first proposed by Mark Elvin, ish scholar Joseph Needham has shown, author of The Pattern of the Chinese Past China was well ahead of the West in most ar- (1973I-has been that China's early adoption eas of science and technology. Many histori- of such modern institutions as family farming, ans agree that by the 14th century China was fee-simple ownership, and the market system

PERIODICALS 151 A Dream Dies in Africa

Washington Post reporter Keith B. Richburg, a black American from Detroit, covered Af- rica for that newspaper from 1991 to 1994. In the Washington Post Magazine (Mar. 26,1995), he tells what he reluctantly found there. This is not the story Isat down to write. Origi- trenched, far more brutal, and far more adept at nally, I had wanted to expound on Africa's poli- the manipulation of state machinery than their tics, the prospects of freedom and development, Eastern European communist counterparts. the hopes for the future. My tour in Africa, af- Africa's militaries~ascompared with those in, ter all, came during what was supposed to be say, South America~areproving less willing to the continent's "decade of democracyLafter return to the barracks and bow to the popular will. the fall of one-party communist states of East- In country after country, even oppositionistsdern- ern Europe, the argument went, and the con- onstrate themselves to be grasping, quarrelsome, solidation of democracy in Latin America, could and in most cases incapable of running things if Africa's one-party dictatorships and militarythey ever do manage to make it to power. Politics regimes be far behind? . . , in Africa is about lucrative spoils and fresh oppor- But three years of following African elections, tunities for corruption, and much of opposition in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Cameroon, politics across the continent consists of an out Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique, have group wanting its turn at the feeding trough. left me4many of those early, hopeful African It's become a cliche to call tribalism the af- democrats-far less than optimistic. I'veseen elec- fliction of modern Africa, but, unfortunately, tions hijacked or stolen outright, elections can- my years of covering African politics has con- celed, elections bought, and elections that have vinced me that it is true. . . . proved to be essentially meaningless. How can In trying to explain Africa to you, I needed you talkabout elections in countries where whole first to try to explain it to myself. I want to love chunks of territory are under the sway of armed the place, love the people. I can tell you I see hope guerrillas? Wlzere whole villages get burned amid the chaos, and I do, in places like Malawi, down because of competing political loyalties? even Mozambique. But the Rwandas and And where traditional belief runs so deep that a Somalias and Liberias and Zaires keep intrud- politician can be charged in public with casting ing into my mind. Three years-three long magic spells over poor villagers to force them to years-have left me cold and heartless. Africa vote for him? is a killing field of good intentions, as Somalia African autocrats are proving far more en- alone is enough to prove.

gave it the initial edge. But thanks to a balloon- during the 16th century, peaking at about 160 ing rate of population growth, there were so million around 1600, and then fell to about 140 many people working the land by the 14th million a half-century later. "If the man-to- century that the incentive to create labor-sav- land ratio were the valid explanation for the ing technology was vastly diminished. Hence, burst of labor-saving innovations up to the the revolution did not occur. 12th century," Lin says, "then that rate should Lin, an economist at Peking University, have been even higher in the 14th and 15th rejects this explanation. China's population centuries and again in the mid-17th century." increased until about 1200, when it was 115 China's industrial revolution was stifled million, he notes, but it then declined to about not by a lack of demand for new technology, 81 million in 1400 before returning to about Lin argues, but by a shortage of supply: "In 115 million a century later. It continued to rise premodern times, most technological inven-

