THE WILSTT QUA-ITEFL-Y Young, 'Jr., and the STRUGGLE for CIVIL RIGHTS Nancy J

WINTER 1990 . , . . . .- - -. - -. THE WILSTT QUA-ITEFL-Y Young, 'Jr., AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS Nancy J. Weiss

Whitney M. Young, Jr., the charismatic executive director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971, bridged the worlds of race and power. The "inside man" of the black revolution, he served as interpreter between black America and the businessmen, foundation executives, and public officials who constituted the white power structure. In this stimulating biography. Nancy J. Weiss shows how Young accomplished what Jesse Jackson called the toughest job in the black movement: selling civil rights to the nation's most powerful whites. Cloth: $24.95 ISBN 0-691-04757-X

HOW OLD AREaÂYOU?. . How Old fire You? Age Consciousness 1~. Age Consciousness in American Culture 1' ' in American Coltore Howard t? Chudacoff Most Americans take it for granted that a 13-year-old in the 5th grade behind schedule," that teenagers who marry "too early" are in for trouble, and that a 75-year-old will be pleased at being told, 'You look young for your age." Did an awareness of age always dominate American life

I- to~ this-~ extent? Howard Chudacoff reveals that our intense age consciousness has developed gradually since the late 19th century. In the process he presents a wealth of surprising facts about our history. Cloth: $19.95 ISBN 0-691-04768-5

AT YOUR BOOKSTORE OR Princeton University Press 41 WILLIAM ST. PRINCETON, NJ 08540 (609) 258-4900 ORDERS 800-PRS-ISBN (777-4726) WINTER 1990 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

COVER STORY m AMERICA'SNEW CITY 24 Chances are you and your neighbor live in different cities. You and your neighbor are not alone. Half of all Americans now live in what used to be called the suburbs. But these former residential enclaves, though lacking skyscrapers and downtowns, are now becoming complete cities unto themselves, designed, in effect, by choices their residents make every day. These new cities may ultimately satisfy our deepest longings for the good life. Or they may become unliveable sprawls. Robert Fishman considers the possibilities.

EUROPE1992 56 A Europe without frontiers. A single currency. A European parliament. Will all of these begin to add up to a United States of Europe at the end of 1992? Steven Lagerfeld describes how the long-delayed dream of Eu- ropean unity has gradually been enacted. Josef Joffe points to the formidable obstacles that still stand in its way.

IDEAS THE WAY THE WORLDENDS 50 Everything seems to be ending these days-the Cold War, history, nature. It's all end-of-millennium mischief, Cullen Murphy suggests.

REFLECTIONS DEPARTMENTS THELIT-CRIT WARS 99 Editor's Comment 6 The critics are at war. The stakes are higher than they seem. Frank McConnell explains. Periodicals 9 Current Books 82 THE NUMBERSOF THE '80s 110 What hath Reagan wrought? Karl Zinsmeis- Research Reports 138 ter paints a numerical portrait of the decade. Commentary 140

AN AMERICANMEMOIR 118 Historian Daniel Boorstin explores his own Cover: Morning View, Hollywood Freeway (1988), by Simeon family's past in frontier Tulsa. Lagodich. From the Tatistcheff Gallery, Santa Monica, Calif.

ISSN.0363-3276 USPS 346-670 m VOL. XN NO. 1 Published in January (Winter),April (Spring),July (Summer), and October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions: one year, $20; two years, $36. Foreign subscriptions: one year, $26.50; two years, $49. Foreign subscriptions air mail: one year, $35; two years, $66. Single copies mailed upon request: $5; selected back issues: $5, including postage and handling; outside U.S. and possessions, $7. Second-class postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices.Editorial offices: 370 L'Enfant Promenade S. W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. All unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Members: Send changes of address and all subscription correspondence with Wilson Quarterly mailing label to Subscriber Service, The Wilson Quarterly, PO. Box 56161, Boulder, Colo. 80322.6161, (Subscriber hot line: 303-449-9609.)Postmaster: Send all address changes to The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 56161, Boulder, Colo. 80301. Microfilm copies are available from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. U.S.A. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 1130 Cleveland Road, Sandusky, Ohio 44870. 'A great wrong ... set-New Turk Timesright." Book Review Announcing THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMERICA'S FOREMOST AUTHORS IN A MAGNIFICENT SERIES OF DELUXE EDITIONS

ntd recently, much of Amer- ican literature could be A complete, deluxe collection found only in disintegrating of American classics old paperbacks, cumbersome anthol- The brilliant fictions of Melville, ogies, or dog-eared hardcovers. Hawthorne and Faulkner, the social Many of our most notable classics- - comedies of Edith Wharton, the high even works published in the 20th adventures of Jack London, the century-were out of print. The Mail-order edition situation was, as the critic Lionel includes handsome slip- Trilling wrote, "a national disgrace." case-yet costs substah- tially less than the book- Now, that great wrong has been store edition. set right. With the support of major foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a non-profit publisher has begun preserving the collected works of our greatest writers in a series of elegant new editions: THELIBRARY OF AMERICA. haunting power of Poe-all this and ************** more is already published. Eloquent superb edit,-onsin every detail. . histories and mind-stretching essays, hard covers of natural stirring works by our foremost Ã£._.,som statesmen, and novels that Easy-to-hold 5" x 8" format transport us into fascinating Protective gilt-trimmed worlds are planned for the slipcases available only in future. And each one mail-order edition appears exactly as the Â Smyth-sewn bindings author intended, in ensure permanence scrupulously accurate, Â Fine, opaque, acid-free unabridged editions. paper makes the books Begin with lightweight and durable Mark Twain Bound-in ribbon markers, Your first volume brings you special end-papers, gilt- Mark Twain's four great Missis- Mark Twain stamped spines sippi tales: The ~dventuresof Tom Up ti1,500 pages-equal to three, Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, four, even five standard-sized Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and books Pudd'nhead Wihon-all complete. *; * Ã x- Â¥ To examine this introductory volume ------free for 15 days, mail the coupon or THELIBRARY OF AMERICA call toll-free 1-800-321-6640. 5 Norden Lane ************** Huntington Station, NY 11746 Praise for YES, please send me Mark Twain's Mississippi THELIBRARY OF AMERICA... Writings, and start my subscription to THE LIBRARYOF AMERICA.I understand each ". . .truly beautiful volumes that are volume costs $24.95 plus $3.50 shipping and a pleasure to have and to hold and handling* (a substantial savings off the book- hand down through the generations." store price); each book comes for 15 days' free examination; no minimum purchase is -Chicago Sun-Times required; and I may cancel at any time simply 't . .a good investment for your home by notifying you. When I pay for Mark Twain's shelves ." -The Wall Street Journal Mississippi Writings, I will receive additional volumes shipped one about every other month. ". . .the best and biggest, the finest If I decide not to buy Mark Twain's Mississippi looking, and the longest lasting Writings, I will return the book within 15 days. edition of its kind ever made. Our My subscription will be canceled and I will be under no further obligation. American culture lovingly recreated." -The New Republic Name I I Address "The most important book-publish- I ing project in the nation's history." City State- Zip_ I -Newsweek 0 Bill me later I Examine four great works Charge my 0 Visa 0 Mastercard I Card No. Exp. date I of Mark Twain 'Future prices may change. All orders subject to approval. Offer limited to new subscribers only; one per address. 8Q1X I FREE for 15 days. ------I NEW YEAR

Slave Law in the Americas Alan Watson In Slave Law in the Americas, Alan Watson argues that the slave laws of North and South America reflect not so much the culture and society of the various colonies but the legal traditions of England, Europe, and ancient Rome. In this pathbreaking study, Watson presents the laws of slavery in ancient Rome and in the slaveholding colonies of America and demonstrates how comparative law can elucidate the relationship of law, legal rules, and institutions to the society in which they operate. $25-00

The Journalises Lincoln Edited by Herbert Mitgang Abraham Lincoln A Press Portrait Edited by Herbert Mitgang Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait brings together contemporary reportage from nearly one hundred newspapers and magazines in America and abroad to form a journalistic biography of Lincoln's political life. "A fascinating and valuable book which captures the stridency and acrimony of the Civil War crisis, , , .This book helps us to see the wartime president as he appeared to his own generation1'-David Donald. $17.95 paper Spectator of America Edward Dicey Early in 1862, the English journalist Edward Dicey arrived in the United States for a six-month visit. A Northern sympathizer who wrote for The Spectator and Macmillan's Monthly, Dicey observed and recorded in this incisive travelogue the thoughts and attitudes of the diverse American populace, from the staunch New England abolitionists to the Westerners whose lives continued almost undisturbed by war. $14.95 paper Washington, D.C., in Lincoln's Time Noah Brooks The journalist who knew Lincoln best, Noah Brooks in 1895 distilled his reportage for the Sacramento Union into this classic memoir of the Civil War years. "Brooks' best writing was about Lincoln himself-his daily activities, his moods, memory, intelligence, and literary tastes-all presented with a judicious mixture of detachment and sympathy1'-Civil War History. $14,95 paper

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And to ensure the utmost 6~~us$3 50shipping/handling Q 1989 MBI authenticity, each is made using ...... tools and dies of classic design, Hamilton Classics 47 Richards Avenue carefully recast from the original watch Norwalk, Conn. 06857 Obse'rve the distinctive Roman test Service Call Toll Free: numerals. The elegant case, richly I1 1-800-367-4534 finished with 10 microns of 18 kt gold, contrasts I Pleasesend me ______Hamilton brilliantly with the deep black round bezel. The I Art Deco watch(es). step second hand. The curved swinging hinges I 412-8424 Inittals to be engraved on back0 q for a snug, comfortable fit. 1: Name (PleasePrint Ctearty) Only one improvement from the original: The I Address high-tech Swiss quartz movement for far greater ~ity/~tate/~ip accuracy and dependability. I (All orderssubiect toacceptance) Char e each of 8 equal monthly $3731 installments tp my credit card' 0Mastercard 0VISA 0Diners Club 0American Express Card # Exp. Date 0I prefer not to use a credit card and will ay by check. Enclosed is my deposit of $99.50' for each watch. I will ay the balance in four equal monthly instalfaientsof $49.75 .Applicablestatesales tax, ifany.will be billed withshipment Editor: Jay Tolson A. Editor's Comment Deputy Editor: Steven Lagerfeld Managing Editor: James H. Carman Literary Editor: Jeffery Paine Production Assistant: We at the WQ tend to be wary about prophecies; history, Henry L. Mortimer, Jr. not futurology, usually informs our perspectives on cur- Contributin~Editors:Steven Fraser, rent affairs. But with a new year just beginning and the Walter Reic , Neil Spitzer, Research- third millennium not far ahead, we decided to hazard a ers: Kristen Bruno, Kelly A. Glass, Sian M. Hunter; Librarian: Zdengk . few forward glances. In our cover story, Robert Fishman V.David; Editorial Advisers: Mary B. describes the emerging sha e of America's new cities. Ste- Bullock, Philip Cook, Robert ven Lagerfeld and Josef Jo8 e consider the prospects of the Damton, Francis M. Deng, Denis European Community in 1992. And Cullen Murphy takes Donoghue, Nathan Glazer, Michael Haltzel, Harry Harding, Elizabeth the approaching millennium as the occasion for some re- Johns, Michael Lacey, John R flections on mankind's abiding preoccupation with the Larnpe, Jackson Lears, Robert end of time. Readers should rest assured, however. Even Utwak, Frank McConnell, Richard when casting into the future, our contributors retain a Morse, Mancur Olson, Richard Rorty, Blair Ruble, Ann Sheffield, S. firm gri on the past. Like oarsmen in a shell, the ad- Frederick Starr, Joseph Tulchin; vance w?I ile looking backwards. Not a bad way, we t}, ink, Senior Editorial Adviser: Peter for anyone to move into the future in these exciting and Braestmp. uncertain times. Publisher: Warren B. Syer Our futuristic speculations are further balanced by his- Deputy Publisher: Kathy Read torian Daniel Boorstin's evocative memoir of his father Business Assistant: Suzanne Turk and life in an earlier America. Recently the recipient of a Circulation Director: Rosalie Bruno National Book Award for his contributions to American Advertising Director: Sara Lawrence letters, Boorstin demonstrates that great history, like great 370 L'Enfant Promenade S.W. .Suite- 704- art, originates in what the poet Yeats once called the "rag- Washington, D.C. 20024 and-bone shop of the heart." (202) 287-3000

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POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

"The Wasp Ascendancy" by Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt, The Ruling Class in The New York Review of Books (Nov. 9, 1989), 250 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10107.

For 300 years, this country was ruled, if says Alsop. Entry into the ascendancy- not always governed, by a small White An- the Roosevelts, of Dutch origin, are a fam- glo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite. George ous example-was frequently advertised Bush notwithstanding, the WASPs as a by "ecclesiastical migration" into the Epis- group have not enjoyed an organized po- copal Church. The rules of behavior and litical victory since the upright ladies of deportment were endless. "For an evening Mrs. Charles H. Sabin's Woman's Organi- suit," Alsop recalls, "a double line of braid zation for National Prohibition Reform on the trousers was required, whereas a helped put martinis back on the nation's mere single line of broader braid was tables in 1933. needed for a dinner jacket." Proper speech Alsop, a prominent newspaper colum- was paramount. One said coffin not cas- nist who counted himself a "very minor ket, curtains not drapes, house not home, member" of the WASP "ascendancy" be- and so on. fore his recent death, writes that his tribe Of course, the WASP way of life was not had many faults and one great virtue: It all trivialities. The greatest advantage of created a handful of political leaders and the ascendancy, Alsop believes, "was that public servants who were without peer. the young had their careers laid out for Truth be told, direct WASP participation them in advance so there was no foolish in politics was only sporadic after the Fed- waffling." Membership instilled the self- eralist Party fell apart during the adminis- confidence and sense of duty that gave the tration of President Thomas Jefferson nation some of its greatest leaders-the (1801-09). "Money was the true occupa- Roosevelts again, as well as such post- tion; and money was the source of the World War I1 foreign policy "wise men" as ascendancy's authority." Controlling the Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. big banks that financed the nation's eco- But "grossly selfish" mismanagement of nomic development, the WASPs of New the nation's financial system during the York, Philadelphia, and Boston "felt a 1920s and the Great Depression finally right, even a duty. . . to set the tune and lay cost the ascendancy its dominance. And a down long-term rules for the rest of the good thing, too, says Alsop. For had it re- country." mained in power, he doubts that it would The WASP ascendancy "supplied the have been permeable enough to allow Ital- role models followed by other Americans, ians, Poles, and other ethnic groups into whether WASP or non-WASP, who were the nation's elite, this nation's "greatest on their way up in the world." It was not single feat in the 20th century." quite as impermeable as we now imagine, Yet today's elite, lacking a cohesive cul-

WQ WINTER 1990 9 PERIODICALS

The WASP ideal: Theodore Roosevelt and family in 1874. Roosevelt declared his opposition to plutocracy and mob rule but thought there was "something to be said" for aristocracy.

ture and a sense of its role in American we must found a new self-conscious elite history, is not likely to produce leaders to create future generations of "wise men even in the small numbers that the WASP more representative of the mixed America ascendancy did. Somehow, Alsop believes, that gives me such pride."

A Thousand "Confessions of a a host" by Patrick Anderson, in Regardie's (Nov. 1989), 1010 Wisconsin Ave. N.W., Ste. 600, Washington, Points of Bite D.C. 20007.

Patrick Anderson says he must have been posture." Anderson eventually realized "temporarily insane" when he first agreed that "it galled [Carter] to speak my words, to write a speech for a politician. He wrote because it suggested that he couldn't do it in the spring of 1976 for Jimmy Carter, everything himself." Unlike many of his then a candidate for the Democratic presi- competitors, however, Carter had more dential nomination. Carter introduced this ambition than ego. new "Kennedyesque" marvel by woodenly Most politicians, says Anderson, who informing an audience, "Now I'm going to went on to write speeches for other Demo- read a statement my staff prepared." Then crats, "don't know what they want to say. he plodded through the text. They really don't want to say anything, be- Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, cause almost anything they say will offend later explained to Anderson that "it was someone." With rare exceptions, "they just part of Carter's I'll-never-tell-you-a-lie hate brevity, scorn clarity, and fear their

WQ WINTER 1990 PERIODICALS

own humanity." Moreover, aides and advi- chose to cover it as a heartwarming Hero sors struggle over every word the candi- Goes Home story. "Our dreary speech date is supposed to utter, and speech- didn't matter a whit," says Anderson. writing becomes a bureaucratic battle, as During the 1988 primaries, Anderson it eventually did in the Carter White played a minor role in Senator Albert House. Gore's (D.-Tenn.) campaign. But Gore Because of the growing importance of gave his all to "debate prep" and paid little TV news, however, their struggles are in- attention to his speeches. "To the media, creasingly irrelevant. Working for Senator and thus to the candidates, the primary- John Glenn (D.-Ohio) in 1983, Anderson season debates promised conflict, drama, wrote a long, dull speech announcing news; speeches were a bother, a yawn, an Glenn's candidacy for the Democratic afterthought." nomination. It was a carefully calculated Since political rhetoric does not really risk, intended to show Glenn as a substan- matter anymore, Anderson jestingly pro- tive thinker rather than a glamorous ex- poses a ban on speechwriters. Perhaps that astronaut. But Glenn gave the speech in would force our leaders to learn again- his Ohio hometown, and TV newscasters how to speak to the American public.

Turning Crimson? The Bush administration as dissected by Di- didn't go to the Kennedy School [at Harvard]. nah Wisenberg of the States News Service, I came to Texas." in Common Cause Magazine (Sept.-Oct. One year later, President Bush's Harvard- 1989). bashing days seem to be behind him. Of the 200-plus appointments made by the Yale- In the heat of [the 19881 presidential cam- educated president, more than four dozen are paign, George Bush attacked Michael Duka- Harvard University graduates or faculty kis for espousing liberal policies "born in members. Some Texans may also be sur- Harvard Yard's boutique." And he boasted to prised that several high-ranking White House a Houston audience last June, "when I aides have ties to Haward's John F. Kennedy wanted to learn the ways of the world, I School of Government.

'IS Government ~ullof Crooks, Or Are We ~ustBetter at Find- The Dark Side ing Them?" by Elder Witt, in Governing (Sept. 1989), 1414 22nd Of Federalism st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20037, and "The Effectiveness of State Economic Development Policies: A Time-Series Analysis" by Margery Marzahn Ambrosius, in The Western Political Quar- terly (Sept. 1989), Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 841 12. Much of the initiative in government dur- 1970, there were 36 officials under federal ing the past decade has shifted from Wash- indictment; in 1987, there were 348. No ington to the nation's state houses and city reliable data exist on state and local pros- halls. And liberals and conservatives alike ecutions. seem to applaud the growth of govern- Yet more indictments do not necessarily ments "closer to the people." The "peo- mean that there is more corruption. As ple," however, may be paying a high price. Witt notes, ethics laws have proliferated Witt, a staff writer for Governing, reports madly; what was legal, or at least over- that federal criminal indictments of state, looked, 20 years ago could put a local offi- city, county, and other local officials have cial behind bars today. More important, grown tenfold over the past 20 years. In she says, is the growing aggressiveness and

WQ WINTER 1990 PERIODICALS

technological sophistication of the Federal measures as bond-financed construction Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and federal subsidies, various targeted tax breaks, and prosecutors since the 1980 Abscam inves- other incentives, the states now spend bil- tigation. In Mississippi, for example, 60 lions annually to promote the growth of county supervisors went to jail recently for industry. Ambrosius put all the numbers taking kickbacks after the FBI mounted a for eight kinds of economic development sophisticated "sting" operation. The FBI programs through a computer. Her ques- used high-tech "body wires" to build air- tion: What impact did these programs tight cases-the supervisors' own words- have on the states' unemployment and in- on tape. dustrial output between 1969 and 1985? Still, Witt concedes, new laws and tech- The answer: near zero. (Tax breaks on nology are not entirely to blame. Corrup- land and capital improvements, she found, tion always seems to follow money, and may have helped ease unemployment state and local officials now control a great slightly.) deal of money: Their budgets total some Ambrosius does not mention corrup- $900 billion, eight times what they were in tion. Her point is that business interests 1960. have more influence at the state level than Bigger budgets also seem to guarantee in Washington. How else to explain bil- more plain-old pork-barrel legislation. lions in state spending that does no dis- Ambrosius, a political scientist at Kansas cernible good? In any event, neither Witt State University, studied the economic nor Ambrosius seems to offer much en- development programs that many states couragement to partisans of the "new fed- have started in recent years. Through such eralism."

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

A Fall "Rethinking the Origins of American Hegemony" by G. John Ikenbeny, in Political Science Quarterly (Fall 1989), 475 River- From What? side Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115-0012.

Along with "endism" [see p.141, ideals and plans it originally articulated "declinism" has been a hot topic recently [during the war], the United States got among foreign affairs specialists. Since the much less than it wanted; in terms of di- publication of Paul Kennedy's The Rise rect involvement in leading the postwar and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), they Western system, it got much more in- have been seeking to gauge just how badly volved than it wanted." American power has ebbed since World During the war, for example, U.S. ofi- War 11. cials believed that a system of multilateral Ikenberry, a Princeton political scien- free trade, embracing even the Soviet tist, looks at the question from a very dif- Union, was essential to ensuring the peace. ferent angle: How great was American But the wretched state of Europe's econo- power to begin with? mies (and its governments' pleas for con- The conventional view, he notes, is that tinued trade protection), along with rising the United States has fallen far from the East-West conflict, prevented Washington heights it occupied immediately after from fulfilling much of its plan. World War 11. And there is no denying that American officials also wanted to mini- by many measures America was a colos- mize direct U.S. involvement in Europe. sus. In 1948, for example, it produced As George F. Kennan wrote in 1947: "It nearly half of the world's industrial goods. should be a cardinal point of our policy to But Ikenberry argues that "in terms of the see to it that other elements of indepen-

WINTER 1990 12 PERIODICALS

dent power are developed.. . in order to eludes, America might have been able to take off our shoulders some of the burdens exercise more of its power during the of bi-polarity." The Truman administration early postwar years if Europe had been (1945-53) sought an independent, unified stronger. But then, as now, power could Europe. Indeed, Congress made progress not be measured as if it were a purely me- on that front a condition for Marshall Plan chanical force. aid in 1948. But the Europe- ans resisted independence. What the United States got Mission Impossible? instead was what it had wanted least: a U.S. com- In The New Republic (Nov. 20, 1989), Harvard's David mitment, through the North Landes suggests that both free-market and "development" Atlantic Treaty Organiza- economists misapprehend the problem with foreign aid. tion, to defend Europe. The earlier confidence that histoy is teleological, tending And what kind of Europe irresistibly toward industrialism and modernity, no longer was it defending? Not the seems tenable. Is it time for a paradigm shift? Suppose the Europe of laissez-faire gov- process of economic development is not the destiny of all ernments Washington had humankind. Suppose instead that what we are dealing with envisioned, but a Europe of is a pool of candidates. Some are favored by circumstance; welfare states, sheltered by some are not. The ones most favored go first. Others follow. protectionism and other And as the pool is exhausted, the hard cases remain-not special arrangements. This only because of the misfortunes and misdeeds of history, but was a compromise Wash- because, for all manner of internal reasons, they do not take to. . . new ways. They don't like them; they don't want them; ington made when the out- they are discouraged from learning them; if they learn them, break of the Cold War com- they want out; etc. Perhaps what we are seeing now is sim- pelled it to support even ply that we're getting down to the hard cases. . . . socialist governments in We must and shall keep tying to help, as much for our- Europe, so long as they selves as for those we want to benefit. But we're going to were non-communist. have to choose our targets better and aim straighter. Ironically, Ikenberry con-

Foreign Aid "Investment Without Growth, Industrialization Without Pros- perity" by Nicholas Eberstadt, in Journal of Economic Growth Steroids (Summer 1989), 1615 H St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20062.

