The City The WILSON QUARTERLY SURVEYING THE WORLD OF IDEAS Bounces Back FOUR PORTRAITS

What Is Hugo Chávez Up To?

Classical Education in America

The Troubled History SPRING 2011 of School Lunch $7.95

The WILSON QUARTERLY

Spring 2011 volume xxxv, number 2 The Wilson Quarterly Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars FEATURES www.wilsonquarterly.com

COVER STORY 16 The School Lunch Wars 37 THE CITY BOUNCES BACK By Kristen Hinman | The federal school lunch Four Portraits program swelled from a tiny effort to feed hungry For decades, the news from cities was all bad. But children into a huge one that is helping to make today, cities are on the rebound. They are seen as kids fatter. Will a new law help? idea labs, exciting places to live, and a shopping 22 What Is Hugo Chávez Up To? alternative to suburban malls, with challenges By Joshua Kucera | The Venezuelan president’s that linger but do not overwhelm the future. efforts to forge an anti- American alliance have Wash- Four writers profile the changing terrain of the ington worried. In Caracas, critics say that Chávez’s 21st- century city. new friends are mainly playing him for a fool. Long Live the Industrial City | 31 Classical Education in America By Tom Vanderbilt By Daniel Walker Howe | The study of Greek and Dense, Denser, Densest | Latin was long thought to be the key to forming By Witold Rybczynski young minds. How did the classics dwindle to a New to the Neighborhood | beleaguered outpost, and what have we lost? By Sarah L. Courteau Stores and the City | ON THE COVER: Cover illustration © Patti Mollica, design by Michelle Furman. Above, the Atlanta skyline at sunset, © James Duckworth.

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

2 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 DEPARTMENTS

4 EDITOR’S COMMENT Friends Who Pray Together, from 98 Academically Adrift: American Sociological Review Limited Learning on 5 LETTERS 79 ARTS & LETTERS College Campuses. By Richard Arum and 8 AT THE CENTER A Tale of Two Literary Cultures, Josipa Roksa from n+1 Reviewed by Ben Wildavsky 12 FINDINGS Crazy for Caravaggio, from Art in America 100 The South and America Since World War II. DFW 101, from The Chronicle By James C. Cobb Review and The Common Review IN ESSENCE Reviewed by Jason Sokol 82 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY our survey of notable 101 Bourgeois Dignity: articles from other Wasted Youth, from The Review of Why Economics Can’t Explain the journals and magazines Economics and Statistics Modern World. By Deirdre McCloskey 64 FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE The Math Beneath, from Seed Tweeting Toward Freedom? from Magazine Reviewed by Martin Walker The New York Times, The New The Revolution That Wasn’t, from 102 Quirk: Yorker, Foreign Affairs, Book- American Scientist Brain Science Makes Sense of forum, and Foreign Policy Your Peculiar Personality. 84 OTHER NATIONS Grand Strategy Revisited, from By Hannah Holmes India’s Vanishing Officers, from The National Interest South Asia: Journal of South Reviewed by Emily Anthes Learning From Al Qaeda, from Asian Studies 104 The Social Animal: Foreign Policy Who’s Dying in Canada, from The Hidden Sources of Love, China’s Inner Struggle, from Health Affairs Character, and Achievement. The Washington Quarterly Asia’s Religious Renaissance, from By David Brooks The Journal of Asian Studies Reviewed by Jag Bhalla 69 ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS The Inequality Engine, from Defying the Democracy Cure, from 105 The Use and Abuse The American Interest Journal of Peace Research of Literature. By Marjorie Garber A Higher Capitalism, from Harvard Business Review Reviewed by Laura Kipnis How to Save the Euro, from 67 CURRENT BOOKS 106 Music for Silenced Voices: Current History 87 Odessa: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets. Null Effect, from American Genius and Death in a By Wendy Lesser Economic Journal: Applied City of Dreams. Economics By Charles King Reviewed by Miles Hoffman Reviewed by Timothy Snyder 107 Helvetica and the New 73 POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 90 Malcolm X: York Subway System: The Elusive Conservative Majority, A Life of Reinvention. The True (Maybe) Story. from National Affairs By Manning Marable By Paul Shaw Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! from Green Bag Reviewed by David J. Garrow Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff Where Are the Female Politicians? 94 Tories: 109 The Hemlock Cup: from American Journal of Political Fighting for the King in Socrates, Athens, and the Search Science America’s First Civil War. for the Good Life. By Thomas B. Allen By Bettany Hughes 75 SOCIETY Diversity Dismantled, from Liberty’s Exiles: Reviewed by F. S. Naiden The American Scholar American Loyalists in the 110 The Immortalization Revolutionary War. Commission: What War Is Good For, from By Maya Jasanoff World Affairs Science and the Strange Reviewed by Nancy Isenberg Quest to Cheat Death. Work Hard, Play Harder, from By John Gray Policy Review 97 The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Reviewed by Edward Tenner 78 RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY Invades Our Liberties. The Enduring King James, from By David K. Shipler 112 PORTRAIT London Review of Books Reviewed by John Mueller Alice Pre-Wonderland

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 3 The WILSON QUARTERLY EDITOR’S COMMENT

The City Resilient

EDITOR Steven Lagerfeld

Thirty years ago, my morning commute took me on foot across New MANAGING EDITOR James H. Carman York City’s West 42nd Street. It was not a good place to start the day. LITERARY EDITOR Sarah L. Courteau ASSOCIATE EDITOR Rebecca J. Rosen The street was lined with peepshows, porn theaters, and shabby ASSISTANT EDITOR Megan Buskey shops, and its sidewalks were littered with trash and a smattering of EDITORIAL INTERN Molly Kozel unconscious human beings from the night before. Dante would have EDITORS AT LARGE Ann Hulbert, James Morris, been speechless. Jay Tolson COPY EDITOR Vincent Ercolano Today, critics complain that 42nd Street is too squeaky- clean, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Daniel Akst, that it has been “Disneyfied.” I prefer to marvel at the rebirth of the Stephen Bates, Martha Bayles, Max Byrd, Linda Colley, Denis Donoghue, Max Holland, storied entertainment mecca New Yorkers once called the Deuce. Walter Reich, Alan Ryan, Amy E. Schwartz, Edward Tenner, Charles Townshend, Alan Wolfe, New York City’s rebirth is a particularly inspiring story, but it has Bertram Wyatt-Brown been repeated to one degree or another— with a few notable BOARD OF EDITORIAL ADVISERS K. Anthony Appiah, Cynthia Arnson, Amy Chua, exceptions—in cities across the country. Crime is down, business is Tyler Cowen, Harry Harding, Robert Hathaway, Elizabeth Johns, Jackson Lears, Robert Litwak, up, and while Americans are not flocking back to live there, they Wilfred M. McClay, Blair Ruble, Peter Skerry, S. Frederick Starr, Martin Walker, Samuel Wells now see downtown as an exciting (and safe) place to go. There is a FOUNDING EDITOR Peter Braestrup (1929–1997) sense that some of the last great urban problems, particularly BUSINESS DIRECTOR Suzanne Napper improving public education, won’t prove so intractable after all. At a CIRCULATION Laura Vail, ProCirc, Miami, Fla. time when the United States is beset by self- doubt, it’s important to The Wilson Quarterly (ISSN-0363-3276) is published in January (Winter), April (Spring), July (Summer), and appreciate such triumphs. October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 For cities, as for people, resilience is a precious quality. In our Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004–3027. Complete article index available online at cover stories in this issue, we have moved in for a street- level look at www.wilsonquarterly.com. Sub scrip tions: one year, $24; two years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one year, $39; the sources of resilience that are reshaping American cities. In a two years, $73. Single issues and selected back issues mailed upon request: $9; outside U.S. and posses- revealing close- up, Tom Vanderbilt shows that while the 21st- sions, $12. Periodical postage paid at Wash ing ton, D.C., and additional mailing offices. All unsolicited century American metropolis won’t be an industrial city, it cannot be manuscripts should be accom panied by a self- a city without industry. Witold Rybczynski, the foremost observer of addressed stamped envelope. MEMBERS: Send changes of address and all subscrip- the city in our time, gauges the likely effect of the forces that seem to tion correspondence with The Wilson Quarterly mailing label to: be propelling us toward much denser cities. From the sidewalks of The Wilson Quarterly Washington, D.C., Sarah L. Courteau explores the dilemmas of gen- P.O. Box 16898 North Hollywood, CA 91615 trification in her own changing neighborhood. City official David CUSTOMER SERVICE: Zipper describes how he and others are working to build on the suc- (818) 487-2068 cess of downtown retail revivals by recruiting grocery store oper- POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 16898, ators and other retailers to help spread vitality to poor inner- city North Hollywood, CA 91615. Micro film copies are available from Bell & Howell In for - neighborhoods. mation and Learning, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. U.S. newsstand distribution through CMG, These writers take us a long way from 42nd Street, and that’s the Princeton, N.J. For more information contact Kathleen point. The urban comeback is a continuing story. Montgomery, Marketing Manager (609) 524-1685 or [email protected]. ADVERTISING: Steve Clark, Advertising Representative, SAGE Publications, Inc. Tel.: (484) 494-5948 / —Steven Lagerfeld Fax: (805) 375-5282 E-mail: [email protected].

4 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 LETTERS

DEFLATING THE which, when combined with harsh PRISON BUBBLE penalties, induce guilty pleas and Joan Petersilia’s article “Be- produce high conviction rates. This yond the Prison Bubble” [Winter minimizes the costs of the cumber- ’11] provides an insightful look at some jury system and produces out- the problems of recidivism and the comes popular with the public. consequences of the failure to Finally, the trend toward crimi- develop successful rehabilitation nalization is aided by legislative programs. She rightly sees room for reliance on the existence of prose- improvement. cutorial discretion. When a broad We would be wise also to con- and harsh statute produces an out- sider the incentive structures sur- come that the public dislikes, blame rounding the creation of criminal falls on prosecutors for exercising laws. For too long we have failed to their discretion poorly, and never examine the causes of criminaliza- with the legislators who adopted the tion, and allowed ourselves to crim- overbroad statute in the first inalize conduct that ought not, in instance. any just world, be criminal. Indeed, When constituents can be satis- as legal scholar William Stuntz has fied, institutional costs minimized, noted, American criminal law “cov- and blame avoided, is it any wonder ers far more conduct than any juris- that criminal legislation is often as diction could possibly punish.” expansive as possible? In reflecting Criminal law’s wide mandate has on the problems of recidivism, we more to do with politics than social should not lose sight of the issue of necessity. Few if any groups regu- criminalization as well. industrial complex,” I am compelled larly lobby legislators regarding Paul Rosenzweig to point out a profound omission in criminal law. The groups that do are Visiting Fellow, The Heritage Foundation her account. more likely to seek harsh penalties, Professorial Lecturer in Law The prison system is a gigantic jobs and more criminal laws rather than George Washington University engine that employs upward of fewer. As a consequence, political Washington, D.C. 750,000 men and women in well- considerations give the legislator paying, unionized positions. A prison every incentive to be over inclusive in Joan Petersilia provides a re- is one of the last places a person with crafting criminal laws. markably comprehensive overview a high school diploma can get a job Moreover, the criminal justice of the United States’ unmanageable that will support a middle- class system is exceedingly expensive to and unaffordable prison system. lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. operate. Broad and overlapping While she offers useful advice on Many small towns across the country statutes allow for easier convictions, making reforms to tame the “prison- would wither without the local prison’s contribution to the tax base. LETTERS may be mailed to The Wilson Quarterly, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. The fewer prisoners there are, the 20004–3027, or sent via facsimile, to (202) 691-4036, or e-mail, to [email protected]. The writer’s telephone number and postal address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for fewer guards are needed. It is not a publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors’ requests for comment. coincidence that guards’ unions have

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 5 LETTERS

become big political players in many address, he declared, “The only way CRIME STOPPERS statehouses, backing all the “tough on to attack crime in America is . . . with- Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig crime” measures and the hardest of out pity.” offer some excellent and creative the hard-line politicians. It is a matter “No mercy” became a political suggestions for dealing with the of job security. The system has evolved, mantra. Candidates for office who behavior of individuals who com- whether purposefully or not, to virtu- failed to embrace the new hard line or mit crimes that get them sent to ally assure higher rates of failure. who favored the rehabilitation of pris- prison [“The Economist’s Guide to Any attempts to shrink the prison oners were ruthlessly denounced. New Crime Busting,” Winter ’11]. population will be fiercely resisted. jails and prisons, and the special inter- I believe that better results can That should be obvious to any serious ests who feed off them, sprouted and be attained by focusing on the poli- observer of the politics of crime and spread like kudzu; prisoners became cies that determine who should go punishment. As the reformers ought profitable commodities. Sustaining to prison, for which crimes, and for to have learned in California, Peter- prisonomics demanded that every how long. That was an issue silia included, coming up with bunk stay filled. An unprecedented addressed within the criminal jus- rational, evidence- based solutions to demonization of prisoners fueled pub- tice system from the 1920s through the problems of prisons is the easy lic wrath; educational and treatment the 1970s, and during that time the part. Figuring out how to translate programs ended, and clemency be- incarceration rate was impressively those solutions into practices in insti- came a thing of the past. stable. Then, as policy became tutions staffed by people whose self- Most long- term inmates eventu- politicized, we saw an exponential interest runs counter to them, whose ally decide they want to be better growth of the incarceration rate to very livelihoods are threatened by the than the worst thing they’ve ever the point that it is now four to five new policies— that is another order of done. At the Louisiana State Peni- times that which prevailed until the difficulty altogether. tentiary, lifers are electricians, early 1970s. Not acknowledging this aspect of plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, Dominating that growth was a the problem will doom the prospects paralegals, paramedics, barbers, and tenfold increase in the incarceration for finally deflating the prison bubble. hospice workers; they run self- help rate of drug offenders. The public Kenneth E. Hartman clubs, tutoring workshops, and visit- was frightened by the violence asso- Author, Mother California: A Story of ing-room concessions. Many are ciated with crack markets and Redemption Behind Bars (2009) rehabilitated but stand little chance increasingly concerned that their Lancaster, Calif. of ever leaving prison. And those who children would get caught up in are released— in Louisiana, with $10 drugs. A political uproar fueled leg- In “Beyond the Prison Bubble,” and a bus ticket— often have nowhere islation that required judges to Joan Petersilia gives an academic to go and are ineligible for public impose often draconian sentences. overview of President Richard M. housing and social services. Fre- But what good is the massive Nixon’s war on crime. As someone quently, even the exonerated can’t incarceration of drug offenders, who who spent 44 years in prison and met find employers willing to hire them. now represent more than 20 per- thousands of maximum security pris- I do not share Petersilia’s assess- cent of state prisoners and more oners, I would like to offer another ment that the war on crime is one of than 50 percent of federal prison- perspective. our country’s “great success stories.” ers? An incarcerated drug offender The view from prison of Nixon’s Policies and practices driven by mer- is simply replaced on the streets. law-and-order campaign, which cilessness improve nothing— neither Fortunately, there has been a signif- came in the wake of the urban riots of the criminal nor American society. icant drop in the demand for crack, the late 1960s, was that the presi- Wilbert Rideau reducing the violence associated dent was exploiting racial prejudice Author, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Pun- with its market and pushing violent and white fear as a political strategy. ishment and Deliverance (2010) crime down to a level not seen since In his 1973 State of the Union Baton Rouge, La. the 1960s.

6 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 LETTERS

We are now at a point at which price meant that other applications of ticized description of the U.S. we are starting to see a convergence economic approaches to the envi- bail- for- profit system [“The Bounty of the Left, which is generally un- ronments and incentives surround- Hunter’s Pursuit of Justice,” Winter com fortable with punitive policies, ing crime and law enforcement were ’11]. In 1964, U.S. attorney general and the Right, which is now very not emphasized or encouraged. One Robert Ken nedy described this sys- concerned with budget deficits. doesn’t have to embrace Freako- tem as “cruel and illogical.” The pre- Thus, we may be in a position to nomics (2005) to appreciate how trial release of the accused, he said, redress the massive growth of the widening the lens of economic per- is not determined by guilt or inno- prison population over the past 30 spective can improve policy think- cence, the nature of the crime, or years. To do so, we should consider ing. One can instead read Cook and the character of the defendant. The the following steps: repeal the dra- Ludwig. factor that determines release “sim- conian laws that have been enacted There is a second sea change in ply is money.” in response to political pressures, or thinking about crime that informs The entire Western world has at least sunset those laws and review and reinforces the Cook and Ludwig since outlawed bail for profit, with their effectiveness; make these performance. A long- held central the exception of the United States. changes retroactive to provide assumption of crime policy was that Why have they done so? Because parole opportunities for the people the criminal propensities of repeat this scandal- ridden approach results sentenced under them; reconsider offenders are fixed and predictable in the costly incarceration of low- whether being sent back to prison is over long periods. The only antidote risk defendants while it rewards the best way to deal with a parolee to repetitive crime was through those who have access to cash who fails a drug test; and develop incarceration, which led the prison regardless of how they acquired it or treatment- oriented alternatives to population to grow fivefold. But the the likelihood they will re offend. incarceration for drug- dependent large crime declines in the 1990s and Most state laws require judges offenders. the 80 percent drop in crime in New to consider both flight risk and Alfred Blumstein York City (without any increase in potential danger to the community J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of incarceration) undercut the notion when making pretrial release deci- Urban Systems and Operations Research that criminal propensities are fixed sions. The bail- for- profit industry Heinz College and immutable. Where did all the and the colorful bounty hunters in Carnegie Mellon University criminals go? The new, more sophis- Tabarrok’s article are not concerned Pittsburgh, Pa. ticated appreciation of crime sug- with preventing new crimes by their gests that incarceration is an imper- clients— such considerations are Philip J. Cook and Jens Lud- fect mechanism of crime reduction simply not part of their business wig’s article is part of a long- overdue and that incentives that assume peo- model. Can we really expect an broadening of perspectives in the ple can change have potential. This is industry that profits every time one economic analysis of crime and its a much more effective way to think of its customers gets arrested and control. Scholars long worked under about controlling crime. needs a new bond to aggressively the assumption that threatened Franklin Zimring seek to minimize fresh business punishment could be considered the William G. Simon Professor of Law and opportunities? “price” of violating a law. According Wolfen Distinguished Scholar The bail-for- profit industry and to this tunnel-vision logic, the effec- University of California, Berkeley the author would have us believe tiveness of crime deterrents (such Berkeley, Calif. that their reality- show model of jus- as hefty prison sentences) accords tice is the only sensible approach. with the first law of demand: People Bail reformers advocate the use of will commit fewer crimes as the A BETTER FORM OF BAIL empirically validated risk measure- punishment grows more costly. I was both entertained and ments (instead of cash) to guide This fixation with penalty as a unsettled by Alex Tabarrok’s roman- judges in determin- [ Continued on page 10 ]

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 7 AT THE CENTER

WOODROW WILSON CENTER WELCOMES NEW PRESIDENT

On February 8, the Woodrow Wilson Cen- Harman began her Washington career in the office ter’s board of trustees ushered in a new era with the of Senator John V. Tunney (D- Calif.). During the appointment of Representative Jane Harman Carter administration, she served as deputy secre- (D-Calif.) as the Center’s director, president, and CEO. tary to the cabinet and as special counsel to the Harman resigned her long- held Department of Defense. congressional seat, telling Along with her husband, Sid- reporters that “the opportunity to ney Harman, the founder and lead and shape the direction of then chief executive of a major the country’s premier policy audio equipment maker, and two incubator—one with interna- of her four children, she moved tional reach and influence— is a back to California in 1991 and thrilling next step for me.” launched a campaign to repre- Like her predecessor, Lee H. sent an oceanfront stretch of Los Hamilton, who represented Indi- Angeles County in the House of ana’s Ninth Congressional Dis- Representatives. She captured the trict in the House of Representa- seat and proved a popular con- tives for more than three decades gresswoman, winning reelection before becoming director of in every subsequent contest, the Wilson Center, Harman though she sat out a term in the brings an insider’s under- late 1990s to seek the Democratic standing of the ways the Wilson Party’s nomination for California Center’s offerings— public debate, governor. After the 2000 election, research, and scholarship— can she returned to Congress. find traction in Washington and Wilson Center president Jane Harman addresses the board Harman’s 17 years in the of trustees on February 8 after accepting her appointment. beyond. Hamilton’s “centered, House were distinguished by a principled, and pragmatic” leadership of the Wilson Cen- commitment to a host of issues relevant to the work of the ter will serve as an inspiration and guide, she said. Wilson Center, including national security, environ- Raised in Los Angeles, Harman displayed from an mental protection, and women’s rights. She was also a early age the enthusiasm for policy that would eventually member of the Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to con- bring her to the Wilson Center. She attended the 1960 servative Democrats who prize fiscal prudence. Long an Democratic Convention and witnessed the nomination advocate of the idea that “the best policy is made in the of John F. Kennedy for president. While working as a center, on a bipartisan basis,” Harman values the Wilson Smith College organizer for Young Citizens for Johnson Center’s commitment to nonpartisanship. in 1964, the high- spirited teenager wrote to her parents, Her vision for the Wilson Center is characteristi- “I’m flying! NEVER have I been so sure of my love for pol- cally ambitious. With Harman at the helm, expect itics, for organizing, for leading— what a week! . .. I’m one more great debates on central issues in foreign and of those freaks of nature they call super- energetic.” She domestic policy and concerted efforts to involve more was passionate about learning as well: She graduated Phi members of Congress and the executive branch. “The Beta Kappa in 1966, and earned her JD from Harvard time is right for a new challenge,” she said upon Law School, where she was one of several dozen women announcing her acceptance of the appointment, “and in a class of 550. this is the right challenge.”

8 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Jane Harman, Director JUMP-STARTING NUCLEAR HISTORY BOARD OF TRUSTEES Joseph B. Gildenhorn, Chair Sander R. Gerber, Vice Chair What do Woodrow Wilson EX OFFICIO MEMBERS: James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, Center staff do when they think a cru- Hillary R. Clinton, Secretary of State, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary, cial academic field is underdeveloped? Smithsonian Institution, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, David Ferriero, They try to jump-start it. That’s the goal Archivist of the United States, James of the Nuclear Proliferation Interna- Leach, Chair, National Endowment for the Humanities, Kathleen Sebelius, tional History Project (NPIHP), a new Secretary of Health and Human Services. Designated Appointee of the initiative spearheaded by Christian President from Within the Federal Government: Melody Barnes Ostermann, director of the Center’s project plans to make its Web site PRIVATE CITIZEN MEMBERS: Timothy Broas, History and Public Policy Program, and (www.wilsoncenter.org/NPIHP) a John T. Casteen, III, Charles E. Cobb, Jr., Thelma Duggin, Carlos M. Gutierrez, Susan Leopoldo Nuti, who heads the Machi- treasure trove of translated docu- Hutchison, Barry S. Jackson avelli Center for Cold War Studies, in ments accessible to researchers

THE WILSON COUNCIL Rome. The project is being funded by everywhere. Sam Donaldson, President the Carnegie Corporation of New York. NPIHP will also record oral histo- Elias Aburdene, Weston Adams, Cyrus Ansary, Theresa Behrendt, Stuart Bernstein, James Bindenagel, Melva Policymakers and academics who ries of key players in weapons pro- Bucksbaum, Amelia Caiola- Ross, Carol Cartwright, deal with nuclear proliferation usually grams, a particularly crucial resource in Mark Chandler, Holly Clubok, Melvin Cohen*, William Coleman, Elizabeth Dubin, Ruth Dugan, F. Samuel focus on its security and conceptual a secretive field where many decisions Eberts, Mark Epstein, Melvyn Estrin, Joseph Flom*, Barbara Hackman Franklin, Norman Freidkin, Mor- dimensions. They don’t draw much on are not put in print. In Israel, the coun- ton Funger, Donald Garcia, Alma Gildenhorn, Charles the history of proliferation, though it try’s nuclear affairs are not physically Glazer, Michael Glosserman, Margaret Goodman, Ray- mond Guenter, Robert Hall, Edward Hardin, Marilyn can provide valuable insight into today’s documented but established in top- Harris, F. Wallace Hays, Claudia and Thomas Hentel- eff, Laurence Hirsch, Osagie Imasogie, Frank Islam, challenges. “Having a better under- secret conversations. South Africa poses Maha Kaddoura, Nuhad Karaki, Stafford Kelly, Christo- standing of why countries proliferate, or a different challenge: Apartheid- era pher Kennan, Mrs. David Knott, Willem Kooyker, Markos Kounalakis, Richard Kramer, Muslim Lakhani, choose not to, or choose to proliferate officials destroyed documents related to Daniel Lamaute, Raymond Learsy, Harold Levy, and then change their minds, can help nuclear weapons in an attempt to pre- Genevieve Lynch, Beth Madison, Frederic and Marlene Malek, B. Thomas Mansbach, Daniel Martin, Anne officials craft better policies,” says pro- vent a revival of the weapons program McCarthy, Lydia Funger McClain, Thomas McLarty, Donald McLellan, Maria Emma and Vanda McMurtry, gram associate Timothy McDonnell. they shuttered in 1990. John Kenneth Menges, Linda and Tobia Mercuro, Project researchers will engage NPIHP will award about eight Jamie Merisotis, Robert Morris, Kathryn Mosbacher Wheeler, Stuart Newberger, Paul Hae Park, Jeanne these questions in a manner foreign fellowships annually to PhD candi- Phillips, Edwin Robbins, Wayne Rogers, David Ruben- stein, Sonja and Michael Saltman, Ignacio E. Sanchez, to policymakers but instinctive to his- dates and post doctoral researchers. B. Francis Saul, Steven Schmidt, William Seanor, torians: through arch i val research. Junior researchers and practition- George Shultz, Raja Sidawi, David Slack, William Slaughter, Diana Davis Spencer, Juan Suarez, Mrs. Working closely with partner organ- ers won’t be forgotten; this year Alexander J. Tachmindji, Norma Kline Tiefel, Anthony izations, NPIHP will identify and NPIHP is sponsoring a two- week Viscogliosi, Michael Waldorf, Deborah Wince- Smith, Herbert Winokur, Nancy Zirkin promote opportunities for scholars history-oriented “nuclear boot *Recently deceased to study nuclear- related documents camp” geared toward people begin- in archives around the world. The ning their careers. They’ll leave The Wilson Center is the nation’s living primed to apply the lessons of his- memorial to Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. It is tory to their work. In the words of located at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Joseph H. Flom Penn sylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 1923–2011 McDonnell, “nuclear weapons pose 20004–3027. Created by law in 1968, the incredible challenges to contempo- Center is Washing ton’s only independent, Former chair, wide-ranging institute for advanced study rary academics and policymakers— where vital cultural issues and their deep his- Woodrow Wilson Center torical background are explored through Board of Trustees but we need to understand the past research and dialogue. Visit the Center at http://www.wilsoncenter.org. to manage the present.”

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 9 LETTERS

[ Continued from page 7 ] ing who can be dead? How can institutional ar - RACE TO THE BOTTOM safely released and who must be range ments made to stop the war Robert J. Samuelson mostly detained. This evidence- based be transformed into an effective gets it right in “Rethinking the approach neither favors the rich nor guarantee of a common future? Great Recession” [Winter ’11]. One penalizes the poor but seeks to The impact of the EU’s current fis- of the outcomes of the recession he administer justice with a sharp focus cal crisis on the Balkans can be best alludes to but doesn’t expound on fairness and public safety— not understood as a crisis of political upon is the role education plays in on profits. imagination. Just two or three creating “real” productivity. It Timothy J. Murray years ago, people in the region wor- deserves to be emphasized. Executive Director ried about living on the outskirts of We have spawned two decades’ Pretrial Justice Institute Europe. Now they worry about worth of employees who are unable Washington, D.C. Europe itself. to do math, don’t understand sci- Ivan Krastev ence (particularly concepts such as Chairman, Center for Liberal Strategies evolution and climate change), and BEWILDERED IN Sofia, Bulgaria can’t master engineering. The THE BALKANS effect on real productivity has been A popular joke in the Balkans Martin Sletzinger’s article devastating. Here in Silicon Valley, starts with a group of children ask- offers an insightful perspective on every company is either started or ing a rabbi, “Please describe the sit- the limitations of international fueled by immigrants, largely from uation in the Balkans in one word.” involvement in the Balkans and South and East Asia. In the future, The rabbi answers, “Good.” The beyond. I agree with many of his these companies will be started children say, “Perhaps you can use points, including his assertion that there, not here. While we fritter a few more words.” The rabbi a major source of instability in the away our time on Facebook (a tech- responds, “Not good.” region is the unbalanced treatment nology that contributes virtually In “A Glimmer in the Balkans” of Serbia by the United States and nothing to the economy and is [Winter ’11], Martin Sletzinger the European Union. laughably valued by Wall Street at captures “the dialectic nature” of Instead of using the term $50 billion), China is set to clean the Balkans today. Preoccupied “nation- building” in thinking about our clock in cleantech, nanotech, with Afghanistan and Iraq, West- the contemporary Balkans, however, and even biotech patents over the ern policymakers think of the I recommend “peace- building,” next 15 years. Balkans as a success. This is not “state- building,” or what the U.S. Unless we return to a leader- how people living in the region feel. Department of Defense calls “stabil- ship position in science and tech- At the moment, the Balkan states ity operations.” Nation- building is the nology, we will lose the race with are beset by a mixture of Greek- process of making a country’s politi- Asia by 2025. The role of our gov- style economic problems, Berlus - cal and national units congruent, ernment should be to fund long- coni- type politics, and a Turkish either by a homegrown government term basic research and develop- ambivalence about the European or by a third party. The U.S. effort in ment (the type private industry will Union. the Balkans falls short of being a gen- never support) that will ultimately The region’s elites are not sure uine nation-building process. lead to breakthrough technologies. how Balkan economies will grow Harris Mylonas With massive cuts in federal and in post crisis Europe. How will mul- Assistant Professor of Political Science state government spending, we are ti cultural institutions, built after a and International Affairs consuming our own seed corn at decade of war and fervent nation- The Elliott School of International Affairs and precisely the time we should be alism, be sustained at a time when Department of Political Science planting it. leading European politicians are George Washington University Sunil Maulik saying that multiculturalism is Washington, D.C. Posted on wilsonquarterly.com

10 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 LETTERS

INDONESIA’S TROUBLES plagued with increasingly complex agriculture improvements) took Robert Pringle highlights the social and economic challenges, the place, a significant amount of car- ongoing debate about Indonesia focus needs to be on improving bon dioxide could be pulled out of and its trajectory [“Indonesia’s governance rather than democracy the atmosphere. The greenhouse- Moment,” Winter ’11]. Optimists, per se. This means getting the gas problem would not be com- who are often well- informed for- bureaucracy to work more effec- pletely solved, but it would be sig- eign observers, point to the coun- tively, efficiently, and transparently, nificantly ameliorated, and nature try’s strengthening Muslim- and in a manner that is publicly would be made more resilient to majority democracy (as if that were accountable. climate change. a puzzle to begin with), its hum- This is, of course, a lot harder The living planet needs the kind ming economy, and the end of than it sounds— and one article can of care and nurturing that Theo - authoritarianism as evidence that it never do justice to the complexities dore Roosevelt so eloquently advo- is doing well. of Indonesia’s troubles. One place to cated. If urban trees produce the The pessimists, who are mostly start, though, may be with a more benefits Jonnes cites, imagine the middle-class Indonesians, believe sober view of the policy challenges. value of applying that attention to that affairs are deteriorating. In Evan A. Laksmana nature on a planetary scale. their view, corruption is worsening, Researcher, Center for Strategic and Thomas Lovejoy religious pluralism and social tol- International Studies, Jakarta, and University Professor erance are diminishing, and unem- Adjunct Lecturer Department of Environmental ployment is skyrocketing as the gap Indonesian Defense University Science and Policy between the haves and have- nots Tangerang, Indonesia George Mason University widens. McLean, Va. Pringle’s article focuses a little too much on the good and not TREE HUGGING Readers of Jill Jonnes’s “What enough on the bad. The challenges “What Is a Tree Worth?,”by Jill Is a Tree Worth?” might want to Indonesia faces have less to do with Jonnes [Winter ’11], provides an know more about a new tool available democracy or Islamic radicalism— excellent exposition of the benefits through the latest iteration of i- Tree, which dominate commentary on of urban forestry. It shows how the Version 4.0, which builds upon the Indonesia— than with political lead- planet functions not as a physical National Tree Benefits Calculator. ership and governance. system but as a biophysical system, The tool, dubbed i- Tree Design, is a The importance of President with the biological and physical graphic interface accessible via Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s will- components affecting one another. Google Maps that allows property ingness to address thorny policy Human- generated climate change owners to “plant” trees on virtual rep- issues such as corruption, unem- is an indication that we have ignored resentations of their property. Once a ployment, and the protection of this fundamental dynamic. Today, tree is “planted,” the tool shows the minorities cannot be overstated. roughly half of the excess carbon benefits that accrue from that tree Yet in the past year and a half, the dioxide in the atmosphere comes type (larger is typically better) and president’s overly cautious and from the burning of fossil fuels (the tree placement. i- Tree Design is image- conscious nature has pre- product of ancient biology and unique in that it can be easily used vented him from taking on the ecosystems); the other half (mostly and understood by the layperson, tough issues, leaving the country over the last three centuries) has whereas the earlier versions of i- Tree mired in one political scandal after come from ecosystem degradation were geared toward forestry another. and destruc tion, which are largely professionals. In a growing country of 250 the result of deforestation. Mark Buscaino million people spread out over 33 If extensive reforestation (along Executive Director, Casey Trees provinces and 470 districts and with grassland restoration and Washington, D.C.