152 WQ SUMMER 1995 tions stemmed from the experiences of arti- the "neofascist" label, he says. Among them sans and farmers, and scientific findings were are the National Alliance (formerly the Ital- made spontaneously by a few geniuses." The ian Social Movement) in Italy, the German larger the population, the more artisans, farm- People's Party and the National Democratic ers-and geniuses. Hence, China's compara- Party in Germany, the National Political tive advantage. Modern technological change, Union in Greece, the National Front in however, mainly results from experiments Spain, the Christian Democratic Party in and discoveries made by trained scientists. Portugal, the British National Front and the "China fell behind the West . . . because China British National Party in England, and CP'86 did not make the shift from the experience- in the Netherlands. All of these are essen- based process of invention to the experiment tially anti-immigrant parties. cum science-based innovation, while Europe Other far-right parties represent what did so through the scientific revolution in the Taggart calls a "New Populism." Although 17th century," Lin says. they often are explicitly or implicitly anti-im- Why didn't China make this jump to mod- migrant, that is usually not the only basis of ern science? Lin, following Needham, sug- their appeal. Switzerland's Automobilists' gests that China's bureaucratic state deserves Party was formed in reaction to the demands much of the blame. Government service was of environmentalists, while the New Democ- considered by far the most honorable and racy in Sweden and the Progress parties in worthwhile occupation, and after the Song dy- Denmark and Norway have an antitax nasty (960-1275), all bureaucrats were selected agenda. The New Populist parties generally on the basis of competitive civil service exami- purport to represent ordinary people, favor nations. Intellectually gifted Chinese had ev- the market and freedom from state restrictions ery incentive to spend years memorizing the on individuals, and oppose "the systemu- Confucian classics and preparing for the ex- which includes "politics as usual," politicians, ams, and thereafter to devote themselves to bureaucrats, intellectuals, and welfare recipi- the bureaucratic life. The rewards and attrac- ents, as well as immigrants. tions of a career devoted to scientific research Some far-right parties-including such were, by comparison, very meager. As a re- major ones as Le Pen's French National Front sult, Lin concludes, "despite her early lead in and the Republicans in Germany-do not fit scientific achievement, China failed to have an neatly into either the neofascist or New Popu- indigenous scientific revolution." list category, Taggart says. But most of them do-and the distinction is important, he argues. The avowedly racist and neofascist parties, as a whole, have gained a lot of publicity Europe's 'New Populists' but have enjoyed much less success with vot- 'New Populist Parties in Western Europe" by Paul ers than the New Populist parties have. Taggart, in West European Politics (Jan. 19951, Frank Whereas most of the populist parties have Cass and Co. Ltd., Newbury House, 900 Eastern won more than five percent of the vote in one Ave., London IG2 7HH, England. election or another in recent years, the neofascist parties have not (with the notable Jean-Marie Le Pen's strong showing in the exception of the Italian Social Movement, French presidential election last April offered which got 14 percent in the 1994 parliamen- fresh evidence of the extreme Right's growing tary elections). power in Europe. But it is a mistake to regard "The new wave of activity on the far right the Right as a monolithic phenomenon, argues is . . . not a continuation of the long-term trend Taggart, a lecturer in politics at the University of neofascism," Taggart concludes, but rather of Sussex. 'a formidable protest force." Eventually, he Some of the right-wing parties have his- says, it may radically transform West Euro- torical links to fascism and clearly deserve pean politics.

PERIODICALS 153 Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"The Work Alternative: Welfare Reform and the Realities of the Job Market." Urban Institute Press, 2100 M St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. (Distributed by University Press of America, 4720-A Boston Way,Lanham, Md. 20706.) 218 pp. $24.95 Editors: Deinetra Smith Nightingale and Robert H. Haveman