Since 1950, when President Harry S. Tru- schemes. The result, says Eberstadt, has man requested a modest $45 million for been gross economic distortion. It is al- his Point Four program, U.S. foreign aid most as if the recipients were on eco- has grown to some $9 billion annually. nomic steroids. Thus, Zimbabwe, Botswa- Add contributions from the other industri- na, and Trinidad, among others, appear to alized nations and aid to the Third World be more "industrialized" than Japan. In- averages some $40 billion annually. With dustry generates 41 percent of Japan's the exception of Japan and Taiwan, virtu- gross domestic product (GDP) but, accord- ally every nation in Asia, Africa, and Latin ing to World Bank data, 43 percent of Bo- America receives help. tswana's. Likewise, gross domestic invest- All of that money is having plenty of im- ment seems to be higher in many Third pact, writes Eberstadt, a visiting scholar at World lands than in the West. the American Enterprise Institute, and As a result, Eberstadt observes, agricul- most of it is for the worse. ture and consumption in these countries For two decades, most aid dollars were claim abnormally small shares of GDP. poured into industrial development But these are precisely the countries

WQ WINTER 1990 PERIODICALS

where farming and con- rect investment by Western sumption-i.e. purchases business has shrunk, but of food, shelter, and other commercial loans and sub- necessities-ought to sidized loans from institu- claim the largest shares of tions like the World Bank GDP. have not. Overall, a re- During the 1960s, devel- markable $1.8 trillion in opment specialists recog- capital flowed into the nized their mistake. Indus- Third World between 1956 trialization was proceeding and 1986. The only plausi- apace, but poverty rates re- ble explanation, Eberstadt mained high. So, says notes, is that Third World Eberstadt, they devoted governments "are being more money to "basic hu- held to a lower standard of man needsH-health care, economic performance education-and merely than those facing their own compounded their error. citizens, international busi- Such aid only swelled the nesses, or the governments budgets of Third World of Western countries." governments, thus shrink- That allows the governing the share of GDP avail- ments of poor countries to able for personal consump- ignore the marketplace if tion. they choose (though some Meanwhile, investment do not), and ultimately to in Third World industry further impoverish their has not abated, even 'I citizens. "Development though it has produced, at Much U.S. aid never reaches the economics" has failed, best, mediocre rates of re- people it is intended to help. As a Eberstadt suggests; the turn. What has happened, result, Washington increasingly market, he believes, de- says Eberstadt, is that di- bypasses foreign governments. serves a chance.

Fukuyama II "A Reply to My Critics" by Francis Fukuyama, in The National Interest (Winter 1989-90), 11 12 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. No article in recent memory has provoked events were driven by a systematic idea of as much controversy as Francis political and social justice that claimed to Fukuyama's "The End of History?" in the supersede liberalism." National Interest. [See WQ, Autumn '89, This argument is not as esoteric as it pp. 12-13]. Now Fukuyama, deputy direc- may seem. For virtually all of us are Hege- tor of the U.S. State Department's policy lians, Fukuyama insists, even if we do not planning staff, answers his critics. realize it. It is from Hegel that we have in- He says that many of these critics misun- herited the notion of history as progress, as derstood his basic point. He argued that a process of evolution "from primitive to history as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel modem, through a succession of stages of understood it has come to an end: Liberal- 'false consciousness.'" History thus must ism has triumphed over all competing arrive at some final truth, an end. The only ideas about the organization of society. "In alternative is radical relativism, as order to refute my hypothesis, then, it is Friedrich Nietzsche held, in which all val- not sufficient to suggest that the future ues and morals are mere "products of holds in store large and momentous their time." That, says Fukuyama, leads to events. One would have to show that these consequences, such as fascism and the

WQ WINTER 1990 PERIODICALS

glorification of war, "which few of us is hard to imagine nationalist conflicts would be willing to stomach." turninsu into wars on the scale of the ideo- Other critics have faulted Fukuyama for logical struggles of the past. ignoring continuing threats to the liberal Finally, there is what the historian Ger- idea. True, he says, the communist world trude Himmelfarb called the "X-factor," could abandon reform. But communism the possibility that some unimagined new can never regain the moral authority that ideology may arise to challenge liberalism. made it a worldwide challenge to liberal- Fukuyama believes the fact that human ism. What about Islamic fundamentalism? progress toward liberalism has been un- "For all of Islam's pretensions of being a derway "since at least the beginning of the universal religion, fundamentalism has Christian era in Europe" makes this un- had virtually no appeal outside of commu- likely. And yet he cannot completely rule nities that were not Muslim to begin with." out Himmelfarb's wosuect. And although Islam claims nearly a billion Fukuyama admits one mistake. What he adherents, the clash between Islam and failed to make clear when he said that lib- the West "seems something less than an eralism will "govern the material world in even match." the long run" was that the "long run" may Fukuyama is more inclined to take seri- be several generations of struggle away. ously the challenge of resurgent national- The end of history, then, is an anticlimax. ism, especially now that German reunifica- It is cause neither for wild celebration nor tion is a serious prospect. Still, he holds, it for complacency.

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

Industrial Policy "The Quiet Path to Technological Preeminence" by Robert B. Reich, in Scientific American (Oct. 1989), 415 Madison Ave., Rides Again New York, N.Y. 10017.

During the 1980s, two Republican admin- from Harvard's Kennedy School of Gov- istrations devoted to the free market have ernment, finds himself in the unaccus- launched an undeclared national defense- tomed position of opposing these govern- oriented industrial policy. ment subsidies. The United States, he says, In 1987, for example, the Reagan admin- already outspends Japan on research and istration approved a $4.4 billion superconductor ac- celerator; a $1 billion "high-performance com- puting strategy" was announced early in 1988. Among other elements of the new "industrial policy" is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's $100 million annual con- tribution to SEMATECH, the joint research venture sponsored by U.S. semi- conductor companies. Reich, the relentless industrial-policy advocate

WQ WINTER 1990 15 Kr stian Zimerman: Chopin, Kronos Quartet: Winter Was Mussorgsky Pictures At An ~aiades;Barcarolle;more Hard Title work by Sallinen plus Exhibition - Plus Night On The Bare '[His] pianism is breathtaking- Barber, Adagio; Webern, 6 Bagatelles; Mountain, more. Montreal Symphony1 literally."-- DG Digital 15332 more. Nonesuch Digital 00675 Dutoit. London Diqital25314 Ravel Piano Concerto' Ashkenazy Rachmaninov, J.R. Baker: Gershwin concerto For The Left hand Piano concerto No. 3 Rha sody In Electric blue-Plus Beroff & Argerich, pianos. London Concertqebouw 0rch.lHaitink. 3 Preludes; An American In Pans; Sym./Abbado. DG Digital 15462 London hital25157 more. Newport Classic Digital 34647 Dvorak symphony No. 9 Jascha Heifetz: The Decca LFrom fhe New World). Chicago Masters, Vol. I. Humoreske, ymphony1Solti."Superlatively good." Habanera, Melodie in E-Flat, Clair de -Gramophone London Digital 15168 lune, Golliwog's Cakewalk, Masks. more. MCA 00604 Mozart Clarinet Conc.; Horn Conc. ftos. I & 4 Pops Britannia - John Williams1 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. DG Boston Pops. Fantasia On Green- Digital 15481 sleeves, more. Philips Digital 15468 Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill Michael Feinstein: Pure Mack The Knife. I'm A Stranaer Here Gershwin - Elektra 54173 Myself, Speak Low. more, London Berlioz Symphonic Digital 15163 ~antasfi~ue- The Philadelphia Pavarotti At Carnegie Hall 0rch.IMuti. "Among the finest." Fete a la Francaise - Montreal Songs and arias by Scarlatti, Gramophone Angel Digital 54244 Svm./Dutoit, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Schubert. Verdi. Donizetti, others. D&UXGymnopedies, Jeux denfants, John ~ustman,piano. many more. London Digital 25235 London Digital 15311 Mozart Eine kleine Corelli, Concerti Grossi Op. 6 ~achtmusik;Adagio & Fugue, Tafelmusik. Includes the famous Tchaikovsk 1812 Overture- "Christmas Concerto." deutsche Romeo ~nd~uliet:~utcracker K. 546. Plus Pachelbel, Canon; harmonia mundi Digital 73751 more. MarrinerIAcademy of St. Suite - Chicago SymphonyISolti. Martin-in-the-Fields. Philips Digital- 0 Cieco Mondo-The Italian "Full of fire and power."-Diqital Audio Lauda .Ensemble HueIgaslNevel. London Digital 25179 An unforgettable early-music album. Reich, Sextet; Six Marimbas Hoist, he Planets - Montreal deutsche harmonia mundi Digital Symphony OrchestraIDutoit. "[A] 53753 Musicians with superlative recording."-Gramqhone members of Nexus & Bartok Concerto For. London Di~ital15448 The Manhattan orchestra; Dance Suite Chicago Symphony OrchestralSolti. Di ital ~hkebox- Boston Pops1 Marimba Quartet. Wifiams. Philips 25059 Nonesuch 00520 "Altogether special."-me London Digital 15177 Perlman: Mozart, Violin Mozart Sym honies Nos. 29 & Concertos 3 & 5.DG Digital 15146 34. "ieAna phiRarmonic/Levine. Perlman: French Violin 'Lively, animated readings."-Fanfare Showpieces - Carmen-Fantasy, Delicious Mozart! DG Digital 15337 Havanaise, Tzi ane more. New York Claudio Arrau: Beethoven, Phil./Mehta. DG ~iiital15457 Copland Appalachian Spring; Cortege macabre; Letter From Home: John Henrv - Si L0u.s Philips Digital 15355 ~~m~hon~l~latkin.~6~elDigital Ton Koopman: Bach, Organ, 54176 Works Vol. 1 -Toccata & Fugue in D The Academv-Bv Reauest Minor, Prelude & Fugue in E-Flat; Neville Marr rye;& he ~cao'emyplay more. Novalis Di~ital01137 Sheep May Safe y Graze, more Angel Nadja salerno-sonnenberg: Mendelssohn Violin Concerto: Saint-Saens, Havanaise; more ~avelBolero- La Valse; Angel Digital 34670 ~a~s6die~sFnole; Alborado de Gracioso - Montreal sound The Trumpet - English Sym./Dutoit. London Digital 15199 Ceremonial Music by Purcell, others. Edward Carroll, trumpet, William Neil, The Pearl Fishers - Jussi Bjoerling organ, others. Newport Classic Digital in duets with Robert Merrill, others. 00990 Glorious! RCA 00992

IPS 540 Res i hi, Roman Tone Poems Salvatore Accardo: Bach Rags And Riches -The David Andres Segovia Plays Rodrigo, The Philadelphia OrchestraIMuti. Violin Concertos. chamber Dusing Singers. Bill Bailey Won't You Ponce & Torroba Fantasia para Pines Of Rome, Fountains Of Rome, Orchestra Of Europe. "Warm tone ... Please Come Home?, more. Newport un Gentilhombre, Concierto del Sur, Roman Festivals. Angel Digital 34443 sensitive [phrasing]."-Gramophone Classic Digital 01036 Castles Of Spain. MCA 63579 Beethoven, S mphonies Nos. "gita' 2516Z Cliburn- Liszt Piano Musicians For Armenia. James 2 & 8-London Classical Plaversl Perlman. Brahms. Violin concertos N~S.1 & 2- Grie Galway, Barry Douglas, Andre Previn, Norrington. "A major revelation." Concerto - ChicagoSym./~iulini. Piano Concert0 The ~hiladelphia others. RCA Digital 00928 -m Angel Digital00466 "Wonderfully invigorating."--0 OrchestraIOrmandy. RCA 00606 The Canadian Brass: More Dvorak. Svmohonv No. 8: Angel 63343 Bylsma: The Violoncello Greatest Hits. RCA Digital 64348 Piccolo - deutsche harmonia mundi James Galwaj: Greatest Hits Digital 63749 Memory, Angel f Music, Perhaps he Performing Piano I Love, Sabre Dance, Clair de lune, Paderewski, others "Live". Newport more. RCA 73233 Classic Digital 14708 Beethoven Symphony No. 9 Finian's Rainbow Original cast. (Choral); Nornngton conducts. How Are Things In Glocca Mora?, Old ngel Digital 00467 Devil Moon. more. RCA 00835 Copland Billy The Kid; Rodeo Rubinstein: Selections From ~com~leteBallet) St. Louis The Chopin Collection - M litary ym.1 latkin. Angel Digital41491 Polonaise, Minute Wa tz, Ballade No 1, The Empire Brass: A Bach Barcarolle, manv more. RCA 54249 Festival -A Mighty Fortress Is Our James Galway: Nocturne. Clair God; Sleepers Wake!; Jesu, Joy Of de lune, plus nocturnes by Chopin, Man's Desiring; more. With Douglas Field, L. Boulanger, more. RCA 10765 Major, organ. Angel Digital 64211

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development by three to one. Its research lion for technologies that cost between laboratories in both industry and the uni- $500 billion qnd $1 trillion to develop. versities are second to none. Reich just happens to have a handy six- Where the United States falls on its face, point program to turn things around. U.S. he argues, is in quickly translating basic industry must search the globe for inven- research into "products and processes for tions with commercial potential, and it designing, manufacturing, marketing and must learn to integrate the work of labora- distributing such products." Experience tory and factory "floor more effectively. seems to bear this out. American scientists Washington must work harder to make the invented the transistor, but in 1953 West- fruits of government research and devel- ern Electric licensed the technology to opment available to industry, and it must Sony. The rest is history. In 1968, another set uniform technical standards for new U.S. firm, Unimation, licensed industrial technologies, such as high-definition tele- robot technology to Kawasaki Heavy In- vision. so that comorate research efforts dustries. And who has heard of Unimation are not wasted. Finally, government must since? During the year ending in March invest more in basic education and indus- 1987, Reich reports, Japanese firms spent trv must invest more in worker training." $1 billion to buy technological informa- Unfortunately, these are not strategies that tion in the United States; U.S. firms spent lend themselves to headlines and ballyhoo. less than half as much in Japan. Between And that, Reich says, "may prove to be the 1956 and 1978, Japanese firms paid $9 bil- major stumbling block."

"Eclipse of the Public Corporation" by Michael C. Jensen, in Corporate Harvard Business Review (Sept.-Oct. 1989), Boston, Mass. Makeover 02 163. The boom in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) stances." Because the owners of stock in and other kinds of corporate takeovers has big publicly-held corporations can rarely provoked cries of outrage in the executive supervise their investments effectively, suites of the Fortune 500 and even in Con- corporate managers have grown fat and gress. Now, from the Harvard Business lazy. They have ignored stockholders' in- School, the high church of corporate cap- terests. Thus, Ford Motor Company execu- italism, comes a lusty cheer. tives have hoarded an amazing $10.5 bil- The publicly-held corporation, declares lion war chest. It ought to be distributed to Jensen, a Harvard professor of business shareholders, Jensen says, but Ford execu- administration, "has outlived its useful- tives are sure to use it for "diversification." ness." We are in the midst of a massive otherwise known as empire building. he restructuring of the U.S. economy. reason is simple. In Corporate America, The chief agent of change is the LBO; executive pay, perks, and prestige are the chief result is that large corporations linked to corporate size rather than to cor- whose stock was once traded on the na- porate performance. tion's stock exchanges are "going private." How do LBO's help? Jensen maintains In 1988 alone, the $77 billion of LBOs that the substitution of "junk bond" debt (mostly financed by "junk bonds") shrank for stock changes everything for the better. the supply of stock in public corporations The need to meet payments "creates the by 2.5 percent. crisis atmosphere managers require to Behind it all is not the greed of buyout slash unsound investment programs, artists like TWA's Carl Icahn or Wall Street shrink overhead, and dispose of assets that investment banks, Jensen argues, but the are more valuable outside the company." "widespread waste and inefficiency of the And since executives in privately-held public corporation and its inability to companies have bigger ownership stakes adapt to changing economic circum- in the business, rewards are more strongly

WQ WINTER 1990 PERIODICALS

linked to performance. Finally, bloated Nabisco private in a $25 billion deal, RJR bureaucracies are reduced. In 1988, when Nabisco's entire 470-person headquarters Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took RJR was replaced by 16 professionals and 44 support personnel at KKR. Jensen says that LBOs make the most sense in mature industries-such as steel, chemicals, broadcasting, and brewing- where little further investment can be justified. Public stock ownership still makes sense in fast-growth sectors where opportunities outstrip company resources, such as computers and pharmaceuticals. Private ownership of industry helped propel West Germany and Japan to eco- During the late 19th century, the creation of rail- nomic success, Jensen believes. And to- roads and other capital-hungry enterprises day's corporate revolution in the United spurred the rise of the public corporation. States is essential to meet their challenge.

"Problems and on-problems in the American Economy" by Rich and Stupid Herbert Stein, in The Public Interest (Fall 1989) 11 12 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. All political discussion in America today the $1 15 billion budget deficit, that only seems to begin and end with the "twin def- means that $60 billion of U.S. investors' icits"-the U.S. budget and trade deficits. money is freed for productive investments. Nobody seems to know exactly why they Well, some may persist, if foreign invest- are bad, observes Stein, an economist at ments don't break us today, then paying the American Enterprise Institute and the interest and dividends on them eventu- chairman of the Council of Economic Ad- ally will. In fact, Stein responds, foreign visers under President Ford. "The fact that investments generate the income to pay they are called 'deficits' seems sufficient." those bills. And the United States still earns Not to Stein. Our obsession with these more from its overseas investments than it two "non-problems," he argues, has led us pays out to foreigners who have invested to overlook larger issues. here. He is particularly dismissive of the $95 Finally, some worry that the trade deficit billion trade deficit. During the early reflects declining U.S. "competitiveness." 1980s, people worried that the trade deficit Strictly speaking, this is not true either. would depress U.S. output and employ- Taiwan's industrial productivity is far ment. That proved false. Now people lower than ours, yet it has a substantial $10 worry that foreigners are "buying up" billion trade surplus with us. America. But capital is flowing into the So what is the "real" problem? In Stein's United States because of attractive invest- view, it is the growing American taste for ment opportunities here that exceed U.S. consumption rather than saving, which savings. "It is as natural that we should im- dropped from about 17 percent of GNP in port capital from countries that are good 1980 to 14 percent in 1988. As a result, we at saving," Stein remarks, "as that we are underinvesting in business, in educa- should import coffee from countries that tion, in help for the poor, in national de- are good at producing coffee." fense-in real "competitiveness." Lost in Some people insist that foreign capital is today's dead-end debates is the fact that merely financing the U.S. budget deficit. the current low taxbig budget deficit re- Wrong again, according to Stein. Even if gime increases consumption and depletes foreign investors underwrite $60 billion of savings. Stein's prescription: Raise taxes.

WQ WINTER 1990 19 PERIODICALS

SOCIETY

Marcus Welby "Warning Symptoms" by Ann Dudley ~o~dblatt,in University of Chicago Magazine (Fall 1989), Robie House, 5757 S. Woodlawn Where Are YOU? Ave., Chicago, 111. 60637. It is more than a slight exaggeration to say teacher, a diagnostician, and a healer." Af- that doctors and patients now seem as ter 1940, medicine's triumph over such likely to meet in court as in the consulting diseases as polio and diphtheria added a room. But the doctor-patient relationship new dimension to the physician's role: is clearly not what it once was. How have "technological guarantor." Patients' unre- things come to such a pass? Goldblatt, a alistic expectations, along with new tech- lecturer in medical ethics at the University nologies and medical specialties, eventu- of Chicago, attributes it to a mixture of law ally drove a wedge between physician and and technology. patient. As a result, medical malpractice The traditional doctor-patient relation- suits began to increase during the 1960s. ship, she says, was "vertical": The physi- Meanwhile, the courts introduced an al- cian was a paternalistic "knower, a ternative "horizontal" model of the doc-

Segregation and 'Integration Shock' in America A Survey of Recent Articles

Even as the nation's first black governor takes panics is also 58 percent. In other words, white office in Virginia, the seat of the old Confeder- Hispanics occupy a kind of middle ground, acy, new symptoms of America's deep racial di- moderately segregated from both Anglos and visions are appearing. Two new studies con- their fellow immigrants who happen to be clude that residential segregation is "even black. (Like Anglos, they are very segregated more extreme than previously imagined." The from American-born blacks.) authors blame racial discrimination. But a Moreover, the authors say, the separation of black scholar argues that blacks themselves Hispanics, black and white, from the larger so- have "regenerated segregation. ciety increased between 1970 and 1980. The most disturbing evidence comes from a In a second study, published in Demography study by Nancy A. Denton and Douglas S. Mas- (Aug. 1989), Denton and Massey gauge the seg- sey in the American Sociological Review (Oct. regation of American blacks in the nation's big 1989). Analyzing 1980 U.S. Census data, the two cities. Using five statistical measures, they find University of Chicago sociologists find that His- extreme segregation in 10 big cities: Baltimore, panic immigrants from the Caribbean, where Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and there are no sharp distinctions between blacks Philadelphia score high by all five measures; and whites, are quickly divided in the United Gary, Los Angeles, Newark, and St. Louis score States. high on four. Black Hispanics (mostly Cubans and Puerto Twenty-three percent of all American blacks Ricans) become "very segregated" from Ameri- live in these "hypersegregated" cities. The au- can society, the authors say. They are "much thors also identify nine integrated cities in the more like U.S. blacks than white Hispanics." South and West. But they contain only two per- According to the authors' "dissimilarity index," cent of the nation's black population. about 80 percent of them would have to move Blacks in the "hypersegregated" cities in- to white neighborhoods to achieve integration. habit "small, densely settled, monoracial But white Hispanics are only "moderately" neighborhoods. . . clustered tightly around the segregated from Anglos. Integration could be city center." Those who do not have jobs that completed if 58 percent of these immigrants re- take them outside the ghetto "would rarely settled in Anglo neighborhoods. The "dissimi- meet, and would be extremely unlikely to larity" between white Hispanics and black His- know, an Anglo resident of the same metropo-

WQ WINTER 1990 20 PERIODICALS

tor-patient relationship. In 197 1, courts in tion "clinics" merely had a service per- California and Washington, D.C. created a formed-the doctors offered them no new concept called "informed consent." advice. Before long, clinics operating on Seeking to restore an awareness of medi- the same (lack of) principles began offer- cine as a "science of uncertainties," Amer- ing cosmetic surgery and other services, ican courts increasingly required physi- evolving into a multi-billion dollar indus- cians to discuss the risks and benefits of try. Across the board, patients gained the treatment. The effect was to transform the power to demand services-from tranquil- doctor-patient relationship into "a con- izer prescriptions to heart surgery-from tractual or commercial partnership." their physicians. In the famous Roe v. Wade decision of Meanwhile, patients who continue to 1973 giving women and their physicians look upon their physicians the old way the right to decide to abort pregnancies, have been given new reasons to be wary. the U.S. Supreme Court spoke almost nos- Hospital cost-containment and efficiency talgically of the doctor-patient relation- measures (e.g., reduced hospital stays) un- ship. But the effect of the Court's decision dermine trust. So do physicians' costly in- was to encourage "contractual" arrange- vestments in magnetic resonance imagers ments. Women who went to the new abor- and other diagnostic devices, which create lis." Hypersegregation and the racial prejudice doubt to create a "racist within." that enforces it, the authors say, are responsible When blacks approach the mainstream, he for "the growing social and economic gap be- continues, "they are not only vulnerable to so- tween the black underclass and the rest of ciety's racism but also to the racist within." American society." They experience what Steele calls "integration But Shelby Steele, a professor of English at shock"-a stab of racial doubt. "The whispers San Jose State University, has other ideas. "Cer- of the racist anti-self are far louder in the harsh tainly there is still racial discrimination in accountability of freedom than in subiugation ~merica,"he writes in where the oppressor is a remarkable essay in so entirely to blame." The American Scholar Because the black (Autumn 1989), "but I ''anti-self " makes every believe that the uncon- personal failure a conscious replaying of our firmation of racial in- oppression is now the feriority, the risks of greatest barrier to our striving are much full equality." greater for blacks, As children, he Steele argues, and writes, all people are many shrink from "wounded in some way opportunity. Children and to some degree by "turn off" school; if the wild world we en- they make it to college counter. From these Bosto (black enrollment is wounds a disbelieving shrinking), they segre- anti-self is born, an internal antagonist and sab- gate themselves from whites; their parents oteur that embraces the world's negative view stand by while outsiders run the shops and of us, that believes our wounds are justified by businesses in black neighborhoods. our own unworthiness, and that entrenches it- Overcoming the crippling black anti-self, in self as a lifelong voice of doubt." But black chil- Steele's view, poses a test of personal charac- dren are doubly wounded by the unique evils of ter. "No black identity, however beautifully prejudice, which accuse them of inferiority conjured, will spare blacks this challenge that, simply because of the color of their skin. The despite its fairness or unfairness, is simply in vigilant anti-self grabs this racial doubt, says the nature of things." But he also has faith that Steele, and mixes it into the pool of personal blacks will eventually succeed.