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 11 FINDINGS brief notes of interest on all topics

Value- Added er in the 60th percentile (based attainment to near the top of Classrooms on student scores on achievement international comparisons. Based tests) raises the average student’s on historical patterns, according Learn more, earn more lifetime earn ings by more than to Hanushek, that would raise the Call it the eight percent solution. $5,000; a teacher in the 84th U.S. gross domestic product by According to Eric A. Hanushek, an percentile raises a student’s earn- more than $100 trillion over the economist at the Hoover Institu- ings by $20,000. With classes of next 80 years and increase annual tion, ousting the worst eight per- 20 to 30 students per year, the U.S. growth by more than one cent of America’s public school increases add up. By the same percent. teachers would produce substantial token, a below- average teacher But teachers’ unions don’t gains for the nation’s economy. can diminish a student’s earnings. think much of the eight percent Hanushek has found that a That’s where the eight percent solution. In a speech in February, typical student may advance by a comes in, Hanushek writes in a Randi Weingarten, president of year and a half in achieve ment National Bureau of Economic the American Federation of during a year with a good teacher, Research paper published in Teachers, went after Hanushek by but by only half a year with a poor December. Replacing the bottom name: “We’ve seen people like teacher. That can have financial eight percent of teachers with Eric Hanushek, who may know a consequences. According to merely average teachers would great deal about economics but Hanushek’s calculations, a teach - raise American educa tional little about pedagogy, try to reduce teaching to a number—a regression analysis— with the implication being that you can fire your way to good teaching. That’s a flawed approach.” Nonetheless, Weingarten agrees that schools need to get inept teachers out of the class - room. In her speech, she pro - posed a process for doing so. Teachers would be evaluated based on classroom observations, lesson plans, student test scores, and other factors, she said. Those whose performance fell short would work with administrators on plans for improvement. After no more than a year, teachers

12 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 FINDINGS

who still couldn’t meet expecta - individuals from birth until age easier to augment than intelli - tions might be removed. If neces- 32. During the period when the gence and wealth. Research indi- sary, an arbitration process would subjects were ages three to 11, the cates that in many cases, a child’s last 100 days at most. Adopting researchers gauged their powers self-control can be enhanced by this process could “put to bed the of self- control, based on first- teaching the parents how issue of teachers who shouldn’t be hand observation as to respond when the teaching,” Weingarten said. well as reports from child seeks atten- “It’s refreshing to see that Ran - parents, teachers, tion and by di is starting to talk in these and the children teaching the terms,” Hanushek says. “What we themselves. child how to have learned, however, is that Among the manage im - saying the right thing and doing measures pulses. Although the right thing do not always go were wheth - such efforts don’t together. Both schools and unions er the chil - have decried the current evalua- dren could tion systems for a long time, and handle frustration, both have promised to work to - wait their turn, and gether to improve them. Yet there stick to a task. are only a few examples where Terrie E. Moffitt of there has been any movement at Duke University and a Here comes trouble all.” He wonders whether Wein - dozen coauthors report the garten’s proposal represents a results in Proceedings of the succeed with everyone, the “substantive change in outlook” National Academy of Sciences Dunedin study suggests that even or simply a response to the prob- (Feb. 15). When they reached modest improvements could gen- lems facing public- sector unions adolescence, the children with erate social benefits. around the country. low self- control were more likely The new research reinforces Hanushek says he ran into to begin smoking, drop out of what many earlier studies have Weingarten a few days before she school, and become teenage par- found, notes Daniel Akst, a Wil- delivered her speech. She told ents. In adulthood, they were son Quarterly contributing editor him, he recalls, “Your eight per - more likely to be raising their and the author of We Have Met cent is giving me all sorts of own children in one- parent the Enemy: Self- Control in an problems.” households, to suffer from high Age of Excess (Penguin). “There blood pressure and other health is,” he says, “overwhelming Control Yourself problems, to be in debt, and to evidence that self- control is asso- have criminal records. Compared ciated with all kinds of good Early uh- ohs with the children with the great- things in life.” In his late seventies, Leo Tolstoy est self- control, those with the supposedly said, “As I was at five, least were on average about three Seminal Unfairness? so I am now.” That remark may be times more likely to experience more apt than the one about all those sorts of adverse outcomes Making the victim pay happy families being alike. A new as adults. The researchers found In cases of statutory rape, the victim study finds that behavior in chil- that a child’s level of self- control sometimes has to send a monthly dren as young as three can pre - is about as reliable a predictor of check to the wrongdoer. For exam- dict troubles in adulthood. the future as IQ or family socio - ple, a 34-year-old California woman In Dunedin, New Zealand, economic status. had an affair with a 15-year-old boy researchers studied about 1,000 Self-control, moreover, may be in the mid-1990s. At his age, he was

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 13 FINDINGS

legally incapable of consenting to Although other countries gotten easy thanks to full- text intercourse. Nonetheless, when the haven’t taken the concept as far as indexing, and access through the woman had his baby, a judge or - Spain has, the European Conven - Internet is now close to ubiquitous,” dered him to pay child support. tion on Human Rights protects he says. Such cases have come before sev- privacy, which is increasingly “What we will see, not just in eral courts, law professor Michael J. being interpreted to include a Spain but elsewhere, are debates Higdon of the University of Ten - “right to be forgotten.” Freedom of about the role and importance of nessee writes in an unpublished expression—also remem bering and paper, and they’ve reached the same protected by forgetting,” adds Mayer- conclusion. Whatever the circum - the conven - Schönberger. “And just stances of con cep tion, biological tion—doesn’t as societies have a fathers are generally responsible for take precedence right to decide paying child sup port. In many over privacy. In what kind of states, the only exception is artificial fact, privacy often information insemination performed by seems to trump should be out- Down the online memory hole? physicians. what one judge lawed, like child Higdon proposes a different dismissed as the pornography, soci- approach. When a man can prove “fetish of the freedom of the press.” eties have a right to decide how that sex was nonconsensual, as in In some countries, Google does easy remembering should be and the case of statutory rape, he ought censor results. Germany, for for how long. . . . After all, it is our to be excused from paying child instance, has ordered that it not decision how we want to live and support. “The time has come for supply links to neo- Nazi groups in what we want to forget and courts to remedy this injustice,” search results. But Google says that remember—not Google’s.” writes Higdon. no country has ever forced it to delete links to sites that don’t them- Houses on the Hill Unforgettable? selves break the law, as Spain is try- ing to do with El Pais. (The Spanish Family matters Search censors right to be forgotten doesn’t extend Why have comity and biparti - Hugo Guidotti Russo, a cosmetic to news media and their Web sites.) sanship dwindled in Congress? surgeon in Madrid, wants to Taking that step would have “a pro- Charles Gibson, the former anchor liposuction his past. The Spanish found chilling effect on free expres- of ABC’s World News, sought to newspaper El Pais reported in 1991 sion,” a Google executive told The find out by interviewing current that Guidotti Russo had been Guardian. and former members of Congress, accused of bungling a woman’s Viktor Mayer- Schönberger, the staff members in congressional breast surgery. He told The Wall author of Delete: The Virtue of For- offices, and academic experts. He Street Journal in March that he’d getting in the Digital Age (Prince- summarizes his findings in a paper been cleared of any wrongdoing in ton University Press), sides with the published in January by the Joan the case, though the Journal Spanish privacy regulators. Tech- Shorenstein Center on the Press, reporters couldn’t confirm it. Now nology has revolutionized social Politics, and Public Policy at Har- the doctor wants Google to change memory, he says. Gaining access to vard University. its algorithm so that searches for particular information a few dec- Although the people Gibson his name won’t bring up the El Pais ades ago might have required a interviewed identified many factors, article. The Spanish judge hearing descent into musty archives or a nearly everyone stressed the impor- the dispute has asked the European vexing encounter with a microfilm tance of legislators’ families— Court of Justice in Luxembourg for reader. In the digital age, by con- specifically, where they live. In the guidance. trast, “storage is cheap, retrieval has 1980s, most members of Congress

14 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 FINDINGS

moved their families to Washington. the patients have had LIS, the greater first third of the novel, as part one Today, by contrast, most families their sense of well-being. of what’s projected to be a trilogy. stay behind, and members typically Previous research had also Scheduled to open on April 15, fly home each Friday and return to found that people with LIS and the movie stars Taylor Schilling, Washington on Monday. other major disabilities say they’re who appeared on NBC’s Mercy, “Even those people who are happy, yet the BMJ study seemed to and features an actor named Edi fierce partisans or ideologues are flabbergast the press and the pub- Gathegi, who, according to The human beings,” Norman Ornstein of lic. Why? “It’s always somewhat Washington Post, is “best known the American Enterprise Institute shocking—quite counter intuitive— for appearing as a vampire in told Gibson, “and if you are standing for any objective data to suggest Twilight and one scene of its on the sidelines of a soccer game that individuals who are profoundly sequel, New Moon, until his char- with a colleague from across the disabled are in fact happy to the acter was ripped apart by giant aisle ... you’re going to have a harder same self- reported degree as the animatronic werewolves.” time vilifying him as the incarnation rest of us,” says Elizabeth Price Though Rand isn’t around for of the devil when you get on the Foley, author of The Law of Life the Twilight craze (she died in floor. We just don’t have that and Death (Harvard University 1982), her own tastes sometimes anymore.” Press). “There’s some sort of deep ran to the lowbrow. In his chroni- Ornstein suggested a couple of psychological disconnect between cle of the 1970s, Mad as Hell ways to encourage senators and rep- non-disabled and disabled folks, in (Knopf), Dominic Sandbrook resentatives to move their families to which the former just can’t grasp writes that she adored the TV Washington. Whereas Congress now what it’s like to be one of the latter.” frequently meets Tuesdays through Research shows that supportive Thursdays, Ornstein proposed that family and friends can it convene five days a week, with one generally help an week off per month. He also recom - individual live with mended giving members housing even the greatest allowances, which would enable adversity. “We are them to establish adequate second highly social crea - homes; currently, they get just a tures, and we $3,000 tax deduction. More togeth- seem to find it erness on the soccer fields, Ornstein very challeng- reckoned, might lead to less discord ing to be on the Hill. happy all Ayn’s Angels alone,” Foley says. Locked-In Expectations “Having people talk to us, touch us, series Charlie’s Angels, which she show concern for us in little ways— called “the only romantic Still happy these are the things of which happi- television show today.” Journalists pounced this February on ness seems to be made.” In a 1979 interview, she said, a study published in the British Med- “It’s not about the gutter. It’s not ical Journal in which Marie- Aurélie Ayn Enthused about half- wit retarded children Bruno and five colleagues found that and all the other kind of shows a majority of patients with locked- in Better angels today. It’s about three attractive syndrome (LIS)—people who are Fifty-four years after its publica - girls doing impossible things. generally paralyzed and unable to tion, Ayn Rand’s sprawling paean And because they’re impossible, communicate except by moving their to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, has that’s what makes it interesting.” eyes—report being happy. The longer finally been filmed— at least the —Stephen Bates

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 15 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

The School Lunch Wars

Sixty- five years ago, the federal school lunch program was created to make American schoolchildren healthier. Today, it’s helping to make them fatter. Will a new law change the diets of millions of kids raised on French fries and chicken nuggets?

BY KRISTEN HINMAN

When Colombia native Beatriz Zuluaga, least once when a parent remarked on the new efficacy of a professional cook for 20 years, became the admis- her child’s bowel movements. More than a third of parents sions director at CentroNía’s DC Bilingual Public Char- have participated in the school’s nutrition workshops. ter School in 2007, she thought she was leaving her old But when I visited the school last fall, all Zuluaga had to career far behind. Then she laid eyes on the trays in the do to temper her optimism was walk into a DC Bilingual lunchroom. Mashed potatoes from a box, chicken lunchroom and discover a chubby, misbehaving fourth nuggets, chocolate milk— to Zuluaga, the processed fare grader relegated to a table facing the wall and going to didn’t look fit for growing kids. At her last job, Zuluaga town on his brown- bag lunch: an Oscar Mayer Lunch- had cooked for 450 people a day. Surely she could take ables “pizza.” As the boy perched a piece of pepperoni and over the school’s kitchen, no? some shredded cheese atop a cracker, Zuluaga picked up the She unpacked her knives and started whipping up from- packaging to inspect its long ingredient list, then put it scratch dishes: lasagna with lentils, peppers stuffed with bar- back down, crossed her arms, and frowned. I expected her ley and turkey, roasted beets. The reformation did not go to seize the opportunity for a teachable moment, but she was over well. One offense after another set the tongues of par- silent. Later she explained, “He didn’t go to the grocery ents and teachers wagging. What is that? How can you serve store and buy that.” that to children? Why are you trying to turn my kid into a Zuluaga’s education, as it were, mirrors what’s occurring vegetarian? in schools across America as proponents of whole— that is, Three years later, Zuluaga has given up on the beets. But minimally processed— foods try to introduce children to American cheese has been scrapped for calcium- rich pro- more nutritious diets through the $9.8 billion federal school volone. White flour has been swapped for whole wheat in lunch program, which feeds about 32 million of America’s pizza crust. Fruit juice, high in sugar, is out. The school nurse 50 million schoolchildren every school day. One in three is reporting fewer sick kids, and Zuluaga has chuckled at American children and teenagers today is overweight or obese. Last year, in a report titled Too Fat to Fight, a group Kristen Hinman is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., who writes of retired military brass blamed school lunches for the fact frequently about food. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Slate. that an estimated 27 percent of American youth are too over-

16 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 decades. The law, which cuts funds from future federal food- stamp benefits to cover the reim- bursement hike, also grants the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) more power to police what’s served in school cafeterias. In reality, though, the battle over school lunches is just beginning, as educators confront a culture that prizes its hamburgers and French fries. How did a program that was designed to improve the nutrition of the nation’s children become a culprit in the scourge of childhood obesity?

s early as the 19th cen- tury, some American A schools operated their own school lunch programs, often with the help of volunteers. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the federal govern- ment began providing some funds for school lunches on an ad hoc basis. But many children still did- n’t get enough to eat. The problem was thrown into stark relief dur- School lunches such as this one are a fat target in America’s war against childhood obesity. ing World War II, when it was discovered that half of all draftees weight to serve in the armed forces. A study of Michigan who were deemed unfit for service were rejected because of sixth graders published in December found that regularly malnutrition. In 1946, Congress passed the National School consuming school lunches was a greater risk factor for obe- Lunch Act “as a measure of national security.” The law sity than spending two or more hours a day watching tele- guaranteed a free or subsidized midday meal for millions of vision or playing video games. needy children. It was also intended to teach America what First lady Michelle Obama, a former hospital executive, to eat. “Not only is the child taught what a good diet consists has made the war on obesity her defining cause, and put the of,” noted a congressional agriculture committee report, school lunch program in her crosshairs. In December, “but his parents and family likewise are indirectly instructed.” thanks in part to her lobbying, Congress passed the Healthy, During the Depression, when farmers were surrounded Hunger- Free Kids Act, which awards schools that meet cer- by mountains of unsold commodities and schools were full tain nutritional guidelines an extra six cents per student of hungry children, New Deal politicos had used the USDA meal. The extra pennies increase federal reimbursements for to funnel surpluses to school cafeterias. Thus, when it came lunches above the rate of inflation for the first time in three time to designate an authority for the new national lunch

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 17 School Lunch

four) eat for free. The school receives a fed- eral subsidy of $2.72 per meal. Children from families earning up to 185 percent of the poverty level pay 40 cents per meal, and the subsidy is correspondingly reduced. Other students pay the “full” price, an aver- age of $1.60. The government also provides a small subsidy for these meals, on the prin- ciple that child nutrition contributes to national security. (Even so, schools often are not able to cover the production cost of the “full” price meals and essentially make up the difference from the subsidies meant for lower- income kids. A controversial provi- sion of the new law will rectify that by requir- ing some districts to charge more for full- pay lunches.) Student participation doubled within the first few years after the federal eligibility stan- dards were set. Educators suddenly found themselves in the food business. Poorer dis- tricts, particularly, didn’t have functioning kitchens, or the money to improve them. It became standard practice for cafeteria staff to purchase ready-made heat- and- eat meals, whose less- than- palatable qualities made headlines once it was learned that much of the Even during the lean years of the Great Depression, educators had to coax youngsters— food was being thrown out. These reports, including these kids fed by an early federal lunch program— to drink their milk. along with the fact that the government was subsidizing lunches for middle- income fam- program, the USDA seemed a natural choice. Schools would ilies that could afford to pay full price, caught the attention receive subsidized commodities and cash reimbursements of Ronald Reagan’s cost- conscious administration. Among in exchange for feeding low- income children lunches that the resulting USDA proposals was the reclassification of met USDA nutrition standards. And so the same law that ketchup as a vegetable—on the theory that replacing broc- was supposed to ensure a nutritious midday meal for mil- coli and lima beans with cheap condiments would reduce lions of kids also created an enduring market for American so- called plate waste. That idea caused a political uproar and farmers. was never carried out, but in 1981 Congress slashed school It was up to state officials to administer the federal lunch reimbursement rates by a third and eliminated money funds. For the first two decades student participation was for equipment. low, partly because many schools lacked adequate facilities Already making do with slim resources and now facing but also because local authorities often established the eli- more budget pressures, some schools turned to profes- gibility threshold with little regard for students’ actual need. sional vendors to replace the cafeteria ladies of old. At the The poor results prompted Congress in the 1960s to estab- same time, many schools added “à la carte” items that could lish a federal eligibility standard linked to the poverty level. be sold to anyone who could pay. Since the government Today, students from families with incomes below didn’t reimburse for à la carte fare, and thus didn’t regulate 130 percent of the poverty level ($28,665 for a family of its nutritional content, school officials were free to offer

18 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 School Lunch

French fries, nachos, and pizza. Some items were branded scratch. Eighty percent of schools exceed the fat allowance per by fast- food companies such as Domino’s Pizza and Taco meal. The average high school lunch has 1,600 milligrams Bell. Many schools also allowed companies to install vend- of sodium—100 milligrams more than the daily amount ing machines that dispensed snack foods, candy, and soda, deemed within healthy limits for children. from which the schools kept a portion of the sales. In the late 1990s, some school districts around the coun- Consumption of government- subsidized school lunches try quietly began removing vending machines or putting the began to fall off because of the “needy” stigma assoc- kibosh on minimally nutritious à la carte programs. But the iated with the reimbursable meals. Kids who had once purchased meals at full price switched to the more tempt- IN 1990, ONLY ONE percent of schools ing à la carte line. Some lower- income students sim- were serving meals that met the USDA’s ply went without. In re - sponse, cafeteria managers dietary guidelines for percentage of goosed the offerings to make them more enticing. Out calories from fat. went baked chicken, in came chicken nuggets; roasted potatoes gave way to Tater Tots. Cheap commodities were reformers who eventually drew national attention were available from the government, in all the processed forms two chefs who had far more ambitious goals. Alice Waters, kids were believed to covet. USDA nutrition standards whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse was in the van- were lax enough that it was possible to satisfy the grain and guard in serving seasonal and local cuisine, won over the Cal- protein requirements with, say, breaded and fried fish sticks, ifornia state superintendent of education with Edible or the fruit requirement with sugar- laced canned peaches. Schoolyard, a garden project at a Berkeley middle school. By 2002, produce gardens had been established in more than 2,000 of California’s 9,000 schools. The same year, Waters n 1990, the USDA commissioned a comprehensive convinced the Berkeley Unified School District to hire Ann analysis of the school lunch program to see how it Cooper, who became known as “the Renegade Lunch Lady,” I stacked up against the agency’s Dietary Guidelines for to revamp its food service program with whole foods. Americans. In yet another bureaucratic oddity of the pro- (Cooper has since gone to work for the Boulder Valley gram, schools had to meet a different, and looser, set of nutri- School District in Colorado.) tion standards. “The results were disturbing,” recounts soci- To the California duo, the biggest culprit in the child ologist Janet Poppendieck in Free for All (2010), a survey of nutrition crisis is the transformation of agriculture since the politics surrounding school lunch programs. “On aver- World War II and the rise of agribusiness. Livestock is age, school lunches were deriving not [the recommended] raised in mechanized indoor facilities rather than pastures, 30 but 38 percent of calories from fats, not [the recom- cash- crop monoculture has replaced the diversified family mended] 10 but 15 percent from saturated fats. The meals farm, and the food industry has undergone far-reaching were also found to be high in sodium. . . . Only one percent consolidation. Today, only two percent of Americans— of schools were serving, on average, meals that complied supported by government subsidies— produce food, and with the dietary guidelines for percentage of calories from they do so at prices so low that the other 98 percent don’t fat— one percent!” have much incentive to question the system. Pervasive mar- Without allocating more money, Congress in 1994 keting by fast- food companies pitching cheap children’s required that school menus meet the USDA’s Dietary Guide- “Happy Meals” and other convenience foods to working par- lines for Americans. But what was on the plate changed very ents has helped establish a drive- through culture. The eat- little. Today, less than 20 percent of schools cook lunch from your- vegetables ethos has given way to an emphasis on

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 19 School Lunch food that can be put on the table quickly (if it’s consumed at closer to the school lunch lines than Washington, or a table at all) and that children will eat without a battle royale America’s feedlots and farm fields. every evening. The view that poor- quality school lunches are the result of a broken food system has led food activists to see bout five years ago Linda Henke, superintendent the USDA as part of the problem. How, they ask, can an of the Maplewood– Richmond Heights School Dis- authority responsible for helping agribusiness produce A trict in suburban St. Louis, decided to start min- and market its output also be an effective nutrition gling with her high schoolers in the lunchroom. When she watchdog in school cafeterias? saw the array of Pop-Tarts, candy, and “cheese fries” that had In 2009, two months after moving into 1600 Penn- been mainstays on the à la carte menu for years, she was dis- sylvania Avenue, Michelle Obama planted an organic gusted. “It was the fish not seeing the water,” she says of her kitchen garden on the White House lawn, a step of both years- long inattention to what her students were eating. She symbolic and practical significance. With her backing, started to lay the groundwork for some drastic changes. the USDA dusted off projects that promote local and Three years ago, with the help of her congressman, Russ regional food systems, rolling out a local- foods market- Carnahan, a local university, and a group of family farmers ing campaign called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your desperate for new markets, Henke began making over the Food.” Another initiative aims to help small and district’s food program. She prohibited candy and chips in the medium- size farms sell their products to schools. cafeterias and had all vending machines but one removed. What elevated Obama’s whole foods advocacy above She required that all the starches come from whole grain the charges of impracticality and foodie snobbery leveled sources and banned the purchase of chicken patties and at Waters and Cooper was the roll out last February of a nuggets— processed chicken, period. Whenever possible, campaign dubbed “Let’s Move” that puts the focus ingredients were to be Missouri grass- fed beef and pesticide- squarely on health—and on those responsible for the free produce. Local sourcing would allow the staff to order well- being of children. “Our kids didn’t do this to them- whole foods, which is not always an option when purchases selves,” Obama said when she announced the wellness are made through the USDA or a distributor. This way, the plan. “Our kids don’t decide what’s served to them at district could prepare the foods as desired— apples for apple- school or whether there’s time for gym class or recess. sauce, tomatoes for marinara and salsa, for example— while Our kids don’t choose to make food products with tons controlling for calorie, fat, and sodium content. An à la carte of sugar and sodium in super sized portions, and then to line was preserved at the high school, but it no longer serves have those products marketed to them everywhere they cheese fries and other junk food. turn. And no matter how much they beg for pizza, fries, When I visited last fall, I was struck by the positive vibe and candy, ultimately they are not, and should not be, the around the revamped program. A teacher said he’d lost ones calling the shots at dinnertime. We’re in charge. We seven pounds by eating in the high school cafeteria every make these decisions.” school day for the previous three months. A senior girl who In placing the blame for the obesity epidemic on had embraced the changes from the beginning observed corporate food processors, educators, and parents, that even she was surprised when football players started Obama picked the right targets. Conventional agri- eating salads. The elementary school’s cook of 14 years told culture isn’t the main problem. If there were greater me her job is now harder, but it’s rewarding. She recounted demand for less- processed ingredients, agribusiness a recent visit to the school her sister’s kids attend in Indiana. companies could produce them. Nor is the USDA’s “They had all this processed food that we don’t serve any- jurisdiction of the program a real obstacle to reform. more, and I was thinking, ‘This is farm country! If we’re city In the 1970s and again in 2001, the department people and we can cook, why can’t they?’ ” pressed Congress for more regulatory authority over These reforms have not come cheaply. The meals cost à la carte and vending machine offerings— only to from $3.75 to $4.25 apiece to prepare. Henke’s board of edu- come up short against the soft drink and snack food cation has allowed her to run the program at a deficit equal lobbies. The real problem— and the solution— is a lot to roughly one teacher’s salary. But if she wants to keep using

20 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 School Lunch

At the Maplewood–Richmond Heights Middle School in St. Louis, Missouri, salad is cool, thanks to the efforts of a visionary district superintendent. local food sources, she has to convince a consortium of National School Lunch Program (less than one percent) had schools to buy in. The farms that have been supplying received awards. That leaves a lot of schools that are still pro- Maplewood–Richmond Heights on an experimental basis moting Tater Tot Day and reheating frozen pizzas. need to sell their food at great volumes to turn a profit. One Food activists hope that the passage of the Healthy, of Henke’s selling points to other school officials? Her cafe- Hunger- Free Kids Act will make a big difference. More terias are selling 10 percent more lunches. money will buy better ingredients and pay for more staff to Administrators such as Henke, Beatriz Zuluaga, and prepare foods from scratch. At least as important is the others in Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Texas have revealed USDA’s increased authority over the nutrition standards of some important principles. It takes a tough- minded school all food served in schools, and the department’s proposal to leader to assert that nutrient-rich food is the right choice for establish more rigorous standards, including two vegetables kids— and that it’s an appropriate use of government dollars. per meal, strict sodium limits, and, for the first time, max- Kids will complain initially but will come around. And a imum calorie counts. number of collateral benefits follow when students eat well. It could take another generation to see meaningful Anecdotal reports from schools with healthful and flavor- change in the waistlines of American children. Yes, reform ful food indicate that teachers have started eating with stu- will require more government money. But at least as dents, attendance rates are higher, and fewer students fall important is a stomachs- and- minds campaign aimed at asleep in class or commit vandalism and violence at school. the nation’s adults: food service directors who cling to the So far, these cafeteria visionaries are the exception. Since argument that a child won’t drink low-fat milk, so cook- 2004, the USDA has administered the HealthierUS School ies ‘n’ cream–flavored milk is better than no calcium at all; Challenge, awarding distinction, but no money, to schools parents who ask, Why do you want to turn my kid into a that voluntarily improve the healthfulness of their meals. By vegetarian?; and teachers who snort, How can you serve last fall, only a paltry 841 of the 101,000 schools in the beets to students? ■

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 21 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

What Is Hugo Chávez Up To?

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has set alarms ringing with his efforts to create a global anti- American coalition. But in Caracas, critics say their bombastic president is giving away the country’s wealth and getting snookered by his newfound friends.

BY JOSHUA KUCERA

When Muammar al- Qaddafi faced world- try might hope for. But Chávez has emerged at a fer- wide condemnation this past winter as he brutally tile moment in world history. The apparent waning struck back against a popular uprising, the Libyan of U.S. power has opened up the possibility of a new dictator may have taken comfort from knowing he geopolitical order, and the worldwide financial crisis had at least one friend left: Venezuelan president and the rise of China have shaken the conventional Hugo Chávez. The two have forged close political wisdom that capitalism and democracy are superior and economic ties during Chávez’s dozen years in to the alternatives. office, and the Libyan leader had already bestowed Chávez has seized the moment by forcefully the Qaddafi International Human Rights Prize on his declaring his intention to change the world. “What we Latin American ally and named a soccer stadium in now have to do is define the future of the world. Benghazi in his honor. In February, Chávez repaid the Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa favors by offering to mediate a peaceful solution to the and Europe and Latin America and Oceania,” he told fighting—at a time when the rebels seemed likely to the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. “I triumph—and defending his old friend on Twitter: want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to “Teach another lesson to the extreme right- wing lit- strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our aware- tle Yanquis! Long live Libya and its independence!” ness. We have to build a new and better world.” Chávez’s quixotic intervention was only the latest Of course, that speech is better remembered for of his efforts to play a role in world affairs larger Chávez’s characterization of President George W. than most leaders of a midsize Latin American coun- Bush as the “devil,” and his claim that the General Assembly chamber, where Bush had spoken the day Joshua Kucera is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. before, still smelled of sulphur—only the most leg-

22 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Is this rogues’ gallery of Hugo Chávez’s friends more than the sum of its parts? The Venezuelan president is shown with (clockwise from the top) Libya’s Muammar al- Qaddafi, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

endary example of Chávez’s frequent and colorful nuclear power. Chávez has threatened to stop selling denunciations of the United States. oil to the United States—the customer for more than Chávez’s torrid rhetoric has earned him both half of Venezuela’s output— and ship it to China admiration—in a 2009 opinion poll of several Arab instead. countries, Chávez was the most popular leader, by a It is the relationship with Iran and its president, large margin— and fear. And he has backed up his Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that makes Chávez most anti- American rhetoric by courting nearly any coun- effusive and worries Washington most. Chávez has try that challenges the United States, including Iran, hailed the Iranian leader as a “brother” and as a Russia, China, Belarus, Libya, and Syria. “gladiator in the anti- imperialist struggle.” Publicly, Under Chávez, Venezuela has spent billions on their two countries have collaborated to build joint Russian rifles, fighter jets, and other weapons, and it banks, as well as car, tractor, and bicycle factories, in recently won Moscow’s help in developing civilian Venezuela. But much of the relationship is not trans-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 23 Venezuela parent, and there has been a great deal of heated than corporate profit? Or do they have the makings speculation (though little hard evidence) that of a Cold War reprise, leading us toward bloc- on- bloc Venezuela has offered to host Iranian missiles on its geopolitical struggle (complete with the potential territory and is cooperating with Russia and Iran on for a rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis)? Or are they nuclear weapons development. Some say that the neither, amounting to little more than self- banks are being used to evade international sanc- aggrandizing speeches and photo ops? tions imposed on Iran. In an effort to get some insight into these issues, Chávez has also been accused of supporting FARC I traveled to Caracas in February to talk to diplomats, guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and Hezbollah political figures, and analysts from both the pro- terrorists in the Middle East. In 2008, the U.S. Treas- and anti- Chávez camps— there is very little middle ury Department formally accused a Venezuelan diplo- ground in Venezuela— and see where they thought the country’s foreign pol- icy was headed, and what role these alliances play MANY WASHINGTON OBSERVERS see in it. It was not a topic government officials Venezuela’s foreign policy as nothing less were very interested in talking about; they than the embryo of a new evil empire. would much rather let the world know about their health care and mat who had served in Lebanon and Syria of acting education programs (which, by all accounts, have as a fundraiser for Hezbollah, and froze his U.S.- been successful). Eventually, with great effort and the based assets. Last year, a Spanish judge charged a help of personal connections, I was able to meet a Venezuelan official with terrorism and conspiracy to couple of government officials in their offices in commit murder based on evidence that he had helped Caracas’s crowded, historic center, where our con- coordinate training sessions involving operatives versations were more often than not punctuated by from FARC and ETA, the Basque separatist organi- the sounds of lively pro- Chávez rallies featuring zation known for its bombings and assassinations. equal parts salsa music and shouts for “socialismo” Meanwhile, Chávez has been creating an alliance coming in the windows. of like- minded neighbors in Latin America, which are Opposition figures, contrary to Venezuela’s rep- also building their own ties with Russia and Iran. utation as a place where free speech is muzzled, “Today Venezuela is accompanied by true friends,” were eager to talk about Chávez’s new alliances. I got Chávez said in 2009. “They range from large coun- many invitations to their homes and offices in tran- tries like China, Russia, and Iran, to smaller countries quil, elegant Caracas neighborhoods where sleek in size but big in solidarity, like Cuba, the Dominican modern houses and apartment buildings stood Republic, and Bolivia, among others.” Nicaragua and behind walls topped with electric fences. Ecuador are also on the list of friends. Many in Washington, Cold War nostalgists in particular, see Venezuela’s foreign policy as nothing less than the embryo of a new evil empire. The rela- n Washington and other capitals, there is much tionship with Iran has aroused particular suspicion, speculation about what Chávez really intends to with China and Russia seen as superpower patrons, Ido with these new alliances. Are his foreign- and Syria and others as partners in a budding anti- policy moves, as he claims, the first steps in creating U.S. coalition. Conservative think tanks hold fre- a post-capitalist world order independent of the quent events on Venezuela’s ties with China and United States and oriented toward justice rather especially Iran, and regularly publish alarmist

24 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Venezuela

Venezuelans rally against a 2009 referendum to end term limits and allow Chávez to seek a fourth term. The pro-Chávez side won by a comfortable margin. reports and op- eds on the topic. “The Tehran- zuela’s oil wealth not only to fund ambitious social Caracas alliance now represents the biggest threat to programs at home but to gain influence abroad. hemispheric stability,” contends Jaime Darenblum, That has allowed his nation of 28 million people, not a Hudson Institute scholar, in a typical example of much larger than Texas, to gain an outsized presence the genre. The new chair of the House Committee on on the world stage. Foreign Relations, Representative Ileana Ros- While the list of Venezuela’s new allies may look Lehtinen (R- Fla.), has vowed to hold hearings on like a global rogue’s gallery in Washington, among Venezuela’s relationships with Iran and Russia. Chávez’s supporters in Caracas it looks like Chávez’s hero is Fidel Castro, and like Castro a freedom— specifically, freedom from the United generation ago, Chávez is using his position as leader States. “Until 1999 [when, a year after Chávez was of a middling regional power— along with fiery rhet- elected, Venezuela adopted a new constitution], our oric and a resonant message of social justice—to foreign policy was basically following the orders of reach for a global role. And Chávez has one advan- the State Department,” said Carlos Escarrá, the gar- tage Castro didn’t: oil. According to one recent esti- rulous chairman of the Venezuelan National Assem- mate, Venezuela has the second- largest oil reserves bly’s foreign relations committee. Venezuelans espe- in the world, and even though its output has declined cially objected to unbalanced trade agreements that under Chávez, it is the world’s 11th largest producer, they say would force them to buy U.S.-made products almost matching Kuwait. Chávez has used Vene - instead of cheaper regional alternatives. For exam-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 25 Venezuela ple, U.S.-promoted pacts such as the Free Trade Area to the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas. of the Americas would forbid countries from buying ALBA, backers say, is shaping up to be a trade bloc less- expensive copies of costly drugs that are pro- oriented toward poverty reduction rather than tected by U.S. patent law. investment and commerce. (The members include Chávez made some moves toward what he calls Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Domin - “multipolarity” in his first years in office— for exam- ica, Ecua dor, Nicaragua, and Saint Vincent and the ple, by trying to reinvigorate OPEC and get it to Grenadines.) ALBA figures heavily in the govern- support higher oil prices— but his resolve to radically ment’s domestic political rhetoric. Liberation hero change Venezuela’s foreign policy was hardened by Simón Bolivar’s tomb, housed in a Caracas temple a coup attempt in 2002. What exactly happened called the Pantheon, is now festooned with flags remains murky, but Chávez says it was orchestrated from all the ALBA countries, as is his birthplace in by the United States. If nothing else, the Bush Caracas’s historic center. The government bought a administration recognized the coup leaders with Hilton hotel and renamed it Hotel ALBA; next to the unseemly alacrity. The incident “helped us to iden- shop selling swimsuits is a bookstore whose shelves tify the empire as an aggressor, so we had to look out are dominated by works of leftist political theory in the world to compensate, to create an equilib- that are a far cry from ordinary beach reading, rium,” Escarrá told me. And if Washington doesn’t including books by Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and like Caracas’s new friends, so be it. “The U.S. isn’t the the American anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan. sheriff of the world anymore. So calling other coun- The government also has opened a chain of ALBA tries ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is just McCarthyism. Now we shops that sell low- priced clothing from ALBA coun- have to speak of ‘sovereign’ and ‘non sovereign,’ ” he tries, such as $5 pants made in Bolivia and adver- said, meaning, respectively, free of U.S. influence tised as “jeans for a socialist man.” (The knockoff Polo and not free. and Abercrombie & Fitch shirts the stores sell, how- ever, strike a discordantly bourgeois note.) For domestic audiences, Chávez does not create ow do Chávez’s principles translate into nearly as much fanfare around Venezuela’s alliances practical foreign policy? Step one, of course, with Russia, Iran, and China as he does around His knocking the United States off its perch, ALBA. Indeed, when assembling an alliance based in particular so it can’t dominate the international on justice and generosity, those are not the first organizations that Chávez blames for Venezuela’s countries one usually thinks of. But government past ills, such as the Organization of American supporters insist that even these new friendships States, the World Bank, and the International Mon- are allowing Venezuela to take the first steps toward etary Fund. Chávez has also moved to create new greater self- sufficiency and independence. regional organizations that exclude the United States As justification for the country’s quest for Chávez- and operate on what he considers more equitable style sovereignty, his supporters frequently cite the terms, going so far as to provide for trade by barter saga of the fighter jets. The nation’s air force has rather than with money. These include Petrocaribe, operated a fleet of U.S.- and European- built aircraft which supplies oil to poor Caribbean countries at since its inception. But in 2005, the United States preferential terms, and the Community of Latin moved to block weapons sales to Venezuela, not only American and Caribbean States, which will include by U.S. companies but by its allies as well. The jus- every country in the Americas except the United tification was that the Chávez government had not States and Canada when it is launched in Caracas in done enough to combat human trafficking and July. terrorism— spurious pretexts, Venezuelans say. As a The most advanced of these integration projects result, Israel was forced to freeze a $100 million is the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA. contract to repair and upgrade the nation’s F-16s, Chávez founded the alliance to act as an alternative and 10 of the 30 in its possession remain grounded.

26 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Venezuela

Washington also blocked the sale of Spanish military There are, of course, simple alternative explana- transport aircraft and naval vessels to Venezuela, tions: Russia and China are happy to take Venezuela’s using laws that allow it to veto sales of equipment money and cheap oil. Neither has embraced Chávez that includes some U.S. parts. Those moves virtually as warmly as he has embraced them, and both see him forced Chávez into the Russians’ arms, his support- merely as a willing customer for their goods, argued ers assert. In the last few years, he has signed con- Julio César Pineda, a former Venezuelan diplomat tracts worth $4.4 billion for combat and military who now hosts a foreign affairs show on the opposi- transport helicopters, fighter jets, and small arms. tion television network Globovision. “Russia and Venezuela also has ingratiated itself with Russia by China are closer to the U.S. than they are to becoming one of only four countries in the world to Venezuela, but Chávez thinks he can move them recognize the Russia- backed breakaway Geor- gian republics of Abk- hazia and South Ossetia. RUSSIA AND CHINA are happy to take This raises an obvious question: For all the faults Venezuela’s money and cheap oil, but they of the United States, why would Venezuela think haven’t embraced Hugo Chávez’s agenda. that Russia (or China, or Iran) would be any more generous a partner? Won’t Russia someday against the United States— it’s absurd.” make the same demands on Vene zuela that the United One Venezuelan blogger wrote at the time of the States has? I posed this question to Omar Galíndez, satellite launch: “The President stated, ‘What does a the academic director of Venezuela’s govern ment- run satellite have to do with socialism? A capitalistic Pedro Gual Institute for Advanced Diplomacy Stud- company launches a satellite to make money. This is ies. “No, Russia is our friend,” he said, adding that an act of liberation and independence . . . to construct Moscow has agreed to help Venezuela develop the socialism within Venezuela and to work together capacity to build parts for the equipment itself. “We with other countries,’ something that I think is great. have a strategic relationship, not a relationship of It is a shame that the Chinese did not think the same dependence.” when they charged Venezuela $241 million, on top of the $165 million in the construction of the two ground control sites.” ne could ask similar questions about Many of the alleged social benefits of the deals Venezuela’s new ties to China. In 2008, the with other countries exist, at least for now, only on OChinese launched a Venezuelan communi- paper. That has led to a widespread belief in cations satellite named the Simón Bolivar that Chi- Venezuela that the government is giving away more nese engineers built under an arrangement with the to its new friends than it is getting in return. “There Chávez government. The United States would only are so many agreements, it’s impossible to keep track offer to sell space on one of its satellites to Venezuela, of them all, but most of them are giving things up,” while China has offered to train engineers so that said Arlan Narvaez, a professor of political economy Venezuela will be able to build a satellite itself in 10 at the Central University of Caracas. “It’s [Chávez’s] years, according to Carlos Escarrá. “The satellite will way of buying attention.” be used for health, education, and the development The most significant element of the China- of all the people of Latin America,” he said. “We Venezuela relationship is a $20 billion loan Beijing wouldn’t be able to do this without opening up our pledged to Caracas, which is partly repayable in oil. foreign policy to other countries.” Many Venezuelans worry that Beijing got by far the

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 27 Venezuela best of the deal. The exact terms have not been made publicized attacks by Chávez on press freedoms, the public, but a U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wik- country has an aggressive opposition media and a ileaks quoted a Venezuelan state oil company official sizable foreign press corps. And no one has come up saying that China was getting the oil for about $5 a with the smoking gun to prove the worst of the barrel, then reselling it at a large profit. allegations. Maryclen Sterling, a sociologist and radio host Most circumstantial evidence suggests that coop- who is generally pro- Chávez, said that although she eration between Venezuela and Iran is neither as understands the necessity of new alliances, she is nefarious as its critics tend to believe, nor as fruitful uneasy about how the government is going about it. as its defenders claim. One U.S. diplomatic cable “We’re in a war, and in a war the goal is to defeat the from Caracas, written in 2009 and released last year by Wikileaks, concluded that there is little reason to believe the claims of THE EFFECTS OF CHÁVEZ’S foreign nuclear weapons cooper- ation: “Although rumors policy beyond Venezuela’s borders fall far that Venezuela is provid- ing Iran with Venezue- short of the president’s rhetoric. lan-produced uranium may help burnish the government’s revolution- enemy, at all costs,” she said. But Sterling is not con- ary credentials, there seems to be little basis in real- fident that Venezuela’s new allies will be any more ity to the claims.” selfless than the United States was. “Chávez is very Those who suspect the worst of Chávez had a tan- naive in certain things, and in general we’re a naive talizing morsel dropped in their laps in 2007 when the country, and a lot of people say we’re doing terrible Venezuelan airline Conviasa and Iran Air inaugurated business,” she said. “I’m concerned that we could be direct flights between Tehran and Caracas. To make it trading one empire for another.” even more intriguing, the flights were said to be In opinion surveys, Venezuelans seem tepid toward unavailable to the general public and free of normal their new allies. According to the Pew Global Attitudes security procedures. “These planes are most likely car- Project, in 2007 (the most recent year Venezuela was rying bad actors from the likes of Hezbollah, Iran’s included in the poll) 48 percent of Venezuelans had a Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Guard’s positive opinion of Russia. Only 16 percent had at Qods Force,” wrote Peter Brookes, a former Pentagon least “some confidence” in Ahmadinejad. Meanwhile, official, in The New York Post. 56 percent had a positive opinion of the United When I was in Caracas in February, I went to the States— a slightly higher level of enthusiasm toward Conviasa ticket office at the Hotel ALBA, and the Yanquis than Britons and Canadians had. inquired about buying a ticket to Tehran. The agent told me that, unfortunately, the service had been canceled “about a year ago.” (She gave me a number hatever the effects of Chávez’s foreign where I could reach Conviasa’s public relations policy at home, its potential impact department for more information, but publicity is W beyond Venezuela’s borders falls far apparently not a priority for the airline; nobody ever short of the president’s rhetoric. While it’s impossi- picked up the phone.) In its day, the flight was some- ble to prove that Chávez is not helping Iran with its thing of a sensation among aviation enthusiasts, and nuclear program, for example, there have been so there was a lot of chatter about it on their Web sites. many allegations, repeated for so long, that they are The posts painted a picture of something more like starting to lose their potency. Despite some well- a political boondoggle than a cloak- and- dagger oper-

28 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Venezuela ation. One German traveler who took the flight in Venezuelan side skimped on some key equipment, 2007—and apparently had no trouble getting a trying to reuse old assembly-line machinery instead ticket— said he had an opportunity to speak with of getting new gear. Predictably, it gummed up the the Iranian flight captain, who told him, “With every works, setting back production. transatlantic flight from Tehran to Caracas we cre- Opposition leaders in Venezuela don’t criticize ate a loss of more than $100,000, but get compen- Chávez’s foreign policy on the grounds that it is sation from the government.” opening the door for Hezbollah or Iranian nuclear weapons, but because Chávez is extravagant in sub- sidizing other countries for political reasons while eniran, the joint Venezuelan- Iranian car and Venezuelans need better schools and health care. In tractor manufacturer, seems to be another fact, spotlighting the danger of Venezuela’s new V triumph of politics over substance. I went to alliances only plays into Chávez’s hands, said Teodoro a Veniran dealer in Caracas to see about buying a car, Petkoff, a leftist turned Chávez critic and editor of but found that there weren’t any for sale. The sales- the Caracas newspaper Tal Cual. He brought up man told me there was a waiting list from 2010 of Representative Ros- Lehtinen’s threats to hold hear- more than 4,000 customers, while only a few dozen ings on Chávez’s ties with Russia and Iran. “I’m very cars had been produced last year. (He also advised worried about the Republicans taking power” in the me not to buy a Veniran, arguing that although the U.S. House of Representatives, Petkoff said. “They initial price was low, many replacement parts are will be a big help to Chávez. Every time any Ameri- expensive imports.) A former Veniran employee told can leader speaks against Chávez, he has material for me that when the factory was being built, the one month of speeches.”