hould America now seek, creases, aside from the wors- Welfare reform now offers the in the words of President ening economy," and thus illusion of some relief from Bill Clinton's 1992 cam- equally unclear what changes these problems. paigns promise, to "end wel- in policy should be made. At The 1988 legislation, which fare as we know it"? No, says $13 billion in 1992, federal obliged states to turn AFDC into Nathan Glazer, a sociologist AFDC expenditures repre- a jobs-oriented program, re- at Harvard University and co- sented a smaller proportion of flected the consensus among editor of the Public Interest, the federal budget than the $5 many liberals and conservatives the neoconservative policy billion spent in 1975. that welfare mothers able to journal. There has been no "whitever the numbers and work should be required to do quantum leap in knowledge costs of AFDC, these are not so, and, if necessary, given edu- about how to make the wel- motivating welfare reform to- cation, training, and other help. fare system work better, nor day," Glazer says. "Rather the The Family Support Act, Glazer any welfare crisis urgently de- issue has become what wel- says, went about as far as na- manding action, he argues, fare symbolizes, not what it is. tional legislation could-and, as since the welfare system was Welfare has come to stand for would be true of any welfare overhauled in the Family Sup- the rise of a permanent depen- reform, it wasn't very far. port Act of 1988. dent population cut off from More than half of adult Although the number of the mainstream of American AFDC recipients are ordinarily Aid to Families with Depen- life and expectations, for the exempt from the act's JOBS dent Children (AFDC) cases decay of the inner cities, for (Job Opportunities and Basic increased between 1989 and the problem of homelessness, Skills Training) program be- '93 by 1.2 million to 5.5 mil- for the increase in crime and cause of illness, incapacity, old lion, it is unclear, Glazer says, disorder, for the problems of age, the need to care for a child "what was driving these in- the inner-city black poor." under three or an ill family member, pregnancy, or other conditions. Of the AFDC re- Percentage of AFDC Recipients not Meeting cipients not exempt, only Minimum Skills Requirements about 16 percent were taking part in the work program in 1992-which exceeded the goal for 1992-93 of 11 percent. The extreme modesty of the goals for participation that were set by the 1988 act, Glazer says, reflects the difficulty ofsetting up various training, education, and placement programs and of moving large numbers of AFDC recipients into them. The results of even the best welfare-to-work programs, studies by the Manpower Sales Clerical/ Service Crafts & Domestic Manual Workers Secretarial Workers Construction Workers Operatives Corporation show, are only Source: The Work Alternative

WQ SUMMER 1995 a little better than no pro- For the rest, he and other Rebecca M. Blank, an econo- gram at all. One reason is contributors believe that a mist at Northwestern Univer- that many of those on wel- well-administered program sity, a woman still may be un- fare get off it on their own can lead many welfare recipi- able either to find a job provid- initiative within a few years. ents to jobs. But given the low ing health insurance or to fully Overall, half of all spells on levels of education, skills, and cover her child-care expenses. welfare last less than two motivation characteristic of Insisting that welfare recipi- years. If the aimis to get people most AFDC recipients, the in- ents work is the right course, off welfare, Glazer points out, come from the jobs is unlikely Glazer says. The need now is then "for a large proportion of to match welfare payments. "to elaborate the administra- the welfare population. . . it Even after one or two years of tive structures that put the re- hardly matters what we do." steady employment, says quirement into effect."

"Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High School History Texts." Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Rd. West, Westport, Conn. 06881.187 pp. $55; $17.95 (paper) Authors: Robert Lerner, Alflzea K. Nngai, and Stanley Roflzinan