WQ WINTER 1990 2 1 PERIODICALS

In Search Of Reverence John P. Sisk on the meaning of Personal ads, caught up in their own egos to treat others in The Georgia Review (Fall 1989). with respect. . . . [Tjhere is a pervasive fear in the world of I trust that observers and scholars of ourpop- the Personals that the amorous intensities ular culture have been giving Personal ads and life-enlarging expectations of youth are the attention they deserve. . . . If so, they may in danger of being lost forever, that unless have noted the extent to which "irreverent" one resorts to the once-unconventional has become a highly valorized term. In a re- means of advertising one's plight in some cent New York magazine, for instance, a 44- public forum, it will soon be too late. . . . year-old man advertises himself as "success- [A society's] fear of sacred space, which is ful, handsome, trim, irreverent. . . ." a fear of life lived by what always appears to People who grew up between the two be the long odds of faith, goes with its reluc- world wars may wonder why a person seek- tance to commit itself to the burden of distin- ing loving company is able to assume that a guishing between revitalizing fresh perspec- capacity for irreverence will make him or her tives and faithless subversions. For lack of desirable. They may remember being advised something worthy of reverential attention it by parents, teachers, and clergymen to avoid must worship life in its precarious time- irreverent people, the idea being that those bound condition, which means that it must for whom nothing is sacred are probably too worship youthfulness.

incentives to order up tests for patients. lation by physicians, and perhaps no-fault But Goldblatt thinks that it is not too late malpractice insurance can help prevent to turn back. Most physicians still deserve doctors from becoming "highly trained trust, she says. Public education, self-regu- body plumbers."

The Culture Empire "Empire Builders, Culture Makers, and Culture Imprinters" by Charles Issawi, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn 1989), Tufts Univ., 26 Winthrop St., Medford, Mass. 02155. Why is it that the Roman Empire left a last- solidified their empire when they "forsook ing cultural legacy in its domain, while the a nomadic for a sedentary life [and] con- Greek influence all but vanished from the centrated all their energies on politics, rul- Mediterranean? Why did the Spanish "im: ership, and war." They left learning and print" their culture on their colonies but scholarship to "the Persians, or those who not the French? Why the Arabs but not the were. . . subject to them." But the empire Persians? Curiously, it seems that certain also must have "culture bearers" who mi- empires that attained the highest cultural grate from the capital to the outlying re- achievements have been the least success- gions. This migration of "priests and ful at passing on these achievements to the scholars . . . ruffians and convicts" oc- areas where they held sway. curred in empires as diverse as the Chi- The reason, says Issawi, an emeritus pro- nese, Indian, Roman, Arab, Portuguese (in fessor of Near Eastern studies at Prince- Brazil), Spanish, British, and Russian. Per- ton, has more to do with the way an em- haps most important, the empire must be pire is organized and where it is located "identified with a religion that either ac- than how advanced its civilization is. tively proselytized or at least easily admit- Three factors seem vital to ensuring an ted converts." This establishes the rulers' empire's cultural legacy. First, the empire language as a sacred tongue, helps spread must establish itself in a defensible region the culture to the masses, and allows it to so its culture can develop and spread. The survive invaders. In Christian Rome, as in Arabs, notes Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, Muslim Arabia, conquerors who destroyed Periodicals continues on page 125 WQ WINTER 1990 The Nobel Prize winning history of World War II... for the first time bound in genuine leather. The Easton Press 161-112 47 Richards Avenue "We stand on the watchtower of history'... Revealing the strategies that turned the tide. Norwalk, Conn. 0685" fighting in defense of all that is most sacred Savoring a victory made bittersweet by the to Man...,' start of the atomic age, and the cold war. FOR FASTEST SERVICE CALL Churchill, A man without peer. So uniquely Leather-bound to last for generations. TOLL-FREE: 1-800-367-4534 gifted that lie authored the greatest history Each volume is fully bound in rich, genuine Please send me ___ six volumes set(s) of ever written - of the cataclvsmic world leather. Original designs are deeply WINSTON CHURCHILL'S - THE SECOND events in which he played the most vital role. embossed in the covers. The spines are \VOH-D WAR "I have never promised anything but blood, accented with 22h~gold. Pages are acid- tears, toil and sweat..." neucral, gilded on all three edges. Endsheets Churchill. Tlie greatest statesman of our are of elegant satin moire. These are historic time. The finest writer of our century. The editions. Heirlooms to be treasured for most extraordinary combination of leader- generations. ship and literature who ever lived. Respond Now! "...Ifthe British Empire and its Common- Churchill's %Second World War is avail- wealth last for 1000 years, men will still able exclusively from The Easton Press, six say... this was their finest hour." volun~esfor only $234.00,payable by credit card in six convenient monthly installments Churchill. The last lion of Europe whose of just S39.00 each. To reserve your set, courage, wit, and guile saved the world at the return die coupon today. most terrifying crossroad in history. 0 VISA 0 MihltrCarcl A historic collecting opportunity. 1)iner.i Club A~~ieric;lnExpress "History as only Churchill [could]write, Now you can own thefisr deluxe, leather- personal proud ...rich with the most bound collection of Winston Churchill's Tlie stately prose in our time." Credit Card # Exp Dale Second World War. - The New York Times 0 I prefer nut 10 u;n-' ;I credit card and will pay by Here is die key to understanding the cru- "The most stimulating and important his- check Enclu~edib my deposit of Sll~,00',I will pay cial event of our century. Churchill, explain- torical works of modern times." the Ix~laticein 3 montl-ily insiallmenis of S39.00* ing how the stage for infamy was set. - Saturday Review each Allow -4 to6week-i :ikr ~payiwnifor ihipmeni Detailing the intricacies of global war. "Magnificent!!" Â¥Includeshippin:ind lh.ii'idiins :\nyapplicablesaL-i r;~xwillbe - The Atlantic billedwiih shiprneni A City's Evolution, by Roger Brown.

WQ WINTER 1990 24 America's New City

Something new is appearing on the American landscape. Architects, planners, and others have given it a variety of names-spread city, slurb, exurb, edge city, sprawl. The profusion of vaguely ominous names is only one sign of our deep uncertainty about what this new thing is. Is it merely the old suburb swollen beyond all proportion? Or are we seeing the distinction between city and suburb gradually being erased? Historian Robert Fishman believes that a "new city," utterly without precedent, is arising. If its opportunities are recognized, he argues, Americans' long quest to combine the amenities of technological civilization with the pleasures of natural surroundings may at last be rewarded. If they are not, the failure will blight the landscape of Amer- ica-and the lives of Americans-for generations to come.

by Robert Fishman

im and Delores Bach live in a New Jersey and New York's Westchester redwood contemporary in West County-the very county whose genteel Nyack, N.Y., about 25 miles "bedroom communities" the writer John north of Manhattan. Twenty Cheever lived in and wrote about for the years ago, their cul de sac was an New Yorker-have become carpeted with apple orchard, and today two office complexes and stores. West Nyack gnarledJ old trees on the front lawn still and other towns in Rockland County have hold up their fruit to the early autumn sun. filled up with families who can't afford This morning, two of the Bach children Westchester's stratospheric home prices. will board buses to school and Delores will Others are moving even farther to the drive young Alex to a day-care center in northwest, to Orange County. Now, the nearby Nanuet. Then she will drive 20 min- Tappan Zee, built as part of the interstate ptes down the Garden State Parkway to her highway system 35 years ago to link New job at a medical laboratory in Montvale, York City with Albany and other distant up- N.J. Her husband, meanwhile, will be on state areas, is jammed every rush hour. In the New York State Thruway, headed east fact, Jim Bach's trip will take about an over the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee hour, longer than his old 50-minute com- Bridge to his job with IBM in Westchester mute by express bus to Manhattan. County. The Bachs still make it a point to get to A decade ago, Delores Bach could not Manhattan once every six months or so for have imagined finding such a good job so a day at the museum with the kids or a close to home. She stayed home with the night out at the theater. They still subscribe children and Jim commuted to midtown to the New York Times. But they have Manhattan. But since the 1970s, northern friends who have not been to "the City," as

WQ WINTER 25 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

it is called, in 10 years. Why bother? They was permanent. At the core was the "cen- can get good jobs nearby, buy anything they tral business district," with its skyscraper could possibly desire at one of a dozen con- symbols of local wealth, power, and sophis- venient malls, attend a college, get fine tication; surrounding the core was the fac- medical care or legal advice-virtually any- tory zone, the dense region of reinforced thing they could want is within a one-hour concrete factories and crowded workers' radius. All they have to do is get in the car housing; and finally, a small ring of affluent and drive. middle-class suburbs occupied the out- The Bachs are fictional, but West Nyack skirts. These were the triumphant Ameri- is a real place-one of literally hundreds of can cities, electric with opportunity and ex- former suburbs around the nation which, citement, and as late as the 1920s they were without anybody quite realizing it, have de- steadily draining the countryside of its tached themselves from the big city and co- population. alesced into "new cities." They lack sky- But modernism is a process of constant scrapers, subways, and other symbolic upheaval and self-destruction. Just when structures of the central city, but they have the centralized metropolis was at its zenith, acquired almost all of its functions. powerful social and economic forces were combining to create an irresistible movement toward decentralization,tearing asun- der the logic that had sustained the big city and distributing its prized functions over whole regions. The urban history of the last half-century is a record of this process. Superficially, the process might be "The big city," Frank Lloyd Wright an- called "the rise of the suburb." The term nounced prophetically in 1923, "is no "suburb," however, inevitably suggests the longer modem." Although his forecast of a affluent and restricted "bedroom commu- new age of urban decentralization was ig- nities" that first took shape around the turn nored by his contemporaries, we can now of the century in New York's Scarsdale, the see that Wright and a few other thinkers of North Shore of Chicago, and other locales his day understood the fragility of the great, on the edge of the 19th-century metropolis. behemoth-the centralized industrial These genteel retreats from urban life es- metropolis-which then seemed to em- tablished the model of the single-family body and define the modernity of the 20th house on its own landscaped grounds as century. the ideal middle-class residence, just as These capital cities of America's indus- they established the roles of commuter and trial revolution, with New York and Chi- housewife as social models for upper-mid- cago at their head, were built to last. Their die-class men and women. But Scarsdale very form, as captured during the 1920s in and its kind were limited zones of privilege the famous diagrams by Robert E. Park and that strictly banned almost all industry and Ernest W. Burgess of the Chicago School of commerce and excluded not only the sociology, seemed to possess a logic that working class but even the majority of the

Robert Fishman, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is professor of history at Rutgers University, Cam- den. Born in Newark, N.J., he received a B.A. from Stanford (1968) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1974). He is the author of Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (1977) and Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987).

WQ WINTER 1990 26 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

less-affluent middle class. The traditional suburb therefore remained an elite enclave, completely dependent on the central city for jobs and essential services. Since 1945, however, the relationship between the urban core and the suburban periphery has undergone a startling transformation- especially during the past two decades. Where suburbia was once an exclusive A fateful choice: Before the triumph of "automobility" a half-cen- refuge for a small elite, U.S. fury ago, it was possible to travel hundreds of miles, well into the countryside, on trolleys such as this one in Moss Point, Miss. Census figures show that 45 percent of the American population is now ters that dot the outlying highways and in- "suburban," up from only 23 percent in terstates have become the home of the 1950. Allowing for anomalies in the Census most advanced high-technology labora- Bureau's methods, it is almost certain that tories and factories, the national centers of a majority of Americans live in the suburbs. business creativity and growth. Inc. maga- About one third remain in the central cit- zine, which tracks the nation's emerging in- ies. Even more dramatic has been the exo- dustries, reported in a survey earlier this dus of commerce and industry from the cit- year that "growth is in the 'edge cities.'" ies. By 1980, 38 percent of the nation's Topping its list of "hot spots" were such workers commuted to their jobs from sub- unlikely locales as Manchester-Nashua, urb-to-suburb, while only half as many New Hampshire; West Palm Beach, Flor- made the stereotypical suburb-to-city trek. ida; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Manufacturing has led the charge from The complex economy of the former the cities; the industrial park, as it is so suburbs has now reached a critical mass, as bucolically dubbed, has displaced the old specialized service enterprises of every urban factory district as the headquarters of kind, from hospitals equipped with the lat- American manufacturing. Commerce has est CAT scanners to gourmet restaurants to also joined the exodus. Where suburbanites corporate law firms, have established them- once had little choice but to travel to down- selves on the fringes. In all of these ways, town stores for most of their clothing and the peripheries have replaced the urban household goods, suburban shopping malls cores as the heartlands of our civilization. and stores now ring up the majority of the These multi-functional late-20th-century nation's retail sales. "suburbs" can no longer be comprehended During the last two decades, the urban in the terms of the old bedroom communi- peripheries have even outpaced the cores ties. They have become a new kind of city. in that last bastion of downtown economic clout, office employment. More than 57 he "new city of the 20th century" is percent of the nation's office space is now not some fantastic city of towers out located outside the central cities. And the T of Fritz Lang's celluloid Metropolis landscaped office parks and research cen- (1926) or the visionary architect Paoli

WQ WINTER 1990 27 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

Soleri's honeycombed Arcology. (Soleri's housing are as large as townships; office plan for a new city in the Arizona desert parks are set amid hundreds of acres of captivated futurists during the 1960s; the landscaped grounds; and malls dwarf some stunted model city that resulted is now a of the downtowns they have replaced. bizarre tourist attraction.) It is, rather, the These massive units, moreover, are ar- familiar decentralized world of highways rayed along the beltways and "growth cor- and tract houses, shopping malls, and office ridors" in seemingly random order, without parks that Americans have built for them- the strict distinctions between residential, selves since 1945. As exemplified by such commercial, and industrial zones that areas as the Silicon Valley in northern Cali- shaped the old city. A subdivision of fornia, Route 128 outside Boston, the $300,000 single-family houses outside Den- Route One corridor between Princeton and ver may sit next to a telecommunications New Brunswick, New Jersey, Du Page research-and-production complex, and a County west of Chicago, the Route 285 area new mall filled with boutiques once found north of Atlanta, the northern Virginia dis- only on the great shopping streets of Eu- trict that surrounds Tysons Comer, or the rope may-and indeed does-rise amid immense region that stretches along the Midwestern corn fields. southern California coast from Los Angeles The new city, furthermore, lacks what to San Diego, the new city includes the gave shape and meaning to every urban most dynamic elements in our national form of the past: a dominant single core economy. It flourishes in the rocky soil of and definable boundaries. At most, it con- New Hampshire, the broad prairies beyond tains a multitude of partial centers, or Minneapolis, the rainy shores of Puget "edge cities," more-or-less unified clusters Sound and the desert outside Tucson. From of malls, office developments, and enter- coast to coast, the symbol of this new city is tainment complexes that rise where major not the jagged skyscraper skyline of the highways cross or converge. As Washington 1920s metropolis but the network of super- Post writer Joel Garreau has observed, highways as seen from the air, crowded in Tysons Comer, perhaps the largest Ameri- all directions, uniting a whole region into a can edge city, boasts more office space than vast super-city. downtown Miami, yet it remains only one of 13 edge cities-including Rockville- amiliar as we all are with the fea- Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Rosslyn- tures of the new city, most of us do Balston, Virginia-in the Washington, D.C. Fnot recognize how radically it de- region. parts from the cities of old. The most obvi- Even some old downtowns have been ous difference is scale. The basic unit of the reduced to "first among equals" among the new city is not the street measured in edge cities of their regions. Atlanta has one blocks but the "growth corridor" stretching of the most rapidly growing downtowns in 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading the country. Yet between 1978 and 1983- metropolises of the early 20th century- the years of its accelerated growth-the New York, London, or Berlin-covered downtown's share of regional office space perhaps 100 square miles, the new city rou- shrank from 34 percent to 26 percent. Mid- tinely encompasses two to three thousand town Manhattan is the greatest of all Ameri- square miles. Within such "urban regions," can downtowns, but northern New Jersey each element is correspondingly enlarged. now has more office space. "Planned unit developments" of cluster- If no one can find the center of the new

WQ WINTER 1990 28 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

city, its borders are even more elusive. employment, and thus stimulating further Low-density development tends to gain dispersion. an inevitable momentum, as each exten- Baltimore and Washington, D.C., once sion of a region's housing and economy separated by mile after mile of farms and into previously rural areas becomes the forests, are now joined by an agglomera- base for further expansion. When one suc- tion of office parks, shopping strips, and cessful area begins to fill up, land values housing. Census Bureau officials have and taxes rise explosively, pushing the less given up attempting to draw a statistical affluent even farther out. During the past boundary between the two metropolitan ar- two decades, as Manhattan's "back offices" eas and have proposed combining them moved 30 miles west into northern New into a single consolidated region for statisti- Jersey along interstates 78 and 80, new sub- cal purposes. Indeed, as the automobile divisions and town-house communities be- gives rise to a complex pattern of multi-di- gan sprouting 40 miles farther west along rectional travel that largely by-passes the these growth corridors in the Pocono old central cities, the very concept of "cen- Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. "By the ter" and "periphery" becomes obsolete. time we left [New Jersey]," one new resident of eastern Pennsylvania told the New lthough a few prophets like Wright York Times, "there were handyman spe- foresaw the downfall of the old city, cials for $150,000 you wouldn't put your no one imagined the form of the dog in." Now such formerly depressed and new. Instead, it was built up piecemeal, as a relatively inexpensive areas as Pennsylva- result of millions of uncoordinated deci- nia's Lehigh Valley are gaining population, sions made by housing developers, shop- attracting high-tech industries and office ping-mall operators, corporate executives,

Source Cornmutingin America, published by the Eno Foundation for Transportation, Inc , Westport, CT, Copyright @ 1987

The diagram represents a day in the life of America's commuters in 1980. Suburb-to-suburb commuting is growing rapidly; it accounts for twice as many trips as suburb-to-city travel.

WQ WINTER 1990 29 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

highway engineers and, not least, the mil- could destroy the very things that inspired lions of Americans who saved and sacri- the new city and build instead a degenerate ficed to buy single-family homes in the ex- urban form that is too congested to be effi- panding suburbs. The new city's cient, too chaotic to be beautiful, and too construction has been so rapid and so un- dispersed to possess the diversity and vital- foreseen that we lack even a commonly-ac- ity of a great city. cepted name for what we have created. Or, The new city is still under construction. rather, we have too many names: exurb, Like all new urban types, its early form is spread city, urban village, megalopolis, necessarily raw and chaotic. The real test of outtown, sprawl, slurb, the burbs, nonplace the new city as a carrier of civilization will urban field, polynucleated city, and (my come when the first flush of hectic building own coinage) technoburb. slows down and efforts to redesign and re- Not urban, not rural, not suburban, but construct begin, as they have in the old possessing elements of all three, the new downtowns today. But before we can im- city eludes all the conventional terminol- prove the new urban world we are building ogy of the urban planner and the historian. we need to understand it. Yet it is too important to be left in concep- tual limbo. The success or failure of the new city will affect the quality of life of the majority of Americans well into the 21st century. In a few scattered locales today, one can discern the promise of a decentralized city that fulfills its residents' basic hopes for comfortable homes in sylvan Perhaps the best way to grasp the inno- settings with easy access to good schools, vations of the new city is to contrast it with good jobs, and recreational facilities of the older metropolis. Lewis Mumford (b. many kinds. More ambitiously, one might 1895), 20th-century America's greatest ur- hope for a decentralized civilization that fi- banist and one of our most clear-sighted nally overcomes the old antithesis of city prophets of decentralization, expressed this and countryside, that fulfills in daily life the contrast succinctly in his classic work of profound cultural need for an environment 1938, The Culture of Cities. There he de- that combines the machine and nature in a fined "the metropolis of old as "a single new unity. center" that becomes "the focal point of all But the dangers of the new city are per- regional advantages." In the new decentral- haps more obvious than the promise. The ized city, however, "the whole region be- immense speed and scale of development comes open for settlement." across the nation threaten to annihilate the The centralized industrial metropolis natural environment of entire regions, leav- that flourished during the 19th and early ing the tranquility and natural beauty that 20th centuries was the last in a series of Americans seek in the new city perpetually urban forms that go back ultimately to Ur retreating another 10 exits down the inter- and Babylon in the ancient Middle East. At state. The movement of urban functions to its heart: the traditional city was an attempt an environment never designed for them to solve the problem of slow and expensive has produced the anomaly of urban-style transportation by concentrating people and crowding and congestion in a decentralized resources at a single point. Occasionally, setting. Through greed and ignorance we this meant locating the city where trade

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

routes crossed or local markets could be the hub and placed all other locations in established. More often it favored riverside the region at a disadvantage. A familiar ur- and seaside locations that lent themselves ban ecology emerged, composed of con- to the construction of a port. centric rings with the central business dis- The coming of the railroads during the trict at the core, the factory zone, and then 19th century amplified the natural advan- the suburban ring. tages of cities like New York and Chicago Moralists regarded these crowded and transformed them into national cen- "monster metropolises" with horror, but ters. Toward the end of the century, as ma- concentration worked. The clustering of of- jor trunk rail lines were supplemented by fice buildings in a central business district similarly converging networks of streetcar multiplied the opportunities for face-to-face and subway lines, the characteristic pattern communication and the exchange of vital of the great metropolis emerged: a city information, opportunities which gave the formed by its transportation system into a big-city businessman a significant advan- centralized pattern of a hub and spokes. As tage over his small-town counterparts. Sim- Mumford argued, such a pattern necessar- ilarly, the subways and trolleys that deliv- ily concentrated "regional advantages" at ered people from around the region to a

WHY PLANNING MATTERS

The shape of the city not only reflects its citizens' values and preferences, Lewis Mumford wrote in The City in History (1961), it also helps form them.

When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to "put the gods in their shrines." The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities: to unite the scattered fragments of the human personality, turning artificially dismembered men-bureaucrats, specialists, 'experts,' depersonalized agents-into complete human beings, repairing the damage that has been done by vocational separation, by tribal- isms and nationalisms, by the absence of organic partnerships and ideal purposes. Before modem man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nurture and love. We must now conceive the city, accordingly, not primarily as a place of business or government, but as an essential organ for expressing and actualizing the new human personality-that of 'One World Man.' The old separation of man and nature, of townsman and countryman, of Greek and barbarian, of citizen and foreigner, can no longer be maintained: for communication, the entire planet is becoming a village; and as a result, the smallest neighborhood or precinct must be planned as a working model of the larger world. Now it is not the will of a single deified ruler, but the individual and corporate will of its citizens, aiming at self-knowledge, self-government, and self-actualization, that must be embodied in the city. Not industry but education will be the center of their activities; and every process and function will be evaluated and approved just to the extent that it furthers human development, whilst the city itself provides a vivid theater for the spontane- ous encounters and challenges and embraces of daily life.