A Caracas wall mural celebrated Chávez’s 12th anniversary in power in February. Chávez says he will seek a new six- year term in elections next year.

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 29 Venezuela

Chávez’s enthusiasm for attention, positive or not, removed Chávez’s name from the soccer stadium. is obvious. He thrives on conflict and on standing Chávez’s embrace of dictators has turned off much of against the United States, and flaunting a close rela- the European and global Left as well, according to tionship with Iran achieves both of those objectives. Petkoff. Chávez does not realize that his message plays “In general, he loves to cultivate an air of mystery, and very differently in Europe, he said. “He doesn’t under- particularly in this case [with Iran]. He knows it stand what Iran or Belarus means for Europe. Iran is makes a lot of noise,” said Elsa Cardozo, a professor very far away from [Venezuela]; eight out of 10 Venezue- of international relations at Universidad Metropoli- lans don’t know where Iran is. But for Europeans, Iran tana in Caracas. The official Iranian Fars News is a real problem. And 9.9 out of 10 Venezuelans don’t Agency quipped that the Veniran factory was know where Belarus is, but Europeans know that it’s the “designed to produce three things: tractors, influ- last communist government in Europe, the last remnant ence, and angst.” of the Soviet empire.” Chávez’s revolutionary, anti-U.S. efforts can per- haps be usefully compared with those of his idol, here are signs, though, that Chávez’s inter- Castro. For all of the doom- and- gloom scenarios national influence is waning. Its apex may Chávez’s new alliances have engendered, he has not T have come with his United Nations speech gone nearly as far as Castro did in his heyday. Chávez five years ago, or the Summit of the Americas in has not sent troops or military aid to like- minded gov- Argentina in 2005 when, with the blessing of then- ernments, as Cuba did in Angola and elsewhere, nor president Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, a major has he offered to host foreign military installations, regional power, Chávez directly challenged U.S. lead- as Cuba did with the Soviet Union. ership in the region. But no countries have joined Chávez’s critics might respond, well, give him ALBA since June 2009, and polls have found that his time. But Chávez also faces constraints that Castro popularity has declined substantially in Argentina, did not. He does not have a superpower patron, as Brazil, and Mexico. As early as 2006, a Latino- Cuba did (though Chávez reportedly hoped that barómetro survey of Latin Americans had him tied China would fill that role), and he is limited by with President George W. Bush (at 4.6 on a scale domestic politics. Although Venezuela may be creep- from one to 10) in popularity. Classified materials ing toward authoritarianism, it’s not there yet. Chávez released by Wikileaks have shown regional leaders faces an election in 2012, and opposition figures speaking dismissively of Chávez. While Brazilian believe they have a chance to win if they can agree on leaders have publicly embraced Chávez, in one U.S. a good candidate. Getting cozy with Iran and China cable Foreign Minister Celso Amorim is quoted say- is not likely to be a winning campaign theme, espe- ing, “His bite is not as bad as his bark,” and in another, cially if people perceive that Chávez’s oil diplomacy “Chávez is not a threat.” amounts to spending money abroad that could go to Other critics pointedly note that Chávez’s claims of domestic social programs and other needs. a commitment to justice are undermined by his But Chávez also has a unique opportunity. embrace of some of the world’s worst dictators. In The United States’ influence is declining, and many the past he has praised Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe, people are looking for something to replace the lib- and more recently, Hosni Mubarak and Qaddafi, argu- eral model of economics and governance. By hitch- ing that the protests in Egypt and Libya were orches- ing his wagon to so many dubious allies, Chávez trated by the United States. Al-Jazeera English, which could be squandering a chance to promote an alter- promotes itself as the voice of the global South and native. But if nothing else, his new alliances have got- would seem a natural ally of Chávez, has been highly ten the world’s attention. “If we weren’t doing all critical of him for his support of the dictators rather this, you wouldn’t be sitting here in my office,” than the people of the Arab world. The rebels in Libya, Escarrá, the parliamentarian, told me. “Venezuela when they took Benghazi in early March, quickly isn’t mute anymore.” ■

30 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Classical Education in America

The study of ancient Greek and Latin long ago vanished from most American classrooms, and with it has gone a special under - standing of the values and virtues prized by Western civilization.

BY DANIEL WALKER HOWE

The classics departments at most Ameri- Republic. Recent books by Carl J. Richard, Caroline Win- can colleges and universities today carry the whiff of nos- terer, and several other scholars emphasize the attention the talgia and old chalk dust. Latin and ancient Greek can’t com- Founders paid to classical learning. So what has happened pete with vocational disciplines such as engineering, to the classics in America since the Founding? business, and medicine. Classics programs are small and For several generations, classical antiquity remained underfunded, and when education budgets are squeezed, alive and well in the American republic, both within edu- such programs are often among the first to go— the recent cational institutions and in the larger society. American elimination of the classics department at the Albany branch colleges required undergraduates to take Latin (and often of the State University of New York is but one prominent Greek); they even usually demanded, as an admission pre- example. In 2009, the College Board, which administers the requisite, that applicants have taken instruction in one or SAT and advanced placement exams to millions of high both languages. While Protestant, Catholic, and secular school students, discontinued the AP exam in Latin litera- institutions differed on theology, in their emphasis on clas- ture. Fewer than 2,000 students sat to translate Cicero and sics they occupied common ground. parse the poetry of Catullus the last time the test was admin- Ever since the Middle Ages, a classical education had istered. Though an AP exam on Virgil remains, the College represented a synthesis of reason and virtue. Classical his- Board’s decision further marginalized classical studies in tory and literature presented a panoply of heroes to admire American education. and celebrate. Roman writers such as Cicero and the two This state of affairs would come as a shock to the Catos embodied not only the stern and self- denying virtues Founders. They believed that if a modern citizenry were to that appealed to Christian mentors but also republican val- benefit from the lessons of history, its members had to ues with special relevance to Americans, such as devotion know the history of Greece and Rome. And they viewed the to the commonwealth rather than to any special interest or young republic they were nurturing as in some ways a faction. Besides, the effort of mastering the rigorous logic rebirth of principles first implemented in the Roman and grammar required to conjugate Latin verbs and decline nouns was itself regarded as a tool to teach young people self- Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emer- itus at Oxford University and professor of history emeritus at the Univer- discipline. sity of California, Los Angeles. His book What Hath God Wrought: The It was, by and large, white males who filled seats in Transformation of America, 1815–1848 won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2008. classrooms and were therefore the beneficiaries of classical

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 31 Classical Education learning. But when secondary academies and colleges for put into the hands of the young student, can hardly fail to women began to appear in antebellum America, they taught imbue his mind with the principles of liberty, to inspire the Latin along with “feminine” pursuits including painting liveliest patriotism, and to excite [him] to noble and gen- and needlework, and the classical emphasis on elocution erous action, and are therefore peculiarly adapted to the inspired women’s rights activists such as Margaret Fuller. By American youth.” Modern history and modern foreign lan- the 1850s, a few schools in Northern cities offered a classi- guages were eventually offered as electives at most colleges cal education to young free African Americans. Missionar- before the Civil War, but classics, along with some required mathematics and science, remained the core disci- pline, as historian Carl J. AT THE UNIVERSITY of Virginia, Latin Richard documents in The Golden Age of the Classics remained the largest department as late as in America (2009). Dickinson College in the 1850s. Pennsylvania was typical: Freshmen studied Sallust, Horace, and Xenophon. ies among Native American people taught Latin as well as Sophomores absorbed themselves in Cicero, Horace, English in their schools, hoping to prepare some of the stu- Xenophon, and Euripides. Juniors took Sophocles, Euripi- dents to go on to college. More fundamentally, the mis- des, Cicero, Juvenal, and Perseus. And seniors finished off sionaries were introducing native people to all aspects of with Aeschylus, Tacitus, and Terence. Even at the Univer- Western civilization, from modern technology to Christi- sity of Virginia, famous for its elective system, students anity, and they considered classical learning basic to that had to pass a Latin exam to graduate, and as late as the 1850s project of assimilation. Latin remained the largest department. To be sure, there were those who agitated against Latin At the beginning of the 19th century, undergraduate in the schoolroom. Benjamin Franklin criticized the focus courses concentrated on the Latin and Greek languages on classical languages (though he was quite willing to make themselves. Students translated texts and wrote composi- rhetorical use of his own hard- won classical learning in his tions of their own in the ancient tongues. Educators inter- writings). Eventually, universities responded to calls for preted aptitude for such exercises as a measure of general more utilitarian training, establishing post graduate schools intelligence and believed that the texts provided models of of medicine, law, and divinity. At the undergraduate level, virtue and vice. Soon, however, teachers set students to the however, educators dug in their heels: The purpose of col- task of analyzing the content of the assigned texts and the lege was not to train students for a vocation, they insisted, values of classical civilization in general. They also began to but to improve their minds with a liberal education. Such devote more attention to Greek as compared with Latin, as an education was called “liberal” because it was intended to cultural historian Caroline Winterer notes in her elegant be liberating and hence suitable for a free person. (Liber book The Culture of Classicism (2001). The shift reflected means “free” in Latin.) a changing America. The Greeks appealed to the rising Romantic movement in literature and the arts. While the Romans had celebrated republican virtues, the Athenians he definitive defense of a traditional liberal edu- had embraced democracy and free thought. New attitudes cation that centered on classics appeared in the found new reasons for studying ancient times. T Yale Report of 1828, drafted in response to a From the Middle Ages until the late 19th century, knowl- request by the Connecticut legislature that the university edge of the classics thus provided educated people the do away with its Greek and Latin entrance requirements world over with a common frame of reference. Physicians in favor of modern languages. “The models of ancient lit- wrote their prescriptions in Latin; scientists still often pub- erature,” wrote Yale president Jeremiah Day, “which are lished research papers in Latin to ensure a worldwide audi-

32 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Classical Education

All eyes are on ancient Greece as Professor Herbert Wing Jr. instructs students at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania around 1945. But classical instruction in colleges across America was rapidly waning. In 1946, Dickinson stopped requiring bachelor of arts candidates to take Latin or Greek. ence of fellow professionals. Lawyers buttressed their argu- fewer than 35 towns were given classical names. ments with Latin phrases. Artists flattered their subjects by Classical standards were not only illustrative and deco- painting or sculpting them in togas. Architects designed rative but in at least some areas profoundly influential. The buildings in the increasingly fashionable Greek Revival authors of The Federalist justified balanced government, style that we sometimes call “Federal,” its Doric, Ionic, and which the Constitution embodied, by invoking Aristotle and Corinthian columns providing an idiom of dignity and Polybius. Later, Southern politician and noted orator John rationality to a variety of American structures, including C. Calhoun made use of classical political ideas in drafting plantation homes, courthouses, banks, and churches. The his own distinctive constitutional doctrines. Early American United States was self- consciously constructing itself as a voting requirements derived their legitimacy from classical modern version of a classical republic. Congress met in a philosophy. The ancient authorities had taught that a citi- Roman- style capitol, where in 1841 sculptor Horatio Gree- zen should be “virtuous,” meaning that he should be dedi- nough installed his famous statue of George Washington cated to the welfare of the commonwealth, not his own self- cast as the Greek god Zeus. (Within a few years, Victorian interest. Voting qualifications were designed to keep the sensibilities found Greenough’s half- naked Washington ballot in the hands of those who could exercise such civic discomfiting, and it was removed. The statue now resides virtue. Only men could demonstrate patriotic virtue through in the National Museum of American History.) Americans military service, so only men should vote. (Indeed, the word loved Greek and Roman names for new towns— Athens, “virtue,” like “virility,” derives from the Latin vir, meaning Rome, Troy, Corinth, Ithaca, Syracuse. In Ohio alone, no “man.”) And only persons capable of exercising independ-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 33 Classical Education ent judgment could attain public virtue. Hence, only men by modern teachers of rhetoric such as the Scottish profes- of property should vote, since (in the days before the secret sor Hugh Blair, whose work was widely followed in the ballot) a servant would vote as his master told him. United States. Public speaking was an art form, practiced Forty years ago, the eminent historian Gordon S. Wood by politicians, lawyers, preachers, lyceum lecturers, dra- asserted that the ratification of the U.S. Constitution marked matic actors, and high school students. Their stylized per- “the end of classical politics.” He has since backpedaled. In formances attracted audiences that were often large and sometimes all-too-passion- ately engaged. In 1849, the bloody Astor Place Riot left CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM remained 22 people dead after a dis- pute erupted between fans prominent in American education, culture, of two Shakespearean actors who had rival theatrical and political life until the Civil War. interpretations of Macbeth. Dedicating the cemetery on the battlefield of Gettys- truth, classical republicanism remained prominent in Amer- burg in November 1863, the famous orator Edward Everett ican education, culture, and political life until the Civil War. held forth for two hours. He described ancient Athenian Far from standing in opposition to the early Industrial Rev- funeral customs, particularly the burial of those who fell at olution, classical learning at first expanded in response to it. Marathon in graves on that historic battleground, and con- The new commercial middle class felt eager to acquire cluded by invoking Pericles’ tribute to the fallen of the Pelo- refinement, which it associated with classical knowledge. ponnesian War. Then President Lincoln delivered his two- Coins with a classical goddess depicting Liberty, Grecian minute address, perhaps the greatest piece of classical gowns for women, and home décor items such as mirrors oratory in American history. Without formal education, encased in classical columns were popular. Steam- powered Abraham Lincoln had absorbed the conventions of classi- presses mass- produced classical texts printed on inexpen- cal rhetoric through practical experience in law and politics. sive paper for consumption by an increasingly literate His address, as Garry Wills explains in Lincoln at Gettysburg public. (1992), demonstrated the Periclean model perfectly in its Both political parties exploited the classics to present “compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality, and their arguments. The Jacksonian Democrats played upon awareness of the deepest polarities in the situation.” Both the classical republican virtues of thrift and distaste for lux- speakers knew that the oratorical conventions they ury in their “war” on banks, especially the Bank of the employed would resonate with an audience steeped in the United States. Missouri Democratic senator Thomas Hart classical tradition. Benton invoked the upstanding farmers of Virgil’s Georgics Before the war, as the debate over slavery grew increas- to advocate pricing western public lands as low as possible; ingly bitter, Southerners had enjoyed a marked advantage his and fellow western congressmen’s efforts prevailed with when they appealed to the authority of the classics. Both the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Jacksonians’ Greeks and Romans had practiced slavery, and Aristotle lent rivals, the Whigs, employed classical republicanism to warn his philosophy to its justification (though he gave his game against the dangers of an overmighty executive and to advo- away when he admitted that slaves were capable of friend- cate balanced government. To them, Andrew Jackson’s rise ship). American defenders of slavery such as George to political power from a military background smacked of Fitzhugh, Thomas Dew, and George Frederick Holmes Caesarism. claimed that the enslavement of blacks undergirded the Classical ideals of rhetoric and oratory governed 19th- equality of white citizens in the South. They pointed to the century American practice. We still value eloquence, but in cultural and artistic triumphs of Greco- Roman civilization those days elocution was taught in school, according to as vindicating slave society. For their part, abolitionists rules laid down thousands of years earlier and transmitted made use of the ancient principle of natural law in their

34 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Classical Education arguments, but they usually invoked Enlightenment or texts, both within and without the classroom, the new Christian versions of it. Few abolitionists were willing to crit- printed media also undercut the relevance and authority of icize classical civilization for countenancing slavery, fewer to elite classical republicanism. celebrate the bloody slave revolt of 73 bc led by the Roman The revolution in communications made political opin- gladiator Spartacus. ions and debates more widely available. This broadened the opportunities for political participation, as more people could learn about candidates, issues, and the decisions of ven while the classics enjoyed what Carl J. Richard government. States responded by liberalizing suffrage calls their “golden age” of prominence in antebellum requirements and providing for presidential electors to be EAmerica, events were beginning to transform Amer- chosen by popular vote. No longer was political leadership ican life and politics. Although historians’ attention gener- to be confined to a leisure class whose members could ally has been focused on Jacksonian democracy, American afford to serve without salary. Nor did the classical ration- political culture was influenced at least as much by improve- ale for a property- based electorate carry conviction any ments in communications and transportation: the tele- longer. Literacy replaced civic virtue as the desirable char- graph, the railroad, the steamboat, and the steam- operated acteristic for a voter. Instead of a small- scale republic with printing press. The steam press, in combination with inno- the restricted citizenry of classical city- states, a continental vations in papermaking, facilitated the mass production of empire with a mass electorate now seemed plausible, even newspapers, magazines, and books, while the railroad and desirable. Political parties, which the classically influenced steamboat enabled their wide distribution. While these Founders had equated with factionalism and hoped to pre- advances encouraged the proliferation of Latin and Greek vent, seized the opportunities provided by the printed media

At the turn of the 20th century, black schoolchildren gaze on Horatio Greenough’s once-controversial statue of George Washington cast as Zeus.

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 35 Classical Education to distribute their pamphlets and broadsides. Improved tion, many great works of classical civilization are still read, means of transportation supported the parties’ traveling though now mostly in translation. The texts of Plato, Aris- election campaigns, whose songs, slogans, and parades totle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, and the Athen- resembled those employed by revivalists and circus ian playwrights are still studied in courses on literature, his- promoters. tory, and philosophy. While we accord them less authority But classical learning and respect for the virtues it taught than Americans did a century and a half ago, we still hold died hard. Displaced from politics and political philosophy, the conviction that the ancient classics have enduring worth classicism found a new purpose in private life. Classical as sources of instruction and inspiration. learning became a vehicle for self- cultivation, for the pur- As they did in the 19th century, today the Greeks seem suit not of public influence or civic participation but of per- to speak to us more profoundly than the Romans, having sonal perfection. Thus, the place of the ancient languages in originated many of the intellectual institutions we increas- a liberal education could be, and was, reaffirmed. Toward the ingly value as characteristically American: democratic pol- end of the 19th century, the ancient languages came to itics, natural science, and free inquiry, to name a few. In a share with modern languages a new category, “humanities,” recent memoir, Garry Wills looked back over his own clas- so named because they nurtured the student’s humanity and sical education, which culminated in a PhD at Yale. “Learn- helped realize his potential. ing classical Greek is the most economical intellectual The Greek and Roman classics have occupied a placein investment one can make,” he wrote. “On many things that definingAmerican culture exceeded in importance only by might interest one— law and politics, philosophy, oratory, the Enlightenment and Christianity. The first overt challenge history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama— there will be con- to their primacy in higher education came with the land- stant reference back to the founders of those forms in our mark Morrill Act of 1862, which established federally sub- civilization.” sidized land-grant colleges for the study of agriculture and engineering. But the general de- emphasis of classics in the U.S. educational system after the Civil War was a broad phe- here are still those among us who defend the value nomenon. Nor was it occasioned simply by the rise of nat- of classical learning. Ridgeview Classical Schools, a ural science. Carl J. Richard perceptively argues that it was T group of public charter schools in Fort Collins, Col- a consequence of a declining confidence in human reason orado, defines their mission this way: “So important has clas- and virtue that diminished respect for the ancient writers sical education been in the history of the West that it would and the heroes they celebrated. Moral relativism undercut only be a slight exaggeration to say that the march of civi- trust in the standards the classical authors had long lization has paralleled the vibrancy of classical schools.” At embodied. Ridgeview schools, Latin is mandatory starting in the sev- Study of the ancient languages and literature remained enth grade, and English itself is taught as a classical lan- important in American higher and secondary education for guage. The schools have so many applicants that admission about a century after classical republicanism began to lose is by lottery. its relevance to the American political system. As late as Ridgeview Classical does not seem to me merely an 1900, half the students in U.S. public high schools were tak- eccentric holdout against modern trends in education. I did ing Latin; then began a long, gradual decline. Classics had not myself enjoy the benefit of a classical education, though always had something of an elite image; after all, classical I studied Greek for a while as a gateway to the New Testa- knowledge was the hallmark of gentility. But in 20th- ment. But in learning about the history of classical educa- century America, elitism came to seem like an accusation tion in the United States, I have come to respect many of the one needed to deny. Parochial and private schools main- ideals for which it has so long stood, to believe that they tran- tained the classical standards longer than most public ones, scend the limitations of time and place, and to hope for their but much of the incentive for Catholic schools to do so was perpetuation. The neglect of classics in our educational removed in the 1960s, when the Mass ceased to be cele- curriculum has been a loss for our civilization. It is not sim- brated in Latin. ply the ancient languages themselves but the spirit in which But all is not lost. Despite their curricular marginaliza- they are studied that has value for students today. ■

36 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 THE CITY BOUNCES BACK

merica’s cities are moving in a new direction. A Many ur ban ills remain, but cities’ great progress in the battles against crime and other chron ic prob- lems has swept away the last cen tury’s sense of hopeless and ever-worsening urban crisis. The Amer i can city is not only re viv ing— it is reinventing it self for a new era.

Tom Vanderbilt on industry’s place Sarah L. Courteau on the front- in the new city...... p. 38 lines of gentrifi cation ...... p. 51

Witold Rybczynski on the variety David Zipper on the inner city’s retail of U.S. cities ...... p. 46 renaissance ...... p. 58

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 37 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Long Live the Industrial City

Today’s successful cities are often regarded strictly as idea labs where creative types gather. But as New York City’s garment district illustrates, manufacturing is vital to the innovation that cities foster.

BY TOM VANDERBILT

Against a wall in R&C Apparel’s crowded Immigrant laborers work on outdated machines in an factory, in an unremarkable building on 38th Street on old building in a well- worn neighborhood, doing the sort the far western edge of New York City’s garment district, of work one imagines was long ago outsourced to is a vast collection of sewing machines shelved with cheaper locations. Indeed, most of it has been. Even as curatorial precision. The collection could be in a New York City was gaining in stature as a fashion capi- museum— many of the machines were built far back in tal in the latter half of the 20th century, its share of U.S. the previous century, and are technically antiques. garment production underwent a full-tilt inversion, For Ramdat Harihar, the factory’s Guyana- born from a commanding 90 percent to less than 10 percent. owner, who began his career sweeping garment factory The story of this shift still haunts the district. “You floors, the machines are not obsolete, but tools for inno- couldn’t walk on the sidewalk,” says fabric wholesaler vation. With a little tinkering— and an arsenal of canni- Bryan Kramer, recalling the jostling traffic of garment balized parts— they can be used to create entirely novel racks that once crowded the streets. Rodger Cohen, the stitching effects, which find their way into the work of second- generation owner of Regal Originals, keeps a tan- leading American fashion designers such as Anna Sui gible totem of the decline: a Pleaters, Stitchers, and and Zac Posen. Sometimes, innovation demands using Embroiderers Association wall calendar from the 1980s machines for new purposes; in one instance, a that lists some 400 members. “I’m the only unionized microwave oven— and a dash of vinegar— helped create pleater left,” he says. Across the street from his office, a new pleat for Donna Karan. someone has hung in another office window a sign that R&C Apparel is in one sense an archetypal, almost reads “Save the Garment Center.” metaphorical, New York garment district business: In the several months I spent researching the dis- trict as part of a team organized by the Design Trust Tom Vanderbilt is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do for Public Space, I talked to everyone from designers (and What It Says About Us) (2008), and is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. to economists to one- man dress form manufacturing

38 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Museum pieces? Hardly. Ramdat Harihar, owner of R&C Apparel in New York City’s garment district, shows off one of the many old sewing machines that workers at his factory still use to produce innovative stitching effects for some of today’s top fashion designers. firms. (The team was convened in response to a pro- metric, three- dimensional sculpture, really— he shot posal to alter the garment district’s zoning that would back, “There is no learning curve. The man spent his have effectively killed the district off; the proposal life doing it. There’s nobody left who does it.” has since been tabled.) It was not hard to imagine But beneath the well- chronicled narrative of gar- myself as a kind of industrial Indiana Jones, mapping ment industry decline—perhaps captured most elo- the murky contours of a business hardly known for its quently in the elegiac homage to glove making in Philip transparency, plying dark warehouses where hulking Roth’s novel American Pastoral (1997)—I began to see machines sat mothballed, being handed business another set of truths: that the garment industry is still cards advertising long- abandoned embroidery crafts New York City’s largest manufacturing sector by employ- such as bonnaz, meeting workers whose average age ment; that the production, service, and supply busi- was just south of retirement. When I asked Cohen nesses that remain play a vital, if underappreciated, role what the learning curve was for a man who was work- in the larger fashion industry of New York; and that even ing on complex pleating patterns— intricately geo- with the emergence of instant communications and far-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 39 The City Bounces Back flung supply chains—not to mention the pressures exerted by landlords look- ing to convert industrial space into more profitable offices— there are still compelling reasons why this industrial network continues to cluster in midtown Manhattan. It has become fashion- able, in part due to the tireless work of urban studies theorist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and Who’s Your City? (2008), to think of cities as big idea labs— creativity skunkworks— where, in science writer Matt Ridley’s infectious phrase, “ideas have sex.” Often, perhaps in reaction to decades of prophecies Back in 1955, the sidewalks of New York’s garment district teemed with clothing racks and workers. Today, though over- of urban decline, this the- seas factories have drained away most of that business, the factories that remain are vital to the city’s fashion industry. orizing takes on the zeal of a crusade. You’d be forgiven for thinking no idea has ever in strategy.” Having manufacturing close to the locus of been hatched outside a metropolis. While not incor- creation isn’t simply a matter of convenience; the process rect, this theory is incomplete. Yes, cities are filled with of production can inform and shape the creative process the modern- day equivalent of the luftmenschen (literally, itself. So before another “industrial” loft is converted to people who “lived on air”), creatives who breathe Wi Fi. a fantasia of Bosch appliances and Brazilian teak floors, But in many sectors of the “creative industry,” there before another productive building becomes a mid range comes a point when something physical must be made, hotel for tourists, let us take a closer look. and when, because of financial or time constraints, it makes sense to have it produced locally. Where I live, in Brooklyn, the jewelry designer down the block may o understand how the garment district hangs need something fabricated in metal— and yesterday!— on, it is worth considering why New York and so will visit a fabrication shop in the Navy Yard; the T first became the nation’s center of garment craft beer that a table of graphic designers is consuming production— a mantle it claimed from the mid-19th was brewed down the street. century straight to the Nixon administration. I don’t have in mind the Industrial City of old, with Blessed with deep ports, water (and later rail) con- its huge buildings housing cardboard box factories, but nections to the rest of the United States, and easy rather, as the design critic Karrie Jacobs said in describ- access to oceans, New York City was a strategic nexus ing Brooklyn’s emerging manufacturing base, one that for the flow of goods, ideas, and people. As economist is “pre–industrial revolution in scale and post industrial Edward Glaeser notes, in garment production, as with

40 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back sugar refining— historically, the city’s second most better elsewhere? “People come to New York City prominent industry— it made sense to center produc- because they want to be in fashion, and fashion came tion at the point of entry for raw materials: textiles to New York because there were people who wanted from England, silk from the East. By 1860, more than 80 percent of textiles imported into the country TODAY, CITIES ARE filled with creatives came through New York. This concentration of who breathe WiFi. industry, with its talent and techniques, also sparked innovation; 19th- century New York gave birth to be in fashion,” says Simon Collins, dean of fashion to everything from ready- to-wear cloth ing to the Singer at the internationally regarded Parsons The New sewing machine. Even as New York’s role as a port School for Design. declined, apparel production remained strong (owing in part, Glaeser notes, to the city’s small footprint and the continuing surge of immigrant labor). eople come to be near other people— to draw But advances in communications and trans - upon their expertise, to exchange ideas, to com- portation— the real cost to ship goods dropped by Ppete. The power of proximity has long been roughly 95 percent over the 20th century— understood: the access to specialized knowledge and diminished New York City’s inherent geographic labor, the lower transaction costs, the “agglomeration advantage in manufacturing. This narrative is inter- effects” in which like breeds like. Large American cloth- woven in the personal history of any longtime “gar- ing retailers such as Wal- Mart and Kohl’s may produce mento,” shorthand for anyone who works in the busi- and sell globally, but they have design studios in New ness. Stuart Edelman, who makes outerwear for the York City. Firms locate in the same place to gain a sense upscale bag manufacturer Tumi, can trace an arc of what the competition is up to and to hire talent, to from working in his father’s business in the coat fac- benefit from the spontaneous interchange that can hap- tories on 12th Avenue, to moving to New Jersey in the pen in streets and elevators, while groupings of show- 1960s, to setting up production runs in South Korea rooms provide one- stop shopping for out- of- town buy- in the 1970s. “Imagine a world of no fax machines, no ers. “There is not a buyer who will go anywhere else,” says FedEx,” he says. “If we made a sketch and sent it over Danielle Shriber, owner and designer of the boutique to South Korea, it would take three or four weeks for fashion house Prairie New York. “People have trouble the package to get there.” Now, an e- mailed “tech getting buyers to go downtown. I’m on 38th between pack”—industry jargon for the specifications to Eighth and Ninth; most showrooms are on 39th assemble a garment— travels close to the speed of between Seventh and Eighth. They see one block as a big light, and FedEx deliveries from China arrive in two hurdle.” days. “We actually get it the next day, because of the Even in an age of e- mail and overnight deliveries, time difference,” Edelman notes. fashion has particular reasons for desiring proximity. The And so the question is not so much why the gar- industry requires a wide range of suppliers, specialized ment industry has shrunk and moved elsewhere, but services, and skilled producers. Bringing a garment from rather why there continues to be a garment district at sketch to rack requires the careful coordination of an all. In asking this, we might as well be asking why entire just- in- time chain of production, involving any cities continue to exist. “If we postulate only the usual number of intermediate steps (that often involve work- economic forces,” observed economist Robert Lucas, ing face to face), on a ruthlessly tight schedule. “It takes “cities should fly apart.” Why would young designers a lot of people to get something made,” says designer scrape by in New York when they could materially live Shelley Steffee. “Even if it’s 12 garments. There are so

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 41 The City Bounces Back many hands that touch that garment.” shortened the lead times in China— we have. But there’s “Hand” is one of the garment district’s enduring a lot more logistics that need to happen from 12,000 metaphors. It begins with the “hand of the designer,” of miles away than from 12 blocks away.” As Edward course—the sketch that animates the idea. But this Glaeser notes in his new book The Triumph of the City, design does not develop in a vacuum. “There’s a naiveté one thing cities do well is eliminate the “curse of complex to believing that a designer can do it alone,” declares communication.” Nanette Lepore, designer of a brand that bears her name And as any Project Runway viewer knows from those and has 11 boutique shops around the world. Clothes trips to Mood Designer Fabrics, the massive garment dis- require skilled hands. Hands to trace the patterns, hands trict emporium where the reality TV show’s contestants to cut the fabric, hands to do the draping, hands to sew, scout for chiffon and charmeuse, it’s important to have hands to embroider, hands to fashion the intricate geom- the raw materials of fashion within easy reach. Fabric etry of pleat patterns, hands to do specialized work such needs to be touched. “It’s not a flat medium you’re work- ing in,” says veteran designer Anna Sui. “When you gather a piece of fabric, NEW YORK CITY’S RISE as a global sometimes because of the thickness of it or the lofti- fashion hub can be traced to a critical mass ness or the bounceability of it, you never know how of manufacturers, suppliers, and artisans. it’s going to react.” Proximity comes at a price, of course, one that as grading and marking, hands to carry all this back and large- scale manufacturers— or the consumers who buy forth. The work has an elegant tactility. In one shop, a their products—typically do not seem willing to pay. worker puts polished stones on a fabric to smooth it out But judging from what’s said by midrange designers before cutting. In another, a worker uses sticks as weights who work in the garment district, selling clothes not for as he rolls up a pleat pattern on a cardboard tube that will several thousand dollars but several hundred, the asser- “bake” in a hulking steam oven. In still another, a seam- tion that it’s too expensive to make things in New York stress deftly manipulates a complicated smocking City isn’t so iron clad. Prairie New York proprietor machine, like a conductor working in colored thread Shriber says that while quality is her main reason for rather than music. working locally, overseas production prices aren’t much The closer these hands are, the shorter the transit cheaper. “By the time you pay your customs duties, air time, and the greater the control the designer can exer- freight, you’re pretty much at the same dollar amount.” cise over the final product. Fashion is an intensely iter- As evidenced by the recent trend toward “onshoring,” in ative process in which time becomes an obstacle. “When which companies including Caterpillar and General you move into higher- end design, there is so much spon- Electric have said they will recall some of the manufac- taneous creativity happening that you don’t want to turing they have done in China to the United States, a wait a month to see your garments,” says Tina Schenk, whole host of issues— rising transportation and pro- owner of the pattern- making company Werkstett. “One duction costs, a weak dollar, quality control irregulari- design is based on another. You want to keep the process ties, intellectual property troubles— lay along the inex- going, you want to continuously look at the things that orable drift toward the low- wage periphery. you’ve been designing.” Andrew Rosen, a third- All of this is not to propose that New York City is generation garmento who founded Theory, a fashion poised to regain its stature as an apparel manufacturing company that now grosses half a billion dollars a year, giant, or even that it should. But as the critical mass of remarks, “Just from an efficiency point of view, I can manufacturers, suppliers, artisans, and technicians that make clothes faster here. Which is not to say we haven’t remains is increasingly threatened by redevelopment

42 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back

Designers such as Nanette Lapore (left) don’t come up with their fashions in a vacuum. Here, she consults with a worker at a garment district factory. and rising rents, it seems evident that the potential Of course, as Elizabeth Currid, an urban planning impacts range beyond the loss of jobs or the loss of scholar at the University of Southern California, points skills. What’s at stake is that layer of infrastructure, little out in The Warhol Economy (2007), these sorts of seen but elemental, that has helped enable New York’s creative exchanges are not purely economic in nature. rise as a global fashion hub. “Agglomeration may be even more important to main- The reason a city like New York still thrives, even after taining the social mechanisms by which the cultural losing most of its industrial base, argues Richard Florida, economy sustains itself,” she writes. The key to under- is that economic success “no longer revolves around standing urban economics in the future, some argue, simply making and moving things.” Instead, he writes, is in so- called non market interactions— for example, “it depends on generating and transporting ideas.” Just an essential ingredient of success in the fashion indus- as neuroscientists speculate that higher intelligence cor- try is being around other people in the fashion indus- relates with the number of network connections between try, both at work and at play. New York City has neurons in the brain and the speed with which they become what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls a “post - communicate, the cities that function best are those industrial production site.” It is a place built for the with the “highest velocity” of ideas, and the most efficient spread of ideas. What the successful 21st- century city and robust links between people. In fashion, ideas not now produces is innovation itself. only need materials and manufacturing processes to Few cultural enterprises are as driven by innova- take shape, but arise from the interplay of designers tion as fashion. “The first thing a customer asks when and manufacturers itself. The closer the connections, the they come into a store is, ‘What’s new?’” says Ron faster and more productive that interplay is. Frasch, president and chief merchandising officer of

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 43 The City Bounces Back the upscale department store chain Saks. “They don’t to a creative industry of immense importance to New want to know what was, they want to know what is.” York City. And while cheap transport and labor means As a cultural product, fashion has a perilously short manufacturing can be done anywhere, service sectors shelf life. “We will sell 60 percent of what we’re going such as law and public relations— and, I would sug- to sell in the first four weeks the goods are on the gest, fashion— still tend to cluster, notes economist Jed Kolko, “because most services involve at least some face- to- face inter- CITIES DRIVE CREATIVITY because action.” The service suppliers they bring together three vital ingredients: of the garment district act as an informal incubator. mutation, error, and serendipity. That word may conjure gleaming Silicon Valley office parks more than it floor,” Frasch says. “That fact hasn’t changed in my does old buildings with dodgy elevators, but the end entire career.” result is the same: Ideas and infrastructure get pro- But what makes innovation happen, in terms of vided to start- ups. While the rise of New York City both inspiration and execution? Inspiration speaks to fashion is indelibly linked to names such as Ralph the intrinsic qualities of New York City: a willingness Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, whose brands now do to accept new people and ideas, proximity to others most of their manufacturing overseas, their busi- drawn by these self- selecting qualities, and the fast nesses didn’t begin abroad. Most young and emerg- transmission of ideas. The world’s great fashion ing designers start their careers working out of apart- capitals— Paris, Milan, London, now Shanghai— also ments, using money borrowed from family and happen to rank among the world’s leading financial friends, working in quantities that are well below an capitals. Like fashion, finance is dependent upon the order that any overseas factory would accept, and fast transmission of information. (Even as face- to- often under sharp time constraints. face trading has declined on Wall Street, firms are co- The garment district firms do more than simply locating the data centers of their automated trading supply needed services; their role extends to every- operations in New Jersey because even on the Inter- thing from knowledge transfer to financing to simple net physical proximity equals speed.) That those four moral support. Hence the value of specialized trades- cities also happen to be their countries’ media capi- men such as Paul Cavazza, who runs Create- a- tals illustrates people’s desire to be close to that infor- Marker, a grading and marking service. (In the gar- mation, to report and transmit it. And so the city ment trade, grading is the creation of patterns for itself, ever novel, ever regenerating, looms as an each size of an item of clothing, while marking is the inspiration. art and science of cutting patterns to minimize fab- ric wastage.) “I had a young designer walk in here last night,” Cavazza told me. “He’s just starting his line. He hich brings us back to Ramdat Harihar came in here at six. I was here with him until 8:30, and his sewing machines. Some might walking him through grading and marking.” W regard him as a vestige of a marginal The garment district doesn’t merely provide a industry. But Harihar— and all of the other manu- seedbed for the young designers who drive fashion; facturers, specialized tradespeople, suppliers, and the iterative process conducted in proximity helps other workers who constitute the district— can also be innovation itself happen. Quick turnarounds give seen not simply as cogs in the production business, designers test labs of a sort, with the final product but as suppliers of a vital set of value- added services often shaped by the manufacturers themselves.