1987 study of the his- expense of major ones. Thus, (1852). "Yet since the 1960s, torical knowledge of in America, Its People and Val- history books give Tubman at A 17-year-old Ameri- ues (1985), by Leonard C. least as much, and sometimes cans found that more of them Wood et al., a 19th-century as- more, coverage than they give were able to identify Harriet tronomer who discovered a to Stowe." Tubman than Winston Chur- comet and happened to be a The political correctness in chill or Joseph Stalin. Three woman is treated extensively, the '80s textbooks also extends out of four knew that women while physicist Enrico Fermi, to the American Indians. Their worked in factories during one of the chief architects of virtues, real and imagined, are World War 11-but only 61 the nuclear age, is barely men- emphasized, as are the vices percent knew when the U.S. tioned. The '80s textbooks, the of the encroaching white set- Constitution was signed. Roth- authors say, present feminists tlers. In Rise of the American man and his colleagues, all of and the feminist movement in Nation (1982),Lewis Paul Todd the Center for the Study of a uniformly favorable light, do and Merle Curti claim that Eu- Social and Political Change at not take any female opponents ropeans brought the practice Smith College, believe that po- of the feminist cause seriously, of slavery to North America; litically engineered history and portray America, past and in historical fact, however, sla- textbooks are largely respon- present, as a sexist society. very existed as an indigenous sible for this skewed state of The effort in recent decades institution in many tribes. knowledge. to include blacks in the text- The rewriting of American They performed a content books also has resulted in some history to bring it into line with analysis of the portrayal of his- distortions, the authors say. the "progressive" prejudices of torical figures in the leading For example, in terms of her the present "has been going on high school history textbooks impact onthe course of Ameri- for some time in the schools," from the 1940s through the can history, Tubman, an es- Rothman and his colleagues say. 1980s. In the three '80s books, caped slave and "conductor" Despite what they believe to be they found a great deal of what on the Underground Railroad, its contribution to the decline in they call "filler feminism": mi- was a far less important figure educational achievement, they nor historical characters and than Harriet Beecher Stowe, expect the political rewriting to events are accentuated at the the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin continue.

RESEARCH REPORTS 155 We welcome timely letters from readers, especially those who zoish to amplify or correct information published in the Quarterly and/or react to the views expressed in our essays. Letters may be mailed to 901 D Street S. W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024, or sent via facsimile, at (202) 287-3772, or E-mail, at WWCEMl66WM.SI.EDU. The writer's telephone number and postal address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

The 'Invisible' Speechwriter ment. They were also professionally committed to anonymity and indeed were known as "ghostwrit- Carol Gelderman's thoughtful solutions to Presi- ers," ghosts being notorious for invisibility. The dent Bill Clinton's problems ["All the Presidents' now-regular identification of the speechwriters in Words," WQ, Spring '951 are sound but insuffi- the next day's newspaper after a presidential ora- cient. In fact, Clinton already appears to agree tion astonishes those of the old school, who be- with her that less is more. To a greater degree than lieve that the speech belongs to the person who before, he has been husbanding presidential ap- gave it. And the practice of consigning speech pearances and pronouncements.~fnothing elie, drafting to people who have no continuous con- at least he no longer gives interviews to the elec- tact with policy and no regular access to presi- tronic media while dripping sweat after a morn- dents no doubt accounts for the decline in quality ing run. of presidential speeches. The latter-day reliance But Clinton faces a news reality that none of onpublic-opinion polls, focus goups; etc., also his predecessors endured to this degree: a hyper- devalues the speech process. The one thing polls powered media echo chamber fed by multichan- really prove is the volatility of public opinion. nel cable TV, talk radio, and the omnipresent Polls register only what people think they think punditocracy. This conglomeration repeats ad without having thought much about a question. nauseam every statementand then People are often ready to change their minds draws and quarters it in a 24-hour news cycle. under the pressure of new considerations and of Even a reticent president will inevitably become practical consequences. Polls are therefore chiefly overexposed. of value in defining the challenge to presidential Another problem is the American public's leadership and indicating what must be done to television-induced shorter attention span. Any- change voters' minds. one who doubts that Americans can't concentrate Timing is essential, too. FDR, of course, had a on anything for very long should try giving a tremendous instinct for timing. In early 1935, traditional 50-minute lecture to the MTV genera- Democrats and liberals had an unhappy sense that tion. the administration was confused, drifting, in the Combine overexposure and a short attention doldrums. The strident voices of Huey Long, Fa- span, and boredom with the incumbent is the ther Coughlin, and General Hugh Johnson domi- result. A bored public is much more likely to nated the headlines. People-among them Ray cancel a presidential series after it has played for Stannard Baker, the biographer of Woodrow Wil- only four years (or if 1994 is any indication, just son, and my father, the liberal historian from two years). Harvard-beseeched the president to regain com- So by all means, bring back the "alter ego" mand of the scene. FDR wrote Baker: "If since last speechwriters and the "quieter rhetorical presi- November I had tried to keep up the pace of 1933 dency." But it may not make all that much differ- and 1934, the inevitable histrionics of the new ence. actors, Long and Coughlin and Johnson, would Larry J. Sabato have turned the eyes of the audience away from Robert Kent Gooch Professor of the main drama itself. . . . Individual psychology Government and Foreign Affairs cannot, because of human weakness,be attuned University of Virginia for long periods of time to a constant repetition of Ckarlottesville, Va. the highest note in the scale." He wrote my father, 'I agree with you about the value of regular reporting. My difficulty is a strange and weird sense