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capitalism. But that was before the birth of the shopping mall. Since the creation of the first fully enclosed mall in Edina, Illinois, in 1956, these gaudy temples of commerce have become social and business hubs of the new cities. Surveys show that the average American now visits a shopping mall once a week, more often than he attends church. The nation's 1,600 malls, along with its strip shopping centers, account for 54 percent ($627 billion) of the nation's retail sales. Shown above is the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, which will be the nation's largest mall when it opens in 1992. In addition to the usual array of shops and department stores, its 96 acres of floor space will host a variety of amusements, including a seven-acre Camp Snoopy theme park under glass. The contemporary mall may be a demented hybrid of the bazaar, the circus, and the television game show, but it has also become (inset) the center of entertainment and community life in many new cities where no downtown has ever existed. Senior citizens gather in them, families stroll through them, and, under the watchful eyes of security guards, adolescents cavort in them.

single downtown created the dense mass of - tempting to become national enterprises. patrons that made possible such urban in- Perhaps the group best served by metro- stitutions as department stores, vaudeville politan concentration was the middle-class houses, movie palaces and concert halls, suburban elite, for they enjoyed all the eco- museums, sports stadiums, and big-city nomic benefits of the great city while living newspapers. in a quiet, leafy-green, smoke-free environ- he complex tangles of branch rail lines ment at its edge. that served the factory zone gave enter- By the 1920s the centralized industrial prises located there a significant advantage city had reached its zenith; at the time, only over those anywhere else in the region. The a few lonely prophets noticed that a series factory zone was also the home of a large of separate and uncoordinated technologi- skilled and unskilled workforce which only cal innovations were converging to under- those enterprises within the zone could tap. mine the special advantages of the central By the 1890s it thus became the natural city. As Mumford suggested, these innova- environment for all manufacturing firms at- tions all had in common the replacement

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of networks of communication that focused prising clarity. Improving public transpor- advantages on the core with networks that tation would save the downtown, but it distributed them equally over a region. would limit residential development to the The great model of such a network was narrow rail corridors of the Pacific Electric the road system. Although early highway System. Los Angeles would thus come to engineers attempted to design major roads resemble eastern cities of the time, with on the hub-and-spokes model of the rail- most people living in multi-family dwell- roads, automobile owners soon discovered ings close to public transportation. A new that the radical innovation of the roads was road system, by contrast, might doom the to open up to settlement areas remote from downtown but it would put virtually every rail lines. In a rail-dominated metropolis, acre of land in the 900 square miles of the most people in cities or suburbs lived no Los Angeles region within a few blocks of a farther than a 15-minute walk from a train major road. That would open the whole re- or trolley stop; with an automobile, people gion to low-density settlement. found that they could fill in the empty Since many of the Los Angeles elite spaces between the spokes of the regional were heavily involved in real-estate specu- rail system without condemning them- lation, it was never much of a contest. selves to a kind of exile. Without hesitation, they chose to sacrifice The effect of trucking on industrial loca- the downtown and persuaded the citizenry tion was nearly as dramatic. First used ex- to go along. "Business is pointing the way tensively during the 1920s, trucks made it out of the intolerable congestion situation possible for factory owners to leave the in our downtown areas," the influential Los crowded streets of the industrial zone for Angeles City Club declared in a 1926 re- cheaper land on the periphery without sac- port. "Branch banks are going out to the rificing timely pickups and deliveries from people, factories are seeking outside other firms that remained in the city. locations. . . and some of our retail mer- Not surprisingly, it was in Los Angeles chants are building, or have established that these possibilities were first recog- branch stores in outlying sections." In a ref- nized. As late as 1925 Los Angeles was a erendum that year, voters overwhelmingly relatively centralized city organized around approved a massive bond issue for new a lively and prosperous downtown served road construction and rejected a modest by a highly-efficient system of public trans- proposal to improve the streetcar system. portation. The big red streetcars of the Pa- cific Electric system traveled over more y the mid-1930s, both the Los Ange- than 1,000 miles of track connecting the les downtown and the public trans- downtown to even the most remote parts of portation system that sustained it what was then a vast region of farms and were already deteriorating, as the city es- citrus groves. But when downtown traffic tablished what was then a unique pattern of reached intolerable levels during the mid- settlement. The downtown was supplanted 1920s the city was presented with two op- by many smaller automobile-based centers posing visions of its future: expand public like the "Miracle Mile" along Wilshire Bou- transportation, or, as the Automobile Club levard (built, like most of the city's other of Southern California proposed, create a major streets, with funds from the 1926 massive new grid of roads. bond issue), while the movie studios, the In the debate among the city's civic and new aircraft factories, and other industry business leaders, the issue was put with sur- scattered throughout the region. Los Ange-

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DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW CITY Howard County, Md.-Ah, springtime in exur- to government with either a gripe or a wish-list bia! Newcomers may detect it in that first whiff as the rural community is reshaped into a of honeysuckle or mesquite barbecue smoke, white-collar suburb in the hills 60 miles west of wafting over from the neighbor's yard. Manhattan. . . . But in western Howard County, where No newcomers, though, are joining the fire working farms still exist amid the three-acre department, once Raritan's social hub, or the "farmettes" and upscale subdivisions, there re- rescue squad. Volunteers are their lifeblood, mains an earthier harbinger of the season: the but as in suburbs everywhere, their member- first withering blast from a freshly manured ship is stagnant. field. -The New York Times (Jan. 4, 1988) "It's country perfume," cracked Todd Tay- lor, a local lawyer and county resident. Gwinnett County, Ga.-Many of the county's But the new folks don't always see it that schools look like trailer parks, with mobile way. Last year, neighbors from the new subdi- homes serving as makeshift classrooms along- vision down the road panicked when a dairy side school buildings. New children arrive in farmer scooped out his winter accumulation of Gwinnett at the rate of 90 each Monday. The cow manure-an annual ritual-and spread it county says it needs to build a new classroom on a field. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday just to "They called the po- keep from getting any lice department, the further behind. . . . Howard County Health The Five Forks Mid- Department, and the dle School assigns old- EPA," recalled William timers as buddies to the F. Kirkwood 111, presi- newcomers to counsel dent of the Howard them to smile a lot and County Farm Bureau. make eye contact. "They wanted to Counselors are ever- know what was that ter- watchful. "It is very im- rible smell." portant that they have a -The Washington Post sense of place," says (April 5, 1989) Greg Brigman. "We are trying to make each Raritan Township, student's world smaller N.J.-The drastic re- so the kids have [an] making of this old farm anchor-a group to go town has changed" what around in orbit with." it means to be a volunteer. Meanwhile the school is searching for its In 1957, the volunteers built the township's own comfortable orbit. Its principal, Michael first fire truck, scrounging parts from junk. The O'Neal, has posted welcome signs at the perim- chassis came from an old oil tanker, the water eter of his school's territory in hopes of drum- pump was donated and the engine was pulled ming up some sense of community identity that from a wrecked Mercury. Art Lentini, a me- might, in turn, promote community support for chanic, John Carberry, a lawyer, and Bill Wor- the school. thington, a farmer, organized everybody. Clean- -The Wall Street Journal ing all the parts, welding them together and (March 26 & 27, 1987) then painting the rig took a year. But now that inspired country camaraderie Los Angeles, Ca1.-Already, mountains more has vanished along with most of the dairy and than 60 miles from the city's center are being egg farmers who gave Raritan Township its leveled to build thousands of new houses to identity for decades. make greater Los Angeles even bigger. And fu- Volunteerism today, such as it is, is repre- turists expect that Los Angeles, the symbol of sented by a trickle of new residents willing to urban sprawl, will become denser, stacked atop join town boards. In 1987, 13 people offered to itself. serve out of about 15,000 residents. Most come -The Wall Street Journal (June 12, 1989)

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les thus established an alternate, decentral- government. ized form for the American city based on In Europe, governments fearful of los- the automobile and the single-family house. ing precious farm land to the encroaching As Los Angeles demonstrated, transpor- cities have severely restricted decentraliza- tation was the crucial innovation. But roads tion wherever they could. As early as 1938 and autos could not have achieved their full the British government prohibited London revolutionary impact without the creation and the other large British cities from ex- of several other important new networks of panding beyond their existing boundaries. decentralization: electricity, telecommuni- A decade later it created permanent cations, mass-market retailing, and new "greenbelts" of farm and park land around modes of corporate management. the cities, including an impressive five-mile Consider electricity. Until the coming of wide Metropolitan Greenbelt which still "giant power" (i.e. regional electricity net- rings London. (Paris, on the other hand, is works) during the 1920s, utility service ringed by a Red Belt, so called because its rarely extended beyond the metropolis. working-class residents consistently vote Thereafter, far-flung homeowners and in- Communist. This reflects another unique dustry enjoyed the same access to reliable quality of European development: The af- electrical power as those at the core. fluent middle class generally prefers urban The telephone network was the harbin- to suburban living.) In the United States, ger of the great series of inventions-radio, however, Washington, as well as state and television, computers, fax machines-that local governments, indefatigably promoted increasingly substituted electronic for face- expansion. Government "planning" was to-face communication, thus reducing the largely unconscious and unintended, but need for meetings and informal contacts that did not lessen its effects. Between 1930 downtown. and 1960, state intervention in four differ- The 1920s also saw the fruition of new ent arenas profoundly affected the shape of techniques of mass production, which the nation's cities: flooded the nation with consumer goods. Housing. Although the American pref- This new plenty created the possibility of erence for single-family suburban houses multiplying the number of retail outlets, was well-established by the 1920s, it took thus breaking the monopoly of the great the New Deal's Federal Housing Adminis- downtown stores. No longer would subur- tration (1934) to reform the nation's rickety banites have to go "downtown" to enjoy a system of mortgage finance and, ultimately, wide selection of goods. put the American dream house within Meanwhile, corporate managers had de- reach of millions of citizens. As historian veloped techniques (and bureaucracies) Kenneth Jackson has shown, FHA regula- that allowed them to supervise a variety of tions also tunneled mortgage money to plants at one time, all of them from a great newly built suburbs, considered good distance. Factories were freed to locate far credit risks, while virtually starving the cit- from the cities, where land and labor were ies of residential construction loans. cheaper. Defense Industries. During World War These new networks undermined the 11, the new factories built to manufacture functional underpinnings of metropolitan synthetics, alloys, aircraft, and other prod- centralization. But the new city might have ucts under the auspices of the Defense emerged slowly and partially if it had not Plants Corporation were rarely located in found an unexpected ally: the American the central cities. For example, Nassau

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County, Long Island, future site of the ar- is no zoning: only deals." chetypal postwar suburb of Levittown, be- Relieved of the task of delivering the full came the East Coast's center for aircraft range of services required by a great city, production during the war, as Grumman, suburbs could tailor public spending to the Republic, and other manufacturers opened specific needs of their constituents. With plants there. Unlike the old urban factories, surprising speed, suburban public school they were built on a single level on great systems developed into formidable enter- tracts of land, in accordance with new prises, soon rivaling and then surpassing ideas of industrial efficiency. Almost over- the once-dominant big-city schools. night these new factories gave the metro- Without anybody intending for it to hap- politan peripheries and decentralized sun- pen, all of these seemingly unrelated forces belt cities a substantial industrial base on converged to generate enormous momen- which they could build during the postwar tum behind the great tide of decentraliza- period. tion that washed over the American Highway Construction. From the be- metropolis after 1945. The tide has contin- ginning, highways were regarded as a pub- ued relentlessly, through booms and reces- lic responsibility, entitled to subsidies with sions, under Democratic and Republican tax dollars, while the rail system was not. administrations, until the old industrial city Rail freight (and often mass transit as well) became, if not an extinct species, at least a remained under the control of private cor- highly endangered one. porations. After 1920, the owners were in- The first significant sign was a drop in creasingly unable or unwilling to improve population. Between 1950 and 1960, all of their services to attract customers. High- the large, established cities lost people. way engineers presided over one of the Boston, the worst case, shrank by 13 per- most massive construction efforts in his- cent, while its suburbs gained 17 percent. tory, culminating after 1958 in the 44,000 New York and Chicago lost less than two miles of the federal interstate highway sys- percent each, but their suburbs gained over tem built at a cost of $108 billion. While 70 percent. To these blows were added these Main Streets of the emerging new cit- shrinkage of the industrial base. Between ies flourished, the rail lines that served the 1947 and 1967, the 16 largest and oldest downtowns stagnated or declined. central cities lost an average of 34,000 man- Local Government. After the turn of ufacturing jobs each, while their suburbs the century, city after city failed to annex its gained an average of 87,000. This trend suburbs because of suburban resistance. As continued through the 1970s, as the cities a result, cities lost the tax base of the most suffered the elimination of from 25 percent prosperous and rapidly expanding areas of (Minneapolis) to 40 percent (Philadelphia) the region. And since zoning in the Ameri- of the manufacturing jobs that remained. can system is essentially a matter of local control, the power to regulate new devel- uilding on their growing base of opment passed to the hundreds of subur- population and jobs, suburban en- ban governments, which had little interest trepreneurs during the 1950s and in restraining growth to create a balanced 1960s began transforming the new city into metropolitan region. Developers learned a self-sufficient world. "We don't go down- they could play one small local planning town anymore," became the new city's board off another, escaping all control. As motto. Shopping centers displaced down- the developer Sam Lefrak observed, "There town department stores; small merchants

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and repairmen deserted Main Street for gested, this "city" lacks any definable bor- stores "along the highway" or folded up ders, a center or a periphery, or a clear dis- shop under the competitive pressure of the tinction between residential, industrial, and growing national chain stores. Even cardi- commercial zones. Instead, shopping ologists and corporate lawyers moved their malls, research and production facilities, offices closer to their customers. and corporate headquarters all seem scat- By the 1970s and 1980s, the new city tered amid a chaos of subdivisions, apart- found itself at the top of a whole range of ment complexes, and condominiums. It is national and even international trends. The easy to understand why urban planners and movement from snowbelt to sunbelt meant social scientists trained in the clear func- a shift toward urban areas that had been tional logic of the centralized metropolis "born decentralized" and organized on can see only disorder in these "nonplace new-city principles. The new city, more- urban fields," or why ordinary people use over, moved quickly to dominance in the the word "sprawl" to describe their own most rapidly expanding sections of the in- neighborhoods. dustrial economy-electronics, chemicals, Nevertheless, I believe that the new city pharmaceuticals, and aircraft-leaving the has a characteristic structure-one that de- old city with such sunset industries as tex- parts radically not only from the old tiles, iron and steel, and automobiles. metropolis but from all cities of the past. Finally, during the 1970s, the new city To grasp this structure we must return successfully challenged the old downtowns to the prophetic insights of Frank Lloyd in the last area of their supremacy, office Wright. From the 1920s until his death in employment. The "office park" became the 1959, Wright was preoccupied with his locale of choice for many businesses, new plan for an ideal decentralized American and old. Jaded New Yorkers looked on in city which he called Broadacres. Although stunned disbelief as one major corporation many elements of the plan were openly after another pulled up stakes and departed utopian-he wished, for example, to en- for former commuter towns like Stamford, sure that every American would have ac- Connecticut, or more distant sunbelt loca- cess to at least an acre of land so that all tions. By the 1980s, even social scientists could reap the economic and psychological could not ignore the fact that the whole ter- benefits that he associated with part-time minology of "suburb" and "central city," farming-Wright also had a remarkable in- deriving from the era of the industrial sight into the highway-based world that was metropolis, had become obsolete. As Mum- developing around him. Above all he un- ford had predicted, the single center had derstood the consequences of a city based lost its dominance. on a grid of highways rather than the hub- and-spokes of the older city. Instead of a single privileged center, there would be a multitude of crossings, no one of which could assume priority. And the grid would be boundless by its very nature, capable of unlimited extension in all directions. Such a grid, as it indeed developed, did But are the sprawling regions cities? not allow for the emergence of an "impe- Judged by the standards of the centralized rial" metropolis to monopolize the life of a metropolis, the answer is no. As I have sug- region. For Wright, this meant that the fam-

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ily home would be freed from its fealty to own "cities" out of the destinations they the city and allowed to emerge as the real can reach (usually travelling by car) in a center of American life. As he put it, "The reasonable length of time. Indeed, distance true center, (the only centralization allowa- in the new cities is generally measured in ble) in Usonian democracy, is the individ- terms of time rather than blocks or miles. ual Usonian house." (Usonia was Wright's The supermarket is 10 minutes away. The name for the United States). nearest shopping mall is 30 minutes in an- In the plans for Broadacres-a city he other direction, and one's job 40 minutes said would be "everywhere or nowhereu- away by yet another route. The pattern Wright foresaw what I believe to be the es- formed by these destinations represents "the sential element in the structure of the new city" for that particular family or individual. city: a megalopolis based on time rather The more varied one's destinations, the than space. richer and more diverse is one's personal "city." The new city is a city la carte. ven the largest of the old "big cities" It can be seen as composed of three had a firm identity in space. The big overlapping networks, representing the E city had a center as its basic point of three basic categories of destinations that orientation-the Loop, Times Square-and define each person's city. These are the also a boundary. Starting from the center, household network; the network of con- sooner or later one reached the edge of the sumption; and the network of production. city. The household network is composed of In the new city, however, there is no sin- places that are part of family and personal gle center. Instead, as Wright suggested, life. For a typical household of two parents each family home has become the central and two children, this network is necessar- point for its members. Families create their ily oriented around childrearing-and it keeps parents scurrying frantically in station wagons and minivans from one place to another. Its set of destinations include the homes of the children's playmates (which may be down the street or scattered around a county), the daycare center, the schools, a church or synagogue, community centers, and the homes of the parents' friends. Although this network is generally more lo- calized than the other two, it is almost always wider than the traditional urban neigh- "Don't Fairfax Loudon!" says a bumper-sticker in suburban borhood. London County, Virginia. Fairfax County is the home of Tysons The two-parent family Comer (above), a prime example of the new city gone awry. with children is the arche-

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typical new-city household, but, especially This network minimizes the traditional since 1970, the new city has made a place distinction between the white-collar world for others. For single or divorced people, of administration and the blue-collar world single parents, young childless couples or of production. Both functions co-exist in older "empty nest" couples, widows and virtually every "executive office park." Its widowers, the new city offers a measure of most successful enterprises are those familiarity and security that many find lack- where research and development and spe- ing in the central city. Its housing is in- cialized techniques of production are inti- creasingly diverse. No longer confined to mately intertwined: pharmaceuticals, for single-family homes, it now includes apart- example, or electronics. Conversely, its ment towers, town homes and condomini- most routinized labor can be found in the ums, and various kinds of retirement hous- so-called "back-offices," data-processing ing, from golf-oriented communities to centers that perform tasks once done at a nursing homes. There are more places to downtown corporate headquarters. socialize. The same mall that caters essen- Each of these networks has its own spa- tially to families on weekends and evenings tial logic. For example, primary schools are may also serve as an informal community distributed around the region in response center for older people in the morning, to the school-age population; shopping while its bars and restaurants play host to a malls reflect population density, wealth, lively singles scene after the stores close. and the road system; large firms locate The network of consumption- where their workers and their suppliers Mallopolis, in economist James Millar's can easily reach them. But because the net- phrase-comprises essentially the shop- works overlap, the pattern on the ground is ping centers and malls which, as Wright one of juxtaposition and interpenetration. predicted, have located themselves at the Instead of the logical division of functions strategic crossroads of the highway system. of the old metropolis, one finds a post-mod- It also includes movie theaters, restaurants, ern, post-urban collage. health clubs, playing fields and other recre- In some places, a particularly active lo- ational facilities, and perhaps a second cale like Tysons Corner, in Fairfax County, home 30 to 100 miles away. Virginia, may draw together elements from Although this network serves much the different networks-shopping malls and of- same function as the old downtown, it is fices-to form an approximation of an old scattered, and each consumer is free to downtown. But the logic of the new city work out his particular set of preferences generally confounds that kind of concentra- from the vast menu of offerings presented tion. Such areas immediately become by Mallopolis. points of especially bad traffic congestion, Finally, there is the network of produc- denying the ready access that is a hallmark tion. It includes the place of employment of of the new city. (It may be poetic justice one or both spouses. It also includes the that the leaders of the American Automo- suppliers-from computer-chip manufac- bile Association, patron saint of the subur- turers to janitorial services-which these ban motorist, have become so frustrated by enterprises rely upon. Information comes the bumper-to-bumper traffic in the area instantaneously from around the world around Tysons Comer that they have de- while raw materials, spare parts, and other cided to move AAA headquarters to the rel- necessities are trucked in from the firms atively open roads of Orlando, Florida.) that cluster along nearby highways. Tysons Comer is an exception. In general,

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FURTHER DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW CITY

Detroit, Mich.-The distinction between "city" and "suburb" makes no sense here. Actually, Detroit is more like Los Angeles than New York: It's a city stuck in a Cuisinart, then poured out, into a big shallow pan. You'll find people living, working, shopping all over the place. The Old City just doesn't have the concentration of functions that make it the undis- puted centerpiece. Indeed, like Los Angeles but for different reasons, Detroit has evolved several separate "centers." Not downtowns exactly, but these concentrations of jobs and people now rival the old riverside "downtown." While [Mayor Cole- man] Young's people scramble for political construction handouts, or pay off developers in concessions to build on their turf, Southfield and Troy-Birmingham enjoy a boom of privately financed building. -The Detroit News (August 5, 1987)

Some companies [in suburban office parks] have tried to compensate for the isolation by Some employers' solution is to carry inner- using consultants more. . . . One executive city workers out to suburban work sites-by summed it up in a word. What, I asked him, public or private transportation-as work loca- gesturing to the empty visitor's parking lot, did tions crop up farther from mass-transit lines. they do about visitors? "We hire them," he said. McDonald's, in suburban Westchester County, -City: Rediscovering the Center (1989) New York and Connecticut, buses in workers by William H. Whyte from the Bronx. Vans go out 26 miles to Dulles Airport from depressed Washington neighbor- Schaumburg, 111.-It's a cliche heard time and hoods. . . . again in the suburban zoning. . . battles and The special vans-derisively labeled "slave cries for the preservation of open space: "We vansn-can serve some workers, some places. don't want to be another Schaumburg!" But they mask gut problems. . . . How many [Ilt's jealousy, pure jealousy, responds people will be anxious to forsake welfare for Thomas C. Koenig, director of planning for the $4- or $5-an-hourjobs with long commutes and Village of Schaumburg. "Most communities high bus fares? wish they had our problems." - The Los Angeles Times (Aug. 14, 1988) By "problems" he means 45,000 local jobs, a population that has grown to 64,000 from 130 Miami, F1.-Miami's miserable experience with in 32 years, no municipal property tax levies, a Metrorail-also called "Metrofail" and "the top-notch police department, its own cultural train to nowheren-could spell the end of any center and many more amenities. major new fixed-rail transit systems. Daily -The Chicago Tribune (July 26, 1988) ridership at last count was about 36,000, less than 20 percent of the projected 202,000. Not Pick your metropolitan area, from Boston to only does Miami's system spring from the old Hartford to New York to Washington, and now hub-and-spokes mentality but it calls on many across the South and Midwest and iq Califor- nders to use two or three modes of transit to nia, and you run into some severe labor short- reach their destination. . . . Says University of ages. The same alarming mismatch appears: Miami Prof. Ira Sheskin: "I figured out pretty Low-skill, entry-level jobs go begging in the quickly I could drive my car in half the time suburbs, while in center cities jobless rates re- and I could park at a meter for 5 hours for main alarmingly high-up to 30 percent or about $2." worse for black teenagers. . . . -US. News & World Report (Sept. 7, 1987)

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the new city allows and requires each citi- ough Corporation of Marlton, New Jersey, zen to make connections among the three found that 72 percent of its customers dur- networks-to make a city-on his own. ing the mid-1980s were two-income cou- The new city has no center or boundary ples, compared to less than 30 percent a because it does not need them. decade earlier. Accordingly, the firm rede- signed some of its houses, substituting a omen have been a not-so-hidden "study-office" for the "sewing room," scal- force behind the new city's eco- ing down the formal living room and en- wnomic success. Since 1957, the larging the family room, providing more proportion of married women aged 27 to pantry space to cut down on trips to the 54 with jobs has grown from 33 percent to supermarket, and selecting building materi- 68 percent. More than half of all women als to minimize maintenance. with children aged three years or younger In other ways, both trivial and impor- are now employed outside the home. Much tant, the new city has responded to the of the economic life of the new city, espe- changing character of families with more cially with its concentration on retail trade flexibility than critics of "the suburbs" are and back-office data processing, would be willing to admit. Encouraged by women's impossible without these new workers. In- groups atld planning boards, some develop- deed, the presence of employment oppor- ers have set aside space for day-care cen- tunities so close to home-convenient, ters in new office complexes. There are ex- with decent pay and flexible schedules-is tended school days for "latch-key" children surely responsible for part of the remark- and, during the summer, recreation pro- able influx of married women into the grams. And only in the new city can one work force (although the plentiful supply of find the extensive array of Pizza. Huts, Siz- workers could just as easily be said to have zler's, Denny's, and other inexpensive "fam- attracted employers). The outcome is more ily-style" restaurants which, though they than a little ironic, considering the fact that may not delight Julia Child, are many a par- the bedroom suburb had originally been ent's salvation at the end of a hard day at designed to separate women from the cor- the office. ruptions of the world of work. The new city thus decisively breaks with the older suburban pattern that restricted married middle-class women with children to a life of neighborhood-oriented do- mesticity. Women still work closer to home than men do, and they still bear most of the responsibility for childcare and housekeep- when Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned ing, but, in contrast to the old metropolis, Broadacre City, he failed to consider the the economic and spatial structure of the role of the old centralized industrial cities

new city tends to equalize gender roles. in the new world of the future. He simply-. Indeed, one can argue that the new city assumed that the old cities would disappear has largely been built on the earnings of once the conditions that had created them two-income families and thus reflects their were gone. The reality has not been so sim- needs more closely than did either the ur- ple. Just as the industrial metropolis grew ban core or the traditional bedroom sub- up around the older mercantile city, so the urb. One large housing developer, Scarbor- new city of our time has surrounded the