44 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back

“When you’re working on a higher- end collection,” brassiere was born. Eventually, the bras became so says designer Shelley Steffee, sewers and pattern popular that Rosenthal and her partners quit making makers “are almost like designers themselves.” They dresses altogether. The service became a product, help solve design problems, figure out ways to reduce which became the lingerie company Maidenform. As costs in ramping up to larger- scale production, and Jacobs wrote, “New work arises upon existing work.” even introduce new techniques. Another designer, Yes, the company left New York, but what’s important Yeohlee Teng, says, “You could have a design you is maintaining the conditions— such as the chains of want cut in a certain way, and your designer could contractors and producers— that help get such ideas turn around and tell you, ‘I can get better yardage if off the ground. you turn this piece around.’ ” In her fall collection last This sort of innovation is often unpredictable, and year, Teng used a sort of double- pleated “checker- not nestled within clearly delineated boundaries. board” technique in a dress. This pleat came from “When new work is added to older work,” Jacobs Regal Originals, Rodger Cohen’s shop, just down the wrote, “the addition often cuts ruthlessly across cate- block. As Cohen told me, one of his workers acci- gories of work.” A little over a year ago, Stoll, a German dentally fed an already- pleated piece of fabric into a manufacturer of knitting machines, opened a facility machine, creating a striking effect. This mistake, in a ground- floor storefront on West 39th Street. made on a cluttered, ancient factory floor, has been While its latest high- tech machines silently hum in the transformed into valuable inputs in the image econ- front window, the place does not exist to sell machines. omy of global fashion. Rather, it is part showroom, part boutique production facility, part technical institute. Faced with a con- stricting customer base for its machines, Stoll was utation, error, serendipity: These are the looking for a way to build its brand and its sales. The ingredients that drive creativity, argues the company identified a market for providing what it Mpopular-science writer Steven Johnson in terms “fast- track samples”—quick one- off proto - Where Good Ideas Come From (2010)—and nowhere types— to the myriad designers in the garment district, more so than in cities, where ideas, drawn from vari- offering a benefit in time and quality versus sending ous subcultures crowded together, leak into a “liquid things abroad. There is no more common complaint network” and “influence their neighbors in surprising among designers than sample quality. The decreased ways.” Shana Tabor, a young designer who heads the turnaround time makes new things possible. Brooklyn- based In God We Trust accessories bou- Creativity in fashion, as in any art, can originate tique, says, “I love days when I’m in the garment dis- anywhere, or come from anything: a splash of color on trict, going up on an elevator to some place, and the a billboard, the movement of a symphony, sunlight door accidentally opens on a floor— and you’re like, dappling through trees, even a new stitch. It is not sur- ‘What are you guys doing in here?’ ” With each level prising that cities tend to be hubs of creativity— there come new possibilities. are more things and people to be inspired by, more The cluttered floor of Regal Originals, filled with knowledge transfer, and, importantly, more ways to machines whose own manufacturers have long gone bring this creativity into actuality. The point, it seems, out of business, is a kind of proof to the late urban is less preserving this or another industry for its own critic Jane Jacobs’s famous dictum, “New ideas need sake, or even championing the idea that people are old buildings.” It was the garment industry of New making things in cities, than enabling the seedbeds York City that provided Jacobs, in her classic text The that help create and sustain the empire of images and Economy of Cities (1969), with a compelling story of aura that is New York City’s fashion industry. The loss how innovation— creative, technological, market— of even a single fabric supplier, like a ripple in a pond, occurs. In the 1920s, a dressmaker named Ida Rosen- is felt everywhere. “It’s like a coral reef,” says designer thal began creating cupped undergarments as a serv- Teng. “You don’t know how the reef will survive and ice to help her clients achieve a better fit. The modern what it will do if certain elements are removed.” ■

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 45 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Dense, Denser, Densest

Americans like their cities spacious. Will concerns about costs and the environment push them to rein in sprawl?

BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

Last fall, Foreign Policy published what it called a global cities index, a list of 65 world cities ranked according to a variety of economic, cultural, and social indicators. Compiled by the consulting firm A. T. Kear- ney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the index measures business activity, the size of capital markets, the United States had no less than six cities in the top and the flow of goods through airports and ports. It 20—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles (in the top 10), also takes into account cultural and information as well as San Francisco, Washington, and Boston. resources such as the number of performance venues, the Lists such as these have become commonplace, and extent of broadband access, international coverage in the American cities are often among the top ranked. It is local press, the degree of political engagement as meas- hardly surprising that the United States contains so ured by the number of think tanks and conferences, many leading global cities; after all, it is an economic and university enrollment and education levels. The superpower and a very large country. What is striking is 2010 list predictably included global powerhouses and that these cities are physically so different— large as well national capitals such as London, Paris, and Tokyo, but as small, old as well as new, horizontal as well as verti- cal, and sprawling as well as concentrated. Clearly there Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of is no one- size- fits- all American urban template. Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (2010). Consider New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.

46 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The popular image of New York, the oldest of the three, Los Angeles may look like the capital of sprawl, but it is more is of a small island crammed with skyscrapers. The real- densely populated than metropolitan New York. Diversity in density and other traits is a hallmark of American cities. ity is different. Manhattan is at the heart of a metropol- itan region that stretches over parts of three states, more than 3,000 square miles of cities, suburbs, and small New York’s. The Angeleno city fathers have worked hard towns. Even within the five boroughs there is consider- to create a distinct downtown— with limited success so able variety between, say, Queens, where homeowner- far— and Los Angeles continues to be a city of many sub - ship is the norm, and Manhattan, where a majority of centers (in that sense, at least, it resembles London). residents are tenants. Unlike London, Los Angeles is not a walkable city, yet it Compared to New York, Los Angeles is very new; 100 is dense, with mile upon mile of cheek- by- jowl dingbats, years ago the city had barely 100,000 inhabitants. Met- boxy two- and three- story apartment buildings. ropolitan Los Angeles has a reputation as a sprawling, Washington resembles neither Los Angeles nor New spread- out place, yet its urbanized area is half the size of York. Although there are tall buildings in Rosslyn, Vir-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 47 The City Bounces Back ginia, just across the Potomac, downtown Washington addition, density dictates the type of mass transit that is has no high buildings at all, thanks to the District of viable— buses, streetcars, light rail, or subways. Yet den- Columbia’s roughly 10-story height limit. Historically, sity is not always what it appears to be. Los Angeles, many American cities had height limits— Los Angeles as somewhat counter intuitively, is extremely dense. So are late as 1957. The difference is that in Washington, thanks San Francisco and New York. Chicago is somewhere in to congressional inertia, between; Washington, the height restriction has given its height re - persisted, making Wash- America’s Global Cities striction— and the low ington look more density of its suburban Population Area Density Parisian than American. (millions) (sq. miles) (inhabitants/sq. mile) fringe— is further down The skyline consists of Los Angeles 12.9 1,667 7, 738 the list, although denser civic landmarks rather San Francisco 4.3 526 8,175 than either sprawling than skyscrapers— the New York 19.1 3,335 5,728 Chicago or Boston, a Washington Monument Chicago 9.6 2,122 4,524 small city surrounded by standing in for the Eiffel Washington 5.5 1,156 4,758 extremely low- density Tower— and downtown Boston 4.6 1,735 2, 657 suburbs. is dominated by bulky Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Of course, the gross office and apartment density of an entire buildings. This mid-rise urbanized region is a pattern extends quite far toward the periphery, instead crude measure. Boston (low gross density) and San Fran- of dropping off quickly to single- family houses, as it cisco (high gross density) both have walkable, high- energy does in most American cities. centers and a relatively large number of downtown resi- dents. The low and compact historic cities of George- town and Alexandria in the D.C. metropolitan area also hat about the other top- rated cities? Chicago’s have high residential densities, and the highest employ- downtown Loop is as clearly defined as ment density is in the capital’s mid- rise center, not Vir- W Manhattan— and similarly vertical— but the ginia’s thriving Rosslyn- Ballston corridor or the outlying flat midwestern topography has allowed the urbanized edge city of Tysons Corner, as one might expect. Although area to extend unchecked in three directions— north, Los Angeles has a high gross density, its small downtown south, and especially west, far past O’Hare Airport. As a has only half as many residents as Chicago’s. And of the six result, Chicago covers a larger area than any of the other major cities, Los Angeles has the lowest share of workers six leading American cities except New York. The historic using mass transit, since, unlike New York, Washington, center of Boston is compact and walkable, and although and San Francisco, it lacks sufficiently high concentrations there are some skyscrapers, there is no memorable skyline. of people living within walking distance of transit stops. On the other hand, metropolitan Boston spreads out The role of mass transit in cities is a reminder that more than either Los Angeles or Houston. Of the six urban density affects sustainability. It has been estimated global American cities, San Francisco is the outlier; not just that a Manhattanite’s carbon footprint is a third smaller the hilliest city, it is also the smallest in area. Hemmed in than that of the average American. Dense urbanization by water on three sides (as Oakland is contained by moun- conserves resources in many ways: Urban buildings, tains), metropolitan San Francisco is less than a third the whether apartments or row houses, are more compact and area of Boston, and packs in more inhabitants per square energy efficient; amenities are concentrated, which mile than any of the six global cities. encourages walking; and public transit becomes an option. For that great analyst of urban life, Jane Jacobs, den- But even the densest American urban regions are not sity was a critical measure of a city’s vitality. Indeed, den- very dense compared to those of Europe. Greater Paris, for sity affects the energy of streets and other public spaces, example, covers only about 1,000 square miles, and has a as well as the variety of amenities a city can support. In gross density of 10,000 inhabitants per square mile.

48 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back

Residents stroll on a greenway in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte’s very low population density is typical of many fast-growing U.S. cities.

Greater London, confined to 600 square miles, is even Suburban densification is more challenging. In denser, with about 12,850 inhabitants per square mile. Philadelphia, where I live, it was common practice in the And the density of Asian cities such as Singapore is even mid-20th century to subdivide large suburban estates higher than that. By comparison, the gross density of a typ- into communities of single- family houses, but such open ical American urbanized area is about 2,500 inhabitants spaces in the suburbs are increasingly rare. Neighbor- per square mile. hoods of single- family housing can be made denser by There are a number of ways in which American cities building clusters of smaller houses on what were previ- could become denser. In vertical downtowns, tall buildings ously large single- house lots, or by introducing row houses could simply get taller, or older office towers could be or low- rise apartment buildings. Both strategies involve converted to residential use, as has happened in some busi- radical changes to neighborhood identity, however. Per- ness districts. The most common form of urban densifi- haps the greatest challenge will be to increase density in cation is the conversion of disused waterfronts, de - the large planned- unit communities that have proliferated commissioned Navy yards, and obsolete industrial areas in the past few decades. In these, any change is con- into housing and office developments, an attractive strat- strained by homeowner associations in which even a small egy since it does not displace existing residents. In older minority of members can effectively block alterations they city neighborhoods, taller structures could progressively find objectionable. replace three- or four-story row houses and low apartment But after a century of spreading out, will Americans buildings, though community resistance makes this a change their minds and draw together? Some observers slow process. maintain (hope) that the current economic recession will

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 49 The City Bounces Back encourage (force) home buyers to demand smaller homes ing about these new growing cities is that they are much less and more densely planned communities. This result would rather than more dense. New York (the city, not the metro- be unusual, since previous recessions have not had simi- politan region) contains 26,000 inhabitants per square lar effects. Consumers generally have short memories. mile, San Francisco 16,000, Chicago and Boston 12,000, Following the energy crisis of 1973, for example, Ameri- and Washington and Los Angeles slightly fewer, but the new cans switched to smaller cars, but by 1984, when prices at cities of the South and West rarely surpass 3,000 inhabitants the pump had dropped, gas- guzzling minivans appeared, per square mile, and the fast-growing city of Charlotte, soon to be followed by SUVs. In any case, choosing where North Carolina, has fewer than that. Jane Jacobs’s teaching notwithstanding, we appear to be spreading out. The latest U.S. Census MANY AMERICANS WILL make fresh figures reveal that during the last decade, suburban areas sacrifices rather than embrace life in outstripped cities in popula- tion gains. Moreover, The denser urban areas. New York Timesreports that “more than a third of all 13.3 million new suburbanites one lives has never been a strictly economic proposition. were Hispanic, compared with 2.5 million blacks and 2 mil- It is always a trade- off among the affordability of housing, lion Asians.” At the same time, the immigrant populations the length of commutes, the quality of neighborhood of small towns and suburbs increased the most, while those amenities— especially schools— and preferred lifestyles. of the big cities remained flat, reversing the historical pat- During the last decade, proponents of downtown liv- tern of the past. Jobs and cheaper housing are strong ing pointed to an increase in downtown residential con- magnets. struction as a harbinger of an urban renaissance, but empty condominiums in cities such as Miami and Chicago suggest that this boom was a product of the housing bub- hanges in migration trends are a reminder that ble rather than a signal of a significant change in home Americans have always shown a capacity to buyers’ preferences. Similarly, the fact that the average size Cadapt. For example, when energy prices spiked of new suburban houses— and lots— has recently shrunk in the summer of 2008, people quickly tightened their for the first time in decades may be less meaningful than belts, driving less, walking more, turning down their air it is made out to be. In a recession, the only customers are conditioners, and shutting off the lights. It is certainly first- time buyers who can afford only modest homes possible that the cold recessionary shower will dampen (which qualify for Federal Housing Administration mort- earlier exuberance and accelerate a shift to urban living, gages, the chief form of housing finance during economic at least among young college graduates and higher- downturns). Meanwhile, larger houses are not being built income retirees. The question is whether the rest of us because move- up home buyers are unable to sell their will embrace denser and more compact suburbs and homes in today’s weak housing market. cities, or whether we will depend on technological fixes New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston such as electric and hybrid cars, more efficient heating grew modestly during the last two decades. (The size of and cooling systems, and alternative energy sources. I Chicago and Washington hardly changed.) While these suspect the answer will be a bit of both. Some people will cities did better than the rustbelt cities, whose populations embrace urban density, but many will make sacrifices in continue to shrink, younger cities such as Colorado Springs, order to continue the decentralized way of life they pre- Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Charlotte almost doubled in pop- fer. The heterogeneity that has always characterized ulation during the same period, and Phoenix, San Antonio, American cities will continue to produce many different and Albuquerque grew by more than a third. What is strik- solutions to suit a large and diverse nation. ■

50 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

New to the Neighborhood

How can you be called an urban pioneer when you move to an inner-city neighborhood where families have lived for generations?

BY SARAH L. COURTEAU

A year ago I moved into a row house in north- lightning rod for debates about the evolution of our cities. east Washington, D.C., two miles from the Capitol. I paid Last year, a study published in the Journal of Urban $85,000, a price so low it’s a punch line in a city where the Economics found evidence of gentrification during the average home sells for more than $600,000. The hot water 1990s in the majority of the country’s 72 largest metro- heater was missing, and the bathroom tub drained into a politan areas. But few places match the galloping pace of downstairs closet. My house inspector, a dead ringer for the gentrification in the nation’s capital. In the last 10 years, gravel- voiced actor Sam Elliott, tramped silently from room Washington’s population has grown by five percent, after to room, occasionally pausing to pronounce, “It’s not proper.” steadily shrinking since 1950. The white population is up The house was in foreclosure and had been vacant for a cou- by nearly a third. Since the 1960s blacks have been a ple of years, so when I found crayons under the old carpet, majority in the District of Columbia, but that balance will I was spared the guilt of imagining them in still- young fin- likely shift in the next few years. gers. But once, someone had loved this place. The backyard Unlike places such as Harlem in New York City, where bloomed with rosebushes staked with weathered shoelaces. yuppies have snapped up decrepit but once- grand brown- With an FHA- backed loan and a savvy contractor, I gutted stones, my neighborhood, which was originally settled by the house and renovated it. I found myself realizing a dream European immigrants, has always been working class. My I’d assumed was miles out of reach: I was a homeowner. two- bedroom is less than 800 square feet, upstairs and down, and lacks a basement. I love the neighborhood— known as Rosedale, after the recreation center on the next white, single professional in my thirties, I moved block— and feel proud and a little defiant to have pulled into a neighborhood of modest houses that is off a financial coup that’s landed me a comfortable life in A almost 90 percent black and where about a third a place that some relatives and friends, and, especially, taxi of the population lives below the poverty line. I’m a gen- drivers (who collectively form a modern Greek chorus of trifier, a category of urban resident that has become a prophetic doom) describe as “sketchy.” But it’s with a mixture of pride and embarrassment that I hear myself Sarah L. Courteau is literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly. called an urban pioneer. Because, of course, this is a

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 51 The City Bounces Back

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968, rioters wreaked havoc on H Street N.E. in Washington, D.C. For decades the corridor was a virtual wasteland. long- settled neighborhood. It’s only new to me. ward, though some businesses reopened, many dam- Many of my neighbors have lived in Rosedale for aged buildings remained vacant. The street was a mute decades, and others can trace their roots back genera- reminder of social failure. Still, life went on. There were tions. They remember when the neighborhood was a summer go- go concerts and afternoons at the Rosedale mix of blacks and whites, before whites began to pick up pool. Kids played in the streets under the watchful eyes and leave in the middle of the last century. They remem- of all the adults in the neighborhood. The 1970s saw the ber when blacks did their shopping on H Street because beginnings of the drug and crime epidemics that would they weren’t welcome in downtown department stores. become full- blown in the ’80s. People started referring to They remember when the Rosedale playground was parts of the neighborhood as “Vietnam,” and residents desegregated, largely due to the efforts of local resident installed bars on their windows and locked doors they’d Walter Lucas, who one day in 1952 led a group of black once left unlatched. In 1980, James Hill, the proprietor children over to play and was beaten and then arrested of Hill’s Market, where people sent their kids never wor- along with one of his assailants. They remember the rying that they’d be shortchanged and old folks could buy riots that tore the area apart for three days after the food on credit, was shot to death in an argument over assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and left change for a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes. the area’s commercial spine, H Street, in smoking ruins. After the riots, recalls 45- year- old Necothia Bowens, Fifty-year-old Stephon Starke recalls that word went out who lives in a house on E Street N.E. that her great- that businesses would be spared only if they displayed a grandparents occupied, the area was abandoned by city picture of King in the window. His father had put a pic- authorities. Their attitude, she says, was, “Well, you did ture in the window of their house, but not at the liquor this. It’s your mess to clean up.” No longer. In 2004, the store he owned off H Street. Two Great Danes kept the D.C. government approved a major redevelopment plan store safe, but many other black- owned businesses did calling for more than $300 million in (mostly private) not survive. investment in the mile- long commercial corridor of H H Street was in decline even before the riots. After- Street that runs from Second Street N.E. to the Maryland

52 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back

Today, businesses are opening, nightlife has returned, and newcomers are moving to the area. Here, people wander H Street during a 2009 festival.

Avenue intersection, three blocks from my house. to decry the changes in working- class London neigh- Today, H Street is an obstacle course of bulldozers borhoods. Though the word has only been in circulation and construction signs. An extensive streetscape project for a few decades, gentrification has become another of is under way, and track is being laid for a streetcar sys- the litmus test issues that define who we are on the polit- tem that next year will connect this once- deteriorated ical and— in the eyes of some— moral spectrum. artery to the Union Station transportation hub. Most The lines of conflict are readily apparent in the evenings, young white partiers from other parts of the comments readers leave on blogs that cover Wash- city and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs crowd into ington’s transitional neighborhoods. Some writers are a string of new bars. During the day, foot traffic is sparser, angry that the neighborhood is changing at all; others and many of the faces are black. Muggings and break- are angry that it isn’t changing fast enough. Some ins do occur, but at about the same rate as in other parts want to control the change, ensuring that a curated of the city. A Rosedale gang known as the E Street mix of businesses is established— no chain stores, Bangers is reportedly still active, though the only evi- please, but nothing too “ghetto,” either. And some dence I’ve seen of it is in graffiti. Serious violent crime is want to curate the people. Gentrification, though rare, and bar-goers and new residents are seldom targets. driven by economic change, often boils down to issues Long- abandoned buildings ring with the sound of of race, even among diversity- celebrating gentrifiers. pounding hammers, and a luxury apartment complex is Elise Bernard, a 32- year- old lawyer who bought a rising on a vacant lot where a Sears once stood. house off H Street in 2003, has for years written intel- ligently and reliably about the area on her blog Frozen Tropics. Bernard, who is white, recalls a conversation he very origin of the word “gentrification” to she had with a college friend when she was contem- describe the process by which an urban area is plating renting out a couple of rooms in her house. T rendered middle class is not neutral. The eminent “She wanted me to somehow racially balance the sociologist Ruth Glass is credited with coining it in 1964 house, like bring in an African American and an Asian,

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 53 The City Bounces Back and I’m like, ‘This is not The Real World. This is my preneur just shy of 50. He recalls that when he arrived on house.’ ” H Street several years ago, after putting his quirky stamp When I started reading Frozen Tropics, I was taken on other parts of the city, “every block had a barbershop aback by the racial tension running through many of or a hair weave operation, a takeout, and a church. Other the discussions. Most of the comments appear to be left than that, you didn’t have more than three or four busi- by whites, though anonymity reigns. Last summer, when nesses per block.” He opened his first club, Palace of Bernard posted news of gunfire (no one was injured) out- Wonders, a tongue- in- cheek burlesque bar, in 2006. side XII, an H Street club that attracts a largely black Today he has a stake in half a dozen establishments on H Street. Englert’s aggres- sively funky imprint has made the street an enter- THE KNOWLEDGE that I’m a sign of tainment mecca for people in search of an alternative change my neighbors may not want has to clubs with dress codes. A brash Pittsburgh made me cautious behind my “Hello.” native who exudes a slightly unruly aura of intense activ- ity, Englert has no patience clientele, the item drew more than 70 comments. “Post with hand- wringing over gentrification, or “gentri- fiction,” all the ‘oh it could have happened anywhere’ nonsense you as he calls it. “The only thing that is constant is change,” he want, bleeding hearts,” sneered one anonymous writer. says when he meets me for an interview at the Star and “This type of crap only happens at joints like XII. . . . Cater Shamrock, a Jewish- and Irish-themed bar that’s another to a predominately younger, black, male population, and one of his projects. “This was an Irish street, an Italian violence will likely follow.” Another, enraged by the “enti- street, a Jewish street, then it became a black street. Why tled racist yuppie mentality” of the neighborhood, wrote, would it stop changing? That’s the question. Why would “May your home values go to shit and may you each find anybody expect things to stay the same, when people live, a Burger King wrapper on your lawn!” die, move, improve their lives? I mean, who’s gonna dig in Absent in most of these discussions are the voices of and own the mantle?” those who have lived in the neighborhood all along. I’ve As an agent of change myself, I nod my head in agree- been met with abundant kindness since I moved to ment. Walking down H Street, it’s hard not to feel a Rosedale. Still, as I ride beside local residents on the bus heady sense of inevitability. Change! Progress! And to or pass them in the street, the knowledge that I’m a sign hold the conviction that all the choices I make about of change they may have mixed feelings about has made how I live—the way I keep up my yard, the restaurants me cautious behind my “Hello.” As I prepared to write this and shops I patronize, the kinds of foodstuffs I buy at the piece, I was struck time and again by people’s willingness local grocery store— are contributions to a joint project of to talk to me, a gentrifier who had moved into their incremental improvement that’s spread among thou- neighborhood and was, in essence, asking how they felt sands of households. about it. Thelma Anderson, a retiree who has lived in the And then, walking home laden with groceries, I watch house a few doors down from me since the 1980s, told me a tall teenage boy in front of me drop a crumpled white she is glad that whites are back and that they don’t show plastic bag, so casually that it seems it’s drifted from his fear. But several longtime residents I spoke with hand because he forgot he was holding it. It falls onto the expressed ambivalence. They’re happy to see the neigh- sidewalk, where it slowly relaxes into uselessness. It is now borhood improving but unsure what their place will be a piece of trash. I ponder whether to stoop and pick it up in the H Street neighborhood of the future. and throw it into a nearby trash can. Wouldn’t that con- The man who’s probably done the most to re- envision stitute a censure not only of him, should he turn around H Street is Joe Englert, a restaurant and nightclub entre- and see me, but of the whole neighborhood, where trash

54 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back

with displacement. Adding to the subtext of forced relocation are bit- ter memories of inner- city revival efforts. The federal urban renewal program, engineered to usher the American city into postwar Corbusier- style order and moder- nity, destroyed some 1,600 black communities in American down- towns between 1949 and 1973, estimates Mindy Thomp son Fullilove, the author of Root Shock (2004) and a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia. The federal highway program also restructured many cities, razing swaths of poor neigh- borhoods and providing an easy route along which middle- class The bitter memory of past urban renewal efforts colors perceptions of gentrification. In this artist’s whites and blacks who were leav- depiction, a ruthless farm combine chews up old neighborhoods and spits out new towers. ing for the suburbs could still com- mute to downtown jobs. blows into streets and yards and forms middens in alley- Quality studies of the residential impacts of gentrifi- ways? But wouldn’t walking by it be a kind of acquies- cation are few, but those that exist largely don’t support cence? It’s this sort of minute social calculus that’s the the notion that low- income residents are forced out of mark of the self- conscious gentrifier, not quite sure of her gentrifying areas en masse. In the study published in status in the community. the Journal of Urban Economics, a trio of researchers that included University of Pittsburgh economist Randall Walsh analyzed nationwide Census data and found no hites aren’t the only drivers of gentrification. such evidence, though they did confirm, unsurprisingly, When I go for a drink at Langston Bar & that newcomers are more likely to be white, college edu- W Grille, a three- year- old soul food restaurant cated, and better paid. Unexpectedly, the analysis also and bar a scant block from my house on Benning Road, showed that in primarily black gentrifying neighbor- at the eastern edge of the H Street scene, the place is full, hoods, black high school graduates are responsible for a the cocktails aren’t cheap, and mine is often the only third of total income gains as the area’s affluence white face. Yet it’s whites, not incoming middle- class increases. It’s unclear, however, how many of those ben- blacks, who get the attention, as Lance Freeman, a pro- eficiaries are longtime residents and how many are new- fessor of urban planning at Columbia University, observes comers attracted by gentrification. in There Goes the ’Hood (2006), his valuable study of the Columbia’s Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, attitudes of residents in transitional neighborhoods. The former executive director of the nonprofit Citizens surprise at white faces, he writes, indicates “just how Housing and Planning Council, studied mobility pat- racially isolated many of America’s inner-city communi- terns in New York City and found that poor house- ties had become.” holds in gentrifying neighborhoods are less likely to What those faces mean lies at the heart of debates over move than poor households elsewhere. They concluded gentrification. The assumption, so widely held that it’s that neighborhood improvements induce residents to regarded as fact, is that gentrification is synonymous stay and that rent control laws— in force in cities includ-

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 55 The City Bounces Back ing New York and Washington— are quite effective at level? Do you lower the level? What do you do?” restraining rent increases in gentrifying areas. (Like Not long ago, Necothia Bowens introduced me to Walsh and his colleagues, Freeman and Braconi used Jacqueline Farrell, who in 1971 bought her house on E data from the booming 1990s. It’s unclear if patterns Street N.E. from a man she describes as the last white per- have changed since the economic downturn.) son then living in the neighborhood. Farrell, 61, whom On the ground, the changes these studies record are everyone refers to as “Miss Jackie,” is a woman with a the accretion of individual choices. For the past six years, pleasantly husky voice and quick laughter known for her Amanda Clarke, a black architect who moved to the cooking. It was a Sunday afternoon, and her niece, Kym United States from Jamaica in 1986, has made her home Elder, 44, who lives in Maryland and works for the in Rosedale. A soft- spoken 40- year- old who lives three National Park Service, was visiting. Patricia Lucas, 50, who blocks from me, Clarke bought her house in a foreclosure lives across the street and whose father- in- law was the auction in 2004 without even seeing the inside, during man who desegregated the Rose dale playground, joined us as well, as did Bowens. There was a lot of jocular reminiscing, and talk about THE H STREET renovations are “improv- the current changes to H Street. ing the neighborhood,” admits a longtime “It looks good,” said Far- rell. “It’s improving the resident, “but I don’t think it belongs to the neighborhood, but I don’t think it belongs to the blacks blacks anymore.” anymore.” Elder chimed in, re - marking to her aunt that the height of the D.C. real estate bubble when she she recalled the first time she rode down H Street and couldn’t snag a house elsewhere in the city. A couple of noticed white faces. “It was a spring night after dark. And years later, she bought a vacant house across the street I called you on the phone, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, where and rebuilt it from the ground up, designing it with clean the hell am I? I’m riding past the Atlas [Theater], and modern lines and lots of light. It’s a bright spot on the they have little bistros. And they’re not afraid.’” block when I pass by. Despite the slow economy, the Everyone in Farrell’s living room was happy to see new house attracted multiple offers within days of being put storefronts and businesses healing over the scars of the 1968 on the market last spring. (The buyer, an Asian- American riots. But they expressed concerns, too. There are rumors woman in her thirties who works as a management con- that an area high school is going to be converted to a char- sultant at Deloitte, moved from a thoroughly gentrified ter school that will require students to apply for admission. D.C. neighborhood.) Clarke just sold a second rehabbed Bowens is bothered that the two bars on H Street that house, a block from her first project, and is preparing to mostly attract black patrons, XII and Rose’s Dream, seem start on a third. to get more scrutiny from the authorities than other bars Clarke knows that the homes she designs are attracting on the strip. No one wants property taxes to go up. If you’re people from outside the neighborhood, but what, she asks, not planning to leave, the concurrent rise in property val- should she do differently? Build less attractive homes? ues that gentrifiers like to celebrate isn’t much consolation. Use inferior materials? “This whole idea of affordable, it’s As for their new neighbors? Well, the early experience a tough one. What is affordable? What does that mean? of those at Miss Jackie’s house has been mixed. It was Because if by definition things are changing, property val- some years ago that the first white person in the new wave ues are going up as a result— just by the mere fact that all moved to the block. In their description, the fellow sounds the vacancies are being renovated. Are you going to try to like a poster child for bad gentrifiers. He called the police hold property values down? Do you renovate at a certain on his neighbors again and again for a litany of minor

56 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 The City Bounces Back infractions and walked his two fearsome Akita dogs That’s why displacement— though it may not happen as through pedestrians on the sidewalk “like he was parting often as people assume— is such a powerful notion. the Red Sea,” Farrell said. Since he left about a year ago— Bowens, who has gotten active in community politics, was foreclosed on, is the rumor— the block is peaceful wants to be upbeat. She helped start a scholarship fund again. But Elder is troubled that when she comes to visit for area students, and ran, unsuccessfully, for the local seat her aunt in Rosedale and says hello to passersby new to on D.C.’s neighborhood advisory commission. But she the neighborhood, they don’t always return the greeting. gets pensive when I ask her what she worries about for the The real friction is with people who have moved in near future. “In my mind, the changes that are happening Brown Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church on still need to continue, but we need to make sure that we 14th Street N.E., which Farrell and Elder both attend. embrace people, because if you don’t, it’s going to be— this The newcomers have complained about parishioners is a heavy word— but it’s going to be like a holocaust parking on the surrounding streets on Sundays and the effect. If you get people to come in and take over, it’s going loud gospel singing that comes from the church. Some, to be like a slavery takeover. You just got people that Farrell suspects, get up early on Sunday mornings to park take over and don’t care about the mindset of the people, their cars just far enough apart that churchgoers can’t fit and they just try to kill off everything that doesn’t belong their vehicles in the spaces between. A few neighbors or look like them.” have even come into the church and interrupted services. “They came down and they talked to us like we were dogs,” Farrell said. Elder was equally incensed: “In the bib- or the past few weeks, the rattle and grind of lical days, they had people come into the services and try backhoes has filled the air. The dilapidated to disrupt them because they were ungodly. Well, literally, F Rosedale Recreation Center was torn down we have to have men at the doors of the church now last fall to make way for a brand-new complex, com- because unfortunately our new white neighbors are say- plete with a library and an indoor swimming pool. ing, ‘Wait! Ya’ll parking? How long you going to be in serv- Months of red tape delayed construction, but work ices?’ I mean, coming into the house of the Lord, scream- has finally resumed. Many of the residents I spoke to ing and hollering!” don’t go to the new bars and restaurants on H Street, In general, it’s not the changes themselves that but everyone was eager for the recreation center to rise bother longtime residents of Rosedale. It’s how and again. Stephon Starke, the man whose father owned a why those changes are happening. In a separate inter- liquor store during the riots, teaches boxing to kids view, Bowens ruefully conceded that it was whites who there. It’s the heart of the community and a monument “saw the baby ready to be reborn” on H Street. She to its history. works as a secretary for a downtown doctor, but noted Hearing my neighbors talk of the day the recreation that business ownership runs in her blood—for years center would reopen, I saw a gulf between the way they her grandmother ran a restaurant near the Capitol perceived it and the way I do— as a boon to my property where people lined up for fried fish on Fridays. “I had value, primarily. Some gentrifiers move in and stay, but an opportunity a long time ago to say, ‘You know, H many, like me, have one foot outside the neighborhood Street is there. No one’s doing anything on H Street. I from the start, anticipating the day when a new job or the can go open up a business.’ But because we weren’t birth of a baby who will grow up and need to attend a taught as black people how to do that, we kind of let it good school will prompt us to put a “For Sale” sign in the sit. . . . That credit word makes us fear.” front yard. I may not be here long enough to see the rec The perception that change of others’ making is wash- center completed a year from now, let alone send my own ing over longtime residents is what’s at the heart of their children, when I have them, off to the pool. No matter anxieties. No one but criminals wants fewer police on the how you measure transience on that spectrum of urban streets. No one wants houses and commercial buildings to morality, it separates me from my neighbors. remain vacant. But neither do they want their community But the possibility of good bye is no excuse not to say to become a place where they’re the ones who don’t belong. hello on the street. ■

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 57 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Stores and the City

Many cities launched revival efforts with downtown festival marketplaces such as Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Can retailers work the same magic in less affluent neighborhoods?