Veterans of earlier presidencies look on the recent known as 'public psychology.' " When the psy- development of speechwriting staffs with incre- chological moment came, FDR made the congres- dulity. In pre-Nixon days, speechwriters were sional session of 1935 as full of achievement as the people, few in number, who had policy responsi- Hundred Days of 1933. bilities and ready access to their presidents and Politics is in the end an educational process, for whom speechwriting was a secondary assign- and speeches are a vital instrument of presiden-

156 WQ SUMMER 1995 tial leadership. Speeches are also important within The notion that the quarantine speech did the executive branch as a means of forcing deci- not go over well has been seized by Roosevelt's sions, crystallizing policies, and imposing disci- apologists, who contend, as Ms. Gelderman pline. Carol Gelderman is absolutely right in ar- does, that the president "could move only as far guing the necessity of "uniting important and as fast as the people would let him." In- policymaking and speechwriting functions in one stead, as I argue in my new book, Hard Bargain trusted adviseru-a Rosenman, a Clifford, a (Scribner), the record shows that the president Sorensen, a McPherson. failed to take advantage of his own rhetorical Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. skills and public concern about aggression in Department of History Asia and Europe and to rally the country against Graduate School and University Center the threat from abroad. City University of Nezu York Robert Skogan New York, N.Y. Chevy Chase, Md.

Carol Gelderman misconstrues reality and helps Professor Gelderman's thoughtful and informa- to perpetuate a political myth when she refers to tive essay is right on target in deploring the trend the "nearly unanimous negative response" to in recent presidencies to separate the speaker FDR's "quarantine" speech of Oct. 5,1937. from the speecl~writer.No president should be As Dorothy Borg pointed out in her classic pressured into accepting a form of staff organiza- "Notes on Roosevelt's Quarantine Speech" (Po- tion incompatible with his work habits. But litical Science Quarterly, September '57), the early reaction was generally favorable. Jay Pierrepont Moffat, head of the StateDepartmentlsDivision of European Affairs, likened the response in his di- ary to "a burst of applause." Of the first flood of letters and telegrams to the president, 423 supported the speech while only 74 were in opposition. A number of major newspapers, from theLos Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to the Christian Science Monitor and the Nezu York Times, welcomed the speech as a signof a stronger America's Biggest U.S. foreign policy. The Chicago Tribune and the Hearst press were hostile, but they were clearly in Selection of the minority. The problem was that neither the president's supporters nor his critics nor apparently the presi- Bargain dent himself knew exactly what he meant by "quarantine." Many supposed that what he had inmind Books was at least some form of economic sanctions Overstocks, Remainders, Imports and Reprints against the Japanese, since anything less would from all major publishers. Books recently priced at render his statement meaningless. Roosevelt him- $20, $30, $40 -now as low as $3.95, $4.95, $5.95. self scotched that idea, however, during an off- Thousands of titles, from yesterday's best sellers the-record exchange wit11 reporters the day after to books you never knew existed. his speech. Over 40 subject areas: Biography, History, Fiction, Sports, Literature, Politics, Health, Nature and more. when questioned about sanctions or the pos- Fast Shipment, normally within 48 hours, and a sibility of a peace conference, Roosevelt simply moneyback guarantee. referred reporters to the concluding words of his ------Please send me your Free Catalog of Bargain Books, speech: "America hates war. America hopes for I peace. Therefore America actively engages in the I search for peace." I Name This,of course, explained nothing. But the president dropped the subject, thus disheartening his early supporters and leaving the field to Hearst and I City I other isolationists who continued to denounce the State Zip speech. This created the (false) impression that the HAMILTON Box 15-172, Falls Village CT 06031 popular response to the speech was negative. ------