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old metropolis. What was once the sole largely followed the factories to the new center is now one point of concentration city, leaving a supply of cheap, old housing among many. which has attracted poor black, Hispanic, In general, the skyscraper cores of the and other minority migrants with no other central cities have adapted to this change place to go. If the industrial city in its prime and prospered. Even a decentralized region brought people together with jobs, cheap needs a "headquarters," a place of high sta- housing in the inner city now lures the job- tus and high rents where the movers-and- less to those areas where employment pros- shakers can rub shoulders and meet for pects are dimmest. The old factory zone is power lunches. By contrast, the old factory thus doubly disadvantaged: The jobless zones have not found a function in the new have moved in, the jobs out. environment. As a result, the central city Public transportation retains its tradi- has reverted to what it was before industri- tional focus on the core, but the inner-city alization: a site for high-level administration population generally lacks the education to and luxury consumption, where some of compete for the high-level jobs that are the wealthiest members of society live in available there. By contrast, the new city close proximity to many of the poorest. usually has an abundance of entry-level The recent boom in downtown office jobs, many of them already going begging construction should not conceal the fact as the supply of women and students seek- that downtown prosperity rests on a much ing jobs diminishes. Unfortunately, resi- narrower base than it did in its heyday dur- dents of the new city have generally re- ing the 1920s. Most of the retail trade has sisted attempts to build low-income fled to the malls; the grand old movie pal- housing in middle-class areas and have dis- aces and many of the nightspots are gone. couraged public transportation links. They Only the expansion of corporate headquar- want to keep the new city's expanding tax ters, law firms, banks and investment base for themselves and to avoid any direct houses, advertising agencies, and other cor- fiscal responsibility for the urban poor. The porate and governmental services has kept new city has thus walled itself off from the the downtown towers filled, and even in problems of the inner city in a way that the these fields there have been major leakages Social Darwinists of the 19th century could of back-office employment to the new city.- only envy. Nevertheless, this employment base has enabled most core areas to retain an array of f the majority of Americans have voted specialized shops, restaurants, and cultural with their feet (or rather, with their activities unequalled in their region. This in cars) for the new city, we need not con- turn encourages both the gentrification of clude that this new environment has been surrounding residential neighborhoods and successful, whether judged by the standards the "renaissance" of the core as a tourist of previous cities or even on its own terms. and convention center. Comparing the new city with the old Yet only blocks away from a thriving metropolis, we can see that the new city core like Baltimore's Inner Harbor one can has yet to evolve anything comparable to usually find extensive poverty, decay, de-in- the balance of community and diversity dustrialization, and abandonment that that the metropolis achieved. The urban stretches out to encompass the old factory neighborhood at its best gave a sense of zone. The factory zones have found no new rooted identity that the dispersed "house- role. Their working-class populations have hold network" of the new city lacks. The

WQ WINTER 1990 42 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

A sketch from Frank Lloyd Wright's plan for Broadacre City. A roadside market and cultural center are in the foreground, with the county seat in the tower beyond. Wright's skills as a writer were inversely related to his genius as an architect and planner, as this excerpt from The Living City (1958) suggests: "Imagine man-units so arranged and integrated that every citizen may choose any form of production, distribution, self-improvement, enjoyment, within the radius of, say, 10 to 40 minutes of his own home-all now available to him by means of private car or plane, helicopter or some other form of fast public conveyance. . . . "When every man, woman, and child may be born to put his feet on his own acres and every unborn child finds his acre waiting for him when he is born-then democracy will have been realized. By way of education made organic, life organic and organic architecture become the greatest servants of modem man. Great architects will surely then develop creative buildings not only in harmony with greenery and ground but in intimate patterns of the personal lives of individual owners."

downtowns provided a counterpoint of di- they found the cultural and social mix of versity, a neon-lit world where high and downtown more threatening than exciting. low culture met, all just a streetcar ride The new city represents the sum of these away. By comparison, even the most elabo- choices, but we should beware of accepting rate mall pales. the architecture critic Ada Louise Of course, many residents of the new Huxtable's snooty judgment of the new city city were attracted there precisely because as "slurb" embodying "cliche conformity they were uncomfortable with both the as far as the eye can see." The new city is community and diversity of the old. They rapidly becoming more diverse than the wanted to escape from the neighborhood stereotypical suburb of old. to a "community of limited liability," and Beyond the inevitable distinctions be-

WQ WINTER 1990 43 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

tween more and less affluent residential lis. The machine of growth is yet again districts, the new city has begun to generate gaining the upper hand over any human "communities of shared concerns" formed purpose. The early residents of the new city around areas of special historic, architec- worried little about regulating growth be- tural, or environmental value. A neglected cause there was still a seemingly endless town bypassed by the malls and highways supply of open land. Now that it is disap- attracts homebuyers who want to restore pearing, the residents of the new city must the old houses and merchants who seek to finally face the consequences of get-and- revive its Main Street. An isolated area near grab development. a state park attracts those who are willing to sacrifice convenience for access to an nce again we must turn for wis- unspoiled landscape. dom to the great prophets of de- Inevitably, the central city will continue centralization, especially Frank to shelter the dominant institutions of high Lloyd Wright. Wright believed that the culture-museums, concert halls, and the- guiding principle of the new city must be aters-but in our electronic age these insti- the harmonization of development with a tutions no longer monopolize that culture. respect for the land in the interest of creat- As the French novelist and cultural critic ing a beautiful and civilized landscape. "Ar- Andre Malraux wrote in his Voices of Si- chitecture and acreage will be seen to- lence (1950), there exists a "museum with- gether as landscape-as was the best out wallsu-a world of high-quality prints, antique architecture-and will become photographs, art books, and other images more essential to each other," he wrote. As which are available outside the museums his Broadacre City plans and drawings or the galleries. In the age of the compact show, he largely ruled out large buildings disc and the VCR, we have concert halls, or even high-rise structures. His plans show opera houses, theaters, and movie palaces the same juxtapositions of housing, shop- without walls. The new city is still a cultural ping, and industry that exist in the new city satellite of the old, but the electronic de- today. But they depict a world in which centralization of high culture and the grow- these are integrated into open space ing vitality of the new city could soon give through the preservation of farmland, the it an independent cultural base to rival past- creation of parks, and the extensive use of civilizations. landscaping around buildings. The most fervent self-criticism coming For Wright, an "organic" landscape from the new city has not, however, fo- meant more than creating beautiful vistas. cused on the lack of art galleries or syrn- It was the social effort to integrate the po- phony orchestras. It comes from those who tentially disruptive effects of the machine in fear that the very success of the new city is the service of a higher purpose. Wright, destroying the freedom of movement and however, gave little practical thought to access to nature that were its original at- how this might be achieved. In one of his traction. As new malls and subdivisions eat books he vaguely suggested that each up acre after acre of land, and as highways county in Broadacres would have a clog with traffic, the danger arises that the "County Architect" with dictatorial powers three networks of communication that to regulate the environment. comprise the city may break down. Too of- Lacking such a figure in reality, the new ten the new city seems to be an environ- city must now undertake the difficult task ment as out of control as the old metropo- of moving democratically from its virtually

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

unplanned pell-mell growth to planning them, New Jersey's farmers are allowed to with a concern for balanced growth. In sell the "development rights" to their farms New Jersey, a public opinion poll taken in to entrepreneurs who can apply them as connection with the proposed "State Devel- credits toward denser development in opment and Redevelopment Plan" shows other areas where new construction is per- that, by a margin of five to one, the resi- mitted. The farmers are thus allowed to tap dents of the highly-developed Garden State the equity in their land without abandoning prefer less growth even at the cost of less it to the bulldozer. economic development. Half agreed that Preserving and enhancing the common controls on development should be "ex- landscape might become the issue on tremely strict," and 25 percent more said which the people of the new cities finally regulation should be "very strict." come together as communities. Not even The ever-present threat of a veto by the Wright's County Architect could accom- state legislature as the plan develops into plish such a task unaided. It will be a slow final form (scheduled for late 1990) shows effort of drafting regulations and making that these sentiments are still far from them stick; of patient upgrading of older determining policy. The New Jersey Plan, construction to newer standards, and draw- however, includes certain proposals that ing together the privatized beauties of indi- will have to figure into any effective land- vidual sites into a unified framework. Fifty use control program in the new city. Lim- years ago Lewis Mumford defined his ideal ited areas of the state are designated as decentralized community as the "bio- growth corridors, while development is dis- technic city," the place where nature and couraged in still-rural areas. Scenic or his- the machine exist in harmony. He saw the toric sites that give identity to a region are coming age of decentralization as a great strictly earmarked for preservation. Wher- opportunity to embody the civilizing virtues ever possible, building is to be channeled of the great cities of the past in a new and back into Newark, Paterson, and other de- democratic form. The last half century has pressed cities. In a creative adaptation of not been kind to utopian expectations, but the urban concept of saving historic build- the promise of a new civilization in a new ings by selling the air rights to build above city need not be lost.

WQ WINTER 1990 45 BACKGROUND BOOKS

AMERICA'S :NEW CITY

merica's big cities, Lewis Mumford de- Cities for America: The Radburn Experience A clared in 1938, represent "a general mis- (Temple Univ., 1982), the Great Depression carriage and defeat of civilized effort." struck before Radburn could be completed. To- In The Culture of Cities (Greenwood, rev. day, that fragment of Mumford's vision is a ed. 198 l), the polymath social philosopher and unique island "surrounded by the endless ex- prophet of decentralization inaugurated a de- panse of northern New Jersey's suburbs." bate over the nature of cities that has continued During the Depression, many veterans of to the present day. Mumford was no partisan of the Radburn effort wound up in the New Deal's the suburb-like virtually all intellectuals, he Resettlement Administration. There, as Paul was appalled by it. His ideal was the medieval Conklin writes in Tomorrow A New World: city, which he argued had been unjustly ma- The New Deal Community Program (Da ligned. Capo, rev. ed. 1976), they planned to build 50 Our images of plague-ridden city dwellers "greenbelt" towns at various sites around the clad in filthy rags come from a later era, Mum- country. But the plan foundered on Congres- ford argued. He insisted that life in the medi- sional opposition to the "socialistic" scheme. eval city was generally healthy and fulfilling, Only three new towns were built: Greenbelt, rich in architectural beauty and civic life. Most Md.; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wis. Like important to him was the openness to nature Radbum, they have since been swallowed up that the cities' "clustered" housing made possi- by encroaching suburbs. Yet Mumford's ideas ble. "Gardens and orchards, sometimes fields were later put into practice in places like and pastures, existed within the city," he wrote, Irvine, California, and are routinely incorpo- as if scenting the moist earth from the far re- rated in many less ambitious housing projects move of his own New York apartment. being built today throughout the country. But Mumford held that the medieval city Mumford's influence was felt in less benign was perverted during the 15th century by the ways as well, according to Jane Jacobs. In The centralization of political power and the inven- Death and Life of Great American Cities tion of the cannon. The need for massive forti- (Random, 1961), she rather unfairly lumped fications made it too costly to found new cities, Mumford together with the Swiss-born archi- forcing the residents of old ones to live in ever tect Le Corbusier and other modernist urban more crowded and unpleasant circumstances. planners, and blamed them for inspiring the di- The forces of politics and "technics" were thus- sastrous urban renewal efforts of the late 1940s unleashed, a dynamic which Mumford traced and '50s. The Decentrists, as she called them, in Culture and in his later, more comprehen- were anti-city. (The garden cities they advo- sive work, The City in History (Harcourt, cated, Jacobs sneered, were "really very nice 1961). City and suburb, he argued, would cul- towns if you were docile and had no plans of minate in what he referred to as Megalopolis, your own.") Yet, Jacobs lamented, their ideas Tyrannopolis, and Nekropolis. became orthodoxy, not only among planners Like others before him, notably the English and architects but also in Congress, state legis- city planner Ebenezer Howard, Mumford advo- latures, city halls, and in the banks and govem- cated a radical reorganization of the land- ment agencies that provide most of the nation's scape-the creation of innumerable small mortgage dollars. "garden cities" of 30,000 souls or so, modeled Adapted to the realities of the nation's exist- on the medieval city. No mere dreamer, he ing cities, Jacobs argued, the Decentrists's anti- managed, along with like-minded planners in urban principles led to the replacement of poor the Regional Planning Association of America, but lively urban neighborhoods with mono- to secure private financing during the 1920s to lithic apartment tower projects designed to build just such a city in Radbum, New Jersey. keep the home separate from the hectic city As Daniel Schaffer notes with regret in Garden streets. Jacobs, a passionate advocate of city

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

life, said that was all wrong. She proceeded to ferry and horse-drawn omnibus, each with its dissect in fascinating detail the characteristics own characteristic pattern of residential settle- of successful urban neighborhoods. She fa- ment. The railroad created exclusive suburbs vored more of everything that she accused the (along Philadelphia's Main Line, for example), Decentrists of disliking: more density, more ac- the trolley fostered leafy middle-class suburbs, tivity, more intensity. and the streetcar mostly served working-class Only in America (and possibly Britain) neighborhoods close to the city center. would she get much argument. As Kenneth T. The trolley system in particular was vast and Jackson of Columbia University notes in Crab- inexpensive, recalls Harvard historian of land- grass Frontier: The Suburbanization of scape architecture John Stilgoe in his wistful, America (Oxford Univ., 1985), Europeans (and evocative Metropolitan Corridor (Yale Univ., others) are astonished by the American prefer- 1983). In 1904, newlyweds Clinton and Louisa ence for suburban life. In some European cit- Lucas, seized with "trolley mania," managed to ies, suburbs simply do not exist, thanks in part make their 500-mile honeymoon trip from Del-

LIGHT WELLS

CIAL

A city of the future by Paolo Soleri (1969). to forceful government planning. "The outer aware to Maine almost exclusively by trolley, boundaries of Copenhagen, Moscow, Cologne, with a bagful of nickels and only a few brief and Vienna abruptly terminate with apartment interludes of railroad travel. Sam Bass buildings, and a 20-minute train ride will take Warner's Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of one well into the countryside," says Jackson. In Growth in Boston (Harvard Univ., 1969) re- the sprawling "megacities" of Latin America mains the classic work on the effects of that and Africa, the outlying areas frequently lack form of transportation. running water, sewers, and police and fire pro- By the 1920s, however, the romance was tection. over. "Most people," Jackson writes, "agreed As Jackson observes, there was nothing in- with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia that evitable about the American pattern of subur- the automobile represented the best of modem ban development. Over the years, suburban civilization while the trolley was simply an old- growth has been built around several different fashioned obstacle to progress." Who could forms of transportation, beginning with the have guessed that Americans would so quickly

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA'S NEW CITY

use their new Fords and Chevies to follow Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). Ex- "progress" to the suburbs? ceeding all others in vitriol, Betty Friedan's Why this American romance with the sub- The Feminine Mystique (1963), assailed the urb? The usual answer is our legacy of Jefferso- "domestic ideology" propagated by Wilber- nian anti-urban sentiment. But in Bourgeois force and his intellectual successors. Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (Ba- Still the exodus to suburbia continued. As sic, 1987), Robert Fishman traces its origins to Carl Abbot of Old Dominion University ob- British ideas about home and family. He says serves in his survey of The New Urban Arner- that the three Americans most responsible for ica: Metropolitan Growth and Politics in popularizing the suburban ideal during the Sunbelt Cities (Univ. of N.C., rev. ed. 1987), mid-19th centurv-writer Catherine Beecher the big city's demographic reign over American and architects Andrew Jackson Downing and life lasted a brief half century. In 1970, the U.S. Calvert Vaux-were deeply influenced by such Census Bureau announced that suburbanites English Evangelicals as William Wilberforce accounted for 37 percent of the U.S. popula- (1759-1833). The Evangelicals, writes Fishman, tion, city dwellers only 31 percent. laid the foundation of Victorianism and, not co- Beginning with Kevin Phillips's premature incidentally, also founded the prototypical sub- celebration of The Emerging Republican Ma- urb in Clapham, south of London. The suburb jority (Anchor, 1970), political analysts have was meant to remove the nuclear family from generally pronounced the population shift to urban vices-crime, taverns, dance halls, the the suburbs and the decentralized cities of the petty corruptions of the workaday world-and Sunbelt a conservative trend, though few have to provide a haven where women, the "faithful shared Phillips's satisfaction with it. Dissent of repositories of the religious principle," as Wil- another kind was heard from neoconservative berforce wrote, could tend to the moral and writer and editor Irving Kristol, who argued in spiritual well-being of their children and hus- On the Democratic Idea in America (Harper, bands. Clapham and other towns like it became 1972) that television and mass higher education the model for the first American suburbs, such were transforming all of America into an "ur- as New Jersey's Llewellyn Park (1857). ban civilization." The nation could do without But for nearly a century, the suburb was as the philistinism of provincial America, he said, distant from the average American's experi- but he worried about how it would fare without ence as Palm Springs or Martha's Vineyard are the ballast of the heartland's agrarian notions of today. The great geographical contest for peo- piety and virtue. ple and preeminence was between city and Another line of argument concerns the fate country, a clash played out through populism at of the poor in America's new geographic dis- the ballot box and in the cultural politics of uensation. Thus William Julius Wilson. a Uni- books such as Sherwood Anderson's portrait of versity of Chicago sociologist, argues in The small town grotesques, Winesburg, Ohio Truly Disadvantaged (Univ. of Chicago, 1987) (1919). Not until 1920 did the U.S. Census Bu- that the shift of people and jobs to the new cit- reau certify the city's victory in the battle for ies is partly responsible for the growing isola- bodies, if not souls. tion of inner-city ghettos and the creation of an It was not long before the suburb replaced urban underclass. the countryside as the city's prime competitor. All of these books, from Mumford's to Wil- No sooner had the first moving vans from the son's, remind the reader that where and how Bronx arrived in ~evittod,it seemed, than ur- Americans choose to live are not just matters of ban intellectuals began publishing furious in- economics or convenience. Each step-from dictments of the alleged sterility of life in the countryside, to city, to suburb, to "new city"- subdivisions. Among them were David Ries- has involved an argument over what values we man's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the as a nation hold dear, a redefinition of what we Changing American (1950) and William H. call "the American way of life."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Many of the titles in this essay were suggested by Robert Fishnzan.

WQ WINTER 1990 48

IDEAS

THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

With the end of a millennium drawing nigh, eschatology, the study of last things, bids fair to become a major growth industry. Anticipating a chiliastic frenzy, Cullen Murphy here offers some thoughts about our timeless preoccupation with the coming end of time.

by CuZZenl~urphy

y fire or by ice? wondered wishfulness and anticipation-indeed, of Robert Frost. With a bang or vengeance. It is a strange but real consola- with a whimper? wondered T. tion to believe that all creation will eventu- S. Eliot. In the chronicles of ally suffer--perhaps in a split second, our mortal race there may snuffed out like an insect by impersonal B have been one or two people, forces--the same fate that we as individuals for example William ("I decline to accept must suffer. Faulkner, apparently, denied the end of man") Faulkner, who did not himself such consolation. Perhaps that's concede that a bold Finis would one day be why he drank. scrawled at the conclusion of the human All of this comes to mind because, as saga. There may have been one or two who some reckon it, we have embarked on the would not have been tempted--were only decade known as the '90s, when Western it possible!--to skip ahead to the final chap- societies have traditionally been troubled ters of our story and discover how it all by thoughts of the last things, entranced by turns out. But most of us from time to time the eschaton,possessed by the prospect of find ourselves contemplating the great oblivion. Technically, ot· course, the final question mark that seems ever to loom just decade of this century doesn't begin until beyond the horizon. the first day of 1991. But this nicety is not This curiosity about the ultimate destiny likely to be observed in the streets. No, the of our species and planet--about the end of '80s, though not quite dead, were em- the world--has its origins, surely, in the balmed months ago in the press. We are consideration of one's personal demise. irrevocably into the '90s now. What is "Lord," pleaded the author of Psalms, more, for only the second time in history "make me to know mine end, and the mea- we are in a '90s decade that precedes a mil- sure of my days, what it is." But mixed with lennium year. There has been considerable curiosity there is also a certain element of speculation by eschatologists, as specialists wa WINTER 1990 THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

on the end of the world are known, that the claimed The End of Ideology. The years turn of this millennium may have an un- since then have given us, in chronological pleasant surprise in store for us. During the order, such books as The End of Taboos, waning months of the 1980s a Mr. Michael The End of Affluence, The End of Intelligent Breen, 31, made news when he punched Writing, The End of Christendom, The End Senator John Glenn in the jaw, muttering, of British Politics, The End of Comedy, The "The earthquakes are starting, the earth- End of Sex, The End of Libraries, The End of quakes are starting." In the decade ahead Law, The End of Art Theory, The End of other eschatologists will be seeking plat- Beauty, The End of Conversation, The End forms to air similar views. The grim orgy of of Organized Capitalism, The End of Desire, prognostication has begun. and several score more. Within the past six months, as the onset nd there may well be something to it of the '90s imparted a sense of special ur- A this time around. To judge from the gency, the prominent eschatologist Francis printed word-merely one among many Fukuyama set Washington abuzz with an types of evidence available-our civiliza- important article in the journal National In- tion has, since mid-century, been engaged terest in which he asserted that we had in a gradual and methodical shutdown of come, in the words of his title, to "The End its constituent parts. The sociologist Daniel of History?," a development that, at the Bell led the way in 1960 when he pro- very least, could make his job on the State

"The Bathos" (1764) was William Hogarth's final work. It was intended both as a satire of doom-predictors and a pessimistic statement about the state of England in his own time.

WQ WINTER 1990 5 1 THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

Department's policy-planning staff obso- With the advent of Christianity, and of lete. Not long afterwards an eschatologist the expectation that Jesus Christ would re- of comparable audacity, Bill McKibben, turn one day soon and establish his king- published a book in which he heralded The dom on earth, millennial fervor flared End of Nature, arguing that the natural again. The original notion of the millen- world, battered by the impact of man, nium, which of course means "a thousand could no longer act as an independent years," was that Christ, whenever he reap- force on the planet. Contemporary es- peared, would reign on earth for that chatologists believe, I suspect, that if length of time, after which would come the enough of the planet's operations can be Apocalypse, or Day of Reckoning, or Last neutralized in advance then significant dis- Judgment. The failure of Christ to reappear locations on the Big Day will be substan- threw theologians and laity alike into con- tially reduced. The New York Times is do- fusion. St. Augustine, whose life straddled ing its part. No doubt anticipating that the the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., a time number of newsworthy subjects still when Christians were no longer holding around to be covered will only decrease in their breath for the Second Coming, tried the 1990s, the Times has decided to discon- to make the best of any lingering millennial tinue its "Saturday News Quiz." hopes by arguing that the very birth of In novels about wise old dogs or grand- Christ had ushered in the millennium, and fathers there is always a moment in the fi- that the next time he came would therefore nal pages when someone scratches his bring not the millennium but rather the head and says, "It's as if he knew he was end of the world. Augustine also warned going to die." The same might be written of Christians not to take the "thousand year" our own epoch. The end draws nigh, and benchmark too seriously, citing Paul's epis- people have begun to behave accordingly. tle to Peter: "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as ome will say: "We have heard all this one day." The situation, in other words, before." In the opinion of skeptics, the was fluid. prophets of doom have, over the years, suf- Augustine's opinion carried consider- fered an erosion of credibility. In galactic able weight, but it did not prevent later sa- circles, they say, Earth is derided as the vants from concluding that since the mil- planet that cried wolf. lennium had begun with the birth of Christ, Mainstream eschatologists concede that the world would end a thousand vears the skeptics have a point. The ancient Su- thereafter. And, predictably, there was a merians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, flurry of concern as the tenth century and Hebrews, for example, all constructed wound to a close that mankind might not elaborate destruction myths. The Persians enjoy an eleventh. According to the chroni- believed that at the end of time a cle of a Burgundian monk named Raoul Saoshyant, or savior, would raise the dead Glaber, numerous signs and portents-an to life; then the earth would be drenched in unexpected meteor seen in England, a molten metal, which on those who had shower of blood in Aquitaine, an eclipse in been wicked would have the effect you Calabria-struck fear into the hearts of the might imagine, while purging them of sin. devout as the year 1000 drew nigh. "On the (Those who had been good would feel threshold of the aforesaid thousandth nothing more unpleasant than a bath in year," Glaber wrote, "so innumerable a "warm milk.") Yet few of the sobering sce- multitude began to flock from all parts of narios put forward by the ancients have the world to the Sepulcher of our Savior at come to pass. Indeed, the damage to civi- Jerusalem, as no man could before have ex- lization has so far been limited to an occa- pected; for the lower orders of men led the sional doctoral thesis. way, and after them came those of middle

Cullen Murphy is managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., he received his B.A. (1974) from Amherst College arid was for several years a senior editor of the Wilson Quar- terly. His essays in Harper's, The Atlantic, and other magazines have been on subjects ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Sovietology to Stone Age Britain. Copyright @ 1990 by Cullen Murphy.