BY DAVID ZIPPER

Pennsylvania Avenue is one of America’s 10 percent. A third of the residents live below the most iconic streets. But if you follow it a few miles east poverty level. of the White House and across the Anacostia River, you So it was a big event last August when a new super- will find yourself in a very different world. The avenue market opened at 2323 Pennsylvania Avenue S.E., in the is lined with gas stations, check-cashing shops, and relatively prosperous Fairlawn neighborhood. Then- take out restaurants that serve the area’s predominantly mayor Adrian Fenty and Councilmember Marion Barry, African- American population. Many of the storefronts a former mayor, came to give speeches and mingle with are faded and worn, and it’s often difficult to tell whether the crowd. More than 300 people turned out to taste the a functioning business operates inside. Few people stroll free samples of sushi rolls and organic hot dogs and the sidewalks. explore something Washington had never seen before: You wouldn’t know it from looking at this stretch an organic grocery store east of the Anacostia. of Pennsylvania Avenue, but the District of Columbia Because I work for the city government trying to was recently ranked among the top cities in the United bring new businesses to the District’s underserved com- States for retail development by Marcus and Mil- munities, I was on hand to savor the moment. One of the lichap, a national real estate advisory firm. The Dis- people I met was an unemployed chef named Dominic trict’s downtown has boomed recently, with 54 restau- who kept himself working with occasional catering jobs. rants and many stores opening since 2007, along with A tall, muscular man with long dreadlocks, Dominic told new office and apartment buildings. But the 130,000 me how happy he was that he wouldn’t have to travel Washingtonians who live east of the Anacostia are over the Anacostia anymore to get the quality ingredients served by only four sit- down restaurants. The unem- he needed. Indeed, the owner of the new store had ployment rates in the area’s two wards are roughly 19 decided to open this location partly because he noticed and 30 percent, compared with a District average of that many of the customers at his store in the Capitol Hill neighborhood were coming from east of the Anacostia

David Zipper is director of business development and strategy in the to shop. The nearest conventional grocery store is more District of Columbia’s Deputy Mayor’s Office. He previously served in New than a mile from Fairlawn. The grand opening was just York City government as executive director of NYC Business Solutions and was a senior associate at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. the latest piece of good news for neighborhoods east of

58 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 First mover: A city subsidy helped persuade Gary Cha to open a new branch of his local grocery store chain in a developing neighborhood. the Anacostia, where some of the benefits of Washing- supply of products ranging from freshly packed meats to ton’s economic stability are finally beginning to arrive. bulk rice and boxes of macaroni and cheese (10 different Close to downtown and blessed with falling crime rates, kinds, no less). When it opened, Yes! Organic became the area has seen its population grow in recent years. only the fourth supermarket east of the Anacostia, where The new supermarket is the latest addition to there is now one grocery store for every 33,000 residents. Yes! Organic Market, a small Washington- based chain Elsewhere in the District, the average is close to one store whose owner, Gary Cha, a cheerful middle- aged Korean per 10,000 residents. immigrant, has found success with stores that are essen- It’s a big victory when a grocery store opens in a tially smaller, more affordably priced versions of a Whole neighborhood like Fairlawn. Health and anti- obesity Foods supermarket. The new store on Pennsylvania advocates such as Michelle Obama point out that many Avenue sells both organic and conventionally grown poor people have little access to fresh fruits and vegeta- fruits and vegetables, and shoppers can find a ready bles. They say it’s imperative to have more grocery stores

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 59 The City Bounces Back in inner cities. Urban development boosters such as the That’s why cities hire people like me: to help fix nonprofit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (my for- such glitches in the market. By educating retailers, mer employer) suggest that enlightened businesses can helping them find suitable sites in emerging areas, solve urban problems, and are quick to applaud the and— when necessary— arranging to subsidize their savvy retail executive who follows the invisible hand to costs, I try to help residents in these communities a neighborhood with unmet demand. Yet events like the gain the shopping options they want, along with new Yes! Organic opening are all too rare. By ICIC’s own esti- job opportunities. mates, inner- city residents’ unmet demand for retail But the stakes don’t stop there. The scarcity of products remained constant at about $40 billion from retail establishments east of the river is one of the rea- 1998 to 2007. There is no reason to believe the gap has sons why Washingtonians spend so much money since closed. shopping in nearby Virginia and Maryland. The Dis- When I’m trying to interest businesspeople in new trict’s Office of Planning recently calculated that local areas, I’ve found that the “consciousness raising” of the residents buy more than $1 billion of goods in the sort these advocates promote is a useful but limited suburbs—roughly equivalent to 15 percent of all retail sales within the city. To put that number in per- spective, eliminating this RETAILERS ARE RELUCTANT to move billion- dollar retail “leak- age” would bring roughly into a new area until they see a competitor $60 million in new tax revenue to the District’s succeed there. coffers. It would also cre- ate jobs. The National Retail Federation esti- tool. In my many meetings with retailers, I’ve never mates that one retail job is created for every known statistics about childhood obesity to motivate a $250,000 in consumer spending. This means that grocery store executive—whether out of altruism or eliminating $1 billion in retail leakage could create guilt—to open a new outlet in a poor neighborhood. enough jobs for 4,000 people, a significant number Nor do I know of any executive who ever drafted an in a city where more than 33,000 people are seeking expansion plan solely on the basis of a neighborhood’s work. unmet demand, even when cities offered a subsidy. Many city governments have recognized retail’s The executives who make the decisions about potential to employ lower- skilled residents, capture where to open new stores are a conservative bunch, sales lost to the suburbs, and catalyze neighborhood often preferring to see a competitor move into a new development, and they have moved beyond high- area first. Chains and supermarkets generally trust profile downtown retail projects such as Ghirardelli local retail brokers to help them make location deci- Square in San Francisco and Faneuil Hall in Boston, sions, but the brokers have their own biases. In par- hoping to grow more retail businesses in lower- ticular, they have an incentive to recommend famil- income neighborhoods. Most of these efforts have iar neighborhoods, even if an emerging area offers focused on retail chains because, while people like me more profit potential, in order to avoid the risk of are thrilled every time a new home grown neighbor- alienating their client. They are also eager to close the hood florist or clothing boutique opens, we realize deal (and receive their commission) quickly, and that the chains’ size means they can hire the most res- better- known neighborhoods are an easier sell. These idents and generate the most tax revenue. Pennsyl- pressures can make it particularly difficult for under- vania’s much- touted Fresh Food Financing Initiative served urban areas to attract the all- important “first provides a suite of financial incentives designed to movers” whose success can draw other retailers. induce supermarkets to move into underserved areas.

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Many cities also encourage retail development in tar- When the company began hiring for the Fairlawn store, geted areas through “tax increment financing,” a form 150 people lined up to apply for fewer than 30 jobs, and of subsidy based on future tax revenues expected Cha says employee performance has been on par with from the project. that in his other District locations. The enthusiasm for retail development isn’t universal. The chains’ concerns about profit margins seem Critics say that new stores merely attract dollars that cus- more justified. Supermarkets already have among the tomers would have spent at other stores in the city rather lowest margins in retail, and a study of the Philadelphia than bring in new money the way, say, a corporate head- area by the Reinvestment Fund, a community develop- quarters or new technology company would. One of my ment organization, found that even before they open counterparts in Dallas told me flatly that he does not con- their doors, new inner- city stores spend seven times sider retail strategies such as the District’s to be economic more on worker training and five times more on security development at all. than their suburban counterparts. Once the stores are That surprised me, because retail has been a major operating, they continue to absorb higher costs for main- development priority in Washington for more than a tenance and ongoing employee training. In Washington, decade. The city has established a nonprofit organization the city government has tried to offset these disadvan- called the Washington, DC Economic Partnership to meet tages by creating a tax exemption program that elimi- with retailers and brokers, offer tours, provide demo- nates virtually all property taxes and license fees for 10 graphic information, and suggest sites for development. years for grocery stores that open in underserved areas. The Economic Partnership plays a central role in organiz- Profits in inner- city supermarkets are further ing the District’s booth at the annual convention of the squeezed by the fact that the stores can’t sell large quan- International Council of Shopping Centers in Las Vegas, tities of high-margin items such as cheese and wine. At where tens of thousands of retailers, developers, and real the same time, the lack of competition can lead to higher estate brokers converge to pitch opportunities and ink prices for consumers: One recent study found that iden- deals. With private meeting rooms and scale models of tical products cost 10 to 15 percent more in inner- city neighborhoods, the District’s exhibit is easily among the grocery stores than in suburban ones. However, this is most sophisticated efforts by cities at the convention. not an ironclad rule; Cha adjusted to local conditions by The District has also created financial assistance shaving a little bit more off the prices at Yes! Organic’s programs to bring “destination” retailers downtown and Fairlawn store. expand residents’ shopping options in targeted devel- opment corridors, or “Great Streets.” Pennsylvania Avenue east of the river is one of nine such corridors. ut market dynamics are only part of the reason Momentum seems to be growing, as retailers such as why less affluent neighborhoods are under- Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Target have Bserved. The inherent risk aversion of many retail established their first stores in the city. Walmart recently executives is a less quantifiable but equally imposing expressed interest in opening four District stores as obstacle. As a retail broker in Chicago observed recently well, including one east of the Anacostia. But Walmart in a trade magazine, the people he represents “never get is something of an anomaly among major retailers; hav- fired for the deal they don’t do.” Brokers themselves ing exhausted most suburban and rural markets, the reinforce retailers’ conservatism through their desire to company is effectively forced into urban areas in the sign a deal as quickly as possible. Few are willing to search for growth. invest the time required to persuade clients that an The District’s efforts to attract grocery stores east of unfamiliar community offers an opportunity worth the Anacostia still face big challenges. When pressed, pursuing. Brokers are well aware that pushing their representatives of the major chains offer an array of clients too hard toward those new markets could back- explanations for their hesitation. Some complain about fire and cost them a commission. For those of us trying a shortage of job- ready workers, though Yes! Organic’s to attract new stores, the result is a chicken-and-egg experience suggests that those fears are unfounded. problem when we try to bring the first large stores into

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 61 The City Bounces Back an underserved community. The vista looking down Pennsylvania Avenue This obstacle can be overcome if local past Gary Cha’s new grocery store is full of promise— and question marks. City government responds quickly when a par- officials hope the supermarket will spark ticular opportunity— at a certain site, at a a retail revival in the neighborhood. certain time, with a certain retailer— presents itself. Even if the deal requires a subsidy, it may be worth pursuing if other retailers will follow. This is Even by Cha’s stan- the kind of potential my colleagues saw— I was not directly dards, a move over the involved in the effort— when the prospect arose of a new Anacostia would be a ven- Yes! Organic store in Fairlawn. ture into uncharted terri- Yes! Organic’s path to Pennsylvania Avenue began sev- tory, though he was some- eral years ago, when Tim Chapman, a local developer, what reassured knowing received a subsidy from the city government to build 118 that his Capitol Hill store affordable apartments at the Pennsylvania Avenue site. The already attracted cus- ground floor of the building was set aside for retail, and it tomers from Fairlawn and was Chapman’s responsibility to fill it. Unlike most locations other neighborhoods east east of the river, the site offered the allure of being in an of the river. Trying to offset attractive new apartment building with a built- in cus- the project’s risk, Cha and tomer base. Just as important, it was on what developers Chapman presented a call the “pm side” of Pennsylvania Avenue, meaning that proposal to the city evening commuters on their way home to suburban Prince government. If the city George’s County, Maryland, could make an easy right turn would help pay for light fix- to park and shop and another right turn to be on their way tures, flooring, and other again. Roughly 50,000 cars pass the site daily. costs of buildout, Cha Chapman hoped to bring in a retailer that would and Chapman would appeal to the building’s residents, but he was rebuffed sign a lease for a 7,500- when he reached out to coffee shops and upscale square- foot space. The city restaurant chains. One of the few retailers that ultimately contributed expressed serious interest was a convenience store $900,000 through the operator whose benefit to the tenants and the sur- Great Streets program, rounding community would have been minimal. enough to cover more than At that point, Chapman shifted his focus to Gary Cha half of the capital cost. A and Yes! Organic. Since Cha took over an existing deal was signed in February 2010, six months before the organic grocery store in the upscale Cleveland Park store’s August grand opening. neighborhood in 1982, his expansion has tended to fol- low a formula: A local leader from an evolving neigh- borhood tells him she is a fan of one of his stores and asks t is too early to know yet whether the Fairlawn store him to open a new one in her area. If conditions look will be successful. Cha claims that it is following the favorable, Cha dives in. That’s how he moved into the Itraditional “j- curve” of a new supermarket, with sales Capitol Hill, Brookland, and Petworth neighborhoods. falling as the novelty of a new location wears off, but then He likes to buy land or secure long- term leases in such rising as the store builds its customer base. Initial sales areas before competitors arrive and property values rise. have led him to adjust his product mix to emphasize “Neighborhoods like Cleveland Park are quickly satu- items that are selling well (organic green vegetables, for rated,” Cha observes. “I try to find others that don’t have example) and remove those that aren’t (microbrew beers). as many grocery options, and then get the benefit as the He also plans to add a hot table so he can sell ready- to- eat neighborhood grows.” dinners to evening commuters.

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The Yes! Organic store’s arrival in Fairlawn came about Yes! Organic help explain why many cities are willing to through a confluence of factors that would be hard to repli- provide financial incentives to help businesses get started. cate. But it could prove to be a pivotal moment for retail Some level of longer-term subsidy may be necessary if the development in the District. City officials and retailers will market by itself does not produce enough results. The clear be watching what happens on Pennsylvania Avenue closely. social benefits of inner- city supermarkets— jobs, conven- If the store does prove profitable, my job will become much ient access to healthy food, and the potential to attract easier. Instead of relying on market data and incentives in other development—suggest that they may merit that my appeals to retailers, I’ll simply point to Yes! Organic and kind of support. ask, “Why aren’t you there too?” Retailers and brokers are City officials like me take no particular pleasure in sub- a competitive bunch, and I suspect they’ll move quickly once sidizing retailers. Indeed, I look forward to the day when they see someone else making money. That’s my goal: to cap- Yes! Organic joins a long list of inner- city successes that are italize on human nature to catalyze inner- city retail devel- so widely known that I no longer have to worry about opment rather than constrain it. recruiting first movers. But that day isn’t here yet. The The spillover benefits from first movers such as inner city’s potential is still waiting to be tapped. ■

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 63 IN ESSENCE reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

64 Foreign Policy & Defense // 69 Economics, Labor & Business // 73 Politics & Government // 75 Society // 78 Religion & Philosophy // 79 Arts & Letters // 82 Science, Technology & Environment // 84 Other Nations

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE them have taken any additional action to help those in Sudan. What social media are not good at, Gladwell maintains, is provid- Tweeting Toward ing the discipline, strategy, hier- archy, and strong social bonds that Freedom? successful movements require. A Survey of Recent Articles Such connections are what gave the four student leaders in Greens- boro, North Carolina, in 1960 the When Egyptian activist and what happens after a revolution. courage to defy racial subordina- Google marketing manager Wael In Egypt, according to a report in tion, despite the likelihood of vio- Ghonim reflected on the over- The New York Times (March 19, lence. The instigators were two throw in February of Hosni Mu - 2011), protesters are starting pairs of college roommates. They bar ak, he said, “Everything was almost from scratch. Amr Ham- all lived in the same dorm, and done by the people [for] the peo- zawy, a political scientist who was three of them had gone to high ple, and that’s the power of the one of the young leaders, is quoted school together. Internet.” Some credit a Facebook saying, “We are still searching for a Gladwell doesn’t mean to say page with sparking the Egyptian good name for a party and an idea social media are worthless: When protests. Twitter, too, played a role, that attracts people’s attention.” people have an array of what social but a different one— helping to Journalist Malcolm Gladwell scientists call “weak ties”—such as spread news to audiences in Egypt, assumed the mantle of skeptic in “friends” on Facebook or contacts but mostly abroad. Ghonim sees chief with an article in The New on Twitter— they are exposed to a great power in these tools. “If you Yorker (Oct. 4, 2010) contrasting greater range of new ideas and want to liberate [a people],” he today’s online activists with the young information, surely a good thing. said, “give them the Internet.” civil rights leaders who launched Such tools can make social Not everyone is so sure. It’s too lunch counter sit- ins in the South in processes work more efficiently. In soon to say how large a role social the early 1960s. Sure, these online 2006, to cite but one small exam- media have played in the recent tools, Facebook in particular, can ple, strangers coordinated online a Middle East upheavals, but a increase participation in social successful search for a cell phone debate about the Internet’s poten- movements— if you can call a single lost in a New York City taxicab. tial to promote democracy has click of the mouse participation. raged for at least a decade, since More than a million people have uthor and New York Uni- before Facebook even existed. joined a Facebook page of the Save A versity professor of new There’s also the question of Darfur Coalition, but few among media Clay Shirky is a bit more

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Cell phones in hand, Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February to demand, perhaps in a tweet, the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. sanguine. Writing in Foreign examine the ability of social media spread word of their street demon- Affairs (Jan.–Feb. 2011), he says to enhance civil society and over strations via text message. Social that Gladwell’s critique is “correct time shift power away from gov- media are not magical. Insurgents but not central to the question of ernments and toward people. may not always prevail (as in Iran social media’s power; the fact that Gladwell took to the letters sec- in 2009). But on balance, social barely committed actors cannot tion of the following issue of Foreign media will bring “a net improve- click their way to a better world Affairs to continue the debate, writ- ment for democracy,” much as the does not mean that committed ing: “What evidence is there that printing press did. actors cannot use social media social revolutions in the pre- Internet Evgeny Morozov, author of the effectively.” era suffered from a lack of cutting- new book The Net Delusion: The Shirky argues that the value of edge communications and organiza- Dark Side of Internet Freedom, social media to the cause of tional tools? In other words, did casts himself as a “cyber-realist” democracy should be measured social media solve a problem that in Bookforum (April–May 2011), over the course of “years and actually needed solving?” pillorying “cyber- utopians”—Gho- decades,” not weeks and months. New technologies have some- nim being the chief example— who Instead of focusing on the small times provided activists with a tool believe that social media can trig- set of instances in which activists that turned out to be crucial, ger spontaneous change. Morozov using new technology were or were Shirky responded. The protesters has pointed out that the new tools not successful at toppling author- who brought down Philippine can be used just as easily— and itarian regimes, analysts should president Joseph Estrada in 2001 perhaps more effectively— by

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authoritarian regimes seeking to ber one rule of promoting Internet spy or crack down on dissidents, Partly because of the freedom: “Don’t talk about pro- by, say, breaking into their e- mail State Department’s moting Internet freedom.” accounts or monitoring their Face- promotion of Internet Before the State Department’s book activity. For example, Chi- initiatives in this area, “the state of freedom, Iran and other nese officials hacked dissidents’ e- Web freedom in countries like countries are seeking mail accounts last year. China, Iran, and Russia was far to create “sovereign” from perfect . . . but at least it was ll of the issues raised by alternatives to Facebook an issue independent of those A new media take on a hard and Google. countries’ fraught relations with reality in one place: the U.S. State the United States.” Thanks to its Department, where officials have collaboration with Silicon Valley seized on the promotion of Inter- the belief that the development of tech companies, the U.S. govern- net freedom as a central plank a strong public sphere must pre- ment’s fingerprints are all over the of American policy. In a January cede regime change. “Securing the best- known tools, and many coun- 2010 speech, Secretary of State freedom of personal and social tries “are now seeking ‘information Hillary Clinton said, “We want communication among a state’s sovereignty’ from American com- to put these tools in the hands of population should be the highest panies.” Russia is considering people who will use them to priority, closely followed by secur- investing in a homegrown version advance democracy and human ing individual citizens’ ability to of Google; Turkey may provide rights.” speak in public. This reordering government- run e- mail addresses If the United States is to pursue a would reflect the reality that it is a to citizens; in Iran, a Facebook policy of “Internet freedom” around strong civil society— one in which alternative exists called Velayat- the globe, it must tread carefully and citizens have freedom of as - madaran (which can be loosely strategically. Shirky’s Foreign Affairs sembly— rather than access to translated as “Followers of the essay explores some of the mistakes Google or YouTube, that does the Leader”). “The best way to promote he says the State Department has most to force governments to serve the Internet Freedom Agenda may already made in this arena. In par- their citizens.” be not to have an agenda at all,” ticular, he criticizes the government’s Such a strategy would also min- Morozov says. “instrumental” approach— the allo- imize the risk that activists will be In the end, the more pedestrian cation of funds for the development seen as America’s pawns. When uses of social media may prove of technologies to “reopen” access to the United States too directly tin- the most revolutionary. Shirky outside Web sites, such as Google kers with the tools that activists cites the “cute cat theory” of digi- or the BBC, in countries where they use— such as when a State Depart- tal media, formulated by Ethan are censored. “Politically appealing, ment official asked Twitter to delay Zuckerman, a senior researcher at action- oriented, and almost cer- routine maintenance so that Iran- the Berkman Center for Internet tainly wrong,” Shirky says. This ian activists could keep tweeting and Society at Harvard University. strategy places too much emphasis during the 2009 uprising— it gives Those in power may often be able on access to outside information the appearance of meddling, to restrict the Internet freedoms sources and not enough on encour- rather than a principled pursuit of of activists with few repercussions, aging communication among citi- political freedom. Zuckerman says, but if their cen- zens, which would strengthen civil sorship hinders the vast majority society. orozov, in a piece in Foreign of Internet users’ ordinary com - Instead, he recommends that M Policy (Jan.–Feb. 2011), munication— sharing pictures of the United States adopt an “envi- argues that it’s too late. Washing- cute cats— they will risk brewing a ronmental” approach, premised on ton has already violated the num- revolution.

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FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE dence in the ability of the U.S. FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE military to transform the globe. Grand Strategy The liberal imperialists put Learning From emphasis on alliances and inter- Revisited national institutions. But both Al Qaeda seek global dominance, which “is THE SOURCE: “Imperial by Design” by John J. Mearsheimer, in The National exactly the wrong for mula,” Mear - THE SOURCE: “Becoming the Enemy” by Interest, Jan.–Feb. 2011. Stanley A. McChrystal, in Foreign Policy, sheimer contends. It only stokes March–April 2011. Since the end of the Cold anti- American sentiment and War, U.S. foreign policy has not pro- gives rogue regimes greater in - In October 2003, soon after duced inspiring results: The United centives to build nuclear wea pons he ar rived in Iraq to head the U.S. States has been at war roughly two (in the hope of deterring an Joint Special Operations Task Force, of every three years. The military Amer ican attack). now-retired Army general Stanley A. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan “The United States needs a McChrystal and his fellow command- have been long and costly. Three new grand strategy,” Mearsheimer ers got out a whiteboard and started to major foreign-policy problems have believes. There are several op - map out the organizational struc ture persisted without signs of resolution: tions, but the best is to return to of the recently founded Al Qaeda in preventing Tehran from acquiring what has been America’s ap - Iraq. “By habit, we started mapping nuclear weapons, getting Pyongyang proach for most of its existence: the organization in a traditional mili- to give them up, and settling the “offshore balancing.” Washington tary structure, with tiers and rows. At Israeli- Palestinian conflict. “The should seek to ensure that no the top was [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, United States is in a world of trouble power dominates any of the three below him a cascade of lieutenants today . . . and this state of affairs is strategically important regions and foot soldiers.” But the more infor- only likely to get worse,” laments (Europe, North east Asia, and the mation the U.S. commanders got, the University of Chicago political scien- Persian Gulf) in the way the Uni - less their white board drawing made tist John J. Mearsheimer, a noted ted States dominates the Western sense. “realist” thinker. Hemisphere. The structure of Al Qaeda in Iraq The mistake the United States This strategy requires a strong was defined “not by rank but on the made was not in the execution of mili tary, but one that is stationed basis of relationships and acquain- its foreign policy but in the choice at home or on carriers offshore, tances, reputation and fame. . . . Who of its grand strategy. In the dec- ready to intervene but not stay. It trained together in the pre-9/11 camps ades since the Cold War, the Uni - also means staying out of the in Afghanistan? Who is married to ted States has pursued “global busi ness of spreading democracy, whose sister?” That structure allowed dominance,” working to maintain and refraining from interference Al Qaeda in Iraq to grow quickly and its primacy and spread democracy, in the domestic affairs of other recover swiftly from losses. A young trying to make the world over in nations. Mear sheimer argues that Iraqi militant could start fighting, its own image. this is “the best formula for deal- build a reputation, and be easily inte- There are two main varieties of ing with the threats facing Amer - grated into the network. One of the global dominance: neoconserva- ica— whether it be terror ism, greatest advan tages Al Qaeda in Iraq tive (embodied by the Bush nuclear proliferation, or a tra - had was the “alarm ing” speed at which administration after 9/11) and ditional great- power rival.” Most it could operate. liberal imperialist (embodied by important of all, offshore balanc- The U.S. military was the opposite the Clinton administration and ing is well suited to dealing with a of nimble. McChrystal sketched out now seeing a revival under Presi- rising China— the number one the shape of the U.S. organization dent Barack Obama). The neo - strategic concern in the years to between Baghdad (headquarters) and con servatives have greater confi- come. a team in Mosul (commanded by

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David Petraeus, then a major general): FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE state that can navigate its own an hourglass. “They met at just one way in the world and resist out - narrow point”—a few antennas on top China’s Inner side pressures”—currently domi- of a trailer in which the special opera- nate. Realism has a long tradition tions forces worked. The antennas Struggle in China, with academics, policy were incapable of transmitting classi- researchers, and members of the fied information “with any timeliness.” THE SOURCE: “Coping with a Conflicted military among its influential China” by David Shambaugh, in The Wash- Units in Fallujah, Tikrit, and else- ington Quarterly, Winter 2011. adherents. Realists reject “con - where could wait days before crucial cepts and policies of globali - intelligence was relayed to them. U.S. policymakers have zation, transnational challenges, “Information we captured could not struggled to come up with the and global governance” in favor of be exploited, analyzed, or reacted to right way to handle China as it a narrowly self- interested foreign quickly enough— giving enemy targets grows into a superpower. Before policy. Recent U.S. moves that are time to flee.” they fasten on a specific approach, seen as hostile— such as the sale To keep up with Al Qaeda, the they should tune in to the debates of a $6 billion arms package to U.S. military needed to become raging among China’s elite about Taiwan—and China’s humming more like a network. McChrystal its foreign policy, writes David economy have stoked realist and his staff took the simple step of Shambaugh, a political scientist at sentiment. convening a meeting of representa- George Washington University. China’s nativist school advo - tives of various U.S. military efforts The questions before the Chi- cates an isolationist foreign pol- in Iraq. A new system emerged, with a shorthand label only a military commander could love: F3EA (find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze). It brought together intelligence analysts; drone oper- ators; combat teams; specialists to exploit information from cell phones, maps, and detainees seized during raids; and more intelligence analysts to distill that information. Operations that once took days now A frightening face masks deep disagreements over foreign policy among China’s elites. could be completed in hours. Soon, the number of daily operations increased tenfold, and success rates nese are fundamental: Should icy, arguing that China should improved substantially. China be active in global affairs avoid virtually all forms of inter- After serving as director of or isolationist? Should it draw on national collaboration. Nativists, the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a little its military and economic might found mostly in the ideological under a year back in Washington, to reach its objectives or should it wing of the Communist Party, are Mc Chry stal became the top com - use soft power— diplomacy and severely critical of capitalism and man der in Af ghan istan in 2009. culture? How much should China the United States, and believe There the net work ing of the mili - continue to focus on its relations that reform has compromised tary was already under way, and he with the United States? China’s socialist integrity and pushed it along. What does it take In the swirl of these discus - autonomy. While nativists’ ranks to lead a network? Well, that’s sions, “realists”—who place “a are increasing, especially among another story, says McChrystal. premium on building up a strong Internet-savvy youth, they play

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second fiddle to the more prag - from the country’s foreign-policy China can still be persuaded to matic realists. establishment. They have some make important contributions on Taking a more conciliatory influence, but it is muted in the issues of global concern such as approach are those who value aftermath of the recent financial North Korea’s nuclear program. working with the West, particu - crisis, which reinforced Chinese U.S. policymakers must be flexible. larly on matters that are in China’s skepticism of global governance Glints of every school will come strategic interest. Some argue that structures. out in China’s “schizophrenic” for- China needs to keep its eyes Should the United States eign policy. The best course is to trained on the “major powers,” respond to China’s current realist “push Beijing for more, and pub- while Asianists contend that posture tit for tat? Shambaugh licly expose its minimalist contri- strengthening ties in China’s back- says no— that would risk a trade butions” to the global order while yard should be the priority. Mem- war. Though the realists and remaining aware of America’s lim- bers of these schools largely hail nativists hold the keys for now, ited leverage.

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS over the last couple of decades. The share of pre- tax income earned by the richest one percent of Americans went from about The Inequality Engine eight percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. But the new book The Great Stagnation, real drama is at the apex of the THE SOURCE: “The Inequality that Mat- ters” by Tyler Cowen, in The American it’s what is causing the inequality pyramid: The richest 0.01 percent Interest, Jan.–Feb. 2011. that is truly troubling: namely, (about 15,000 families) claimed an unwieldy financial industry less than one percent of pre- tax Many social critics assail whose core practices undermine earnings in 1974, but more than rising income inequality in Amer- the stability of the economy and six percent in 2007. ica, but in the assessment of Tyler the prosperity it provides. What’s fueling the gargantuan Cowen, a George Mason Univer- There is no question that in - income increases of the mega - sity economist and author of the come inequality has increased rich? It’s not manufacturing,

The first passers by, the owners of loss- making EXCERPT businesses, are invisible: Their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are Financial Giants still only waist- high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, before the normal- sized people appear. But then, in came up with a striking way to picture inequality. the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes Imagine people’s height being proportional to their to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earn- income, so that someone with an average income is of ers walk by, right at the end, each is more than two average height. Now imagine that the entire adult miles tall. population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income. —The Economist (Jan. 22, 2011, Issue 36)

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which once propelled men such Cowen, is that when their bets the social impact consulting firm as Henry Ford into the strato - flop, as they did during 2007–09, FSG. Business leaders believe sphere of wealth. It’s the world of “everyone else pays the price”— that all profits are equal, but finance. In 2004, the top 25 particularly those lower on the Porter and Kramer argue that hedge fund managers together income ladder, who can spend “profits involving a social purpose earned more than all the CEOs of months unemployed in the wake represent a higher form of cap - the companies listed in the S&P of a financial crisis and don’t have ital ism.” By investing in commu- 500. Among people earning more a fancy degree and valuable social nities, a clean environment, and a than $100 million a year, Wall network to fall back on. healthy and well- paid work force, Street investors outnumbered Cowen says we must “find a companies will reap big profits executives of publicly traded way to prevent or limit major over the long haul, they say. companies nine to one. banks from repeatedly going When it comes to addressing Two practices central to the short on volatility at social ex - problems such as housing and financial industry drive the pense.” The catch? No one knows health care affordability, and skyrocketing incomes: “going how to do so. It remains to be assistance for the elderly, compa- short on volatility” (betting seen whether the new financial nies have relegated helpful initia- against unlikely swings in market regulation law will have a positive tives to peripheral social-respon- prices) and “moving first” (being effect. sibility units. faster than the competition when “For the time being, we need to By exploring business solu - new information emerges, some- accept the possibility that the tions to such problems, managers times by seconds or less, in a financial sector has learned how can create what Porter and Kram - winner- take- all system). to game the American (and UK- er call “shared value,” meaning, Going short on volatility based) system of state capitalism,” simply, everybody wins— society involves betting against unlikely Cowen writes. “It’s no longer will benefit from the innovation events— such as a collapse of the obvious that the system is stable business can bring to bear, and mortgage bond market. The at a macro level.” businesses will be more produc - returns can be steady and unspec- tive and more efficient, and over tacular, until one starts using ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS time will create greater markets other people’s money and taking for their goods. “The purpose of riskier bets. And if you bet wrong, A Higher the corporation must be rede - “what’s the worst that can hap - fined as creating shared value, pen? Your bosses fire you, but you Capitalism not just profit per se,” the authors will still have millions in the bank write. and that MBA from Harvard or THE SOURCE: “Creating Shared Value” by They contrast their plan with Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, in Wharton.” Add the safety net of Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb. 2011. well- intentioned strategies such government bailouts, and you’ve as fair trade, which attempts to got an industry in which many of For too long, businesses see that farmers in the developing the top earners do not have much have pursued narrow, short- term world are paid more than the pre- to lose. strategies that maximize quick vailing rate for their crops. In a It’s worrisome “from a social profits and don’t address society’s shared-value ap proach, com - point of view,” Cowen argues. In greatest needs. They are squan - panies would train farmers in normal times, society suffers as dering an incredible opportunity, more productive techniques and many of the most talented people argue Harvard Business School supply them with better tools, choose the financial sector over professor and management strat- seeds, and fertilizer, improving fields such as medicine or educa- egy guru Michael E. Porter and productivity and output. Prelimi- tion. But more dangerous, says Mark R. Kramer, cofounders of nary evidence indi cates that such

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a strategy can boost farm incomes since the global financial crisis economist at the University of Cali- more than fair trade does. unleashed waves of economic panic. fornia, Berkeley, there is no doubt When a company’s link to one In Greece, the cause was a love affair that the EU needs to undertake seri- specific community is tight, as with “enormous, unsustain able gov- ous reform to prevent future boom- with the computer industry in ernment budget deficits.” In Ireland, and- bust cycles. He prescribes sev- Silicon Valley or the diamond- it was large homes and a real estate eral measures, all of which would cutting trade in Surat, India, the bubble that dwarfed that of the strengthen the hand of the EU rela- benefits of a “shared-value” ap - United States. With such different tive to national governments. proach will be bigger and more proximate causes, what can the First, the EU must strengthen obvious. For example, Nespresso, European Union do from on high, the Stability and Growth Pact, a Nestlé brand, located the pro - “beyond encouraging member states through which it monitors the fiscal cure ment facilities for its coffee to tend to their gardens”? policies of member countries and beans near the farms where the It can begin by examining one ostensibly subjects offenders to sanc- beans grow. This allowed it to com mon ality: At base, both coun - tions and fines. Some steps have assess the quality of the product tries were experiencing credit booms already been taken: In the past, on the spot and pay growers a that began in 2002, just three years sanctions could not be imposed premium for superior beans. absent a vote by the EU Council of Social entrepreneurs and com- Ministers. Now they proceed unless panies in the developing world a vote overturns them. have led the way in making socie- The euro was supposed Eichengreen’s second recom - tal improvement central to their to increase European mendation is meaningful stress tests business plans. The challenge cohesion. Instead, it for Europe’s banks. There are big now is to do so across the busi - has pulled the core and obstacles to administering such ness community, in every decision periphery further apart. tests: National governments are companies make. more interested in preventing their Capitalism has long been “an banks from losing market share than unparalleled vehicle for meeting in making an honest assessment. human needs, improving after the introduction of the euro. Supervision of the stress tests will efficiency, creating jobs, and (Seventeen of the 27 EU member have to be delegated to a supra - building wealth,” Porter and countries have embraced the euro.) national authority. “If Europe has a Kramer say. New opportunities European technocrats hoped the single currency and a single financial await. euro would create “cohesion” market, it is going to need a single through a rise in per capita incomes bank regulator,” Eichengreen says. ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS in “peripheral” countries such as Ire- Finally, the EU should create a land, Greece, Portu gal, and Italy, permanent emergency financing How to Save bringing them closer to parity with vehicle. “Crises will happen,” Eichen- “core” countries such as France and green writes. “Not establishing a the Euro Ger many. But instead of con verging, properly funded facility capable of the core and periphery grew further providing emergency assistance is THE SOURCE: “The Euro’s Never- Ending apart; Ger many enjoyed an export the macroeconomic equivalent of Crisis” by Barry Eichengreen, in Current History, March 2011. boom, while on the periphery, driving without a seat belt.” foreign capital financed consump - These steps will not be easy polit- Every broke country is tion, not investment. ically, but if Europe’s leaders do not broke in its own way. At least that’s Though it’s unclear whether take the necessary precautions, “not true of the European countries that these booms were caused by the just the euro but the EU itself could have come to the brink of default euro, argues Barry Eichengreen, an be at risk.”

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ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS attention to people makes them show some evidence of the effect, more productive. The Hawthorne but much of that correlation can be Null Effect study helped usher in a whole field explained by other, pre viously unex- of research, called industrial psy - amined factors. THE SOURCE: “Was There Really a chol ogy; influenced the shape of Remarkably, for example, the Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination ideas about human relations and researchers always came in to alter Experiments” by Steven D. Levitt and John management; and shaped the fun- the lighting on Sundays, when the A. List, in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Jan. 2011. damentals of experimental design. factory was closed. They then Since the 1970s, scholars have measured the effect on Monday. In 1924 the National Re- returned to the data from follow- But the workers were always more search Council ran a now famous up experiments done at the Haw - productive on Mondays than on experiment at Western Electric’s thorne plant and questioned the other days, even when not being Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois. original findings, but the data studied. The original researchers The researchers asked a simple from the initial studies, conducted seem to have mis taken the day-of- question: Does better lighting make in 1924 and 1925, were thought to the-week effect for the Hawthorne workers more productive? They have been lost. University of effect, Levitt and List remark. were surprised by what they found. Chi cago economists Steven D. They find some evi dence that Productivity improved regardless of Levitt and John A. List were able workers being studied became whether the lights were low or high. to locate them in the libraries of more productive over a long The unexpected results gave rise the University of Wisconsin, Mil- period of time, but nothing strong to one of the key insights of modern waukee, and Harvard Business enough to justify any big claims. psychology, later named the Haw - School, and apply modern statisti- The Hawthorne effect may have thorne effect: Researchers can cal techniques to the nearly risen to prominence because it had change the behavior of their subj - century- old data. They find little behind it “the power of a good ects merely by studying them. More support for the Hawthorne effect. story.” But good stories do not good broadly, the mere fact of paying A “naive” reading of the data does science make.

Nothing could be stupider or less historically EXCERPT defensible than this belief, yet few assumptions are more widespread among the world’s intelligentsia, planners, and, especially, bureaucrats. Technological End Times? change has never been moving faster or with greater force than it is today, as the implications of one The word ‘developed’ contains an important revolution in IT after another work themselves out; assumption: that a historical process known as devel- the foundations of the global economic and political opment (closely related to modernization— another order are being shaken by the dramatic rise of new problematic word) not only exists throughout the powers. Yet somehow many of us believe that world, it culminates in a known end which has already the Western world is an end state: the comfy couch at been reached. This word implies that countries like the end of history rather than the launching pad for France, Canada, and our own happy United States of another great, disruptive leap into the unknown. America have reached the end of history, the summit of human achievement, stable and enduring arrange - —WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, professor of ments in political economy that are unlikely to change foreign affairs at Bard College, on his blog, much going forward. Via Meadia (Jan. 17, 2011)

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POLITICS & GOVERNMENT launched a vigorous reform effort based on the notion that maintain- ing public order is part of the social safety net. The Elusive Conservative Olsen contends that reform, rather than wholesale dismantling, Majority is not at odds with the conservative project. Indeed, he argues, certain

THE SOURCE: “After the Wave” by Henry [they] love the bricks used to build safety- net programs are essential if Olsen, in National Affairs, Winter 2011. it.” It’s this paradox that has pushed free- market capitalism is to many Re pub lican governors—as it flourish. Republicans may have did President George W. Bush—to trounced the Democrats in the drastically expand government POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 2010 midterm elections, but if his- spending under their watch. tory is any indication, their big Many Republican- leaning voters Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! gains will be fleeting. The GOP are not conservatives at all. They failed to cement electoral wins in are antiliberal: They prefer low THE SOURCE: “In Front of the Burgundy Curtain: The Top Ten Lessons I’ve Learned 1966, 1980, and 1994 into a perma- taxes and balanced budgets, but About Advocacy Before the Nation’s Highest nent governing majority. Henry fearing they could lose everything Court” by Lisa S. Blatt, in Green Bag, Autumn 2010. Olsen, a vice presi dent of the they’ve worked for, they also conservative American Enterprise support state- sponsored welfare In her two decades of prac- Institute, says Republicans need to and retirement benefits. They are ticing law, Lisa S. Blatt has argued face some facts about the voters patriotic and support the armed 30 cases before the nation’s high- who are the decisive swing bloc: the forces but are suspicious of est court, more than any other white working class. anything “big,” whether it be the woman in the country. Her up- Many conservatives have long military, business, or government. close- and- personal vantage point believed that as a whole, the This piece of the puzzle—the fear of has taught her a few things about American electorate tilts center- anything “big”—“gets to the heart of life at the Supreme Court. right. In surveys, self- described working- class identity,” Olsen says. At oral argument, each side’s conservatives outnumber liberals “Conservatives need to persuade lawyer has 30 minutes to “present” by as much as two to one. Well working- class voters that their her case, which really means that over half the voting public says it efforts to reform key safety- net pro- she will be peppered by tough ques- favors smaller government. But grams are intended not to shred tions from nine of the smartest peo- those same polls also find strong those safety nets but, rather, to save ple in America. Well, just eight in support for large government pro- them,” Olsen argues. He endorses practice, since Justice Clarence grams such as Social Security and efforts like the one conservatives Thomas hasn’t spoken at oral argu- Medicare, and other surveys show made in pursuit of welfare reform ment in more than five years. In high levels of backing for educa - in the mid-1990s. It was framed as Blatt’s opinion, that is “a blessing.” tion spending. When Republicans a question of encouraging welfare Eight justices are plenty! come to power and try to reverse recipients to be more independent, The justices, particularly Anton- liberal policies, voters respond by not as a chance to save money and in Scalia and Stephen Breyer, pur- voting Democratic in the next take away from those in need. In posely ask outlandish questions in election cycle. New York City, crime is down and order to reveal the limits of each “Voters,” Olsen says, “may hate police budgets are shrinking years party’s legal reasoning. In one case the house of government, but after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani involving a government property

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rights of either individuals or the government. When it comes to which cases the Court hears, “coor- dinated and strategic movements” and amicus curiae briefs (those submitted by interested parties) have gained influence in recent years. Each year, only one percent of petitions filed are heard by the Court, about 70 in all. With so few cases heard, it’s a rare privilege to stand in front of the Court’s bur- gundy curtain—rarer yet if you’re a woman. “The courtroom is a battlefield,” Blatt says. Prepare to fight.