COMMENTARY 157 wordsmitlis in a distant White House office of been, even under Emersonian or Biblical dis- speecliwriting will never be able to reflect the pensations of unified relation between word president's decisions and policies as well as a and world. It is characteristic but too self-criti- Rosenman, Clifford, or McPlierson-people who cal of Mojtabai, however, to say that she as not only wrote speeches but participated in the much as any writer falls short of reaching "be- formulation of decisions and policies. yond," since her example amply authorizes her Theodore C. Sorensen hopes "for my country's writers, and for our Special Counsel to the President, 1961-64 literature." She is not alone: sharers of lier Nezo York, N.Y. faith-in the power of tlie insufficient word, in what slie herself calls "our" revisions and revisionings-abound among readers and writ- Religion and Writing ers, students and teachers, alike. We are all helped by hearing her. Not long ago, as tlie elevator I was riding in Gordon 0.Taylor reached the ground floor, someone behind me Chapman Professor of English said rather loudly, "Well, I never discuss poli- University of Tulsa tics, sex, or religion in public." There is a scin- Tulsa, Okla. tilla of wisdom here, because one often needs a perspicacious guide, a modern Hermes, to lead one through the minefields of controversy, es- I'm sympathetically familiar with the spiritual pecially when certain groups of fundamental- need to which A. G. Mojtabai's essay gives urgent ists start tossing about their homemade liand- utterance, and gratified therefore by tlie extended grenades. In lier article, "A Missed Connec- reference it makes to a lecture inwhicli I com- tion" [WQ,Spring '951, A. G. Mojtabai asks us to pared D. H. Lawrence's story "The Blind Man" read modern, postmodern, and contemporary with Raymond Carver's story "Catliedral." In each literature in order to see how creative writing of these stories, blindness becomes an avenue to can evoke-or fail to do so-the faith within us. human transcendence. Mojtabai amplified her la- One telling observation signals her thesis: "Pas- ment that literature is no longer "expected to offer sivity despite energy and constriction of aim light in a dark place" by referring to my judgment strike me as tendencies for concern in contem- tliat the transcendence imagined in Lawrence's porary North American fiction." I find tliat Pro- story was awe inspiring and tliat tliat imagined in fessor Mojtabai knows the literary and spiritual tlie later Carver story was comparatively trivial. terrain well; slie is sensitive to the power of the I'd like to state for the record, however, that in a word in all its manifestations. But I wonder if subsequent published version of my lecture I felt some discussion of the novellas of Andre Dubus, compelled to qualify that judgment. or tlie critical thinking of Reynolds Price, or tlie I continued to find Lawrence's story a more poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, or tlie novels of boldly visionary literary accomplishm~ntthan Walker Percy might change tlie tone of her Carver's, but several considerations also brought analysis? It might just be my Ignatian bias of me to trust Carver's democratic, reassuringly comic, finding God in all things, but I often am uplifted minor instance of transcendence more than I anv by the recent works of creative writers. longer could the exclusive and punitive greater tran- Patrick Sainzoay, S.J scendence of "The Blind Man.'' Literary Editor, America This shift need not be equated, though, with Nezo Yorlc, N.Y. absolute loss. Mojtabai twice compares the crucial "dark place" from which literature can rarely continue & guide us to the dilemma of finding suffi- A. G. Mojtabai's is the most provocative medi- cient way to regard mortality; the composed spirit in tation on writing and reading-as interlocked which Carver apparently faced tlie imminence of his lenses on living-I've read in some time. Its premature death also influenced my increased ap- focus on (dis)connections between contempo- preciation of "Cathedral." In his final weeks as he rary culture and religious sensibility is as "seri- was rereading Cliekliov's stories, he wrote one of his ous" in implication for those who see in secular last stories, "Errand," as an account of Cliekhov's terms as for those to whom "connection" is own premature death. Though part invention, "Er- souglit in the language of belief. rand incorporates tlie testimony of Cliekhov's wife 'Constrictions" of vision and "dismantle- Olga ~ni~per:as lier husband's ultimate moment ments" of reach and grasp are indeed parts of approached, he stopped sipping tlie champagne tlie landscape, as perhaps they always have prescribed by his physician to ease his breathing,