WQ WINTER 1990 52 THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

- rank, and then all the greatest kings, counts, and bish- ops; and lastly many noble ladies and poor women. For many purposed and wished to die in the Holy City." In modern works of popular medieval history the re-creation of the scene in Europe on New Year's Eve, 999, has become almost standard- ized, like the compulsories in gymnastics. Pope Sylves- ter I1 nervously says mass at St. Peter's, the multitudes quake, the rich give away their belongings, and all await the tolling bell at mid- night. The story that has come down to us may be something of an exaggeration. As the historian Henri Focillon and others have shown, Raoul Glaber, a major source of information about the "terrors" that stalked the first millennium, is not always the most reliable of chroniclers. The famous New Year's Eve scene also rings false. In his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic new book, Cent~~ry'sEnd, Hillel Schwartz points out that nations and cities all over Eu- Tlie "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1498) is one of the 15 rope celebrated New Year's woodcuts Albreclit Dlirer made to illustrate St. John's Reve1ation.s. on different days: on Christ- mas Day in Rome, for example. on Easter in France. on January 1 in pending therefore on whether one calcu- Spain, on July 9 in ~rikenia. oreo over, lates the millennium from the year 1 or the there would have been no agreement on year before the year 1, the millennium is which year was in fact the millennia] one. reached in the year 1000 or 100 1. The Anno Domini calendrical system was Despite his reservations, Focillon con- invented by a fifth-century monk, Dionysius cluded that Europe truly was afflicted with Exiguus, or Dennis the Little, and long after "an ill-defined fear" as the n~illenniumap- his death was adopted as standard for proached. When the millennium came and Church purposes. It has a major quirk. went without Apocalypse or Armageddon, Dennis decreed that the first day of the year the people of Christendom resumed lives 1 was the day, a week after his birth, on filled with more quotidian forms of irrita- which Christ was circumcised, or January tion, such as forgetting in the first few 1. This meant that Jesus was born in the weeks of the new year to write M on their year before the year 1, but Dennis had no checks instead of DCCCCLXXXXIX. But way to designate that year (the idea of B.C. the genie was out of the bottle and, as Hillel wasn't thought of until much later). De- Schwartz makes clear, the final decade of THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

"Trinitrite Tempest" (1988), by Nagatani/Tracey. This work of apocalyptic art alludes to the world's first nuclear explosion at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.

each subsequent 100-year period has been present epoch be any different? characterized by apocalyptic bombast and There are plenty of reasons why. One of giddy trepidation. In the 1290s, millenarian the prophecies of Nostradamus, the 16th- movements appear all over Europe; roving century French seer, runs like this: "The bands of Flagellants tour the countryside, year 1999, month seven./From the sky shall scourging themselves with leather whips come a great King of terror." There are Old tipped by iron spikes and calling upon God Testament prophecies that speak of Arma- to "Spare us!" In the 1390s, in the wake of geddon as occurring a generation after the yet another outbreak of bubonic plague, reestablishment of a Jewish state. There is a the danse macabre appears in drama; on traditional Buddhist teaching that the stage, cadaverous figures dressed as popes, world will end some 2,500 years after the clerics, nobles, and common men mock death of Buddha-who died roughly 2,500 the pridefulness of life and urge submission years ago. Psychic pyramidologists who unto Death. In the 1490s, Savonarola have examined the inner galleries of the preaches repentance and doom in Flor- Pyramid of Cheops at Giza report that the ence; to the north, Albrecht Diirer pro- world will end around the turn of the duces his famous series of woodcuts, The present century, a conclusion supported by Apocalypse, its four horsemen cantering Aztec, Hindu, and Hopi data, by certain cal- across the sky with a scale of justice and culations of Heraclitus of Ephesus, and by a weapons of death. Century after century the prophecy of the medieval Irish monk St. '90s no sooner heave into view than the Malachy. To all of this add the fact that we pamphleteers and street-corner orators are nearing not just the end of an ordinary whip a goodly portion of the populace into century but the end of a millennium-a a fearful frenzy. circumstance that in itself must sorely And yet so far as we know the world has tempt fate. The evidence suggesting an im- on none of these occasions come to its con- minent date for the end of the world has clusion. Why should the close of the been convincingly marshalled by Charles

WQ WINTER 1990 54 THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

Berlitz in Doomsday: 1999 A.D. It is not a The most horrifying prospect for the book for the faint of heart. planet may also be the most likely one, ac- In the minds of eschatologists the big cording to some eschatologists. In May of unknown is not when but precisely how the the year 2000, astronomers tell us, Mer- world is going to end. Various theories cury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be have waxed and waned in popularity. Dur- aligned behind the sun, aimed directly at ing the 1950s and '60s nuclear annihilation Earth on the other side. The pull of these was the anticipated form of demise. This planets could, some say, be so intense as to was succeeded during the 1970s by an rupture seismic faults and even to cause expectation that the greenhouse effect devastating tsunamis in the planet's under- would result in the melting of the polar ice lying magma, the molten rock pulsing in caps, drowning us all. Lately, however, sev- powerful waves beneath the mantle and eral prominent eschatologists have backed disturbing continental plates. The geologic off, noting that because the planet is due for disruptions could be so great that, com- another ice age-the current "interglacial" bined with the immense and ever-growing being near its end-the greenhouse effect weight of the Antarctic ice cap, they could may actually help tide us over what is ex- cause a "wobble" in Earth's rotation and pected to be a 100,000-year cold snap. possibly cause a "polar flip," with the planet falling over on its side or turning ith the exception of a small working completely upside down, like an unskilled w group at the London School of Eco- kayaker. Scientists are unanimous in the nomics, which still holds out the hope that view that the result would be a real mess. Doomsday will be brought on by man- Is there no way out? Should we stop made factors such as pollution and the de- worrying about the deficit and the integrity struction of the rain forests, most eschatol- of the Social Security system? Science has ogists now look to exogenous forces. The done much to improve the lot of humanity, chances that Earth will be hit sometime but it remains powerless before many of soon by another celestial body, for exam- the possible catastrophes we face. We can- ple, are not negligible. "Big Asteroid Passes not deflect the path of Toro, much less that Near Earth Unseen In a Rare Close Call" of Jupiter. And yet there is one slender declared a New York Times headline last thread of hope. April. The asteroid, traveling 46,000 miles In early Christian times, years were an hour, crossed our planet's path unde- counted from the beginning of the world, tected, at a distance equal to only twice that or Anno Mundi, and it was calculated that between the Earth and the moon, and the year of Christ's birth was 5199 A.M. As astronomers say it will be back. "Sooner or the dreaded millennia1 year 6000 A.M. came later it should collide with the Earth, the closer there was great consternation in Moon, or Mars," one astronomer told the Christendom. And then someone had an Times. This asteroid has company. The idea. Why not, it was suggested, adopt Den- planetoid Toro, for example, which is five nis the Little's calendar, so that when 6000 kilometers wide, now orbits between Ve- A.M. arrived it would actually be 800 A.D.? nus and Earth, and while it currently poses The proposed calendrical reform was ap- no danger, a slight gravitational shift could proved at the Synod of Whitby, and disaster send this speeding "death star" right into was averted. our flanks. Fortunately, there are only The task ahead is plain. Let us reform, about 40 fast-moving bodies whose orbits friends, for the end is nigh. And let us act regularly cross Earth's path. before the year 7190 A.M. is out.

WQ WINTER 1990 55 Titian's The Rape of Europa (1561). Europe 1992

The Greeks named Europe for the princess Europa, who, according to myth, so charmed Zeus that he transformed himself into a bull and carried her off from the Middle East to Crete. Zeus promised her that their sons would rule "over all men on earth." Europe has often seemed, in another sense of the word, no more than a myth. Although Europeans have often spoken of their common culture, Europe has been mostly a word on the map, a name for a continent that gave birth to both the world's greatest cultural achievements and its bloodiest wars. Suddenly, however, the elusive goal of European unity seems within reach. The 12 nations of the European Community have agreed to merge into a Common Market by the end of 1992. Many believe that political unity will necessarily follow. And now the dramatic eclipse of communism raises the prospect that Eastern Europe may join. Here, Steven Lagerfeld describes the journey to 1992; Josef Joffe points to the formidable obstacles that remain.

WQ WINTER 1990 56 by Steven Lagerfeld

specter is haunting Eu- healthier ally? Or will it remain the benign rope-the specter of old ghost we've known for so long? "1992." But unlike the The drama of 1992 provides endless specter of communism in- cause for speculation, but only this much is voked by Karl Marx and certain: Europe has not even a ghost of a , Friedrich Engels more chance of soon achieving the grand aims of than a century ago, this one does not in- the millenialists. Indeed, it now seems spire dread among the major powers of Eu- clear that Europe will fall short of the con- rope. To the contrary. They are encourag- crete goals its leaders set for 1992. [See ing it to materialize. box, p. 64.1 Whatever is or is not going to What will actually appear remains a happen will take far longer. mystery. Some Europeans imagine a Eu- Brilliant publicity is making a historic rope economically integrated, a colossus development seem even more earth-shat- larger than the United States in population tering than it is. Take the "1992" slogan it- (324 million versus 244 million) and nearly self. The official deadline for implementing its equal in gross national product ($4.6 tril- the program is actually December 3 1, 1992, lion versus $4.9 trillion). Others, going con- which gives the European bureaucrats who siderably beyond, envision the eventual are supervising the project, the "Euro- development of a politically and culturally crats," an entire year to hustle stragglers unified United States of Europe in which onto the bandwagon. There is a list of ex- every Parisian or Berliner is a European actly 279 directives to be written and im- first, a Frenchman or a German second. plemented. The checklist serves to remind Meanwhile, we Americans look on like one and all of exactly how far along Europe confused spectators, alternately cheered or is on the road to blissful fusion. (Only 145 frightened by thoughts of what the grand directives to go!) climax may bring. Will the apparition take And then there is the very term Euro- form as a fanged and unfriendly protection- pean Community. The 1992 program repre- ist Europe? Will it become a stronger, sents the culmination of what used to be

WQ WINTER 1990 57 EUROPE 1992

called the Common Market, but that tions: physical, technical, and fiscal. sounds too, well, common, as if it involved The physical barriers-passport checks old women in shawls selling vegetables in a and the like-are enormous. One study village square. By some mysterious profound that a tourist's ordinary 750-mile trip cess, Common Market has largely dropped by car from London to Milan takes 58 out of everyday use, replaced by the sleek hours, while a similar journey within the and sophisticated term, European Commu- United Kingdom takes only 36 hours. For nity, or, better yet, simply "the Commu- freight-carriers, the delays are even more nity." Americans have good reason to excruciating. A trucker hauling a load of worry about U.S. competitiveness in the goods from Spain to France might be re- post- 1992 world: The Europeans have quired to present dozens of documents at clearly learned a thing or two about ad- the frontier to satisfy, among other things, vertising. export and import licensing requirements, health and safety regulations, and trade- his latest episode in what has been a quota laws (any Japanese TVs in there?). toddler's wobbly march toward Eu- Average wait at European borders: 80 min- T ropean integration began in Decem- utes. Total costs: $10 billion annually, not ber 1985, when the leaders of the EC na- counting $5.5 billion in foregone trade. All tions met in Luxembourg to endorse the of these internal border controls are to be Single European Act. The Common Market abolished. was then in such disarray and its goals so Technical barriers range from variations long delayed that hardly anybody noticed. in national standards for such things as fruit As political scientist Stanley HofEmann re- juices and jams to national laws which pre- cently observed, the leaders themselves did vent cross-border sales of insurance poli- not seem to understand exactly what they cies. These are extremely costly obstacles. were undertaking. The goals were certainly As things now stand, for example, differing ambitious. The Act contemplated nothing national standards force manufacturers to less than the complete abolition of internal make seven models of the same TV for the frontiers among the 12, allowing the free European market. movement of people, goods, and capital. Finally, there are the fiscal barriers: the "The European Community's 1992 cam-. separate national tax systems of the EC paign," the London Economist cheered last members. The target here is indirect taxes, May, "is doing to red tape and government such as value-added taxes (the equivalent of controls what Harry Houdini did to chains, sales taxes). Today, rebates and payments of straps and manacles." these taxes as goods move from country to The key to achieving all of this is the country are a major cause of border delays. implementation of the 279 directives. Some "Harmonization" is supposed to cut of those that have been written are dozens through all the paperwork. But no attempt of pages long, dealing with matters as mun- is being made to harmonize direct taxes on dane as noise standards for lawnmowers personal or corporate income. and as significant as guidelines for corpo- If all of these objectives are achieved, rate mergers and acquisitions. These the EC estimates that it will give the collec- directives are aimed at eliminating three tive gross domestic product (GDP) a jolt of kinds of barriers among the member na- up to 6.5 percent spread over several years,

Steven Lagerfeld is deputy editor of the Wilson Quarterly.

WQ WINTER 1990 EUROPE 1992

create as many as two million new jobs, and reduce consumer prices. All told, perhaps a $300 billion pay- off. A less optimistic estimate by Data Resources Inc. takes into account the fact that parts of the 1992 agenda are not going to be completed by the deadline. It projects only a .5 percent increase in GDP. Europe will profit, but judging by the behavior of its stock markets, there is no economic bonanza just around the comer. The beginning: Officials celebrate the inauguration of the Euro- pean Coal and Steel Community in 1952. At right is Jean Mon.net, the father of modem unity efforts and the ECSC's first president. are even more unreliable than usual because so much about the ulti- ma1 spirits" of capitalism to get them into mate shape of Europe after '92 remains un- the competition in computers, biotechnol- certain. Even if the EC could write finis to ogy, and other emerging industries. They al- every one of the 279 directives on January ready have efficient producers; they need 1, 1993, it still may find itself poorly pre- good innovators. This is what British Prime pared to compete in the global economy. Minister Margaret Thatcher and members The causes of "Eurosclerosis" have little to of the Bruges Group have been arguing.* do with markets. The world is a market, But most Europeans still seem determined and West Germany (not Japan) is already to keep capitalists in zoos. the world's largest exporter. The fact that Ideally, '92 should be good for the entire the United States is a "single integrated world economy as well as for Europe. Not market" did not spare it from paying dearly only should foreign business find new mar- for overregulation and corporate flabbiness kets in Europe, but European firms should during the 1970s, and European industry become more competitive on a global today is generally far more heavily regu- scale. The worry is that the Europeans will lated, far more coddled, and far flabbier compensate for the lowering of internal than American business was only a decade trade barriers and the painful adjustments

ago.- this will inevitably. require- by creating even Of course, the abolition of frontiers stouter walls-quotas, domestic-content within Europe will lower costs for the big rules-against outsiders. This is the For- multinational firms that already operate tress Europe scenario. across borders-not only European com- American anxieties on this score fluctu- panies but the likes of IBM and Toyota- and allow Smaller Ones to forage for new *The Bruges Group is a London-based organization of free- market-oriented intellectuals. Created after Mrs. Thatcher's business. What the Europeans need more famous Sentember 1988 sneech in Bruees.-. Beleium. - attack- ing the notion of a European "superstate," the Bruges Group than anything, however, is a large dose Of generally favors the 1992 initiative, but fears that Brussels what John Maynard Keynes called the "ani- will use it to increase regulation of European business.

WQ WINTER 1990 EUROPE 1992

ate from week to week. At stake is the na- they operate; they cannot simply receive a tion's largest ($76 billion) market for ex- charter in one state and open branches in ports. Early in 1989, Washington and the other 49. So the EC proposal would American business were up in arms when have required either a change in federal the EC banned imports of American beef law (and the structure of American bank- from cattle that had been fed growth hor- ing) or the forfeiture of the European mar- mones, erasing in one fell swoop $100 mil- ket. Fortunately, the EC was persuaded to lion in U.S. exports. The EC was not de- drop reciprocity, at least for the moment. terred by the absence of scientific evidence But it has warned that it will monitor the that the hormones are harmful to humans. treatment that European banks receive in Needless to say, this raised U.S. suspicions the 50 states (and other countries), and that the Brussels bureaucracy was actually may think again about reciprocity if it feels more concerned about the health of Eu- that they are suffering discrimination. rope's cattle industry than the well-being of Although it received very little attention its citizens. in the press, the United States dodged an- At the same time, Willy de Clercq, the other very large bullet-a cruise missile, EC commissioner in charge of external really-last September. Once again, four- trade, was talking recklessly about the prin- legged creatures that go "moo" were at the ciple of "reciprocity," or what we Ameri- center of the controversy. cans call "managed" trade. And France's U.S. pharmaceutical companies have Socialist prime minister, Michel Rocard, developed a hormone-like substance called was moaning and mixing metaphors about Bovine Somatotropin (BST), which turns "a Europe of the jungle, a house open to ordinary dairy cows into blue-ribbon milk the four winds, a plane without a pilot." producers. EC Agriculture Commissioner Reciprocity has many meanings. But what Raymond MacSharry worried that BST de Clercq had in mind was the antithesis of would enable Europe's largest dairy farm- free trade. Like many other Europeans, he ers to drive smaller operators out of busi- favors tit-for-tat trade policy: We'll let you ness. Nudged by Europe's environmentalist sell $1 million worth of steel here if you let Green movement, MacSharry proposed a us sell $1 million worth in your country. subtle change in the rules of the game that could have had very Ear-reaching conse- ut Mr. de Clercq is gone now, and,- quences. Normally, decisions about for a variety of reasons, the pros- whether to allow imports of substances like pects for free trade are a little BST are governed by three criteria: the brighter. In April, the EC backed off from a safety, efficacy, and quality of the product. plan that would have required reciprocity MacShany suggested creating a fourth cri- in banking. Under the plan, U.S. or other terion: socioeconomic impact. If adopted, foreign banks would have been able to op- the new criterion would allow the EC to erate like European banks, with headquar- ban imports of BST-even if it were proved ters in, say, Paris and branch offices safe, reliable, and effective-on the (dubi- throughout the EC, only if European banks ous) ground that it would hurt Europe's had the same privileges here in the United small dairy farmers. States. The problem is that even American Of course, that is the kind of thing the banks don't have those privileges in the EC does anyway, but now it must resort to United States. Under federal law, banks subterfuge to do so. (Last June, for exam- must be chartered in every state in which ple, the EC adopted new "quality" stan-

WQ WINTER 1990 60 EUROPE 1992

COMPARING THE U.S. AND THE EC

Population Per Capita (AO/o Unemp. of Land in Population TV's Per U.S., 1988 (~efici) (Millions) (9 of GDP) Rate, 1988 Agriculture Per Sq. Mile 1,000 Pop. ($ Billions) ($ Billions) Belgium 1 1,802 52 10.2 47 319 301 111.9 {2.9 Luxembourg {lo 14,705 44 1.7 49 133 253 Denmark 5 13,241 58 - 5.6 66 119 386 2.6 (.7) France 56 12,803 52 10.3 58 102 402 22.3 (2.1) West Germany 61 13.323 47 6.2 48 245 379 20.8 (12.2) Greece 10 6,363 43 7.4 70 76 174 1.2 .1 Ireland 4 7,541 55 17.6 8 1 5 1 260 3.6 .8

Netherlands 15 12,252 60 9.5 54 356 467 19.7 5.5 Portugal 10 6,297 44 7.0 48 11 1 157 1.4 .06 Spain 39 8,681 42 20.1 62 77 322 7.4 1 .O United Kingdom 57 12,340 44 8.3 77 233 534 36.4 .4 United States 244 18,338 37 5.4 46 26 813

Sources: World Development Report 1989; U.S. Department of Commerce; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop- ment; Statistical Offices of the European Community; Statistical Abstract of the United States 1989.

WQ WINTER 1990 61 EUROPE 1992

dards for canned sardines which Moroccan are compelled to open new plants in Eu- fishermen cannot easily meet but that rope rather than in the United States or Spanish and Portuguese fishermen, just by elsewhere. Intel, a large American com- coincidence, can.) Under MacSharry's pro- puter chip-maker, has already begun build- posed "fourth criterion," the EC would not ing a $400 million plant in Ireland. be forced to defend its protectionist dodges. And while the potential European market he face of the new Europe-fortress for BST is relatively small, consider what or something else-is not simply damage the fourth criterion might do if it T going to appear out of the mists on were applied to other areas-who knows, New Year's Day, 1993. It will be built piece maybe even to America's multibillion-dol- by piece, as a result of a thousand-and-one lar soybean exports to Europe. independent negotiations over obscure In September, the EC avoided a final de- trade matters such as BST. And it is worth cision on BST but banned the use of the pointing out that few sturdy fortresses have substance for 15 months. In 1991, however, been built so haphazardly. There are al- a final decision is due on BST and, far more ready some gaps in the earthworks that important, the fourth criterion. have been thrown up so far. In October, While individual U.S. industries have when the EC announced its new "non- shrieked when their interests have been binding" quota limiting American-made threatened by EC actions, American busi- fare to 50 percent of what is broadcast on ness no longer seems to be greatly alarmed European television stations-the most by the possibility of a Fortress Europe. "For alarming of all EC trade actions so far, af- those that can meet the challenge," Fortune fecting a $2 billion U.S. market-Spanish, magazine enthused last April, "Europe will Greek, and Portuguese officials privately be an exciting new frontier of growth." Big told the U.S. government that they would Business in particular has always treated ignore it. Europe as a single market, and it has been The United States, the EC'S largest for- putting its chips on 1992. (U.S. direct in- eign trading partner, finds itself in a curious vestment in Europe rose from $79 billion position as 1992 approaches. After World in 1983 to $126 billion last year.) Its great War 11, Washington nudged Western Eu- concern is that U.S. subsidiaries in Europe rope toward some form of integration, see- receive the same treatment under Commu- ing a united Europe as a stronger bulwark nity law that EC companies receive. So far against the Soviet Union and as a hedge so good. against another conflagration in what John But the great surge of American invest- Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisen- ment in Europe is partly related to a sec- hower's secretary of state, once called the ond worry, that a united Europe will erect "rickety fire hazard" that was Europe. even more import barriers than the individ- At the same time, American (and other) ual countries already maintain. Here the diplomats of the day were convinced that precedents are less encouraging. The suave autarkic trading blocs, such as Japan's assurances of EC officials that they mean to Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, block only Japanese imports only reveal Britain's Commonwealth "sterling bloc," how little they value and understand free and Germany's special arrangements in trade. The EC'S new domestic-content rules Eastern Europe, had contributed to the out- for semiconductors, for example, will cre- break of the war. Virtually nobody antici- ate "forced investment," as manufacturers pated that Europe itself might someday

WQ WINTER 1990 62 EUROPE 1992

threaten to become a protectionist trading tors, who couldn't bear to see French bloc. Today, much of Washington's old en- troops serve under non-French generals. As thusiasm for European unity is gone. While a kind of compromise, six European na- the diplomats in the U.S. State Department tions-Belgium, France, the Netherlands, murmur politely encouraging things about Italy, Luxembourg, and West Germany- 1992, their pin-stripe suits are damp with signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, thus giv- sweat. At the Commerce Department, un- ing birth to the Common Market. The der Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, good treaty created the European Economic manners have been abandoned. Mosbacher Community (EEC) with the long-term aim has demanded, rather implausibly, an of "establishing a common market and pro- American "seat at the table" where the EC gressively approximating [harmonizing]the is establishing its trade policies. Led by economic policies of the member states." Carla Hills, the U.S. Trade Representative, (The name was officially shortened to the government trade negotiators are hoping European Community in 1967, although for the best, even as they take a hard-nosed common usage has changed only recently.) attitude toward the Europeans. That meant abolishing tariffs and other bar- During the 1950s, Washington largely riers to the free movement of people, ser- stood aside for fear of seeming to meddle. vices, and capital within the EEC. Left It applauded as the Europeans took their out-or at least left ambiguous-were ef- first step toward unity: the treaty creating forts to integrate not only the markets but the European Coal and Steel Community the economies of the six nations. That (ECSC) in 195 1. This was a French initia- would require, for example, the creation of tive, inspired by Jean Monnet, a smallish, a single currency and a unified tax system, dapper economist-something of an Anglo- and Europe's leaders were not yet prepared phile, if that can be said of a Frenchman- to surrender that much national sover- who had spent most of his career in public eignty. They still aren't, despite Monnet's service outside of France and had preached prediction that growing economic coopera- the need for a united Europe since the tion would lead to political union. 1920s. There was a clear economic motive behind the ECSC: The French feared the isenhower himself had hailed Euro- eclipse of their steel industry as West Ger- pean unification as "a new sun of many's revived. But as Monnet wrote, the E hope, security and confi- higher purpose was "to make a breach in dence. . . for Europe and for the rest of the the ramparts of national sovereignty which world." Even so, the EEC was born only a will be narrow enough to secure consent, dozen years after the end of World War 11; but deep enough to open the way towards Europeans were not about to embark upon the unity that is essential to peace." By that a utopian adventure. The Common Market he meant essentially peace with Germany. puttered along, as had been hoped, and ac- The quest for Franco-German rapproche- complished its first great task, the elimina- ment is also central to 1992. tion of intra-EC tariffs, in 1968, more than a Soon after the creation of the ECSC, year ahead of schedule. There progress Monnet and others engineered several bold more or less came to a halt. attempts to form stronger pan-European The oil-price shocks of the 1970s and unions. These foundered on nationalist sen- the rise of Japanese competition turned the timent. The European Defense Union was Common Market nations inward. Each scuttled in 1954 by Gaullist French legisla- vainly sought its own solutions to the de-