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT Where Are the Lisa S. Blatt in her natural habitat. She has argued 30 cases before the nation’s highest court. Female Politicians? seizure, Justice Breyer asked the sion. The justices wondered wheth- THE SOURCE: “Gendered Perceptions and Political Candidacies: A Central Barrier to government’s lawyer whether his er the government’s logic in defend- Women’s Equality in Electoral Politics” by argument implied “that the Consti- ing limits on corporations’ spend- Richard L. Fox and Jennifer L. Lawless, in tution would permit, in your view, ing in political campaigns could American Journal of Political Science, Jan. 2011. the Taj Mahal, for example, to be lead public libraries to ban a 500- forfeited if it was once used to sell a page biography published by a cor- It wasn’t very long ago that teaspoonful of marijuana.” Blatt poration that ended with the almost no women were elected to says she half- expected the lawyer to sentence, “So vote for person X.” major political offices. In the respond, “Justice Breyer, are you The lawyer’s answer was yes, and 1970s there were two female gov- crazy?” But he didn’t take the bait, the government subse quent ly lost ernors, and it was only in 1978 and instead outlined under what the case 5–4. In such instances, that the first woman whose circumstances that would indeed Blatt recommends either “tossing husband had never served in Con- be the case. logic and consis tency entirely out gress was elected to the Senate for Nevertheless, there are times the win dow” or rethinking your a full term. Today, many more you should not carry your argu ment argument al together. women hold elected office— there to its logical conclusion: “Whatever Blatt also makes some clear- are 17 female sena tors— but the you do, don’t say, ‘The government eyed observations about the Court’s gains have slowed since 2000. can ban books.’” This is essentially role in American law. “Constitu- Scholars offer several explana - the mistake government lawyers tional change is inevitable,” she tions: overt discrimination, “situa- made during the 2008 oral says. Judges often espouse re- tional” factors (e.g., not enough argument concerning corporate straint, but the truth is that Su- wom en in the feeder fields of law cam paign expenditures in Citizens preme Court cases are a zero-sum and business), structural barriers United v. Federal Election Commis- game: Each decision expands the (e.g., the large number of incum -

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bent male office-holders), and Lawless of American University, political arena are another deter- socialization (the persistence of have found, simply, that it is “diffi - rent. Just 52 percent say they have a traditional gender roles that deter cult for women to embrace them - thick enough skin to endure a women from entering the fray). selves as politicians.” In a survey campaign. Academic research suggests of high- level professionals work- A similar strain of self- doubt that overt discrimination is no ing in law, business, education, appears in studies of women longer a potent factor. Situational and political activism— fields beyond the realm of politics, begin- explanations have lost some of likely to contain people who ning when they are quite young. their power since women have might run for office— they find Adolescent females, for example, increased their presence in law that 80 percent of the men believe think less highly of their mathemat- and business. And the enactment they are either “qualified” or “very ical abilities, despite no objective of legislative term limits in 21 qualified” to hold elected office. indicators that males are actually states without subsequent large Less than two- thirds of the more able. And while females get gains by women has put into women regard themselves so better test scores in language arts, doubt the role played by the male highly. their self- assessment of their abili- incum bency advantage. Women are also twice as likely ties is no higher than males’. Situational factors and structural as men to say they are “not at all It will likely be a long time barriers surely play some part, but qualified” for the job. (Nine percent before women come close to hold- they cannot account for the size of do so.) This is particularly striking ing an equitable share of the the gap. That leaves just one can- because women are also more likely elected offices in this country. didate: socialization. to aspire to local, rather than What they have to overcome next, Now, two political scientists, national, offices— positions usually say Fox and Lawless, is a sociali - Richard L. Fox of Loyola Mary - requiring fewer credentials. zation process that breeds self- mount University and Jennifer L. Women’s perceptions of the doubt.

SOCIETY consider ations could be made only if they were “nar rowly tailored”— that is, if they were just two of many traits the institution considered in Diversity Dismantled holistically evaluating candidates. No longer could institutions auto - years as one of its principal tools, matically increase the rankings of THE SOURCE: “Affirmative Inaction” by affirmative action, has fallen out of minority applicants. William M. Chace, in The American Scholar, Winter 2011. favor with the courts and the public, Such holistic scrutiny is too writes William M. Chace, a former expensive for public universities, American colleges and uni- president of Wesleyan University with their tens of thousands of versities have long been governed by and Emory University. In 2003, the hopefuls. Many states, mean while, two competing ideals: They aim to U.S. Supreme Court upheld the have banned affirmative action be both meritocratic centers of place of diversity in higher edu - through ballot initiatives and by intellectual excellence and “model cation in Grutter v. Bollinger et al., other means. In California, a 1996 commonwealths” that bring ruling that race and ethnicity could state ban cut black enrollment in together individuals of diverse continue to serve as criteria in ad - the freshman class of the elite backgrounds. missions. But that same year, in Uni versity of California, Berkeley, The “model commonwealth” Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al., the from 258 to 140 in less than a ideal has taken a big hit over the Court said that racial and ethnic decade. Nationwide, only about

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35 percent of four- year public SOCIETY Amend ment was ratified just institutions consider minority sta- three years later, and women soon tus in admissions decisions, down What War Is went to the polls. Another war, in from more than 60 percent in the Vietnam, led to a further expan - mid- 1990s. Good For sion of the franchise, when in 1971 Public skepticism about affir - Con gress lowered the voting age mative action is high. Critics point THE SOURCE: “Strange Bedfellows: War from 21 to 18. and Minority Rights” by Robert P. Saldin, in to sizable Indian, Vietnam ese, World Affairs, March–April 2011. World War II and the Korean Chinese, Korean, and Iranian con- War pushed the country down a tingents on many campuses, scoff- The demise of “Don’t Ask, path toward greater racial equal- ing at the notion that diversity is Don’t Tell” last December was only ity. At the outset of World War II, waning. They observe that African the most recent iteration of an old African Americans were kept from immigrants are nabbing slots pri- pattern: Over the last century, the battlefield because white offi- America’s wars abroad have had cers believed they were not trust- the salutary side effect of advanc- worthy and would flee. “But the Critics of affirmative ing minority rights at home, says luxury of holding such prejudices action point to sizable Robert P. Saldin, a Robert Wood collapsed amidst manpower Asian contingents on Johnson Scholar at Harvard shortages,” Saldin says, and over many campuses, scoff- University. the course of the war more than ing at the notion that Before World War I, suffragists one million African Americans had pushed without success for served in combat, though units diversity is waning. women’s voting rights. President were still segregated. President Woodrow Wilson was a staunch Harry S. Truman issued an execu- opponent of gender equality, tive order ending segregation in marily intended for the descen - telling his staff that a “woman’s the armed forces after the war, but dants of slaves. In one 2009 poll, place was in the home, and the it wasn’t fully implemented until 61 percent of respondents said type of woman who took an active 1952, during the Korean War. they opposed affirmative action. part in the suffrage agitation was In the civilian world, too, There is a place where the idea of totally abhorrent,” as an aide later discriminatory policies fell during the model commonwealth can and recalled. World War II. The Soldier Voting must survive, Chace says. Private But the war changed Wilson’s Act of 1942 abolished the poll tax, colleges and universities, with their mind. About 25,000 women the first expansion of African- deep coffers, can afford to evaluate served in Europe in various capac- American voting rights since applicants case by case. Because they ities, including on the front lines, Reconstruction, and a 1944 Su - don’t directly take much public and some 350 were killed. At preme Court decision ended all- money, they are somewhat shielded home, more than one million white primaries. A New York Times from state bans on racial prefer - women took jobs outside the reporter wrote at the time that “the ences. And anti– affirmative action household to aid the war effort. In real reason for the overturn is that groups, because of their regard for a 1917 speech before the Senate, the common sacrifices of wartime private institutions and individual Wilson reversed himself, saying, have turned public opinion and the rights, are less likely to challenge “We have made partners of the court against previously sustained non public schools in court. Iron - women in this war; shall we admit devices to exclude minorities from ically, Chace observes, private col - them only to a partnership of suf- any privilege of citizenship the leges may “end up being more di - fering and sacrifice and toil and majority enjoys.” verse in their enrollments than not to a partnership of privilege Saldin sees two explanations for public colleges.” and right?” The Nineteenth wartime liberalization. Discrimin -

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ation against women, African Ameri- essential to becoming a Hawkeye.” puses of booze in the years since. cans, or gay men and women de - Social events such as house parties, Today, roughly 80 percent of stu- prives the country of their contri bu - pre game tailgating, and Greek life dents drink and 45 percent binge tions at a time of great need. And build cohesion, and all run on the drink. discrimination against blacks became fuel of alcohol. College administrators have increasingly untenable when the College life wasn’t always this employed a variety of strategies to nation was rallying against fascism way. Until the 1970s, the drinking end alcohol’s reign: calling in law and communism in the name of free- age in almost every state was 21— enforcement, imposing academic dom. Second, war tends to engender and the college population was rela- sanctions, pushing “responsible” a stronger sense of national cohesion. tively small. But when thousands of drinking, limiting supply on cam - Deep divisions in society take on a young American men went off to pus, and spreading the word that different cast when we feel “we’re all fight in Vietnam, many at home alcohol is not as popular as students in this together.” argued that if they were old enough perceive. All of these strate gies have to die for their country, they should failed, and the colleges must share SOCIETY be old enough to drink. (The draft some of the blame; they have often age had been lowered from 21 to 18 been half- hearted in their efforts. Work Hard, in World War II, but few argued College administrators will never then that the drinking age should succeed in drying out their cam - Play Harder follow.) By 1975, only 11 states still puses, nor should we want them to, had a drinking age of 21, and alco- Poe argues. Administrators should THE SOURCE: “The Drinking Game” by Marshall Poe, in Policy Review, Oct.–Nov. 2010.

The rules of the College Drinking Game are simple: Stu - dents must drink excessively, and politicians, college presidents, and public health specialists must rail excessively about the excessive drinking. They’re missing the mark, says historian Marshall Poe. “Col - lege drinking per se is not the prob- lem,” he argues. Not the problem? That may come as a surprise to many, but Poe Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! University of Wisconsin football fans do their part to rouse school spirit. argues that the effect of alcohol on campus is “largely positive.” Ameri- hol began its starring role in the life narrow their focus, harshly punish- can higher education is the envy of of the American college student. ing the minority of college drinkers the world, and one of the reasons for It wasn’t long before statistics who pose a threat to themselves that is that colleges and universities from the National Transportation and others— about 10 to 15 percent have done something very difficult: Safety Board began to show a of the population. Any student create strong communities and a shocking rise in teenage traffic charged by police with public intoxi- sense of identity. From his perch at accidents. Between 1976 and cation or driving under the influ - the University of Iowa, Poe has 1985, the drinking age bounced ence should be expelled without observed that for most students, back up in 26 states. But colleges ado, he recommends. For everyone “rowdy drinking is considered have been unable to rid their cam- else, bottoms up!

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RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY ably fragmented.” The King James Bible became “a uniting symbol for English- speaking Protestantism” rather than “a totem of royalism, as The Enduring King James it so easily might have done.” As a result, after the upheaval of under financed set of committees” the English Civil War, the Interreg- THE SOURCE: “How Good Is It?” by Diar- maid MacCulloch, in London Review of produced the new bible in just seven num, and the restoration of Charles Books, Feb. 3, 2011. years. II in 1660, Anglicans, English Much of its success resulted, Protestant Dissenters, and the As we noted in “Chapter MacCulloch believes, from the com- Established Church of Scotland and Verse” (“In Essence,” Summer mittees’ reliance on “a single early emerged as “people of a single 2010), the King James Bible, Tudor translator of genius, William book.” And they took that book with published 400 years ago this year, Tyndale,” who translated the sacred them when they moved across the has a long history of shaping Western text from Hebrew and Greek in the oceans to new lands. literature and culture. It has also 1520s, and on Coverdale’s Psalm MacCulloch, who teaches theol- engendered innumerable modern translations. But the King James ogy at Oxford and whose latest translations, whose more colloquial version also appeared at a fortuitous book is A History of Christianity: language—meant to appeal to every- historical moment, just as the Eng- The First Three Thousand Years, one from “extreme teens” to “busy lish and Scottish churches were recounts these developments in the moms”—could not be further from “grudgingly moving together under course of reviewing several books the “thees” and “thous” of the King James’s guidance, and before published in conjunction with the original. But, as Diarmaid MacCul- English Protestantism had irretriev- quadricentennial. In one of these, loch observes, the King James an essayist “chronicles how Bible had strong competition successful a handmaid of even in its own time, principally empire the KJB proved.” from the Geneva Bible of the Unlike other bibles, for 1550s and Miles Coverdale’s instance, it translates four dif- 1538 edition, which formed the ferent Hebrew words to mean basis for the Book of Common nation, which helped inspire Prayer. Why did the King “a new vision of Britishness as James version prevail? a nationality with a mission.” The idea for the new trans- The King James Bible still lation came from King James exerts a powerful influence on VI of Scotland, who later culture and language in the became King James I of the English- speaking world. But newly conjoined kingdom of MacCulloch reports that Great Britain. He objected to scholar David Crystal, who uses “the bitter notes” in the Geneva Google searches to explore “the Bible, marginalia that, in his continuing background hum of view, often took on the tone of Jacobean sacred text” in mod- a hectoring minister. When ern vernacular, finds that the James ascended the British influence is uneven. Of the 257 throne in 1603, “a remarkably phrases from the King James efficient and scandalously King James I of England Bible that Crystal says remain

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in wide use, only a few come from the religious people who have the same Old Testament. Among them, from number of friends. Genesis, is one that has become a A new study says Any evidence that a belief in God “treasured part of English usage”: Go churchgoers are hap- by itself leads to happiness is “weak forth and multiply. pier chiefly because of and inconsistent,” the authors report. the friends they’ve Private practices such as praying at RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY made in the pews. home are not linked to greater life satisfaction. Those who attend Friends Who church but have no friends there are not any likelier to be happy than Pray Together . . . Churchgoers are happier because of those who stay home on Sunday.

THE SOURCE: “Religion, Social Networks, the friends they’ve made in the pews. If you aren’t a believer and are and Life Satisfaction” by Chaeyoon Lim and Two sociologists, Chaeyoon Lim looking for more satisfaction in your Robert D. Putnam, in American Sociologi- cal Review, Dec. 2010. of the University of Wisconsin, life, a strategy of going to church in Madison, and Robert Putnam of order to make friends isn’t going to In study after study, re- Harvard (author of Bowling Alone, work: A bevy of friends from church searchers have found that religion a seminal 2000 book about Ameri- does little to bolster life satisfaction for makes people happy. Nearly 30 per- cans’ declining social connected- those who don’t consider religion an cent of people who attend religious ness), find that people who have important part of who they are. What services weekly report “extreme” sat- close friends from their congrega- really seems to make people happy is isfaction with their lives, compared tions are more likely to be happy the sense of belonging that comes with less than 20 percent of those than those who have the same from a combination of religious iden- who steer clear of religious institu - number of close friends through tity and religious friends. As Lim and tions. Why? Is it because church - non religious affiliations. People Putnam put it, “It is neither faith nor goers feel loved by God? Is it because who regularly attend church and communities, per se, that are impor- they sleep easy at night, knowing have three to five close friends from tant, but communities of faith. For life where they’ll go after they die? No their religious community are 50 satisfaction, praying together seems to and no. A new study finds that the percent more likely to be “ex tremely be better than either bowling together answer may be much closer to hand: satisfied” with their lives than non- or praying alone.”

ARTS & LETTERS events (departmental open houses versus book parties). In 1975 there were 79 programs in creative writing offering a master of A Tale of Two fine arts (MFA) or other degree. Today there are 854, and each is a Literary Cultures source of financial support for writers— lecture fees, adjunct profes- and the publishing house (here after, sorships, and something pen porters THE SOURCE: “MFA vs. NYC” in n+1, Fall 2010. NYC). Each culture has its own heroes could once only dream about: steady (Stuart Dybek in the former, Philip employment, even tenure. “It’s safe to America is home to two dis- Roth in the latter), standard genre say that the university now rivals, if it tinct literary cultures, defined by (short story versus novel), must- read hasn’t surpassed, New York as the where a writer earns his keep: the uni- publications (Poets & Writers versus economic center of the literary fiction versity (which we’ll refer to as MFA) The New York Observer), and social world,” observes the unnamed author

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of this article, an n+1 editor. MFA programs, according to Poets & death. One exhibition in Rome Some have celebrated this new Writers, are part of large public uni- drew more than 5,000 visitors economic cushion as liberation for versities); the continued unemploya- daily and kept its doors open the writer from the profit- driven mar- bility of twenty-somethings; and the around the clock in the days before ketplace of publishing. But any writer continued hunger of undergraduates it closed. Mar ket ers splash Cara- who leaves NYC for MFA will find for undemanding classes does seem vaggio’s name on everything, that freeing herself of one market’s more forward- looking than one that sometimes plausibly (for example, pressures just places her under anoth - relies on overflow income from super- a “Caravaggio” canvas and paint - er’s. In MFA- land, a prospective fluous books by celebrities, politi - er’s easel), but at times less so writer will first experience pressure to cians, and their former lovers.” (Cara vag gio-branded eyeglasses publish short stories in literary quar- and Caravaggio “velvet effect deco- terlies, followed by a race to publish ARTS & LETTERS rative stucco”). And, of course, her thesis, and finally, the necessity of there is a Caravaggio iPhone app. continuing to publish more stories, all Crazy for Art historian Richard E. Spear while teaching a fresh crop of literary writes that Caravaggiomania was hopefuls. Caravaggio preceded by a period of increased For writers traveling in the world THE SOURCE: “Caravaggiomania” by scholarly interest beginning in the of MFA production, from classroom Richard E. Spear, in Art in America, middle of the 20th century that has Dec. 2010. workshops to literary journals to now spread to mass audiences. This, anthologies, the form that gets stud- Is there anything that in Spear’s opinion, is “positive,” but ied and published is the short story. wouldn’t be improved by a dash of he is not impressed with the reasons “At first glance,” says the author, “this Caravaggio? No, apparently. In behind the public’s adoration. may seem like a kind of collective sui- recent years Caravaggiomania has To begin with, many people cide, because everyone knows that no ripped and roared across the art confuse interest in Caravaggio’s one reads short stories.” But what world, reaching explosive propor - compelling life story with interest “everyone” reads is not as important tions in 2010, the 400th anniver- in his art. Michelangelo Merisi in MFA culture— the incentives to sary of the Italian Baroque artist’s (his birth name) was born into publish for a large audience aren’t there. What matters is to get read by other MFA students and to have one’s stories assigned as course work year after year. In the publishing world, by contrast, novels lose their spots at the best seller table in a matter of weeks. (“The contemporary New York canon tends to be more contemporary than canon,” the auth or smirks.) Paradoxi- cally, the obscure short stories of a professor teaching in an MFA program may find a more enduring readership than an NYC writer’s novel. It remains to be seen, but MFA may have more staying power than NYC. “A business model that relies on tuition and tax revenue (the top six Caravaggio’s cinematic style makes him a darling of modern viewers. Above, Judith Beheading Holofernes.

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poverty in northern Italy in 1571. tor Martin Scorsese says that reasons, writes Jennifer Howard, a He murdered a rival in Rome, was Caravaggio’s work has been in flu - senior reporter at The Chronicle of imprisoned in Malta, escaped, encing filmmakers since the late Higher Education. One is that Wal- took refuge in Sicily, and died in 1960s. lace’s writing— typified by the 1,100- 1610 while making his way back to Spear believes that Caravag gio - page Infinite Jest (1996), an “epic, Rome in hopes of winning a papal mania will fade, as fads do—there’s ironic, lonely- in- the-crowd, cri de pardon. His sexuality, education, just no telling when. Un til that time, coeur of a novel”—has all the and religious beliefs all remain the masses can enjoy their Caravag- makings of scholarly fodder. subjects of speculation. Spear says gio T- shirts, key chains, and art Wallace’s work also broke the pre- that our culture “fetishizes” biog- exhibitions. vailing literary mold. In the opinions raphy, and that it’s typical that of some ivory tower denizens, he artists who rise to star status have ARTS & LETTERS moved beyond the abstruse post - interesting backgrounds. mod er nism of Thomas Pynchon, Though Caravaggio’s biography DFW 101 John Barth, and Don DeLillo— could draw crowds on its own, the American novelists who seemed to “immediate and easy” nature of his THE SOURCES: “The Afterlife of David own the future of the canon in the work also plays a role. “This is not to Foster Wallace” by Jennifer Howard, in 1970s and ’80s. Unlike these bleak The Chronicle Review, Jan. 6, 2011, and imply that Caravaggio’s work fails to “Our Psychic Living Room” by Rebekah writers, Wallace did not seek to reward sustained looking, which Frumkin, in The Common Review, unmask “the hollow hypocrisy of the Fall–Winter 2010–2011. surely it does, or that it appeals only bourgeois social order,” Marshall to the populace or the 100 million When the celebrated writ- Boswell, an English professor at who communicate in tweets,” er David Foster Wallace committed Rhodes College, tells Howard. Spears contends. The artist employs suicide in September 2008, at the Writing in The Common Review, dramatic lighting and framing to age of 46, scholarship on his dense, Rebekah Frumkin agrees, arguing lend a mystical quality to his human footnote- laced fiction and nonfiction that Wallace’s allure derives in part subjects, imbuing his paintings was sparse. Since then, academics from how earnestly he writes about (about 60 exist that are definitively have been hard at work filling the moral questions present- day Ameri- attributed to him) with a cinematic void, essentially making Wallace “the can novelists have been reluctant to quality. Vittorio Storaro, a cele - next canonized American writer.” address directly. His fiction and brated cinematographer, called Car- Academic studies of the literary essays take on a range of complex avaggio “a great filmmaker.” Direc- lion have proliferated for a number of subjects (mathematics, drug addic-

long dying fall after we have finished it (if we finish it), every EXCERPT novel affords us, with the generosity of a buffalo carcass affording meat, hide, bone, horn, and fat, the opportunity to measure precisely, at our leisure, the distance between it and Try, Try Again that L’Enfantesque dream. Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them As with the scientist, the chef, the parent, as with anyone down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over caught up in the practice of art—that distillation of the human the findings; to learn from our mistakes. enterprise, which is, at its simplest, a business of paying attention— failure instructs the writer. Every novel, in the —MICHAEL CHABON, author of six novels, including moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the the Pulitzer Prize –winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written; but in the and Clay, in McSweeney’s (Issue 36)

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tion, and the influence of the main- not only to plumb a contemporary arguably most keenly felt in the cof- stream media, to name a few), but but also to stake their professorial fee shops where literary aspirants they are also about “trying your best quills on unmarked scholarly hone their craft. He has had an to be a good, kind human being in a terrain— mountains of Wallace’s “immense and wide-rang ing in - hostile world; about telling the papers are newly available at the fluence on the direction of con tem - Truth; about admitting your vulnera- Harry Ransom Center at the porary American fic tion,” Boswell bilities and sincerely seeking help University of Texas, Austin. The tells Howard. “Jona than Franzen, from others,” Frumkin, a student at curator of the Wallace archive says George Saunders, Zadie Smith: All Carleton College, writes. the impressive resource may help are indebted to Wallace.” Scholars There is some opportunism at archival research become “more (and fans) don’t have to content work in the dawn of Wallace stud- central to the work of a new genera- themselves solely with his surviving ies. The scholars drawn to his work tion of scholars.” peer fiction writers just yet— The Pale are generally young, and they see in With all the activity Wallace is King, Wallace’s unfin ished last novel, the great writer’s output a chance inspiring in the ivory tower, his loss is has just been published.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY per capita in come. Studies look- ing at per capita patent counts have uncovered a similar phenomenon. Wasted Youth It’s possible that the early years of an inventor’s life are not only the

THE SOURCE: “Age and Great Invention” for young scientists to learn before most prolific but also the most by Benjamin F. Jones, in The Review of they can start making their own creative— the best chance to pro - Economics and Statistics, Feb. 2010. contributions. At the start of the duce the sort of Einsteinian break- Albert Einstein was not 20th century, scientists began work- throughs that can upend the foun- yet 30 when he published a series of ing on their own ideas around age dations of a field. It’s a Catch-22 for papers that forever changed what 23. Today, most don’t get started the budding researcher: Study long we know about matter, space, and until they reach 31. time. Though Einstein was unusu- Unfortunately, ally young to be making career- innovation poten - capping discoveries, most of the last tial still seems to century’s great innovators weren’t fizzle out in the much older when they made theirs, fifties, regardless of typically in their late thirties or early when a scientist forties. “Great innovations are the begins producing. [province] of the young,” writes The average R&D Benjamin F. Jones of the Kellogg worker today con - School of Management at North - tributes about 30 west ern University. But perhaps not percent less than a for long, Jones finds. Over the century ago, as course of the 20th century, the mea sured by com- mean age at which scientists made paring the number their great achievements rose by of such workers in about six years. the economy and They look like children! James Watson and Francis Crick uncovered Why? Simply put, there’s more the growth rate of the double- helix structure of DNA when they were both quite young.

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enough to make your big break - what mathematicians call hetero - site in the Lower Omo River Valley through, and you’ll find you’re too scedasticity. Kibish Formation in Ethi o pia, he was old to do so. Complexity theorists—the math- given pause by the stone tools our sup- ematicians who explore these sorts posedly “primitive” human ancestors SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY of systems—are beginning to pin - had left behind. Nothing about the point some early warning signs of tools seemed archaic or primitive in The Math systemic collapse. One is that as sys- the least; they were made by hands tems get closer to melt down, they that skillfully manipulated a range of Beneath become slower to re spond to exter- rock types, and were not all that differ- nal stimuli. Another is that pulses ent from what a flintknapper could THE SOURCE: “On Early Warning Signs” occurring in neighboring parts of make today. What separates these by George Sugihara, in Seed Magazine, Dec. 20, 2010. the web become syn chronized. For “primitive” flintknappers from “mod- example, nearby brain cells fire in ern” humans? On the surface, it doesn’t unison in the lead-up to an epileptic Maybe not much, says Shea, a pro- seem that financial modeling has seizure. fessor at Stony Brook University. much in common with climate sci- A similar pattern emerged before Archaeologists have for too long per- ence, ecology, or neuroscience. But the recent financial crash. Over in fact these fields are grappling time, financial institutions’ invest - An archaeologist says with similar mathematical prob - ment holdings became more alike lems: how to map nonlinear, deeply (the perverse result of each institu- it is time to discard interconnected systems and antici- tion independently pursuing the notion of distinct pate systemwide collapse, notes extreme diversification) and began primitive and modern George Sugihara, a theoretical biol- to respond to changes in the market periods. ogist at the Scripps Institution of nearly simultaneously. When large Oceanography in San Diego. financial institutions such as Leh - For financial modelers, the chal- man Brothers fell apart, the fallout petuated the idea that there are dis- lenge is to predict crashes. An in - was not unlike what happens in an tinct primitive and modern periods, vest ment banker looking at one eco system in which many animals with a revolution occurring between portfolio will not be able to see the rely for sustenance on one large ani- the Middle and Upper Paleolithic systemic factors that could lead to a mal species that suddenly dies out. periods (roughly 40,000 years ago). In meltdown. Likewise, a marine Heed Einstein, Sugihara advises: fact, fossil evidence challenging that scientist trying to protect a species “Everything should be made as sim- view has been around for decades. of fish will not be able to account for ple as possible, but not simpler.” From the 1970s onward, archaeol- all of the variables in the system that ogists based their idea of the Paleo - affect the survival of that particular SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY lithic revolution on artifacts from fish without looking beyond that Europe, where they had found fossils one species. In the field of climate The Revolution of Homo sapiens with Upper Paleo - science, linear models cannot lithic tools dating back 35,000 years, predict what we know historically to That Wasn’t and Homo neanderthalensis and be true: that climate change can be THE SOURCE: “Refuting a Myth About other proto humans with earlier tools. rapid and extreme. The existing Human Origins” by John J. Shea, in Ameri- But later, when they began to look can Scientist, March–April 2011. models are all very good for outside Europe, in Asia and Africa, painting a picture of a complex sys- John J. Shea is an archaeol- they found much older Homo tem at a specific point in time, but ogist. He is also a flintknapper, or sapiens— some dating as far back as they do not have the ability to someone who makes stone tools. 200,000 years— with the same primi- explain “jumps in variability,” or While on a dig at a 195,000- year- old tive tools once associated with Nean -

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der thals. To accommodate this evi - according to Shea, merely reflects should study variations of human dence, archaeologists theorized that these scientists’ bias.) If modernity behavior from place to place. modern behaviors emerged tens of were a revolutionary shift, why If you look at stone tools produced thousands of years after the earliest would it dis ap pear for prolonged in eastern Africa from 284,000 to Homo sapiens. periods? 6,000 years ago, you don’t find a The tendered explanation is a Shea believes that things such as steady accumulation of different tech- nice way of fitting the evidence to a sophisticated stone tools don’t appear nologies, but constant and wide varia- long- cherished narrative, but it is because of sudden shifts in human tion depending on the needs Homo not really scientific, Shea says. The abilities. Humans create them be - sapiens faced given the environmental archaeological record shows that cause their particular environment conditions of the time. In recent cen- “modern” behaviors have cropped up demands them, and because they can turies humans have exhibited great in different regions for long periods build on the technological advances varia tion in stone tool technology, but of time but then vanished. (Archae- of their forebears. Rath er than focus “no anthropologists in their right ologists label sites yielding this kind on the illusory prog ress of Homo minds would attribute this variability of evi dence “precocious,” which, sapiens, Shea argues, archaeologists to evolutionary differences,” Shea says.

OTHER NATIONS nuclear powers), and the officer cri- sis undermines its capabilities. One retired officer Kumar interviewed said, “In a future war, we will suffer. India’s Vanishing Officers When today’s leadership grows 30 years hence, it will be mediocre at In 1997, when the Ministry of very best.” He predicted that India THE SOURCE: “The Officer Crisis in the Indian Military” by Dinesh Kumar, in South Defense first hired an advertising could lose the next war with either Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, agency to burnish the military’s image, China or Pakistan. Dec. 2010. the army faced an officer shortfall of India’s armed forces are nearly 13,000, more than 25 percent OTHER NATIONS among the largest in the world, with of the slots it was seeking to fill. Three more than 1.3 million troops on years later, the shortfall reached 31 Who’s Dying active duty. But they are facing a cri- percent. The navy and air force have sis: They can’t find enough qualified smaller but growing shortages. in Canada and willing candidates to fill their In addition to recruitment, THE SOURCE: “Lesson From Canada’s Uni- junior officer ranks, reports doctoral India’s military faces problems with versal Care: Socially Disadvantaged Patients candidate Dinesh Kumar of Mon - retention. Between 1995 and 2007, Use More Health Services, Still Have Poorer ash University in Melbourne. requests from officers for early Health” by David A. Alter, Therese Stukel, Alice Chong, and David Henry, in Health The shortage is not entirely new, release surged by nearly 200 Affairs, Feb. 2011. but today it is worse than ever, in percent, suggesting “a very high part because the opening of India’s level of internal dissatisfaction.” Canada’s universal health economy has created new avenues The armed forces’ woes could care system is often cited as an for upward mobility. In addition, abet regional instability. India’s mil- example for the United States, but it new officers face the unappealing itary must be prepared to fight is not without its limits. A new study prospect of being shipped off to the nuclear and conventional wars finds that although ready access to country’s counterinsurgency mis - against China and Pakistan (six of health care in Canada helps to nar- sions against separatists in the the army’s 13 corps are located along row the gap between haves and province of Jammu and Kashmir. the disputed borders with those two have- nots, Canada’s poor continue

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OTHER NATIONS olic but Pentecostal- flavored move- Even though Canadians ment with millions of mem bers in have more equal access Asia’s Religious the Philippines. Its typically very poor adherents are promised to health care than Renaissance “wealth in magical exchange for Americans, there is still tithing donations to the ‘treasure a substantial gap THE SOURCE: “Religious Resurgence in boxes’ so prominently displayed at between the health of Contemporary Asia: Southeast Asian Perspectives on Capitalism, the State, and El Shaddai’s five-to-10-hour prayer rich and poor. the New Piety” by Robert W. Hefner, in The rallies.” Followers chant the slogan Journal of Asian Studies, Nov. 2010. “I am rich! I am strong! Something Defying a century of pre- good is going to happen to me!” to have worse health than wealthier dictions that East and Southeast In Thailand, the Buddhist Canadians, say David A. Alter and Asia would become increasingly Dham makâya Temple near Bang - three of his colleagues from the In - secular in an age of modernization kok has attracted throngs of middle- stitute for Clinical Evaluative and globalization, these regions class Thais using similar messages Sciences in Ontario. are in the grips of a religious and slick advertising. But like many In their study of 15,000 patients resurgence. Intriguingly, it’s not a of Asia’s religious innovators, the in the province of Ontario from return to old-time religion but an temple is not concerned only with 1996 to 2008, people with low in - explosion of religious movements material well- being. It upends tradi- comes were nearly three times as that are distinctly modern in tion by giving ordinary followers likely to die during the study. Poorer character. They tend to be laity access to the forms of meditation people also went to see a primary- based, to be receptive to leadership once monopolized by monks. In a care doctor far more often than by women, and to preach a path to world in flux, says Hefner, insti - those of greater means, an average material wealth, ob serves Robert tutions such as the Dham makâya of 62 times over the course of the W. Hefner, director of the Institute Temple offer people “confidence and study versus 47. The discrepancy, on Culture, Religion, and World moral security.” the authors say, arose not because Affairs at Boston University. Of all the religious resurgences, poorer patients received inferior One of the most dramatic arri - China’s has been the “most start - care or were seeking preventative vals is El Shaddai, an officially Cath - ling,” in light of the aggressively sec- care, but because of behavioral pat- terns that increased the likelihood of certain illnesses, such as heart disease. Low- income patients tended to smoke more, get less exer- cise, and have worse eating habits. They also were more likely to suffer from depression. Alter and his coauthors believe that their findings “do not argue against universal health care,” but demonstrate that universal care alone does not completely close the gap between rich and poor. More aggressive measures, such as behav- ioral interventions early in life, are necessary to accomplish that. Chinese Buddhists attend a Buddhist Association of China conference in Beijing last year.

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ular state there. A genera- forced assimilation. In tion after the “ ‘supersti - 2002, the Grand National tion’-smashing calamities” EXCERPT Assembly voted to allow of the Great Leap Forward radio and tele vision pro- and the Cultural Revolu- grams to be broad cast in tion, tens of mil lions of China’s Foodies Kurdish (al beit for a limited Chinese have become amount of time each day). prac ticing Bud dhists, sev- We, the people of Chengdu, love to eat. Food is In 2004, when possibilities eral hundred million ob - more important than life itself. . . . My grandpa told were the brightest they had serve ancestral and temple me how, in the 1930s, when warlords were battling ever been, the Kurdish rites, and perhaps as for control of Chengdu, and artillery fell on the insur gent group the Kurdis- many as 60 mil lion con - Huangchengba area, deluging streets with debris as tan Workers’ Party (PKK) sider themselves Chris - houses collapsed, customers in a packed mapo tofu announced an end to a tian. Women are dispro- restaurant watched the bedlam creep closer as they four- year- old cease-fire and portionately repre sented waited for their meals, urging the chef to hurry so resumed a two- pronged in the leadership of lay they might take shelter. The chef maintained his campaign of ur ban bomb- Buddhist associations, steady pace in the open kitchen, responding, “Mapo ings and rural insurgency. new Christian groups, and tofu cannot be rushed; that would ruin my Why did the PKK not neo-traditionalist temple reputation.” seize the moment? The worshipers. group needed to assert its Even Islam, a religion —LIAO YIWU, a writer in Sichuan Province, power or risk fading into that has historically in Asia Literary Review (Winter 2010) irrelevance, argues political shared little common scientist Günes Murat ground with Western Tezcür of Loyola University capitalism, has in Asia been OTHER NATIONS Chicago. The conservative ruling revived with a market- friendly fla- party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip vor. In Indonesia, Islam de Defying the Erdo gan, the Justice and Develop - marché (or market Islam) has ment Party (AKP), was growing in arrived, borrowing freely from Democracy Cure power in Kurdish Turkey and taking

American Protestant evangelical- THE SOURCE: “When Democratization votes from the Democratic Society ism. One of its stars is Craig Radicalizes: The Kurdish Nationalist Move- Party, a Kurdish party. Moreover, Abdur rohim Owensby, an Ameri- ment in Turkey” by Günes Murat Tezcür, in without the galvanizing effect of state Journal of Peace Research, Nov. 2010. can convert to Islam who was a repression, the PKK would have trou- Protestant preacher and worked Spurred by the hope of ble signing up recruits. with Moral Majority leader Jerry joining the European Union, Turkey Since 2005 the pace of reform has Falwell before he made a fortune embarked on a wave of reform be- slowed, and the AKP’s power in the in Indonesia selling subscriptions tween 1999 and 2004. It abolished its Kurdish region of Turkey has waned. to cell phone messages from the death penalty, liberalized regulation of This has led the PKK to modify its Qur’an. political parties and the press, and behavior, as evidenced by the declara- Instead of destroying religious expanded the rights of non- Muslim tion of a temporary cease-fire in 2009. faith, globalization and moderniza- minorities. Ankara even eased up on Democratization is often thought tion have created new needs among treatment of the coun try’s ethnic to be a salve for ethnic conflict, Tezcür those whose lives have been changed, Kurds, who are concen trated near the observes, but when ethnic insurgen- Hefner concludes, and religious borders with Iraq and Iran, and who cies are unable to translate their entrepreneurs have succeeded by have been subjected to a long- stand- power into electoral gains, the medi- answering their call. ing Turkish policy of repression and cine may not work.