158 WQ SUMMER 1995 announced emphatically that he was dying, then armament and agreed to enhance the process for drained his glass appreciatively and "quietly lay on future review of the NPT. his left side and was soon silent forever." The decision on extension represents a strong Monroe Engel global affirmation of the continued importance of Cambridge, Mass. arms control to international security. Worldwide support for efforts banning chemical weapons, nuclear testing, and the production of fissile ma- Giving Up the Bomb terial for nuclear explosives, as well as for further reductions in nuclear forces-along with the in- Mitchell Reiss's article on nuclear nonprolifera- creased interest in conventional and regional arms tion ["The Future That Never Came," WQ, Spring control-further attests that arms control will re- 951 included a section on the then-imminent con- main a vital force in the post-Cold War world. ference to review and extend theNuclear Nonpro- Lawrence Sclzeinma~z liferation Treaty (NPT). Reiss identified impor- Assistant Director for tant issues and noted the stakes involved in the No~zproliferationand decision to extend the treaty. Regional Arms Control The NPT Conference culminated on May 11 U.S. Arms Control and with a consensus decision by more than 170 na- Disar~nainentAgency tions that theNPT should continue in force indefi- Washington, D.C. nitely. The United States was committed to this objective and had conducted intensive diplomatic efforts toward it for more than three prior to Corrections the conference under the leadership of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. President In Carol Gelderman's "All the Presidents' Words" Clinton. on a trio to Russia and Ukraine at the time (WQ, Spring '95), it was incorrectly stated that of the conference, issued a statement from Kiev Secretary of State Dean Rusk was unsympathetic which noted that this outcome was a "victory for to the idea of a partial bombing halt in North all" and a decision that "will build a better future Vietnam. Rusk proposed such a measure. Due to for our children and the generations to come." an editing error, the year of President Theodore The Conference also adopted a set of prin- Roosevelt's presidential campaign was given as ciples and objectives on nonproliferation and dis- 1908. The correct year is 1904.

Credits: Copyright @ 1995 Superstock; p. 9, Copyright @ 1995 Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 13, From the collection of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village; p. 15, Copyright 0 1956 by Ralph Crane, Life Magazine; p. 17, Copyright @ 1995 Superstock; pp. 20,44,140, The Bettmann Archive; p. 25, Copyright @ 1950 Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 31, David Hume, by Louis Carrogis, Copyright of the National Galleries of Scotland; p. 37, The Death of Socrates (1787), by Jacques Louis David, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; p. 40, Illustration by Vint Lawrence; p. 43, Energy Technology Visuals Collection, Department of Energy; pp. 45,75,123, UPI/Bettmann; p. 55, Courtesy of Science magazine; p. 63, Cartoon by Downes/Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate; p. 67, ITAR-TASS/SOVFOTO; p. 72, Car- toon by Shein/Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate; p. 81, Flag (1954-54, dated on reverse 1954), by Jasper Johns, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Photograph @ 1995 The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; pp. 84, 129, The Granger Collection; p. 86, Nimatallah/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 87, Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 90, Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.; p. 101, Copyright @ 1995 Paul Lowe/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 105, Eason & Associates, Washington D.C.; p. 107, Courtesy of Helen Sheehan, London, England; p. 112, Copyright @ 1995, Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos, Inc.; pp. 114-15, courtesy of Phyllis Ficarotta, Llewellyn Park Historical Society; p. 120, From Tozun Planning in Practice, by Sir Raymond Unwin, Copyright @ 1971, Benjamin Blom, Inc.; p. 123, from The Anglo American Suburb, edited by Robert A. M. Stern, Copyright @ 1981, Architectural Design; p. 124, Nassau County Museum; p. 126, Courtesy of DPZ Mid-Atlantic Office; p. 138, Courtesy of Ameri- can Clock &Watch Museum, Inc., Bristol, Conn.; p. 143, Copyright @ 1995, Brian Kenney, Venice, Fla.; p. 147, Courtesy of The New York Historical Society.