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WHAT'S SPROUTING IN BRUSSELS? BRUSSELS-The young Eurocrat squeezed fer free chauffeured limousines and other ex- into a tunnel-shaped office in the European travagant perquisites. Community's drab headquarters building could Brussels itself is bulging at the seams with hardly tear his eyes away from the documents an influx of hopeful favor-seekers. The city's overflowing his desk. At 6:30 in the evening he famous two- and three-star restaurants-where seemed unfazed by the prospect of another all- lunch is generally a three-hour affair-are over- nighter. He was, after all, building a new Eu- flowing with lawyers, lobbyists, and officials. rope. Real-estate prices, though still low by European "We used to be seen as these awful, over- standards, have tripled during the past three paid, underworked bureaucrats," the German years. And speculators are obviously hoping for banking expert said cheerfully. "Now we can more. Whole residential neighborhoods near hold our heads up. We're the people with the EC buildings are boarded up and shuttered; ideas." developers are holding on to the once-cozy After years of stagnation and inactivity, the town houses, awaiting even higher prices be- thousands of functionaries who work for the fore reselling them or replacing them with of- European Community couldn't be riding a big- fice buildings. ger wave. The impending fusion of 12 nations Despite the surge of enthusiasm, the 18,000 into a "single integrated market" has put them employees of the EC, never famous for their in charge again. They not only have something efficiency, remain bound by bureaucratic tradi- to do, it's something important. tion. The entry a few years ago of Spain and "Five years ago, I was considering whether I Portugal, in fact, has made the machinery of should go to the private sector. I wouldn't the European Commission and its sister body, dream of doing that now," said a British for- the European Parliament, more cumbersome eign-trade functionary. than ever. With nine official languages and a The implementation of the 1992 project, a staff composed of citizens of all 12 countries, massive undertaking requiring 279 new Eu- the EC is a living Tower of Babel, in danger of rope-wide directives that must make their way gagging on its many tongues. through a complex, seven-stage approval pro- At an informal level, the problem is less se- cess, has the halls of the sterile Berlaymont vere. Low-level staff meetings are usually held building buzzing. From trucking to banking to in French or English, the de facto working lan- taxes to television, the separate markets of guages at the Berlaymont. But when the higher- Western Europe are being opened up to re- ups get involved, national pride steps in and forms and competition, and the new rules of few demean themselves by speaking tongues the game are being written here. other than their own. That means 12 interpret- One new regulation will wipe out a third or ers if six languages are spoken at a meeting, 27 so of the German trucking industry, the official if all nine are used. (Why do those combina- in charge of drafting it says, with a hint of sat- tions not make mathematical sense? Because isfaction in his voice. Another will change the some languages can't be translated directly into way Italy trains its dentists. Another will over- some others. Few interpreters are fluent in turn a Danish prohibition against tin cans-un- both Greek and Danish, for instance. So the less the Danes succeed in getting an exemption; speaker's language must be routed through a it's a hot issue in Denmark. more common tongue first.) The importance of these rule changes has Just to make things more difficult, the Ger- brought dozens of American companies and mans are under new instructions from home to law firms to Brussels, to monitor and to lobby demand that all documents be presented in the European Community. Not only are these German as well as French and English, no mat- enterprises hiring former U.S. diplomats to ter how low-level the meeting or transitory the open doors, they are stealing some of the EC's issue. They've been known to walk out of con- best and brightest for the same purpose. (A conferences or refuse to participate if their native servative estimate is that there are 20,000 Euro- tongue isn't used, even though many of them pean and foreign lobbyists working in Brus- speak three or four languages fluently. sels.) In cases where retirement and pension Squabbles aside, the Eurocrats remain on rules discourage the ex-Eurocrats from accept- the list of Belgium's best-paid employees. Many ing large salaries, private-sector employers of- earn over six figures in dollars, and, though his

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salary is not public information, Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commis- sion, is said to earn more than President Bush. No wonder that some of Europe's steepest restaurant and taxi prices can be found in Brussels and Stras- bourg, France, the home of the European Parliament. The Parliament is no less Byzantine than the Commis- sion. Made up of 5 18 directly elected members from all EC countries, it holds its full ses- sions in Strasbourg, more than an hour from Brussels. Is that hard on the legislative body's staff? Ask them if you can find them-they're based in Lux- The Berlaymont Building embourg, more than 100 miles from Strasbourg. With dreams of traveling less, Parliament cut off his microphone, but the rightist contin- has authorized the construction of a huge new ued until he was removed by ushers. complex, including a legislative chamber, in Parliament features more famous faces than Brussels. Work has been underway for months, before as well. Former Minister Willy de but France and Luxembourg have not agreed Clercq, French arch-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, to the move, and they have the power under EC and French Communist leader Georges law to veto it indefinitely. When asked what the Marchais-all are members, as are several building will be used for if Parliament never lesser-known British lords and ladies and a de- shows up, EC staff members mumble some- scendant of the Hapsburg dynasty. thing about a convention hall. The leaders of the 12 European member na- Despite its bizarre politics, the European tions view the increasing power of the EC bu- Parliament is a lean machine in some respects. reaucracy with some misgivings. British Prime It has a total of about 3,200 staff aides, com- Minister Margaret Thatcher, for one, has de- pared to about 18,000 for the U.S. Congress. cried the possibility of a "European super-state The most important committees, dealing with exercising a new dominance from Brussels." such issues as taxation and monetary policy, Other countries couldn't be more pleased with have six staffers at the most. The average com- the prospect of a stronger Brussels. mittee staff in the U.S. House of Represen- Italy, for instance, has been a strong advo- tatives numbers in the fifties or sixties, with cate of expanding the single market into an all- some staffs exceeding 100. encompassing political union. That is because Like the Commission staff members in the Italians, who have seen one government af- Brussels, members of Parliament are increas- ter another topple since the end of World War ingly feisty these days. Seated by party, not by 11, have reason to believe that the Brussels bu- country, they bicker over the wording of bills, reaucracy might do a better job of running Italy jeer at the president (a Spaniard named than the Italians have. Enrique Baron Crespo) in the time-honored style of backbenchers throughout Europe, and -Anne Swardson openly read newspapers while business is being conducted in the chamber. Once a docile rub- ber stamp for the Commission, Parliament reached new levels of obstreperousness last fall Anne Swardson is a business reporter for the when a rightist member loudly and lengthily Washington Post. She visited five EC nations re- protested what he saw as a procedural slight to cently under a fellowship from the Eisenhower his party. He went on at such length that Baron Foundation.

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ket. The system is not without costs: Partici- pating in it basically means marching in step with West Germany's powerful Bundesbank, which sits like an elephant on inflation, oblivious to the temptation of low interest rates and economic expansion. At the same time, a new European Cur- rency Unit was created. Some day, it may serve as the EC's universal currency. For now, however, it is used only in a few paper transactions. The ecu, as it is sometimes called-some would like to rename it the Wrapped in the flag of Europe: Jacques Delors, monnet-has been minted in small quanti- the president of the European Commission. ties and is legal tender only in Belgium. (It is worth about $1.10.) But even at the Brus- cadets recessions, energy shortages, and sels airport, at last report, you can't buy a chronic inflation. It was during this period newspaper with one. that "nontariff" barriers (e.g., quotas) pro- Despite these accomplishments, the EC liferated, aimed against both outsiders and was so paralyzed by quarrels among its fellow members of the Common Market. members that the Council of Ministers re- The Common Market was not entirely fused in 1982 to pay for an official celebra- moribund. In 1973, three new members tion of the 25th anniversary of the Treaty of joined the original six: Denmark, Ireland, Rome. Pieter Dankert, the Dutch president and Great Britain. (Greece entered in 1981, of the European Parliament, compared the and Spain and Portugal joined in 1986.) Or, EC to "a feeble cardiac patient whose con- to use the EC's overblown terminology, dition is so poor that he cannot even be which frequently sounds like mumbo- disturbed by a birthday party." jumbo borrowed from the Loyal Order of Three years later the patient was fit to Moose: First there were the Six, then En- chase nurses around. The Europeans real- largement, then the Twelve. ized that they were being left behind as the In 1978, the EC created the European world economy began to recover from the Monetary System. Responding to the de- global recession of the early 1980s. Instead struction of the postwar Bretton Woods in- of being a comfortable Number Two to the ternational monetary system by President friendly United States, they faced the pros- Richard M. Nixon during the early 1970s, pect of straggling in at Number Three be- the member nations agreed to coordinate hind a surly America and remote Japan. the foreign exchange rates of their curren- They were (and still are) combating high cies.* By minimizing fluctuations in, say, unemployment. Europe's basic indus- the value of the Belgian franc compared to tries-steel, autos, and the like-were no the German mark, the system lowered the match for the Japanese and other Asian risk of doing business across borders and competitors. Far worse, Europe was falling encouraged trade within the Common Mar- further and further behind both Japan and the United States in computers, semi- 'Britain, with its special ties to the United States and its historical ambivalence about close involvement with continen- conductors, electronics, and a host of tal Europe, long delayed joining the EMS. Recently, however, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tentatively agreed to smaller high-tech industries. While Ronald throw the pound into the EMS pot. Reagan was declaring it to be morning

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again in America, Europeans were still nations to the 1992 program, and it intro- struggling along with their flashlights. duced a crucial reform in the governing in- In 1984, Wisse Dekker, president of Phil- stitutions the EC had created since 1957. ips, the Dutch electronics giant, declared Today, there are four key institutions: that the failure to complete the "home- The Council of Ministers. The EC's su- work" given in the 1957 Treaty of Rome preme body, it is comprised of the 12 lead- was the source of Europe's distress. He pro- ers of the member nations (or their repre- posed to realize the promise of the Com- sentatives), with final power to approve or mon Market with a plan he prematurely disapprove EC actions. dubbed "Europe 1990." The Common Mar- The Commission. Now headed by ket had been launched during the 1950s for Delors, it is the EC's executive branch, with reasons of state, over the opposition of 17 Commissioners (the equivalent of cabi- much of European business, which was net secretaries) appointed by the Council then wed to local markets. "Now the situa- and some 12,000 "Eurocrats," headquar- tion has been reversed," observed Giovanni tered in Brussels. Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat, "it is the en- The Court of Justice. Based in Luxem- trepreneurs and corporations who are bourg, it is the EC'S 13-member "supreme keeping the pressure on politicians to tran- court." It deals chiefly with trade and busi- scend considerations of local and national ness disputes involving both governments interest. We believe that European unity is and individuals. our best hope for stimulating growth and The Parliament. Sitting in Strasbourg, technological innovation, and for remain- France, its 518 members are elected by ing an influential presence in the world." popular vote in the EC countries. The Par- The project got the capable leader it liament is the only democratic body in the needed in 1985, when Jacques Delors, a EC organization, and the only body that former finance minister in the Socialist lacks a clear function. Controlling about 30 government of France's Francois Mitter- percent of the EC's $50 billion budget, it and, became president of the EC's Commis- has few other powers. Ever hopeful, ever sion, or executive arm. (He was recently helpless, the members sit in eight political appointed to another four-year term.) groupings from left to right, rather than in Delors, one of the architects of Mitterand's national delegations. disastrous scheme to nationalize large sec- The big change wrought by the Single tors of French industry, was a very curious European Act was the limitation of mem- choice. But he seemed to grow larger than bers' veto powers. Before the Act, any na- life in a job that had only diminished other tion could veto any proposal in the Coun- men. cil. Now, the veto power is sharply limited. Most decisions are reached by "qualified" elors immediately set out to "com- (i.e. weighted) majority votes. This new plete the internal market." By chemistry encourages the members to DJune 1985, he and Lord Cockfield, compromise rather than play "chicken." an EC commissioner from Britain, had The Act also broadened the powers of drafted the White Paper which laid out the the European Parliament, transforming it 1992 program. By the end of the year, they from a 98-pound weakling into a 99-pound had won the endorsement of the 12 leaders one. Now it can veto petitions for EC mem- of the EC nations for what was called the bership and trade agreements with non-EC Single European Act. It committed the 12 nations. And it can request changes in

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directives and regulations drawn up by the But even if Europe fails to realize the Commission, although these alterations are dream of unity, some of Americans' worst subject to the Council's approval. fears about a protectionist Europe may still European enthusiasts hope that these come true. It is entirely possible that a Dis- new powers will transform Parliament into united States of Europe will choose a more something more than the glorified univer- protectionist course. Long before Mr. sity eating, drinking, and debating club it Delors came along, the EC created a Com- has been. But in the parliamentary elec- mon Agricultural Policy (CAP), a program tions held last spring, only 59 percent of the of subsidy and protection so enormous European electorate bothered to vote-not ($33 billion) and comprehensive that it bad at all by American standards, abysmal dwarfs the U.S. farm program. Under the by European ones. CAP, Europe subsidizes crops, supports farm prices, limits certain imports, and n EC-speak, Parliament's shortcomings heavily subsidizes exports (i.e. "dumping"). and the problems they represent are re- European crop subsidies, for example, I ferred to as the "democratic deficit," as launched Italy into competition with Cali- if they amounted to nothing more than a fornia in the kiwi fruit market; because of troublesome budget item. But as many ob- European export subsidies, American farm- servers have pointed out, Parliament may ers have lost substantial markets for wheat be the key to the European adventure. So and chicken in Egypt. Overall, CAP costs far, the business of European integration American farmers billions of dollars in ex- has been conducted largely over the heads ports annually. It is a major target of U.S. of most Europeans, by politicians and un- trade negotiators. The Europeans know elected technocrats like Delors. Even that it is a scandal-ridden pork barrel, but though Europeans are generally far more they stand by it. willing to concede autonomy to the state In another pre-Delors venture in co- than Americans are, the technocratic drift operation, England, France, and West Ger- of the '92 effort could ultimately be its un- many in 1966 created a consortium called doing. Outright opposition to 1992 is now Airbus Industrie to compete with Boeing scattered. By majorities of around 80 per- and McDonnell-Douglas in the global civil- cent, Europeans have long supported ian aviation market. By 1972, the Airbus greater integration-in the abstract. But A300B took to the skies, and today the con- they could be in for a big surprise when sortium manufactures high-quality prod- more and more of the '92 directives are im- ucts which claim about 25 percent of the plemented: when French beers find their world market for airliners, most of it way into West German stores, or when Brit- wrested from its two U.S. competitors. ish (or American or Japanese) companies European breasts swell with pride when buy out Spanish manufacturers, or when Airbus is mentioned. Yet the consortium Dutch electronics workers are laid off be- has been on the dole for 20 years. Subsidies cause plants are shifted to low-wage from the five European governments that Greece. The EC itself has estimated that now participate (Spain, the Netherlands, completion of the '92 program could cost and Belgium have joined the consortium) Europe 250,000 jobs per year during the have run into the billions-Boeing esti- first years of the plan-although many mates $15 billion over the first 18 years- more would also be created. And what if a although the exact amount remains a se- recession comes along? cret. The consortium operates like a monu-

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mental corporate "share-the-wealth" chain trade, and all have various needs for for- letter. Fuselage sections, nose landing-gear eign goods. The Irish, Danes, and Dutch, doors, ailerons, and other components are for example, have no domestic auto indus- built at 67 different plants scattered tries of their own. As a result, they lust after throughout the five nations, then ferried by Toyotas and Nissans. Jagdish Bhagwati, an giant cargo planes called Super Guppies to economist at Columbia University and the the central plant in Toulouse, France. After author of Protectionism (1988), argues op- assembly, each Airbus is flown to Hamburg, timistically that their huge overseas invest- West Germany, where its interior is fitted. ments now give European (and other) cor- Then back to Toulouse for delivery-some- porations every incentive to oppose times at prices below cost, critics charge- protectionism. The same is increasingly to the customer. true of governments. The global economy Europlanners seem to think that this is a is blurring national distinctions-American terrific way to create 200,000 jobs and trade negotiators, for example, now find strike a blow at the Yanks, never mind the themselves trying to keep open foreign fact that European taxpayers (and Ameri- markets for Honda automobiles built in ca's unsubsidized workers) are footing the Ohio. And Bhagwati also points out that in bill. They would like to see more ventures this new environment, protectionism is of its kind. Thus, last fall's quota on imports largely futile. World trade grew very rapidly of U.S. television shows came with a cherry even during the protectionist 1970s. on top: a $275 million handout to foster a All of this suggests only that at best Eu- European answer to Hollywood. rope's markets during the 1990s will not be These are not encouraging models of in- much more closed than they are today. tra-European cooperation. Add to them Some observers believe that a slight open- Delors' controversial plan for what is called ing is even possible. At this point, one can a Social Dimension-an expensive and all- only guess. But a significant dismantling of embracing European welfare state-and protectionist policies now seems out of the one can easily imagine the EC seeking a question. cozy, protected, but ultimately suicidal re- European unity was conceived in the tirement from the world marketplace. name of peace and international amity, de- But a variety of factors will probably signed to end the divisions among nations prevent the Europeans from erecting an that led to two world wars. For it to end up impregnable Fortress. Some of the EC na- as little more than an elaborate support for tions (West Germany, Britain, and the Neth- outmoded protectionism would be worse erlands) have traditions of relatively free than disappointing. It would be tragic.

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Too LITTLE,Too LATE? by Josef Joffe

hree years from now, on scribed by German law. Spanish tinto will January 1, 1993, Western compete with Greek retsina and British Europe will be "born riesling (yes, there is English-made wine) again." The 12-state Euro- on a "level playing field," as a key 1992 pean Community (EC) will shibboleth has it. By 1993, West Europeans turn into the Single Inte- may even tackle one of the most frightful gratedT Market (SIM). This new creation will tasks of all: the design of a SIP-a "single unite some 320 million people with a com- integrated plug" to fit every electrical outlet bined gross domestic product of about five between Portugal and Greece. trillion dollars and will stretch from Cork So will "1992" be like "1776," when the to Calabria, from the Atlantic to the Ae- 13 colonies decided to bid farewell to gean. As a trading bloc, it will surpass all George I11 and set up the United States of others in the world. Even today, the (exter- America? By no means. After all, the for- nal) exports of the EC dwarf those of the mer colonies took another 11 years to other two giants, the United States and Ja- agree on a common constitution, and even pan. The EC is good for 20 percent of world by 1787 they did not really amount to one exports, followed by the United States with nation, indivisible. Real integration eluded 15 percent and Japan with 9 percent. the United States until 1865, when, after The process of Euro-fusion is known by four years of fratricidal civil war, force of the shorthand symbol of "1992." By the arms decided the question of whether there end of that year, supposedly, everything was truly e pluribus unum. Real economic will be in place for the "Big Bang" of 1993. integration in the United States was not A dream will then come true: the free achieved until the early 20th century. It movement of capital, people, and goods- took the completion of the transcontinental untrammeled by national governments and railway to draw the two coasts into a single their legions of customs, immigration, and market. And though Americans never had health inspectors. In theory, it will no to battle with francs, marks, lire, pounds, longer matter whether a physician is a and pesetas, they had no "central bank" un- docteur (French), Doktor (German), or til the Federal Reserve System was founded dottore (Italian). All will be able to set up in 1913. shop in Copenhagen without the permis- Come 1993, West Europeans will have sion of Danish authorities-though in prac- at least as far to go as the young American tice they will have to learn Danish before nation did. They will have no common cur- being able to tell their patients to "Say rency-apart from the ethereal European aaah.. . ." Creme fraiche from Normandy Currency Unit (ECU). They will have no will arrive on the dairy shelf of a Munich "European Bank" to determine interest supermarket without passing through the rates and money supplies for the entire rigorous pasteurization procedures pre- Community. Instead, 12 central banks will

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try to grope their way toward "monetary other through a "qualified majority vote," union"-a task so overwhelming even to this is not what happens in practice. The contemplate that it has been postponed un- unwritten but ironclad rule is that no na- til the late 1990s. West Europeans won't tion shall be outvoted if it chooses to pro- have a single "federal" income tax, and it is claim the issue at hand as one of "vital na- very doubtful whether they will be able to tional importance." impose the same "value-added tax" (the Eu- The European Parliament in Stras- ropean version of a sales tax) on all 12 bourg, on the other hand, has virtually countries any time soon. none of the classic functions of a real par- Nor will the Community have "harmo- liament. It cannot make laws, appoint the nized" the myriad national laws-not even executive (the Commission), or vote those that pertain only to economic inter- taxes-the three prerogatives that have course and regulation. Already, the conten- made legislatures in the democratic world tious issue of indirect taxation has been one of the three pillars of power next to the postponed beyond 1993, and the same goes executive and the judiciary. for the abolition of border controls.* There are just too many rules and regulations in search of "harmonization." That is why the "founding fathers," the experts of the EC Commission in Brussels, have left national product safety standards and other obstrep- erous issues in abeyance-trusting that they will be resolved on a case-by-casebasis in future suits brought before the European Court. The American analogy falls apart completely when it comes to the question of political governance, to the much talked about "single integrated government" (SIG). To be sure, a European Parliament already meets in Strasbourg. But the "real" parliament is the Council of Ministers in Brussels, which represents not electorates From Le Monde, Paris. but states. This is where sovereignty lies and will remain-or, more precisely, where sovereignty is shared ad hoc by 12 independent governments. Whatever the European Commission (the "executive") Why all the fuss, then, about 1992? does must be sanctioned by the Council of There won't be a European Bank, there Ministers, and though the emissaries of the won't be a European Currency, and there 12 states can theoretically outvote one an- won't be a single rule-making power-all "This reflects profound differences in historical develop- of which are logically necessary to make 12 ment. The British would like to remain in charge of their separate markets into a truly common one. borders because once a person is inside the country, he is hard to track down-given that the UK, like the US.,knows Nor will there be a federation with true neither identity cards nor registration with the authorities at the place of residence. The continental countries have both, centralized power-at least not for a very which makes border checks less vital. long time, if ever. Twelve states will con-

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tinue to exist, along with their national gov- this is just the beginning: the first step to- ernments and frontiers. Customs borders ward a truly united Europe. Ensconced be- will vanish and a few supranational institu- hind towering protectionist walls, so it is tions such as the Commission, the Euro- thought, the 12 will go on to build the pean Court, and the European Parliament "United States of Europe," rivaling the su- will encourage cooperation. But in many perpowers and dominating all commercial respects, 1992 will be little more than competitors. 1957-a quarter-century later. In 1957, the original six EC states he hopes and the apprehensions are (France, the Federal Republic of Germany, equally exaggerated; 1992 will not Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Lux- T be the annus mirabilis of the Euro- embourg) concluded the Treaty of Rome. pean Community. If history is a guide, 1992 The agreement provided for a perfect cus- will not be the take-off point from which toms union in stages. That it was not European integration soars unswervingly achieved according to the original schedule toward perfection. Ever since the venture was the fault, first, of the six early birds who began in 195 1 (with the European Coal and resisted implementation and, then, of the Steel Community), "Europe" has been the six latecomers (Britain, Denmark, Greece, story of hopeful starts and grinding halts- Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) who asked for the story of nation-states seeking the eco- exemptions and special treatment. Leveling nomic benefits of scale without having to trade barriers that should have been re- pay the ultimate political price: the loss of moved years ago, 1992 is in many ways old national sovereignty. Inevitably, such an en- business; what is new about it is its attack terprise generates more cant than candor. on "invisibles" like national health, prod- Candor would require admitting that the uct, and environmental standards, all of "teleology" of Europe-what it is to be- which hamper free trade and the opening come-is shrouded in deepest darkness. of a Community-wide market for profes- And for good reason: Neither Francois sional services. Mitterand nor Helmut Kohl nor Margaret The sound and the fury result, then, less Thatcher, to name but three key players, from fact than from expectation. And from wants to legislate himself or herself out of a resurgence of hope. In 1985, after years of existence. Nor do their compatriots want to stagnation and "Europessimism," the Euro- become the equivalent of Michiganders or pean Community suddenly developed new Californians; that is, Europeans first and energy. This surge inspired the Single Euro- Frenchmen, Germans, or Britons second. pean Act of 1985-the "constitution" of the The nation-state is alive and well in Eu- Single Integrated Market. The new elan gal- rope. It is not about to crumble like yester- vanized the imagination of the West Euro- day's doomed empires. And while the West peans-and struck fear into the hearts of Europeans know in their hearts what they Americans and Japanese. Europeans hope, do not want-the sacrifice of their state- while Americans and Japanese suspect, that hoods on the altar of European unity-no-

Josef Joffe, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is foreign editor and columnist for Siiddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. Born in Lodz, Poland, he received a B.A. (1965) from Swarthmore College, an M.A. (1967) from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. (1975) from Harvard University. He is author of Friede ohne Waffen? Der Streit urn die Nachriistung (Peace without Arms? The Conflict over TNF Modem- ization) (1981) and The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States and the Burdens of Alliance (1987). Copyright @ 1990 by Josef Joffe.