86 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 Also in this issue:

David Garrow on Malcolm X CURRENT

Nancy Isenberg on the Revolu- tion’s loyalists BOOKS John Mueller on reviews of new and noteworthy nonfiction civil liberties

Ben Wildavsky on the sorry state of college Port of Memories educations Reviewed by Timothy Snyder

Jason Sokol on the South’s The 20th century defies nostalgia as clearly as Pierre ODESSA: recent history and mocks historical categories. For histori- L’Enfant’s traffic circles or ans and others concerned with European civi- Baron Hauss mann’s boule- Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. Emily Anthes lization, the Holocaust disfigures the natural vards. It was built from reflex to make sense of the past. Historians of practically nothing begin- By Charles King. on personality W. W. Norton. and genes con tem porary Europe often pay little atten - ning in the late 18th 336 pp. $ 27.95 tion to the extermination of its Jews, while century at the orders of an Laura Kipnis historians of the Holocaust generally separate enlightened Russian despot, Empress Cather- on how to read their ac counts from European history. Some ine, on the designs of a series of Western Euro- literature social theorists see the Holocaust itself as an peans, for the express purpose of being a per- end point of modernity, and thus as a power- fect port. At the same time, its Black Sea locale Miles Hoffman ful reason to embrace a postmodern view of is perhaps the borderland par excellence. It on Dmitri the world. Yet the historians who have tried to was the end of civilization for ancient Greeks Shostakovich follow this prescription find that the post - coming from the south by sea and, two millen- modern embrace of the fragmentary and the nia later, their distant Russian imperial heirs, F. S. Naiden on liminal provides no refuge from the horror. coming from the north by land. The city’s hin- Socrates and his Attending to the borderlands rather than the terland, the steppe, was for both ancient world capitals, and to zones of multinational settle- dwellers and modern settlers— primarily Ital- ment rather than nation- states, they realize ians, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians— savage that it was in precisely such places that the and un known. Odessa was not only the south- Holocaust began, with mass shootings over ern extreme of Russian imperial power, but pits. If the modern storyline seems to lead the port where Russian subjects profited from straight to the gas chamber, the postmodern knowing the rest of the world. If St. Petersburg one leads to the ditch. projected an image of calm majesty, Odessa Along the northern coast of the Black Sea, emanated a pragmatic cosmopolitanism. nostalgia meets history, and the modern the In his elegant history, Charles King, a pro- postmodern. The great port Odessa, a de - fessor of international affairs at Georgetown signed city, represents enlightened modernity University and the author of histories of the

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Caucasus and the Black Sea, contemplates the kets that they kept through the mid-1800s. origins of the city. Odessa was the proudest crea- The city’s large and increasingly Jewish middle tion of an empire that was breaking the Polish- class usually mediated in trade or provided for the Lithuan ian Commonwealth, mastering the Cos - city itself. There was almost no manufacturing, sacks of Ukraine, and driving Ottoman armies to and so the city’s prosperity depended upon serf the south. All of this made room for a New Russia labor in the countryside and favorable conditions on the steppe and seacoast that is today chiefly on the world markets. The Crimean War of southern Ukraine. The chief architect of this New 1853–56 taught the British and the French to seek Russia was Catherine’s favorite, Governor-General suppliers other than the Russian Empire, which Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, a forceful and was then their enemy; American farmers were the clever man who understood that façades can be beneficiaries. The opening of the Suez Canal in foundations. 1869 further reduced the importance of Odessa. The founder of Odessa itself was José Pascual Once Europe was trading in earnest for foodstuffs Domingo de Ribas y Boyons, a warrior from Naples across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, Russian whom Catherine placed in charge of the city’s design wheat and Black Sea ports mattered much less. At in 1794. The steadiest presence was that of Duc de the same time, the end of serfdom in the Russian Richelieu, governor-general from 1803 to 1814, who Empire brought free but impoverished peasants weathered the plague and showed his sense of fair- from the Ukrainian hinterland to Odessa, where ness by treating Jews and Christians equally during they confronted a downwardly mobile but still its ravages. Also important to King’s account is Gov- confident Jewish middle class. ernor-General Mikhail Semyon ovich Vorontsov, like For Europe in general, the moment of social and the others a hero of Russia’s wars of expansion in the political distress associated with the end of the south. King shows an admirable lack of 19th- century globalization occurred in the 1920s sentimentality in his treatment of the affair of and ’30s. But in Odessa, class degradation and eth- Vorontsov’s wife with Alexander Push kin, which nic violence came early, in the 1890s and 1900s. As ended when the wronged husband sent the poet King shows, during the Revolution of 1905 in the away to count locust eggs after one of the region’s Russian Empire, Odessa was the site of extensive periodic infestations. During the first third of the pogroms, sometimes followed by episodes of Jew- 19th century, the story of Odessa is one of power, not ish retaliation. At the end of World War I, as the romance. Russian Empire collapsed into civil war and Ukrain ians sought national independence, Odes - dessa was at the forefront of the economic sa’s Ukrainian hinterlands were wracked by the globalization of the 19th century, and the continuous mass murder of Jews. It is hard to think Ocity’s rise and fall forecast what would of these killings as “pogroms,” since the number of happen throughout Europe and, indeed, the West. victims was in the tens of thousands, a scale never With a population that would grow to more than before seen. For this reason, King suggests that 400,000 by the end of the century, Odessa became Odessa provided a precocious sense of the politics one of Russia’s largest cities. Established near the of the 20th century, or indeed the 21st. mouths of four rivers, it was the ideal place from King attends to the career of Vladimir Jabotin- which to export wheat from the Russian Empire sky, an Odessan Jew who founded right- wing “revi- across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and then sionist Zionism,” a doctrine that advocated an the world. The Napol eonic Wars made Odessa one immediate return to a Promised Land defined of the centers of European trade. Napoleon tried to rather broadly to include the whole of the British carry out a kind of reverse blockade, banning the Mandate of Palestine. Jabotinsky was a kind of sale of grain from central Europe to his enemies. multinationalist, respectful of and respected by Russian foodstuffs from Odessa thus gained mar- other Eastern European nationalists, and, as King

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Sergei Eisenstein drew bloody inspiration from the failed Revolution of 1905 to immortalize Odessa in his film Battleship Potemkin, but reality was less cinematic. Here, Odessan soldiers and workers take up arms in October 1905. points out, drawn at one point to Benito Mussolini’s ers has begun. It was during the Revolution of brand of fascism as a model. Although this current 1905 that the sailors of the battleship Potemkin of Jewish politics was never very important in mutinied against their officers near the port of interwar Eastern Europe, and Jabotinsky had no Odessa. Twenty years later, the pioneering direc- success organizing the mass emigration he wanted tor Sergei Eisenstein masterfully transformed this in the 1930s, King notes that Jabotinsky’s identifi- event into a beautiful film, exaggerating the scope cation of Jewish self-esteem with expansive territo- and resonance of the revolt and adding the unfor- rial nationalism has enjoyed a rebirth of sorts that gettable scene of the civilian massacre on the began in the late 20th century. For King, Odessa Staircase. Jabotinsky’s ideas were an unsurprising King skillfully separates fact from myth, and consequence of the collapse of a cosmopolitan, transforms himself from historian to critic. He middle- class city in which Jews could no longer feel plays both roles well, but the price here is the loss that they had a secure place. of the Bolshevik Revolution as an event. In King’s account, the red flags go up in Odessa in 1917, and n 1905 an anchor slips, prose becomes Soviet power is consolidated a few years later, but poetry, and King shifts from history to mem- we are not told just how. Much happened in Iory. This is no doubt a conscious choice, since between, not least a Hapsburg occupation of the for King the city’s moment of greatness has city and its hinterland in 1918. King treats Soviet passed, and its rise as a symbol for itself and oth- governance of the city in the 1920s and ’30s less

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attentively than Russian imperial governance in territories conquered by Romania, were sent to the 1820s and ’30s. It would have been interesting concentration camps. When the Soviets returned to learn about Odessa’s role during the collecti - to Odessa in 1944, they counted 48 surviving vization of agriculture in Soviet Ukraine, when Jews. As King shows, the particular horror that the grain that might have fed a starving popu - befell Odessan Jews during the war was blurred lation was instead exported from Black Sea ports. by postwar Soviet propaganda about a “hero city” It would also have been interesting to learn how united in suffering and resistance to fascism and Odessa, still a multinational city, suffered from the by the fact that the postwar communist regime in mass national shooting operations of Stalin’s Romania was an important Soviet ally. Great Terror of 1937–38. Odessa, today a pleasant seaside city of 1.2 mil- Yet King must attend to myth if he is to make lion people in independent Ukraine, powerfully one of his major points: Nostalgia for Odessa, resists historical placement. It fits neither national Soviet and otherwise, has much to do with its narratives of Ukrainian liberation nor nostalgic Jewish population, as presented, for example, in tropes of Russian revivalism. The city still seems Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales (1931), a collection of rooted in nothing except itself and the works of short stories set in the city’s Jewish quarter, Mol- genius of natives and admirers such as Babel and davanka. At the same time, too little is known Eisenstein. It ought to be an inescapable part of about the extermination of Odessan Jews during Western histories of the Holocaust and modern World War II, when Soviet power was absent. Europe. Yet, with important exceptions such as Odessa’s Jews fell victim not to Germany, but to Patricia Herlihy’s foundational 1986 book Odessa: Germany’s ally Romania. A History, 1794–1914, it has generally escaped When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in them. King makes a virtue of these difficulties, tak- June 1941, Romania was the most important of ing the city on its own engaging terms. His writing the Third Reich’s allies. The Romanian army in - is aesthetic without superficiality, and erudite with- vaded southern Ukraine, and placed a large out pretension. Reading the book is like traveling as region known as Transnistria under its own con- your best self, the self that you never quite are, trol. After a bomb planted by operatives of the ready with every reference, worldly and wise. Be - Soviet state police, the NKVD, killed Romanian cause King opens a difficult world with grace, the occupation authorities in Odessa, the Romanians book’s ending comes, as it should, as a shock. murdered perhaps half of the 50,000 Jews then in the city. The remaining half, like Jews in other Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). A Revisionist’s History Reviewed by David J. Garrow

In 1965, a fascinating important black freedom advocate has appeared in political voice was silenced when MALCOLM X: more than 35 years, but now, in the appropriately A Life of a team of assassins gunned down titled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Columbia Reinvention. Malcolm X, a man whose intel- University professor Manning Marable fills this void By Manning Marable. lectual and religious journey had Viking. 594 pp. $ 30 with a landmark book that reflects not only finally transformed him into an thorough research and accessible prose but, most eloquent spokesman for human equality. No com- impressively, unvarnished assessments and consis- prehensive and credible biography of this signally tently acute interpretive judgments.

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Malcolm, of course, chron- icled— or authorized journalist Alex Haley to chronicle—his own life in his famous The Autobiogra- phy of Malcolm X, published nine months after he died, but Marable definitively establishes that the Autobiography omitted some sig- nificant aspects of Malcolm’s youth ful criminal life while drama- tically exaggerating others. Several chapters Malcolm had prepared were deleted before publication, and he did not review important portions of what millions of read- ers would think of as “his political testament.” The Autobiography as published, Marable warns, “is more Haley’s than its author’s.” Born in 1925, Malcolm Little spent his early years in Lansing, Michigan. His childhood was replete with family tragedies: His physically abusive father died vio- lently when Malcolm was six, his mother was confined to a mental hospital when he was 14, and the Malcolm X addresses a Harlem rally in support of desegregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in older half- sister who took custody 1963. Increasingly, he devoted himself to the civil rights movement before his murder in 1965. of him was arrested repeatedly for various minor crimes after Malcolm went to live an odyssey during which Malcolm would reinvent with her in Boston. Malcolm quit school in ninth himself several times over. He spent six and a half grade, and by age 19 his preference for theft and years, from ages 20 to 27, incarcerated in Massachu- robbery over regular employment had earned him setts prisons before being paroled. Lennon visited his first of several arrests. Marable corroborates the him, but the man who most changed his life was fel- evidence first presented in Bruce Perry’s valuable low convict John Elton Bembry, 20 years Malcolm’s but flawed 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a senior, who challenged him to develop his intellect Man Who Changed Black America, that Malcolm by using the prison library and enrolling in corres- developed a close relationship with William Paul pondence courses. By 1948, when one of Malcolm’s Lennon, a wealthy gay white man in his late fifties, brothers told him that he and other family members who paid Malcolm for sex. had converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Malcolm also had an older white girlfriend and wanted Malcolm to convert too, the young prisoner partner in crime, whom he physically abused. When had acquired a profound intellectual earnestness. Malcolm’s sloppiness allowed the police to unravel The NOI had been founded in 1930 by a myste- their small burglary gang, his girlfriend testified rious mixed- race man who disappeared in 1934 and against him and served seven months, while Mal- was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, née Poole, a colm was sentenced to eight to 10 years. Thus began Georgia native who headquartered the small sect in

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Chicago. The Nation of Islam was Islamic in name ever before, and advertised the dominance of the only, for Muhammad’s teachings represented an NOI’s militant all- male internal enforcement arm, odd ball amalgam of black nationalism and science- the Fruit of Islam. fiction cosmology that bore only the slightest The year 1957 marked a period of “tremen - relation to the Muslim faith. By the late 1940s the dous growth for Malcolm,” Marable writes. As the NOI had fewer than a black freedom struggle in America gained thousand members, but momen tum, Malcolm’s interest turned toward Frustrated African for the newly seri ous arguments over the civil rights move ment’s Americans responded young prisoner the agenda. He “no longer saw himself exclusively as to Malcolm X’s angry group “became the an NOI minister,” and that put him in increasing condemnations of white start ing point for a spiri- tension with the sect’s leadership. The NOI’s black tual journey that would nationalism was essentially apolitical, and Elijah racism and black passivity. consume Malcolm’s life.” Muhammad could “maintain his personal author- The NOI taught that ity only by forcing his followers away from the blacks’ true ancestral outside world.” sur names had been lost during slavery, and In January 1958, soon after rejection by a long- Malcolm, like most members, adopted X as his new time girlfriend, Malcolm married Betty Sanders, a last name. nurse and NOI member with whom he had shared Malcolm mastered Muhammad’s doctrine, and a handful of awkward dates. The partnership was by mid-1953, less than a year after his release from deeply troubled from the outset. Betty combatively prison, he was a full- time NOI minister. He was not opposed the “patriarchal behavior” of her husband yet 30 years old. Malcolm’s rhetorical prowess soon and the NOI, and Malcolm “rarely, if ever, displayed emerged as one of the sect’s greatest assets, and by affection toward her.” Within a year, Malcolm was 1955 membership had grown to some 6,000, in writing to Elijah to confess that she was complain- large part thanks to Malcolm’s efforts. Over the next ing “that we were incompatible sexually because I six years the ranks of the NOI reached upward of had never given her any real satisfaction” and that 50,000 as frustrated African Americans responded she was threatening to seek it elsewhere. When, to Mal colm’s angry but articulate condemnations of nonetheless, Betty gave birth to several children, white racism and black passivity. Malcolm both de- Malcolm absented himself and treated his wife nounced all whites (“We have a common oppressor, “largely as a nuisance.” a common exploiter. . . . He’s an enemy to all of us”) Growing tensions between Malcolm and the and derided mainstream civil rights leaders as NOI’s ruling circle eclipsed those at home. “The “nothing but modern Uncle Toms” who “keep you national leadership increasingly viewed the rank and me in check, keep us under control, keep us and file as a cash register,” Marable writes, and Eli- passive and peaceful and nonviolent.” jah had developed a habit of impregnating the Muhammad had assigned Malcolm to the NOI’s young women who worked in his office— including Harlem temple. On the afternoon of April 26, 1957, Malcolm’s former girlfriend— in flagrant violation of several New York City police officers savagely beat the NOI’s rules mandating sexual fidelity. Talk of the an NOI member who had verbally objected to their affairs spread, but when Malcolm raised the subject treatment of a suspect. Initially the police refused to with his closest fellow minister, Boston’s Louis X— transfer the severely injured complainant to a hospi- later Farrakhan— Louis quickly relayed word to Eli- tal, but when they finally did, Malcolm led a well- jah, who was already jealous of his protégé. disciplined protest of about 100 NOI members Nine days after the assassination of President through central Harlem that eventually swelled to John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm sar- thousands. The Harlem demonstration thrust both castically characterized the murder as a case of the NOI and Malcolm into the public eye more than “the chickens coming home to roost.” But it was his

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follow- up remark—“Chickens coming home to several attackers narrowly failed to grab Malcolm roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made at his own front door, and soon thereafter a trio of me glad”—that created controversy and gave Elijah firebombs set off at three am sent Malcolm and and his top aides a pretext for suspending Malcolm his family fleeing in their night clothes. He would from his ministerial role. Three months later Elijah not escape for long. A week later, three gunmen made the suspension permanent, and Malcolm and two accomplices, all members of the NOI’s announced that he was leaving the Nation. Newark mosque, riddled Malcolm with close- Malcolm immediately embraced the real range gunfire at a Manhattan lecture hall. He was Muslim faith, a commitment he cemented with a dead at 39. Several hours later, Louis Farrakhan visit to Mecca in April 1964 that deeply affected his delivered a guest sermon at the Newark mosque. worldview. He returned home with a vastly different political message. “Separation is not the goal of the arable’s only significant failing in this Afro- American,” he told a Chicago crowd, “nor is otherwise hugely insightful volume is integration his goal. They are merely methods Mhis undisciplined and inconsistent toward his real end— respect as a human being.” speculation about what, if anything, the FBI— Mal colm went abroad again in July, traveling pri- which was conducting extensive electronic mar ily in Africa and the Middle East until Novem- surveillance of Elijah Muhammad— or the New ber. Marable rightly terms this “a journey of self- York Police Department knew in advance about discovery,” and in most countries Malcolm was feted the assassination team. Until the complete record virtually as a visiting head of state. He told one of the FBI’s surveillance is released, those ques - friendly reporter that he would “never rest until I tions will remain unanswered. What is publicly have undone the harm I did to so many innocent known is that at least one of the gunmen still lives Negroes” during his years trumpeting the NOI’s openly in Newark and has never faced law pseudo theology. enforcement interrogation or prosecution. Malcolm’s compass of thought was widening Much of the official lack of interest in Mal - beyond issues of color, and he struggled to find colm’s life, both before and after his murder, “a new terminology to translate increasingly stemmed from the fact that “at the time of his complex ideas into crowd-friendly language,” death he was widely reviled and dismissed as an Marable writes. As a result, Malcolm could voice irresponsible demagogue.” That caricature has contradictory opinions just days apart, praising long since been discarded as historians and the integrationist leaders such as Martin Luther wider public have come to realize the remark able King Jr. one day, then ridiculing King and liberal potential that the Malcolm of 1964 and 1965 had politicians the next. as both a fearless champion of black America and But Malcolm’s fatal hurdle remained his an internationally recognized proponent of violent former comrades in the NOI, who were human equality across all faiths and colors. In outraged by Malcolm’s public remarks about Eli- fact, Marable is correct when he contends that by jah’s profligate behavior. What’s more, “by em - the final year of his life Malcolm had come to bracing orthodox Islam,” Marable argues, “Mal - represent “a definitive yardstick by which all colm had marginalized the Nation in one fell other Americans who aspire to a mantle of lead- swoop,” and his conversion made NOI leaders all ership should be measured.” This superbly the more determined to see him dead. Leading perceptive and resolutely honest book will long the charge was Malcolm’s former friend, Louis endure as a definitive treatment of Malcolm’s life, Farrakhan. In December 1964 he declared in the if not of the actors complicit in his death. NOI’s newspaper, “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not es cape. . . . Such a man as Malcolm is David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, Univer- sity of Cambridge, is the author of Bearing the Cross (1986), a worthy of death.” One night several weeks later, Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

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America’s Losers Reviewed by Nancy Isenberg

With the current rage From the first page, Allen paints Tories as born TORIES: for the Founding Fathers, it is Fighting for the to the purple, wealthy office-seekers from proud not surprising that their home- King in America’s families, living in Cambridge on “Tory Row” (an grown enemies would spark First Civil War. 18th-century version of a gated community), and new interest. Historians have By Thomas B. Allen. motivated by simple greed and resentment long regarded the loyalists— Harper. 468 pp. $26.99 toward the uppity revolutionaries. James Otis Jr., those who remained faithful to LIBERTY’S EXILES: a principal defender of colonial rights, is “a Tory in the Crown during the Revolu - American a long line of influential Tories” until his tion ary War—with a jaundiced Loyalists in the conversion to the patriot side. John Adams would eye, dismissing them as back - Revolutionary War. turn over in his grave to read this ridiculous ward-thinking defenders of By Maya Jasanoff. description of Otis—the man whose eloquence he Knopf. 460 pp. $30 monarchy and losers in the con- credited with having ignited the Revolution. test for American independence. Often forgotten is Adams identified with Otis because, as late as the fact that loyalists made up a sizable proportion 1775, he too struggled to define himself as a of the population. Historians have estimated that patriot and an American. This difficult process they constituted one-fifth to as much as one-third was experienced by many others as well, a of the 2.5 million British colonists who had to phenomenon Allen entirely ignores. choose a side at the outbreak of the war in 1775. Failing to distinguish propaganda from events Thomas B. Allen’s Tories is, unfortunately, not on the ground, Allen is unable to separate myth the book to read on this topic. Although Allen has from reliable accounts. He draws heavily on 19th- written several books, mainly popular military his- century sources, such as Thomas Jones and tory, he is not well versed in modern scholarship on Edward Floyd De Lancey’s History of New York the American Revolution. His very title is a good During the Revolutionary War (1879), which must clue that he has no interest in presenting a nuanced be read with a skeptical eye. Nor does he bother to account. “Tories” was a term of derision used by the sort out the political views of the loyalists. Instead, revolutionaries. Allen’s book is really about the he depicts them as empty vessels, moti vated by a American patriots, whose every action he defends, visceral, self-serving anger. The Declaration of while diminishing their opponents. Allen’s Tories Independence, Allen claims, sparked “surprise” at are “spymasters,” “informers,” “moles,” collabor - the patriots’ audacity, then made loyalists’ blood ationists, assassins, and plunderers. British military boil, since to their ears it “contained line after line of officers fare scarcely better. At Concord, for exam- libel” against George III. ple, the British commander is “fat” and “inept,” This is an absurd statement. The loyalists were while patriot general Artemas Ward is “a big rug - not living in a vacuum, blindly ignoring a decade of ged man.” (Although George Washington’s devoted protests. Many people who were to become loyal - general Henry Knox was fat by any measure, Allen ists supported these protests. Loyalists, in fact, had never describes him that way.) Allen uses the same diverse political interests. And the Declaration was hyperbolic language found in wartime propaganda, propaganda, far less important to them than the reducing the divisions between patriots and loyal- resolution approved by the Continental Con gress ists to a morality tale of dashing victors and about a week earlier, on June 24, 1776, declaring dastardly villains. that residents who refused to show loyalty to the

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new government were now traitors. The June 24 diplomats handed the territory over to Spain in resolution legitimated state laws and procedures 1783. Following her husband to the University of for the confiscation of loyalist property, suppressing Edinburgh, where he received medical training, freedom of speech and denying them rights. Allen’s she and the family moved next to the yellow Tories come across as foolish reactionaries, shocked fever–infested island of Jamaica. After two of her and enflamed by Jefferson’s prose—despite the fact children died, she returned to Scotland and spent that they were immersed in the same European many years apart from her husband. After his intellectual traditions and had adopted the same death in 1807, she finally found a permanent political vocabulary. Tories is a sad example of what home with her surviving children in Nova Scotia. can get passed off as history, and displays a minimal David George, born a slave in Virginia, trav - understanding of the British imperial world that eled as a free black loyalist to Nova Scotia, where the loyalists inhabited. he established a Baptist church. In 1792, he migrated with his family to Sierra Leone as one of aya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles is a fine the founding members of Freetown, an antislav- contrast. In this smart and gracefully ery experiment and free black colony. He owed his Mwritten book, Jasanoff provides an freedom, in part, to John Murray, Lord Dunmore, instructive story of how losers shape history. A the last royal governor of Virginia, who had issued historian at Harvard, she specializes in modern a proclamation in 1775 granting freedom to all British and imperial history, and thus easily avoids the pitfalls of seeing the loyalists through the distorted lens of their patriot adversaries. The cast of characters she introduces at the beginning of the book are three-dimensional fig- ures—people who speak in their own words, are fascinating in their own right, and exhibit con- flicted views and divergent aspirations. As a perk, Liberty’s Exiles takes us beyond Yorktown (the conclusive battle of the war) to describe the loyalist diaspora after Lord Cornwallis’s army surrendered. Beverley Robinson was a Virginian, a good friend of George Washington who married into a large landholding family in New York. After commanding a loyalist regiment, Robinson said farewell to his sons and headed off to England in 1783. One son went to Canada, and another stayed behind in the British garrison in occupied New York to the bitter end. Separated by war, many in the Robinson clan were fated never to see each other again. Georgia-born Elizabeth Lichtenstein John- ston spent much of her life in transit. After mar- rying a loyalist army captain during the war, she was evacuated from Savannah, Charleston, and East Florida—the last viewed as the promised Colonists who remained loyal to the British Crown were the American Revolu- land for southern loyalist exiles until British tion’s biggest losers, and thousands fled to settle in Canada.

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slaves who sought British protection. Dunmore’s harbinger of future state welfare programs. Equal - act set the stage for subsequent British policy sup- ly revealing of their liberal impulses is the fact that porting black loyalist exiles. transplanted loyalists resisted top-down rule and Dunmore’s own tale had its twists and turns. In made demands for rights from the British govern- 1786 he became governor of the Bahamas, where ment, much like their former enemies in the he backed schemes for retaking Florida as a first United States. step toward reconquering the United States. His Resistance, persistence, and resentment when loyalty to the Crown was bitterly repaid. He ended promises were not kept made loyalists important his days in disgrace in England, after one of his subjects within the British Empire. Galloway and daughters married a son of George III without the William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s son, were king’s permission. The royal family disowned the active in demanding financial compensation for disobedient son, and in his last meeting with King loyalists from Parliament. Guy Carleton, the British George III, Dunmore had to suppress his rage, commander responsible for relocating loyalists Jasanoff writes, when the king called their “joint from New York, refused to comply with one of the grandchildren ‘Bastards! Bastards!’ ” terms of the Treaty of Paris—the return of all slaves These disparate personal narratives tell a to their former masters. He defiantly told George larger story about how loyalists spread across the Washington that the freed slaves were to be settled British Empire, changing it in the process. Jas - in Canada. Men such as Lord Dunmore and Mary- anoff exposes the irony that loyalists more resem- land loyalist William Augustus Bowles promoted bled their provincial enemies than they did their schemes for retaking territory, with Bowles offering allies in the British Isles. Loyalists were not “born” perhaps the most visionary plan: a pro-British yet loyal. Beverley Robinson resisted declaring his independent Creek state of Muskogee in Florida. loyalty for two years, even as his good friend John Territorial expansion was another agenda that loy- Jay, prominent patriot and future Supreme Court alists advanced, as they became leading figures in chief justice, urged him to join the Revolution. Jay Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Africa, and India. and Robinson were not that far apart politically, The first major proposal for colonizing Australia since both had backed the so-called Galloway came from an American loyalist refugee. Plan, a 1774 proposal for home rule that missed Jasanoff forces us to rethink the Revolution’s passing in the Continental Congress by a single losers. Loyalists parted with vast tracts of property, vote. Joseph Galloway drafted the plan, which ancestral homes, and beloved family members. But would serve as the prototype for a unified Canada as they rebuilt their lives, they redefined the British in 1867. Empire. They came from different religious back- Jasanoff gives compelling evidence of the loyal- grounds, different colonies, different races and ists’ influence and their ad hoc agenda, which she classes. Yet the British government’s desire to incor- neatly describes as the “spirit of 1783.” The massive porate the exiles, and thus to advance Britain’s relocation of 75,000 white loyalists, free blacks, global objectives, allowed the loyalists to assume a and slaves after the war contributed to the imper - unique position: Fighting to regain their lost status, ial ambitions of Great Britain. These exiles secured or in the case of free blacks, to ensure their new sta- extensive state support from London to resettle in tus, they became dynamic agents of political Canada, which not only repaid their loyalty but change. As a result, Jasanoff concludes, “these los- ensured a strong, continuing British presence in ers were winners in the end.” Liberty’s Exiles tells a North America. Britain provided reparations, pro- complex and original story of the loyalists. It is a tected the freedom of former slaves, and overcame history worth knowing.

the difficult logistics of moving and resettling large Nancy Isenberg is a professor of history at Louisiana State Uni- numbers of exiles. The effort laid the foundation of versity, the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007), and coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jef- a coordinated system of refugee relief and was a ferson (2010).

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CONTEMPORARY AFFAIRS pathetic bunch, and couldn’t subvert their way out of a wet paper bag. Why are we Security at What Price? expending so much time, effort, and treasure Reviewed by John Mueller on them?” As Shipler documents rather well, we are In his fascinating 2000 back at it again in the post-9/11 era— except THE RIGHTS OF book “Communazis,” the late THE PEOPLE: that technological and other developments scholar of German literature How Our Search for have allowed for an exponential increase in Alexander Stephan describes Safety Invades surveillance. Thus, billions of communi - the U.S. government’s sur - Our Liberties. cations are intercepted and millions of cases veillance of a group of émi- By David K. Shipler. are opened, leading, as he astutely points out, gré writers who lived in the Knopf. to a preposterous situation in which coherent 363 pp. $ 27.95 United States and Mexico policing is hampered by obedience to a stand- during and after World War II. None were ing order that authorities follow up on all tips found to pose much of a subversive threat, (99 percent of them “hoaxes,” according to and the surveillance never led to real perse - one U.S. attorney). The “If You See Some - cution—indeed, few of the writers noticed thing, Say Something” counterterrorism hot- that they were being watched. Instead, what line run by the New York City police generates impresses Stephan is the essential absurdity thousands of calls each year— more than of the situation, as huge numbers of govern - 16,000 in 2009 alone—but not one has led to ment employees intercepted and catalogued a terrorism arrest. communications, meticulously recorded Shipler, whose previous books include The comings and goings, and sifted enterprisingly Working Poor (2004) and the Pulitzer through trash bins, exhibiting a “combination Prize–winning Arab and Jew (1987), makes a of high efficiency with grotesque overkill”— credible case that civil liberties are at risk of and all, of course, “at taxpayers’ expense.” abuse. But he documents only a limited David K. Shipler’s compass in The Rights amount of maltreatment, much of which of the People is wider, and so his book gives seems to have been somewhat self- correcting. context to Stephan’s microanalysis. During He spends considerable time on a couple of years of hot war and then decades of cold war, cases from shortly after 9/11—when our guardians sought to preserve our secur ity by intercepting millions of pri - vate telegrams, opening and photo graph - ing countless private letters, compiling watch lists containing millions of names, and opening hundreds of thousands of intelligence files. Particularly during the Cold War, some advocates expressed strong concerns about encroachments on civil liberties. But though few, if any, domestic communists engaged in real espionage or committed violence in the postwar period, at no point did anyone say in public, “Many domestic Commun - ists adhere to a violent foreign ideology; however, they are actually quite a In the post–9/11 era, domestic surveillance has increased exponentially.

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intelligence agencies, it must be noted, were Miranda rights. Shipler briefly surveys the mindlessly stoking hysteria by confidently mostly pathetic people arrested since 9/11 and erroneously estimating that there were and finds them to be scarcely scarier than the thousands of Al Qaeda agents loose in the domestic demons of the Cold War. But this land. In one of the cases Shipler highlights, a issue should be central, rather than inciden - cascade of misidentifications and fancied tal, to his argument. To undo the security sys- connections led to accusations against an tem that has burgeoned over the last 10 innocent man, Oregon attorney Brandon years, one must attack not simply the conse- Mayfield, and in the other, a prosecution was quences of the system but the premise that egregiously mishandled. However, Mayfield furnishes its essential engine, and Shipler received a formal apology from the Justice leaves that substantially untouched. It may Department sweetened with a $2 million also be useful to factor in the spectacular payment, and the other case was thrown out costs of enhanced domestic security expendi- of court and the mis- tures since 9/11, which appear to have accu- guided federal prose- mulated to more than $1 trillion. As Stephan If people think the chance cutor indicted. might amazedly suggest, taxpayers really every year of being killed by No defense of civil ought to take note. a terrorist is dangerously liberties is likely to be terribly effective as John Mueller is the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security high, they are unlikely to be Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at long as people believe Ohio State University. His books include Overblown: How Politi- moved by concerns about cians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Miranda rights. that the threat from Threats, and Why We Believe Them (2006), Atomic Obsession: terror ism is nothing Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (2010), and Ter- ror, Security, and Money, coauthored with Mark Stewart, to be short of existential. published later this year. This fear, stoked during the George W. Bush admin istration and still promoted under Barack Obama, goes almost completely unex- Bad Educations amined by pundits and the press. In 2008, Reviewed by Ben Wildavsky then–Department of Home land Security sec- retary Michael Chertoff bizarrely declared that How much do under- ACADEMICALLY the threat was “a significant existential” one. graduates really learn in col - ADRIFT: And the hype continues unchallenged. At a lege? The question sounds Limited Learning on recent press conference, current Homeland straightforward, but system- College Campuses. Security chief Janet Napolitano announced atic answers have proven By Richard Arum and that, though the likelihood of a large- scale remarkably elusive. Now Josipa Roksa. Univ. of Chicago Press. organized attack is diminished, the continued Academ ically Adrift, which 259 pp. $ 25 danger of a small- scale disorganized attack provoked a firestorm of dis- means that the terrorist threat is higher than cussion when it was released in January, pro- at any time since 9/11. vides a disheartening verdict: not much. Fully The point is not that there is nothing to 45 percent of undergraduates experience no find, but that excesses can only be reduced if improvement in their critical thinking, the hysteria about terrorism is substantially reasoning, and writing skills during their first dampened. If people think that the chances two years of college, according to sociologists that they will be killed by a terrorist in the Richard Arum of New York University and next year are dangerously high (rather than Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. By one in 3.5 million, as is the case), they are their senior year, more than a third see no sta- unlikely to be moved by concerns about tistically significant gains, according to a

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more recent report by the authors. so it is little wonder that they give undemand- To reach their conclusions, Arum and Roksa ing assignments and focus instead on research used an innovative test called the Collegiate and other professional activities that will Learning Assessment (CLA), an essay exam advance their careers. that measures writing and analytical skills and Still, some colleges do a much better job has been administered at hundreds of schools than others of teaching students. Colleges can around the country for more than a decade. improve student learning simply by creating a Many institutions keep the results confidential culture of high expectations. After controlling or report them in ways that are hard to deci - for demographic background and level of pher (and to compare to those of other col - preparation, Arum and Roksa found that leges). This means that it’s difficult for college undergraduates whose professors required applicants and their parents to find out how more reading and writing learned more. much learning occurs in the classroom. Pre- Academically Adrift has by no means won serving schools’ anonymity, Arum and Roksa instant acceptance in the academy. The authors’ worked with other researchers to test a repre- reliance on the CLA has fueled debates about the sentative mix of 2,322 undergraduates at a test’s methodology, and also whether its focus on diverse group of 24 four-year institutions, first generic skills rather than subject- level knowledge as freshmen and then later in their college limits its usefulness. (The organization that careers. The authors also studied surveys and administers the CLA once received a grant from transcripts to determine how college culture the Kauffman Foundation, where the author of and expectations influence the undergraduate this review is a fellow.) But in interviews Arum academic experience. and Roksa have pointed out that math and How can students learn so little? For one science majors, who may not be asked to do as thing, they spend scant time on academic much writing as their counter parts in the human- activities. Surveys show that full-time students ities and social sciences, saw the largest CLA spend about 27 hours a week either studying or gains. The authors suggest that those students’ in the classroom; in the early 1960s that figure tendency to spend more time on homework may was 40 hours a week. By the authors’ account, also benefit their reasoning skills. students’ devotion to social life, extracurricular Whatever criticism this book provokes in the activities, and (for many) jobs takes up a lot of higher-education establishment, its value is enor - their time. Yet 85 percent of those in the study mous. The disconcerting findings of Arum and had a B- minus average or better. Roksa should resonate well beyond the academy. Arum and Roksa contend that educational What good is broadening college access— an emi- institutions themselves are deeply complicit. nently worthy mission— if students aren’t acquir- George Kuh, a researcher at Indiana University ing analytical abilities? With better information who studies higher education, describes a on academic outcomes (and more transparency silent compact that often exists between pro- from colleges), it will be possible to evaluate fessor and student: “I’ll leave you alone if you which institutions teach students the most, and leave me alone.” About one- third of stu dents in which offer the best value. Only then can we insist the study had taken no course during the previ- that colleges and universities that don’t measure ous semester that required more than 40 pages up deliver the undergraduate education American of weekly reading. Half had never taken a class students deserve. in which they were asked to write more than Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the 20 pages during a semester. At many insti - Kauffman Foundation. He is the author of The Great Brain Race: tutions, faculty members receive slim rewards How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (2010) and coeditor of Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innova- for concentrating on undergraduate teaching, tion, which was just published.