COMMENTARY 159 s I write these words, the 104th gress other parts of bills that he must now Congress is about to depart for its accept or reject in toto. Although it is widely Memorial Day recess, leaving be- believed that such a power would strengthen hind great expectations, great the executive branch and reduce "pork in the anxieties,A and a cloud of uncertainty over budget, its effects might be quite different. No the entire federal government. These are one doubts, however, that the balance of power precisely what one might expect at the out- between the branches would be altered. set of a revolution involving the size and But if today's ultimate issues are the shape of the federal government, and that scope of federal authority and the separa- government's relation to the states and the tion of powers, the lion's share of time and people. There can no longer be any doubt attention has gone to the titanic effort to that a revolution began with last November's reduce the federal deficit-indeed, in the elections and that it involves fundamental versions most likely to carry the day, to questions that go far beyond the debate over balance it in seven years, probably even how to reduce or eliminate the federal bud- with a tax cut. These are not, of course, get deficit. separate issues. One may begin with a fun- Legislation to begin the process of amend- damental conviction that the government ing the Constitution to require a balanced should be smaller and less intrusive and budget, to limit the terms of members of Con- rejoice that accomplishing this will inciden- gress, and to permit officially sanctioned tally eliminate the deficit; or, one may begin prayer in public schools and other public places with a belief that the deficit must be elimi- has been introduced in Congress; the first nated and note, with whatever degree of proposal failed by a single vote in the Senate. pleasure or pain, that this can be done only There is talk in Congress" of ex- by drastically reducing the role empting certain bills from consti- of the government. one man's tutional review by the federal chicken may be another's egg, but courts, including the Supreme whatever the sequence, the two Court. The Court itself has not been are inseparable, and together immune to the new spirit. Recently, their effect can scarcely be called it struck down a federal law forbid- anything less than revolutionary. ding guns on school playgrounds as an un- Lest this give the impression of a mono- constitutional intrusion into state and local lithic juggernaut moving inexorably to a affairs. What had seemed to most adults predetermined end, I should mention a few eternal verities-the right of judicial review countervailing or indeterminate tendencies. stemming from Marbury v. Madison (1803) The Democrats are showing signs of recov- and the use of the Constitution's interstate ery from the shock of last November and commerce clause as the foundation of al- may yet produce a coherent and persuasive most any legislation Congress saw fit to alternative to the prevailing philosophy. The pass-have thus been cast into doubt. awesome discipline of the Republicans Nor is this all. The separation of powers shows signs of fraying as Congress moves among the three branches of government also from rhetoric and general proposals to the seems more than likely to undergo alteration. difficult business of framing and passing Even as Congress ponders exemptions from specific legislation. And, most important, it judicial review, a bill has been passed by the remains to be seen how the electorate will House and is being debated by the Senate that respond to the pain and sacrifice it surely would materially increase the role of the leg- will be called upon to bear. But of one thing islature in the conduct of foreign policy. Both there can be no doubt: we are privileged (or houses of Congress are also considering laws, fated) to be witnesses to, and participants in, very different in form but identical in intent, one of the epochal moments in this nation's that would give the president a "line-item" history. veto over appropriations bills, allowing him Charles Blitzer to approve some parts and send back to Con- Director

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