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HISTORY are but the latest incarnations of Northern writers who, in the dec ades after World War II, established So Goes the Nation their own moral righteousness by divorcing the Reviewed by Jason Sokol nation from Dixie and turning a blind eye to the fact that racism was an American trait rather than James C. Cobb is a don of a Southern aberration. Southern historians, and his The THE SOUTH AND Cobb makes a good case for the primacy of the South and America Since World AMERICA SINCE Southern economy in understanding develop ments WORLD WAR II. War II is impressive for its scope in race, politics, and society. To image- conscious and sweep. No important event By James C. Cobb. white leaders during the early 1960s, Martin Oxford Univ. Press. in the last 70 years escapes his 374 pp. $ 24.95 Luther King Jr. was a “fearsome figure” indeed. The eye: the shifting terrain of party mayor of Augusta, Georgia— a segregationist politics and the rise of the civil rights movement, hotbed— capitulated to the integration of lunch the relationship between race and regional identity, counters and theaters in 1962 only because “we the unchecked strength of the South’s corporate were afraid they would bring in Martin Luther elite and the sad plight of its working classes, the King.” As Cobb shows, Southern business leaders popularity of NASCAR and the enduring power of finally concluded that “their desire to keep the the blues, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and South racially southern must give way to their goal the South’s role in the election of Barack Obama. of making it economically American.” When Cobb The problem is that all of these individuals and pushes himself to make strong claims like that, he episodes merely dance across the pages— and then is best able to illuminate the dynamic link between they are gone. the South and America. Cobb covers territory that many others have Though Cobb is a historian, he offers more orig- explored— though few have attempted so thorough inal observations about the present than he does a synthesis, or brought the story of the Southern about the past. He places the horror of Hurricane past up to the present. Those familiar with his Katrina within a mini history of New Orleans, prodigious output— including The Selling of the expertly condensing the city’s economic, racial, and South (1982), The Most Southern Place on Earth political ordeals since World War II. And he notes (1992), and Away Down South (2005)—will find that in the 2008 presidential election, Barack him sometimes recycling it, but also, at his best Obama aroused “intensified white resistance” moments, expanding upon a career’s worth of within certain Southern enclaves. There were not insights. many counties where Obama polled considerably Cobb offers one major interpretive frame: the worse than Democratic candidate John Kerry had idea that America itself has been quite “South ern” in 2004. The South— particularly Alabama, all along. “Neither the South nor America can ever Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee— was home to be truly understood as anything but a part of the 97 percent of those counties where he did. Yet the other,” he writes. He is most pas sionate when evis- other nine states of the former Confederacy offered cerating writers and schol ars— economist and New surprising degrees of support to the man elected York Times columnist Paul Krugman and political America’s first black president. To Cobb, this trans- scientist Thomas Schaller chief among them— who formation in the region’s racial politics outweighs have insisted that the South is a land apart. Long any lingering resistance. after South ern states had buried their Jim Crow Cobb concludes by returning to the theme of the signs and jumped into the nation’s economic and South and the nation. “The fundamental reality of political mainstream, such observers continued to Dixie was every bit as ‘American’ in 1941 as it is portray the region as distinctive because of its ra - today,” he writes. This is an intriguing line of argu- cial ly tinged political conser vatism. To Cobb, they ment. But the problem is that he means to make a

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comparative point— and he presents only half of could never have happened without the steam the picture. Nearly everything Cobb posits about engine, and maritime historians say the same about the North and the West is filtered through the Royal Navy. quotations from New York Times and Newsweek Each of these claims has merit; none are satis- reporters. One wishes his claims were much more factory. Yet there are few more critical questions in richly documented and textured. This lifelong history. Though societies in the past— including the Southerner is content to remain in his Southern Roman Empire, China in the Song dynasty, and perch while making assertions about the nation late medieval Venice— produced great wealth writ large. through innovation, none achieved Britain’s rapid My hope, as a Northerner with a keen interest in and sustained economic growth, which broke the South as well as the North, is that Cobb will one through the usual day fully apply his acumen somewhere above Vir- Malthusian constraints ginia or beyond Texas. For now, we are left with his (in which prosperity The key to the Industrial compelling insights into Southern history alongside leads to overpopulation Revolution, an economist his surface impressions of Northern history— not a that can erode that pros- argues, was a great change bad proposition with so learned a guide as Cobb, perity). in the way people spoke but not a profound one either. But in 18th- century and thought about the Britain, just as Robert Jason Sokol teaches African-American history at Harvard Uni- merchant and the manufac- versity. He is the author of There Goes My Everything: White Malthus was preparing Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights (2006). turer and their values. his argument that mass starvation was looming, To Get Rich Is Glorious the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. Reviewed by Martin Walker Real income per capita in Britain doubled in the 80 years from 1780 to 1860. That in itself was remark- There are dozens of the- able. But from 1780 to the present day, British real BOURGEOIS ories income per capita has increased by roughly 1,500 to explain the transforma- DIGNITY: tion that sparked the Industrial Why Economics percent. And however spasmodic and ugly the Revolution in Britain and, con- Can’t Explain the process, the magic has spread to much of the world. sequently, shaped the modern Modern World. Deirdre McCloskey, a professor of economics, world. Some historians say that By Deirdre McCloskey. history, English, and communication at the Univer- the traditions of British liberty, Univ. of Chicago Press. sity of Illinois at Chicago, ably deploys all her varied 571 pp. $ 35 law, and private property were fields of expertise to offer a new and overarching behind it. A religious variant of this idea is that it explanation. The key to this revolution, she argues, could never have happened without the Reforma- was a great change in the way people spoke and tion and the Protestant ethic. Intellectual historians thought about the merchant and the manufacturer talk of the impact of the Enlightenment. Some and their values. Not only did a new respect for the economists point to the capital accumulations that bourgeoisie emerge after endless generations of resulted from the slave trade and the exploitation of aristocratic and religious and clerical disdain, but India and other colonies. Scientists cite the Royal broad social acceptance made people feel free to Society, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton (and innovate and chart their own life courses. An entire Francis Bacon before them), who charted the way social system based on birth, land owning classes, to innovation and made mechanical tinkering and a stability that made privilege permanent respectable. Financial historians tout the Bank of almost overnight adopted the mantra often attrib- England’s organization of debt and credit markets. uted to Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.” Historians of agriculture argue for improvements “The North Sea economy, and then the Atlantic in farm productivity. Technologists contend that it economy, and then the world economy grew

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because of changing forms of speech about markets leads her. Her core argument, that “talk and ethics and enterprise and invention,” McCloskey argues. and ideas caused the innovation,” is a splendidly She goes on to examine and dismiss the claims of promising start. other scholars about the origins of the Industrial Martin Walker is a Woodrow Wilson Center senior scholar. Revolution, and she is right to question them. In His fourth novel, Black Diamond, will be published this summer. the 18th century, France’s foreign trade grew faster

than Britain’s, and France had a bigger internal SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY market. China, India, and the Arab world had strong and prosperous seafaring and trading tradi- Who Are You? tions before Europe was launched on its so- called Reviewed by Emily Anthes Age of Discovery. So why didn’t these parts of the world make the breakthrough? What makes us who we McCloskey’s critiques of other historians can be are? The question has QUIRK: tedious, and her writing style is so didactic in places captivated philosophers and sci- Brain Science Makes that it becomes irritating. But the broad thrust of entists for millennia, from the Sense of Your Peculiar Personality. her book and her erudite excitement in ideas are ancient Greeks and their exhilarating. To buttress her argument, she ranges humors to the 19th-century By Hannah Holmes. Random House. impressively from the changing social meaning of phrenologists who believed they 262 pp. $ 26 the word “honest” to post- Marxist theory and could divine someone’s person- Goethe’s poetry. When Shakespeare wrote of “hon- ality by mapping the bumps on his skull. The per- est, honest Iago,” observes McCloskey, he intended sonality question captivates us still, though the to convey that the character was “honorable in an answers have gotten more complicated— and aristocratic way,” while for novelist Jane Austen, microscopic. But fret not: To help navigate the writing two centuries later, the word meant upright modern maze of neurotransmitters, animal mod- and “reliable in a bourgeois way, for making deals.” els, and evolutionary theory, we have science writer All of this is greatly impressive and persuasive, Hannah Holmes and her book Quirk. but there remains a nagging question: Why did the Today, many psychologists divide our tempera- rhetoric change, and why did the innovating bour- ments into a handful of major components known geois become respectable? Was it simply because as “The Big Five”: neuroticism, extraversion, he had money, and overmortgaged aristocrats saw agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. the advantage of marrying their daughters to his Each of these factors gets further broken down wealth? Or was it that when the Glorious Revolu- into six facets—agreeableness, for instance, tion tamed the British monarchy, the social order includes the facets of trust, cooperation, and altru- became sufficiently open for the traders and inven- ism. How people score on each of these and other tors to surge in, just as the Bank of England (1694), dimensions can provide snapshots of their unique Jethro Tull’s seed drill (1701), and Thomas personalities. Newcomen’s steam engine (1712) were heralding Holmes devotes each chapter to a single facet the coming financial and technological surge? (she covers 18 in all), using the same formula to Skepticism toward any single- cause theory of explore each trait. She begins with a peek into a lab such a transformation is healthy, and it is tempting where rodents are bred to exhibit one particular to say that it was the combination of so many facet. In the anxiety chapter, for example, we meet simultaneous changes, a thought that McCloskey the Nervous Nellies, mice that cower in the dark implicitly accepts even as she supplies a mono - corners of elevated mazes, afraid to venture into causal explanation of her own. This book is the sec- the open. Such animal subjects are helping ond of a planned six-volume series on the bourgeois researchers unpack the biological underpinnings era, so we shall see where McCloskey’s great project of personality. Want to create one of these fretful

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rodents? Disrupt a gene that regulates sero- tonin, a neurotransmitter that’s also been implicated in depression. Then Holmes shows that the same chem icals and genes influence human per- sonalities. Study a group of anxious female college students, and you’ll find that they, too, have genetic variants that alter the way their brains process serotonin. Finally, Holmes explores why such diversity of per- sonality exists in the first place. “Why,” she asks, “would evolution produce animals that appear to be overly fearful, and overly bold?” Biologists have long known that, from an evolutionary point of view, a diverse population is a healthy one. A species that includes creatures of all shapes, sizes, and talents is more likely to have some individu- als that can survive whatever challenge the world throws at them. Brains Imagine (1995), by the artist Myrrh It’s not a new idea, but it’s interesting to consider in relation to personality. Let’s look again altruistic behavior look as though they’re bound in at anxiety. When food was scarce, brave animals holy matrimony. Or in biological matrimony, at willing to travel to fill their bellies would have had any rate.” an obvious evolutionary advantage. But venturing The genetic effect on altruism is indeed away from home comes with risks— of becoming remarkable, but DNA is not the end of the story. lunch for other critters, say, or suffering a grievous To assess generosity, scientists often use a game in injury. So when food was plentiful and easy to find, which players are given a small amount of cash the nervous homebodies would be more likely to and asked to decide how much to contribute to a survive and pass on their high- anxiety genes. common pool of money. Noting, for example, that Holmes has a gift for making complex science subjects from cultures in which offering charity is clear and accessible, but Quirk has one flaw: It insulting tend to give little, Holmes concedes cul- exhibits more than a whiff of biological determin- ture’s influence on this experiment. ism. Consider the discussion of altruism. It’s an observation that warrants more than a Research ers have found that a neurotransmitter couple of sentences in a chapter chock- full of known as vasopressin is connected to altruism. molecular biology. Even if Holmes wanted to The gene responsible for the vasopressin system maintain her rigid focus on genes and neuro trans - comes in two forms— a short gene, which leads to mitters, it would have been worthwhile to remind less vasopressin, and a long gene, which leads to readers that brains and genes are just part of the more of it. On average, Holmes writes, “people puzzle. With personality, as with most human with two copies of the short version of the traits, it’s nature and nurture. Holmes’s book, vasopressin gene give the least; those with one interesting as it is, addresses only half of the long and one short copy are middling; fools who equation. give the shirt off their back are most likely to have Emily Anthes is a science writer who lives in Brooklyn. She is two copies of the long version. Vasopressin and working on a book about biotechnology and the future of animals.

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Reasoning Against “often have met someone like themselves who achieved great success.” Reason The Social Animal is a marathon surface skim of Reviewed by Jag Bhalla a sea of scientific studies. Brooks claims this isn’t a science book, since it doesn’t get its feet wet in the The Social Animal is a book details. But the tradeoff of depth for a flood of THE SOCIAL of grand and diverse ambitions, factoids may satisfy neither fans of science writing ANIMAL: by one of the nation’s most intel- The Hidden Sources nor lay readers. To give but one example: To lectually creative journalists, New of Love, Character, illustrate the limits of the conscious mind, Brooks York Times columnist David and Achievement. notes that at its peak it “has a processing capacity Brooks. His aim is to revolution- By David Brooks. 200,000 times weaker than [that of] the ize our culture’s operative beliefs Random House. unconscious.” It’s a tantalizing observation, but he 424 pp. $ 27 about human nature, using sci- doesn’t indicate how this capacity was measured. entific studies that reveal the “building blocks of As readers of his Times column might expect, human flourishing.” His book is part fiction, part Brooks serves up a smorgasbord of seductive nonfiction popularization (neuroscience, psychol- sound bites and contagious coinages (e.g., ogy, sociology), and part grand synthesis (intel- “Emotional Positioning System”). But some fall lectual history, social policy). The genre- blended flat (as in the New Age- y “the swirls that make result delivers some hybrid vitality, but at the up our own minds are shared swirls” and his expense of coherence and rigor. snarky “sanctimommies”). And he struggles with Brooks believes Western culture has a lobot- conceptual laxity, missing opportunities to clar- omized view of human nature inherited from the ify or revolutionize the terms of the debate. He French Enlightenment. René Descartes and other mainly uses the word “unconscious” to describe philosophers described humans as autono mous information processing that is emo tional, individuals endowed with powers of reason that are instinctive, or not explicitly reasoned, though separate from and pitted against the emotions. The one of his key goals is to de- Freud our world- ability to flourish depended on an individual’s sup- view and show that the “unconscious” isn’t just a pression of his unruly passions. British Enlight- collection of dark, nasty urges. enment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam It’s in his efforts to “draw out the social, political, Smith argued that we are fundamentally social and moral implications” of the science that Brooks beings, that our reasoning faculty is weak, and that reveals his true colors: He’s a timid revolutionary. our emotions are strong and can be usefully edu- Though he makes some practical recommendations cated. The French rationalist view fit better with the for education— such as providing “structure for dis- rise of the mechanistic sciences. But old dualisms organized families” through parenting classes or must now duel with data: Science sup ports the intensive mentoring— he chooses not to draw British view. broader political conclusions. How should we deal In a fictional narrative, Brooks weaves vignettes with the fact that our economies and institutions are from the lives of two characters, “Harold” and built on assumptions about human nature that are “Erica,” to illustrate the “hidden sources of love, char- now demonstrably wrong? acter, and achievement” of his subtitle. He uses their The human flourishing that Brooks describes is upbringings, educations, courtship, and so on to precisely what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when model what research shows are key influences on a he quoted Aristotle’s phrase “pursuit of happi ness.” successful life. For instance, Erica pursues a career Jefferson thought of the Declaration of Indepen- in business after a successful entrepreneur with dence as a revolutionary document grounded in whom she identifies visits her school. Brooks ex- science. Brooks takes us toward a declaration of plains that studies show that ambitious people interdependence, based on scientific, if not yet self-

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evident, truths. For Jefferson and Aristotle, the indi- ipation. Garber’s approach to putting things right vidual pursuit of happiness meant a life well lived, brings Roland Barthes’ anti hero back to mind. which required strong relationships and the fulfill- If anyone is qualified to rescue literature from ment of community obligations. They knew what the threat of irrelevancy, it’s Garber, the William R. science today is rediscovering— that the flourishing Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard, and of the individual depends on the flourishing of author of some 15 books on cultural and literary others. matters, including six on Shakespeare alone. She We aren’t as far advanced in this revolution as simply knows everything there is to know about the Brooks would have us believe, but his book, despite history and practice of literature and criticism. Yet its flaws, is a contribution to intellectual history in despite having written a sizable chunk of her previ- the making. ous books on our most venerated writer, Garber is

Jag Bhalla is a writer and entrepreneur living in Washington, D.C. He not a proponent of the Great Books approach— she’s is the author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears (2009), and is no fetishizer of the canon or timeless notions of currently at work on a book about old ideas undergirding our discourse that are now demonstrably wrong. quality. For her, “literature” is a shifting cultural sta- tus ascribed to books by critical arbiters of the moment, not an intrinsic quality. Rather, there are

ARTS & LETTERS literary ways of reading, and literary ways of writing— a book becomes literature when we ask lit- Words at Play erary questions of it. Equally, books lose the status of Reviewed by Laura Kipnis literature when they fall from these considerations, the fate of many—perhaps the majority of— works In The Pleasure of the by once-revered authors. Text, critic Roland Barthes THE USE AND For Garber, literary ways of reading pose open- bemoaned the sorry state of liter- ABUSE OF ended questions— the most interesting of which are LITERATURE. acy in his time, which was mid- those without definitive answers. What she’s 1970s France. Half the By Marjorie Garber. dislodging with her deceptively anodyne sug- Pantheon. population didn’t read at all, “a 320 pp. $ 28.95 gestions are the traditional modes of criticism that national disgrace.” Literary stud- hinge on judgments of quality. She’s deeply uninter- ies too was moribund, conquered by two tedious ested in what makes particular books good or bad; forms of moralizing: “the prevailing one, of what engages her is how meaning is produced. She platitude; and the minority one, of rigor.” It was a prefers the brand of criticism that engages in uncer- frigid, pleasure- challenged climate for literature. tainty, productive mistakes, and continuous re-read- Barthes imagined an “antihero” who gains access to ings that settle nothing—“every way of reading pro- the bliss of reading by renouncing literary duces an equal and opposite way of re-reading.” judgments altogether, in stead savoring the contra- Useless speculation and lack of purpose are the dictions and unpre dict ability inherent in language heroes of this story. Along with Barthes, and another itself. influential Frenchman she’s fond of invoking, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Litera- deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, she upholds ture opens with a strikingly similar lament about lit- “play” as the watchword: Literary theory is at its best eracy in her time, which is present- day America. in “the play of language, the ambivalent ambiguities The share of college graduates receiving English of the signifier, and the modes of counterintuitive degrees is a shockingly low four per 100, and there’s argument.” If play is the hero, false dichotomies are been an accompanying drop in reading rates across the enemy. No binary goes undeconstructed: fiction all age groups. This is bad news not just for litera- and nonfiction, high and low, truth and lies, memoir ture professors, but for democracy, since reading and false memories. correlates strongly with various forms of civic partic- Which isn’t to say that Garber is predictably

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trendy: One of the surprises here is her rousing sup- best, Shostakovich (b. 1906) managed to turn the port for that old warhorse, New Criticism, or “close simplest of musical building blocks— melodies and reading,” in her mind a more inherently radical way rhythms of often-striking banality— into extraordi- of understanding texts than the sociological and his- nary musical structures of vast emotional range, all torical methods that the denizens of English depart- while living a strange double life as both privileged ments generally regard as “political.” The practice of beneficiary and torment ed victim of the Soviet mining literature for nuggets of self- help, whether regime, under which he lived until his death in 1975. ethical or psychological, also rouses her contempt. This book, however, adds little of consequence Reading Marcel Proust shouldn’t be the answer to to the study of the music or the man. Lesser is a cul- anything, since literature’s refusal to be used is its tural critic, a novelist, and the editor of the literary “most moral act.” (She’s also oddly irked by books journal The Threepenny Review, and she writes written from the point of view of animals— Laura well. Sadly, though, she calls her reliability into Hillenbrand’s 2001 horse racing tale Seabiscuit question right away when she declares that comes in for some rare derision.) Shostakovich’s “own voice” cannot be heard “in To my mind, Garber is entirely right in every even the best of his symphonies,” a surprisingly respect. But if literary studies is a way of asking sweeping assessment from a non musician who literary questions, I can’t help asking one about conceded a page earlier that she has listened only to Garber’s own literary style. I was left wondering “most” of the composer’s 15 symphonies. Later, she what a defense of literature by Garber would gives a nuanced analysis of the Soviet author read like if it embodied the imaginative play Mikhail Zoshchenko’s use of language— without and stylistic freedom she celebrates, rather than mentioning that she doesn’t speak Russian. the scholarly apparatus and muted tones she Distressingly, much of Lesser’s account of em ploys here. Garber has, after all, previously Shostakovich’s life consists of material and insights romped her way through such subjects as cross- that appear in previous biographies. Time and dressing, the love of dogs, and the erotics of real again, she uses others’ stories as if she were the one estate, in books that were impressively re- who had realized their illustrative value. I kept Eliz- searched but somewhat more unleashed. The abeth Wilson’s important compendium, Shosta- Use and Abuse of Literature is an enormously kovich: A Life Remembered (1994), at hand as I learned and wide- ranging defense of the literary read, and though Lesser acknowledges her debt to imagin ation, but as Garber herself says, “The the book— calling it “a major source” and citing it future importance of literary studies . . . will frequently— I was struck nonetheless by how often come from taking risks, not from playing it safe.” she weaves Wilson’s stories into the narrative as if the syntheses were her own. Laura Kipnis’s most recent book is How to Become a Scandal: To cite but one example: In an anecdote about Adventures in Bad Behavior (2010). She is a professor in the Depart- ment of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern University. the Twelfth String Quartet and Dmitri Tsyganov, the violinist to whom the quartet was dedicated, Wilson writes, “When Tsyganov anxiously brought A Life Set to Music up the subject of serialism, Shostakovich retorted, Reviewed by Miles Hoffman ‘But one finds examples of it in Mozart’s music.’” Lesser retells the same story: “And when Tsyganov MUSIC FOR Wendy Lesser discovered SILENCED VOICES: voiced concerns about the explicitly serial elements the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich and in the quartet, Shostakovich apparently answered Shostakovich and fell in love. I His Fifteen Quartets. him by saying, ‘But one finds examples of it in admire her passion for this mu- By Wendy Lesser. Mozart’s music.’ ” The only credit she gives Wilson sic, and I understand her fascina- Yale Univ. Press. is for the direct Shostakovich quote. 350 pp. $ 28 tion with the composer. At his Music for Silenced Voices is based on two major

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premises. The first is that because Shosta kovich’s string quartets—15 in all— flew under the radar of Typical Type suffocating Soviet scrutiny, the composer was able Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff to fill them with music that was more “pure” and “personal” than the music of his symphonies— the Here’s a riddle: What is HELVETICA AND implication being that the quartets are the key to a so ubiquitous and generic that THE NEW YORK true understanding of Shostakovich and are some- it barely registers in the mass SUBWAY SYSTEM. how of greater value than most of his more famous consciousness, and yet so The True and “public” works. objectionable to some that it’s (Maybe) Story. This is an argument clearly based on personal been publicly denounced as By Paul Shaw. preference and enthusiasm. One could easily make “fascist” and, simply, “crap”? MIT Press. 131 pp. $ 39.95 the case, for example, that nothing could be more The answer is the typeface personal or revealing than the manner in which an Helvetica. Created in 1957 by two Swiss typog- artist responds to obstacles and duress. As Igor raphers, it is both a modernist icon and a work- Stravinsky once wrote, “Whatever diminishes con- horse default, at once retro and still in heavy use. straint, diminishes strength. The more constraints It’s not derided in quite the same terms as type- one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the faces such as Papyrus (think of those hideous chains that shackle the spirit.” Lesser is so wedded Avatar subtitles) or— heaven forfend— the goofy to her theory of the quartets’ unique status that she script of Comic Sans. Still, to some graphic casually dismisses the opinion of the distinguished designers Helvetica is emblematic of crushing conductor Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s conformity, or, at the very least, a pitiful lack of own son, who said of his father’s work, “His quar - creativity. American Apparel, Gap, and Crate & tets and his symphonies—yes, it is the same circle of Barrel use it to hawk their wares— it has long feelings, just on a different scale.” been a favorite of corporations trying to seem The book’s second major premise is that readers friendly or down-to-earth. To others, Helvetica will want to be told quite specifically what “we” hear is typographic perfection, infinitely flexible and and feel in each quartet. Lesser informs us that the exquisitely modern, with a gorgeous interplay of Seventh Quartet, for example, “is not asking for positive and negative space. sympathy, nor is it crying tears over its own sorrow,” This tension among the typeface’s many and that “in the Adagio fourth movement [of the meanings was one of the themes of Gary Hust- Third Quartet] we are dead.” She is certainly enti- wit’s excellent 2007 documentary Helvetica, tled to feel and hear whatever she likes, but as con- which featured many shots of New York City verts and zealots often do, she overestimates the subway signage. But as design historian Paul interest to others of her particular “good news.” Shaw explains in Helvetica and the New York Cultural historian Jacques Barzun once wrote Subway System, Helvetica has not always been that the critic must not “blur in the minds of his the face of the city’s underground rail. Shaw readers . . . the difference between words and delves into the question of why Standard, the music.” To the extent that Wendy Lesser has com- typeface used in the 1960s modernization of the municated her enthusiasm and encouraged readers system’s graphics, was replaced by the very simi- to delve deeply into the Shostakovich quartets, she lar Helvetica. The book is also a concise history has done the music a service. To the extent that she of the New York subway, a visual archive of a has imposed her own limited and limiting interpre- century’s worth of underground signs (some of tations on the reader, she has not. which are still in use), and an impressive study of the conflict between the purity of design and Miles Hoffman is violist and artistic director of the American the messiness of the real world. Chamber Players and music commentator for NPR’s Morning Edi- tion. He is the author of The NPR Classical Music Companion (1997). New York City’s first subway line was opened

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After decades of visual chaos, the typeface Helvetica brought at least the illusion of order to the New York City subway system.

by a private company in 1904. It soon had a haul using the Standard typeface. But the unman- rival; neither included the other’s routes on its ageable sprawl of the subway system— not to maps. In 1940, the city bought both systems and mention the city’s financial troubles in the early merged them with its own. The new system 1970s— thwarted designers’ best intentions. The inherited the visual noise of all three: painted only aesthetic constant was an altogether different terracotta lettering, mosaic station names, kind of signage: graffiti. porcelain enamel directional signs, and hand- By the 1990s, however, Helvetica was every- lettered service notices, with no standardization where. Why did it eventually trump all other whatsoever. typefaces? In large part because it is the ultimate In 1957, New York designer George Salomon default choice. Shaw lists the various letter- sent the city an unsolicited proposal for an making equipment catalogued in the 1989 MTA integrated (and quite fetching) signage system Sign Manual, including machines used to pro- based on the elegant sans serif type face Futura duce digital type, phototype, and computer- and some unmissable fat direc tional arrows. based letters and stencils. “The only typeface The city declined to use the overall plan, but that was available for all of these systems and adopted Salomon’s color-coded route map, the methods,” he writes, “was Helvetica.” first to show the entire subway system at once. At the same time that advancing technology This would be the pattern for years to come: an assured Helvetica’s fate in New York, the per- acknow ledg ment that something had to be done sonal computer was bringing the typeface to a about the chaos, but a lack of the wherewithal far wider audience. The masses now possess the (money, political weight, courage) to see a com - means of typographic production, but there’s no pre hensive plan through. During the 1960s, cities guarantee that good design will follow. Helvetica such as Milan, London, and Boston redesigned can indeed be a thing of beauty, but only in the their airport and subway graphics, and New York right hands. attempted to follow suit by hiring the design firm Unimark International and beginning an over - Sara Sklaroff is the editorial director of Diabetes Forecast.

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RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY bly the advocate of humanism and ethical rela- tivism Protagoras, bump up against ordinary The Life and Times Athenians for whom we have scraps of epi - graphical evidence, such as a man named of Socrates Simon, who was perhaps the proprietor of a Reviewed by F. S. Naiden cobbler shop Socrates frequented. Hughes is at Like Doctor Johnson, her best in describing the Athenian agora, Socrates had a Boswell— THE HEMLOCK CUP: where Socrates spent much of his time en - Plato. That was not the only Socrates, Athens, gaged in the conversations that Plato and disadvantage under which and the Search for Xenophon would rework. Good on Socrates’ the Good Life. Socrates had to labor. Imag- social life, she is best on his social environs. ine our having Boswell’s Life By Bettany Hughes. Alas, Plato and Xenophon keep getting in Knopf. of Johnson (1791) without 484 pp. $ 35 the way. The pathos of the death of Socrates any of Samuel Johnson’s derives from three Platonic dialogues, the works. Then imagine not one but two Bos - Crito, Phaedo, and Apology. The best defense wells. In Socrates’ case, the second was Xeno - of Socrates (much bet- phon, the Athenian soldier and author who ter than the defense wrote two dialogues in which Socrates figures Plato says Socrates Did the spirit of Athenian as the chief speaker. gave in court) appears democracy kill Socrates? Into this quandary Bettany Hughes inserts in Xenophon’s works, The Hemlock Cup, a new biography of Socrates. which present Soc - Hughes tries to ignore Plato and Xenophon, rates as a practical man and a good citizen, and write a Life and Times. She has good rea- not an atheist or a corrupter of youth. The dif- son for this evasive maneuver. Socrates was put ference between Plato’s pathos and Xeno - to death after being convicted by an Athenian phon’s advocacy makes the conviction of court on a charge of impiety and “corrupting Socrates problematic. Plato implies that the youth,” and this episode in the philoso- Socrates died because of his own nobility, pher’s life invites an explanation that takes in which the court resented. Xenophon implies all the circumstances surrounding this most that Socrates died because the court did not famous of ancient Greek trials—the attitudes of want or get the facts. Plato implies that the jurors; the way of life in Athens, an early Athens is degraded. Xenophon disagrees— the democracy; the man-made environment and polis is only mistaken. its influence on public business. The death of Hughes does not know whom to believe. Socrates, an event that the painter Jacques- She relates Athens’s errors during the Pelo - Louis David portrayed on a narrow scale, pon nesian War, which ended in 404 bc, just demands a grand scale. five years before the trial of Socrates, yet she Hughes has read widely, if conventionally, praises Athenian democracy without any of in recent scholarly literature, and so she pro - Xenophon’s reservations. Xenophon and vides up- to- date chapters or digressions on Socrates both admired Sparta, and Xeno - Athenian religion, the fifth-century bc build- phon lived there after being exiled from ing program for the Acropolis, and the Pelo - Athens, but Hughes is contemptuous of pon nesian War. Aristophanes is an important Sparta, and indifferent to other Greek city- figure, thanks to his satire of Socrates in The states such as Argos and Thebes. Yet the Clouds, and so is Alcibiades, the Athenian gen- career of Socrates suggests that some atten - eral and admiral who was perhaps Socrates’ tion ought to be paid to Sparta and the favorite pupil. Other early philosophers, nota - others. So far as we can tell, the Athenian

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courts performed worse than the courts in humanist counterattack against such radical other Greek cities. The trial of Socrates is far technological utopianism. For polemical from the only illustration of this weakness. verve, the new death defiance has met its We know that the Athenian assembly dealt match in the prolific English political philoso- high handedly with the city’s officials, a mis- pher John Gray. The Immortalization Com - take to which Socrates objected. That re - mission, in which Gray melds history with sponse may have made him unpopular. We philosophy as he seeks to demonstrate the also know that Sparta’s assembly mostly futility of pushing against death’s outer limit, avoided this sort of mistake. Did certain Ath - is in a genre of its own. en ian institutional weaknesses kill Socrates? The book appears at first to examine two Or did the spirit of Athenian democracy kill seemingly unconnected groups: the small him? Hughes avoids these questions, prefer- band of upper- class Englishmen and -women ring to write a dramatized Baedeker. of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who Readers who want an introduction to Soc - sought proof that the mind persists after rates’ Athens will benefit from this book (and death, and a group of Bolshevik theorists and would have benefited more were it shorter). officials who aspired to re- engineer the Those seeking an introduction to Socrates will species. The English psychics (who included find that Plato still has custody of him, and eminent figures such as former prime minis- that Xenophon is still trying to liberate him, as ter Arthur Balfour) were alarmed by Darwin- any advocate would, from a politically contro- ian theory’s intolerable implication that versial entourage. humans were no different than animals and

F. S. Naiden is an associate professor of history at the University might be doomed to extinction; since most of of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. them had given up on religion, they turned to science to prove that human personalities Do You Want to survive death. The Bolsheviks likewise rejected the notion that they were “the spawn Live Forever? of chance,” and set about remaking the Reviewed by Edward Tenner human animal in an attempt to conquer death. Though they never succeeded in Americans have become extending lives, they ended millions prema- obsessed with the once THE turely in their quest to destroy and then esoteric topic of how to IMMORTALIZATION rebuild humanity. retard, suspend, or even COMMISSION: In seeking evidence of mental life after reverse aging. Low- calorie Science and the death, the English group went beyond con - Strange Quest to diets, genetic engineering, ventional séances to produce texts sup - Cheat Death. nanotechnology, electronic posedly dictated by the spirits of the dead By John Gray. scanning and uploading of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. that, Gray argues, were merely projections of the mind’s contents and pow- 273 pp. $ 24 the living writers’ shared philosophy and cul- ers, and the preservation of ture. Their most spectacular project was the cadavers for ultimate revival are among the natural conception and birth of a boy they suggested antidotes. Ray Kurzweil’s book The believed had been planned by the spirits of Singularity Is Near, in which the computer the dead to deliver a messiah for humanity in scientist predicts that humans and machines crisis. Only recently has it been revealed that will merge and make immortality possible, a man and a woman of the circle, married to continues to inspire media coverage six years others, carried out this plan, possibly with after its publication. The time is right for a the tacit knowledge of the woman’s husband.

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They never proclaimed their goal or told the invasive study of Lenin’s brain soon fore - child of his destiny, and he lived a conven - closed that option). On a much grander scale, tional if adventurous upper- class existence as in Soviet hands the idea of overcoming death a Guards officer and spy, learning something by remaking humanity became, Gray argues, of his origin only near the end of his life, an inspiration for human experimentation after he had become a Catholic monk. and eventually mass murder, which he For the Soviets, the goal was not commu- recounts with bloody specificity. nication with the hereafter but physical Gray’s goal, revealed in his last chapter, is trans formation on earth. The so- called God- to expose cryonics, the Singularity, and other builders of the late tsarist era, who believed forms of modern immortalism through ex - that science could be harnessed to cheat tremes of tainted lineage: English ineffectual- death, were influenced by the Russian Ortho- ity and Soviet carnage. To those who believe dox mystic Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, who that by mid century technology will achieve proposed reconstituting the bodies of all the the God- builders’ goals, Gray’s book will seem earth’s dead and sending them into space to the desperate expression of a doomed outlook. colonize the universe. Upon Vladimir Lenin’s But others will find in The Immortalization death in 1924, the revolutionary Leonid Commission a darkly rewarding vindication Krasin established the Immortalization Com- of their suspicion that in “longing for everlast- mission of the book’s title to plan Lenin’s ing life, humans show that they remain the mauso leum. The memorial, which was death- defined animal.” erected in Moscow’s Red Square, was not just Edward Tenner, a contributing editor of The Wilson Quar - a public symbol of the dead leader’s continu- terly, is the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996) and Our Own ing influence, but a laboratory for the conser- Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2003). He is a vation and eventual resurrection of his body visiting scholar at the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communica- tion Studies and the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural and mind (though physical deterioration and Policy Studies.

Credits: Cover, p. 37, Patti Mollica; p. 2, © James Duckworth; pp. 8, 59, 62–63, © David Hawxhurst; p. 12, © Phil Hands, Philhandscartoons.com; pp. 13–14, istockphoto.com; p. 15, photo composite, Ayn Rand, © Oscar White/CORBIS; Charlie’s Angels, Spelling-Goldberg/The Kobal Collection; p. 17, Flickr photo from Ben Wildeboer, reproduced by permission; p. 18, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives; p. 21, Emily Rasinski, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; p. 23 (clockwise from top), Xinhua/Photoshot/Newscom, AP Photo/Miraflores Press, AP Photo/Fernando Llano, Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images; p. 25, Flickr photo from Guillermo Esteves, reproduced by permission; p. 29, AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos; p. 33, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; p. 35, © Corbis, all rights reserved; p. 39, © Stefan Falke; p. 40, Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress; p. 43, © Julia Xanthos/New York Daily News via Getty Images; pp. 46–47, Flickr photo from Sebastian George, reproduced by permission; p. 49, © Kent Smith; p. 52, AP Photo; p. 53, © Elise Bernard, reproduced by permission; p. 55, © Jean-François Batellier; p. 65, AFP Photo/Marco Longari; p. 68, © Deng Coy Miel; p. 74, AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin; p. 77, Joe Koshellek/MCT/Newscom; p. 78, © Stapleton Collection/Corbis; p. 80, © Art Resource, NY/Art Resource; p. 82, Copyright © A. Barrington Brown/Photo Researchers, Inc.; p. 85, Liu Zheng/Color China Photo/AP Images; p. 89, © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource; pp. 91, 112, © Bettmann/Corbis; p. 95, Copyright © The Granger Collection, New York/The Granger Collection; p. 97, © Jimmy Margulies; p. 103, © Myrrh; p. 108, Courtesy of MIT Press.

Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 111 PORTRAIT

Alice Pre-Wonderland

Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) was a fellow in mathematics at Oxford when he made the acquaintance of Alice Liddell, the six- year-old daughter of the dean of Christ Church. An enthusiastic photographer and adorer of children, particularly girls, Dodgson shot Alice throughout her childhood, most famously producing this suggestive photograph in 1858. Four years later, he concocted a tale to entertain Alice and her sisters that became the children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In a book out this spring, The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester observes that while there’s no evidence that Dodgson acted improperly, his fondness for photographing young girls “puzzles and intrigues to this day.”

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