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body can agree on what it does want be- Or take the "dirigisme versus laissez yond 1992. Indeed, the "constitutional faire" debate. "We have not successfully debate" has just begun: between "states' rolled back the frontiers of the state in Brit- righters" and "communitarians," between ain," Thatcher observed in Bruges, "only to free traders and protectionists, between see them reimposed at a European champions of laissez-faire and advocates of level. . . . The Treaty of Rome was intended dirigisme, between aficionados of the free as a charter for economic liberty. Our aim market and advocates of welfarism. In each should not be more and more detailed of these debates, the British appear to be on regulation from the center; it should be to one side and the 11 other nations on the deregulate, to remove the constraints on other. But if this were the case, the 11 could trade and to open up." A French official has easily cajole or bully Margaret Thatcher put the issue thus: The British are building into submission. They cannot because they an internal market for the consumer (with do not speak with one voice, let alone think low prices and high real wages), while the with one mind. French are building one for producers Take Mrs. Thatcher's opening volley in (with high profits and low vulnerability to the constitutional debate, delivered in her outside riveils). speech at Bruges, Belgium, on September 20, 1988. "Europe should not be protec- n fact, the debate is not two-sided but tionist. . . " she began. "It would be a be- three-cornered. Its antagonists are eco- trayal if, while breaking down constraints I nomic liberty, state intervention, and on trade to create the single market, the social welfare. It reflects one of the oldest Community were to erect greater external ideological struggles in European history: protection. We must make sure that our ap- between the classic liberals and free- proach to world trade is consistent with the marketeers like Adam Smith, David Ri- liberalization we preach at home." cardo, and Joseph Schumpeter, on the one While the French and the Italians are hand, and mercantilists, socialists, and traditionally and instinctively protectionist Catholics like Jean Baptiste Colbert, Karl (there are virtually no Japanese cars to be Marx, and Jacques Maritain, on the other. found in Paris and Rome), the Dutch and The former believed that the individual was Germans are not (though West German the rightful center of all economic activity, capital and insurance markets are nicely that the greatest individual gain equalled sheltered by informal cartels). Likewise, the the greatest common good. The latter Spaniards, who are past the industrial take- wanted to shift the focus to the collective- off point and depend on large tourist earn- in order, variously, to strengthen the state ings, are more fervent free-traders than the in its rivalries with other states (the mer- Portuguese and Greeks, whose economies cantilists), to favor one class over another in many respects are closer to those of the (the Marxists), or to ensure that a quantum Third World than those of the First. Such a of social justice would temper the ravages collection of countries, ranging so widely of economic competition (the Catholic ad- in economic development and commercial vocates of "subsidiarity"). interests, won't easily agree on a common Although "1992" will not resolve these trade policy, let alone on the European ideological differences, it is safe to bet that equivalent of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.* the New Europe, with a long history of state

'The infamous American tariff of 1930 which imposed oner- intervention behind it, will not end up look- ous duties on many imports. ing like Reagan's America of deregulation

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policy" or its opposite, a policy of competition and diversification, the Parisian bureaucracy inevitably takes the lead. Power in Germany, by contrast, flows from neo- corporatist roots: Large organized interests (labor, business, public employees, peasants) have habitually ex- ercised-and will retain- veto power over public choice. As a consequence,

-- the protectionist instincts of From Munich's Suddeutsche Zeitung. the two countries make for "Show your violin," says Mrs. Thatcher. Extracting a baton from distinctly different policies. her case, she clearly did not come to play along with the others. While the French are ex- and welfare cutbacks. Still, it is not just ternal protectionists, the Germans are in- Thatcher versus everybody else, but the ternal protectionists. Paris will typically oldest game in the history of the nation- pick a strategic industry, define it as being state: the one in which states with very dif- in the "national interest," and then seek to ferent traditions and cultures try to assert shelter or strengthen it against the interna- themselves against others. The French, tional market-even at the expense of coming out of the mercantilist-absolutist groups and firms at home which are not so tradition of a Louis XIV, instinctively favor favored. Given the cataclysmic changes suf- statism. The Germans, however, look back fered by Germany during this century, the to a very brief history of centralized deci- basic German consensus is stability uber sion-making and are therefore more in- alles: Nobody must lose. Hence designated clined to contemplate power-sharing winners are not so much nurtured as among autonomous institutions. The Ger- known losers are subsidized-whether

man Bundesbank, for instance, is the most - coal, steel, agriculture,- Paris, or the EC powerful national bank in Europe not just likes it or not. because it commands the almighty Alternatively, if change is unavoidable, deutschmark but because it is virtually in- losers must be bought off. French, British, dependent of the government. France's Italians, and others care little about shop- central bank enjoys no such independence. closing hours. In West Germany, though, an So it is hard to see how the French and ancient federal law prescribes in detail the Germans will ever agree on a European times when consumers are allowed to buy Bank for the monetary union they contem- certain goods. A recent attempt to keep plate. stores open on Thursday evenings unleashed a national storm, pitting shop- rance and Germany are both more keeper associations and retail clerk unions collectivist than Britain-but in very against (badly organized) consumers. The Fdifferent ways. Roughly speaking, in outcome was a draw: Hours that were France it is the state that is strong; in Ger- added on Thursday night were lopped off many, it is society. Whether it is "industrial Saturday afternoon. Similarly, the veto pre-

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rogative of large, well organized groups will for parts of Germany that were never con- lead Bonn to fight tooth and nail against quered by Roman legions). But what have any European company law that grants Portuguese and Greeks in common to- unions less power than they have under day-except, ironically, Japanese "dura- German "co-determination law," which bles" and the products of American pop provides workers equal representation on culture? It is not the Chanson de Roland boards of firms above a certain size. but the TV show Dallas that provides in- stantly recognizable images and metaphors he point of these examples is that throughout Europe. even when two nations like France Nor are any of the 12 governments T and Germany are similarly posi- about to slink away. Thatcher made only a tioned along the collectivist-individualist self-evident point when she stressed "will- scale, policies at home and in Europe can ing and active cooperation between sover- differ profoundly. And since the road to eign states" as a necessary condition of Eu- 1992 and beyond must be travelled by rope's evolution. It is a safe bet that no states driving not simply in tandem but in public-opinion majority would be found for convoy, progress will be slower than some the "United States of Europe" if sovereignty hope and others fear. Possibilities for colli- were jeopardized. How many Germans or sion lurk around every comer. Frenchmen would be willing to see Bonn Which is why Thatcher, speaking in the or Paris become like Albany or Sacra- name of realism, rightly raised the "states' mento? And what common language rights" issue in her Bruges speech in Sep- would the Europeans speak? Charles de tember 1988. "Willing and active coopera- Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher's spiritual prede- tion between sovereign states is the best cessor, used to suggest the non-existent Vo- way to build a successful European com- lapuk in order to make fun of the European munity. To try to suppress nationhood and ideologues. But a synthetic language it concentrate power at the center of a Euro- would have to be. And to get an idea of how pean conglomerate would be highly dam- difficult it would be to come up with a new aging.. . . It would be folly to fit [the EC Esperanto, one need only consider the countries] into some sort of identikit struggle involved in deciding upon a uni- personality." Her words brought howls-of form cover for the European passport- condemnation from "good Europeans," one whose color had to be different from but in fact the British prime minister any used by the 12 governments. (The color merely pointed out the obvious. finally decided upon was burgundy.) Unlike the 13 American colonies, which had relatively little history of their own in 1776, the European 12 are nation-states or former empires whose history goes back as far as the demise of Rome some 1500 years ago. By 1400, Britain and France were dis- The Community's history of fitful starts tinct nation-states, not just royal posses- and grinding halts dramatizes two prob- sions of the Tudors or Valois. The 12 speak lems. One is obvious: Integration can only nine different languages, vernaculars that go as far and fast as the sacro egoisrno-the are older than their separate statehoods. "sacred egoismw-of nations allows. The Ages ago, these now separate nations were other problem is less obvious but no less part of a common Latin civilization (except profound. Western Europe has chosen a

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path to unity that knows no precedent. It is past-economics or politics, Marx or Bis- not political will that fuels the engine but marck? If we turn to the two best known economic necessity. It is not the Philadel- instances of unification, the United States of phia Constitutional Convention or Bis- America and the second German Reich marck's Prussia that will bring unity out of (187 1-19 l8), economics does not look like diversity but, if you will, Karl Marx and the the preordained winner. In both cases, po- "modes of production." Economic litical choice (or, in the German case, impo- forces-the need for economies of scale or sition*) preceded the integration of the for international competitiveness-are sup- economy. In post- 187 1 Germany, it was not posed to lead the way; political institutions the "hidden hand" of the market, much less are expected to follow. In Marxist terminol- functional necessity, but the iron fist of Ber- ogy, it is the "sub-structure" that will deter- lin that forced a centuries-old world of mine the "super-structure." autonomous kingdoms, principalities, Marxist terminology, however, is no duchies, and free cities into one nation and longer in vogue. The contemporary, non- then into one market. "Blood and iron" revolutionary version of economic deter- achieved what the Reich's paltry predeces- minism is "functionalism," the reigning sor, the North German Customs Union creed of Europeanists since integration's (Zollverein), could never do: They created a infant days during the early 1950s. Func- powerful state in all of Germany. This state tionalism banked on what one could de- then proceeded to tear down customs bar- scribe as "unification on the sly." The pro- riers, impose a common currency, sweep cess would begin with the merger of away the many restraints on trade put in certain sectors such as coal and steel. Such place by kings, guilds, and associations, and mergers would soon generate irresistible replace them with new nation-wide laws pressures for the integration of more and and regulations. more sectors. This is known as the "spill- In terms of brute state power, the young over effect": If there were free trade in American republic was a spindly adoles- steel, functionalists reasoned, how could cent compared to the muscle-bound Ger- cars be excluded? If Volkswagens were to man Reich. But even in the United States, a sell duty-free in France, why not chablis in supreme political act-the fusion of 13 ex- Germany? And once goods travelled freely, colonies under an overarching general will the invisible barriers of indirect taxes and as laid down in the 1787 Constitution-pre- internal regulations would have to go. Then ceded and shaped what would come after- there would remain national monetary pol- wards: economic integration, territorial ex- icies, which distort trade; so they would pansion, and what one might call the have to be harmonized and brought under dismantling of conflicting internal rules a common monetary authority. But since and regulations pertaining to agricultural monetary authority is the sacred preserve production (i.e. the abolition of slavery). of autonomous governments, this last ram- The market did not make the state. The op- part of national sovereignty would have to posite is in fact the case. The growth of cen- fall in order to allow the forward march of tral government's power in the United economic integration. States is the history of the government's ex- The theory appears both logical and pansion into the market via countless regu- plausible. But compare its premises with latory laws and agencies-the Interstate

the historical record of integration else- +The process of German unification has aptly been called where. What has driven the process in the "the conquest of Germany by Prussia."

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AN 'F' FOR EFFORT?

An uncharacteristic gloom permeated the European Commission's latest (September 1989) progress report on the 1992 agenda. The report also shows how complex are the obstacles to the "single integrated market." Of the 100 directives, regulations, and other measures that were supposed to be "imple- mented" and in effect throughout the EC as of September, the Commission reported, only six were actually in force in all 12 nations. Spain and Portugal have fallen far behind their partners; Greece, Italy, Belgium, and Ireland are also lagging badly. In Italy and Portugal, for example, none of the EC directives regulating pollutants from autos has been put into effect. Although the report does not say so, this reflects a major fault line in the EC. The relatively poor nations which have joined the EC looking for an economic lift-Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland-are going to be reluctant to pay the costs of the strict standards for safety and health favored by the wealthier nations. Even when laws are on the books, the Commission found, compliance is often far from exemplary: "It is. . . shocking that national bureaucracies all too often continue to regard Community nationals as foreigners and, in practice, deprive them of their rights of establishment and residence through nit-picking interpretation of rules." The European Court of Justice, meanwhile, is having "alarming" difficulties making violators toe the line. Nine nations have ignored Court rulings. The Greeks, for example, have defied a decision that requires them to drop restrictions on foreign architects and surveyors; the West Germans are in violation of a 1987 Court ruling outlawing 16th-century purity laws that bar imports of many non-German beers. There is trouble at the top, too. The European Council is tied in knots over the elimination of various border controls and the "harmonization" of indirect taxes. French resistance is a major cause of the tax deadlock. Harmonization would require Paris to reduce its steep value-added taxes and other indirect levies and to rely much more on its income tax, which French governments since the Revolution have been loath to do. The Commission warned of "a worrying lack of progress." What it did not say is that it now seems clear that major elements of the 1992 program will not be in place on time.

Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade policy. Yet a nation's fiscal-monetary mix Commission, the Federal Communications determines the pace of unemployment and Commission, the Federal Reserve System, inflation at home, and these are factors of and a host of others. great weight when electorates decide on The historical record, then, does not the fate of their governors. point to the primacy of economics over politics. The record suggests that the reality t is doubtful that any government in of West European integration will always Western Europe will want to let go of fall short of the functionalist dream-un- I the levers of the economy. Functional- less the states do what they show no sign of ist theory proclaims that the governments wanting to do: merge their sovereignties have no choice because the nation-state, into something that is more powerful than pushed and pummeled by an increasing each and all. number of transnational forces, is no Not even the dream of 1992 will be real- longer in charge of its economic destiny. ized by New Year's Day 1993. For in order But if this is true, why would governments to have a truly common market, the 12 will compound the problem by offering up fur- need a truly common monetary and fiscal ther powers to a supranational body? Pre-

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cisely because the nation-state has been of the 12 can offer. Already, the "concentra- battered by transnational forces beyond its tion of capital," as Marxist terminology has reach, it now seeks to recapture control, it, is bursting through national and conti- not to relinquish it. nental confines, as the sustained rush to- Force may be the only effective unifier, ward global corporate alliances and merg- as history again suggests. In America's case, ers continues. George I11 forced the colonies into unity; in Germany's, it was Bismarck who brought ake an example which may prove about unity through "blood and iron." But typical of future trends. In 1989, the in the contemporary West European set- T West German Post Office opened ting, there is neither a dreadful enemy nor bidding for the installation of a private mo- a formidable unifier. Instead of facing over- bile telephone network in the Federal Re- whelming pressure to unite, the West Euro- public. The race was entered by seven con- peans may soon find themselves faced by a sortia-not one of them purely European, powerful reason not to. The reason comes let alone German. Among the contenders: in the form of an irony: Just at a time when Olivetti (Italy), Shearson Lehman (U.S.), Western Europe is trying to grow bigger, it BCE Mobile (Canada), Cables and Wireless is finding that it may become something (Britain), Lyonnaise des Eaux (France), that is still too small. Comvik (Sweden), and various German The irony consists of two parts. First, banks and companies. Big Business, it is even as a perfect customs union, Western obvious, already operates on a global rather Europe may be too small economically. Af- than a continental scale. ter all, more and more goods and services Also, it is no longer clear whether are being produced and distributed on a Volvo, Toyota, IBM, or BP are "national" global rather than a national or even re- corporations in any meaningful sense. They gional level. Second, as the ideological divi- produce world-wide, their shares are sion of Europe wanes along with the Cold traded world-wide, they sell global rather War, Western Europe may become too than national products, and their loyalties small politically. The ultimate irony may are no longer necessarily focused on their well be that a united Western Europe, both home countries. If IBM, for instance, does as an institution and as a dream, is ap-. well, its workers in the United States do not preaching obsolescence just as the 12 are necessarily do better as a result; it is more poised for their Great Leap Forward. likely that IBM's profits go up because it Consider, for instance, the global scale has shifted jobs to lower-wage locales. The of production and consumption. The threat day is not far off when American, French, posed to the EC by this development is that or German cars will be world cars, subject market forces, given current trends, will only to modifications required by local outleap institution building. One key mo- tastes-as Japanese and Korean consumer tive for 1992 is to present European pro- electronics already are. ducers with an open market of 324 million The implications of globalization are consumers so that they can profit from still unclear. But they do not necessarily economies of scale and acquire competi- make Big Business (or consumers) into tive muscle. Yet the ultimate economy of faithful allies of national governments or scale may soon be measured in global regional institutions like the European terms. Companies may well end up requir- Community. Economic necessity, viewed ing a far larger base than even the Europe by functionalists as the motor for European

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integration, may impel producers toward open trade and investment-toward the global widening of economic frontiers rather than to their regional tightening. To maximize profits, the modern corporation does not necessarily need what Brussels is building. And just as business long ago learned to ignore national frontiers, so may it learn to circumvent and leapfrog whatever obstacles the EC puts in its way. Political developments pose equally salient chal- From Amsterdam's De Telegraaf. lenges to the future of the Who next? Austria and Turkey have already applied for member- EC. In many respects, the ship in the EC, and others are sure to follow. So are troubling European integration ven- questions: Should neutrals be allowed in? Members of the Warsaw ture is a child of Joseph Sta- Pact? The EC refuses to rule on any applications until after 1992. lin and of Harry S. Truman. Beginning wi* the Marshall Plan in 1948- rate West European consciousness-are 5 1, the United States pushed West Europe- loosening, too. Suddenly, Gorbachev's So- ans toward integration in order to create a viet Union is knocking at the EC'S doors in bulwark against the Soviet Union on the Brussels. Austria wants in. So does Turkey. continent. Unwillingly, Stalin also played a The Swiss, Swedes, and Norwegians will crucial part. His looming presence over- not want to be left out forever. And Hun- shadowed ancient rivalries and fears which gary and Poland are positioning themselves had kept Europe at war for centuries-qs- for association. Will the 12 want to keep pecially the "arch enmity" between Ger- them out? And if they don't, what will hap- mans and Gauls. The United States, playing pen to West European unification? the protector, helped put these enmities to Only one thing is beyond doubt. More rest. Germans and French could reach members equals less homogeneity; and the across gulfs of resentment and blood to join less homogeneity, the slower the ascent to hands in the common European enterprise the summit of political union. It is precisely because, for the first time, there was sud- for this reason that some EC countries may denly a player in the system more powerful want to keep newcomers out. But at least than either.* one key player in Western Europe will op- But the Cold War is waning. And with its pose exclusivity. passing, the 40-year-old ligaments of the That player is West Germany-a coun- Western system in Europe-NATO, a sepa- try that has been in, of, and with the West during the past 40 years but which, at the 'For an elaboration, see my The LimitedPartnership: Europe, the United States and the Burdens of Alliance (Cambridge: same time, has been powerfully pulled east- Ballinger, 1987), ch. 5: "Alliance as Order." ward. The reasons are obvious. First and

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foremost is the fact of the postwar partition Meanwhile, West Germany's traditional of Germany. For a long time, that issue role in Europe is changing, regardless of seemed to be settled within the framework events in the East. Forty years ago, of of "bipolarity." But as bipolarity recedes, course, West Germany was a defeated, oc- the "German question" once again moves cupied, and discredited half-nation. In or- to the forefront. The crumbling of the Ber- der to come out from under unilaterally lin Wall is only the most visible and dra- imposed controls, the young Federal Re- matic example of this. If the "de-Sovietiza- public had to become a partner in multilat- tion" of Eastern Europe continues, what eral and voluntary ones. That is why the use is the German Democratic Republic new German state became a compulsive (GDR) to Moscow? Moscow most likely will joiner-in the hope that it could regain sov- no longer need the GDR as the strategic ereignty by submerging itself in the West- brace of its East European empire. If the ern community, be it the European Coal democratization of the Soviet bloc contin- and Steel Community, NATO, or the Euro- ues (no foregone conclusion), and the GDR pean Economic Community. For the Fed- continues the reforms that are moving it eral Republic, self-abnegation was the very away from Prusso-Socialism, what is left to condition of self-assertion. legitimize the GDR's existence as a second German state? he success story of the European Regardless of such possible develop- Community during the 1950s and ments, the postwar system in Europe has T '60s cannot be divorced from the become fluid enough to throw the German unique, but transient, state of its soon-to-be question wide open. And while outright most powerful member. Unable and unwill- reunification is the least likely outcome, ing to translate its growing economic "reassociation" or "confederation" is not. weight into political muscle, the Federal Whatever happens, the Soviet Union will al- Republic acted as paragon of integrationist ways retain veto power over Germany's virtue. As long as the Cold War was at its evolution, and that forces West Germany to coldest and West Germany's moral rehabili- be scrupulously deferential to Moscow's tation was incomplete, deference to al- imperial sensitivities. lies-especially to France-was the key- Such deference will have consequences stone of German foreign policy. Bonn paid for the West European venture. For as more into the EC'S communal kitty than it Bonn strengthens the walls of its West Eu- got back in so-called rebates; it yielded to ropean house, it will presumably take care France on matters of agriculture and "high not to build too high or too fast. If and politics"; and throughout, the Federal Re- when Washington and Moscow disengage public chose communal discretion over na- from Europe, even a benign Soviet Union tionalist valor. will not look kindly on a West European But with the fading of thesoviet threat superstate that replaces the United States as and the dimming of memories of World the counterweight to Soviet power. Nor War 11, the Federal Republic has begun to will Bonn want to close the EC'S doors to act like a "normal" nation. In the past, only East Germany and Mitteleuropa, that mythi- De Gaulle would fling his veto against the cal locale of Central Europe, which, in the Community; during the 1980s, West Ger- imagination of some Germans, Czechs, mans have displayed similar petulance, of- Poles, and Hungarians, is the true cultural ten for relatively trivial reasons-such as and political home of their nations. blocking a minuscule drop in EC cereal

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prices. Bonn, in short, has begun to "re- tion of sturdy nation-states in search of nationalize" its foreign policy precisely more integration where tolerable bargains when the Community is poised to leap to- among 12 sovereignties can be struck. ward more supranationality. It is clear, too, that West Europeans Just as West Germany's eager must act in a world that is changing more Europeanism served as motor of integra- rapidly and profoundly than the Communi- tion in the past, its new role, welded to its ty's "founding fathers" could possibly have enormous economic and political clout, foreseen. With a globalizing market exert- may well act as a brake in the future. After ing its pull and an emancipating Eastern 1992, the next scheduled step is monetary Europe beckoning, the Community may union. Today, the West German well become too small economically and Bundesbank acts as the de facto manager of politically. the European Monetary System (EMS), And, finally, the ascent to the summit of which seeks to keep members' parities in supranationality becomes not easier but lockstep. Informally, in fact, the EMS has harder with each stride forward. It does so become a deutschmark zone, beholden to because each step takes the West Europe- monetary discipline meted out by the ans into more difficult terrain, where the Bundesbank. This being the case, it is diffi- shadows of national autonomy loom ever cult to see how the EC will go forward to a more menacingly. The dream of European unified monetary authority. Will the West unity may be older than the European na- Germans relinquish their dominance? If tion-state, but the dream has not yet been not, will the others accept it de jure and not able to overcome the reality of national just de facto? sovereignty. And no matter how battered As Western Europe prepares for its and outmoded that reality is said to be, its Great Leap Forward, it becomes increas- longevity bears a message. It is a message ingly clear that it will not jump as fast or as of persistence, and it will not be drowned far as some people think. Western Europe out by 1992 or any other future assaults on remains what it has always been: a collec- the ramparts of sovereignty in Europe.

FURTHER READING

The Memoirs (Doubleday, 1978) of Jean tions. The European Challenge, 1992: The Monnet, the EC'S "founding father," and Benefits of a Single Market (Cower, 1988), Serge and Merry Bromberger's Jean by Paolo Cecchini, is the EC'S official vision Monnet and the United States of Europe of the fruits of an integrated Europe. The (Coward-McCann, 1969) provide historical 1992 Challenge From Europe: Develop- perspective on today's integration efforts. ment of the European Community's Inter- European Unification: The Origins and nal Market (Nat'l. Planning Assoc., 1988) by Growth of the European Community (Eu- Michael Calingaert, a former US. Foreign ropean Community, 1986), by Klaus-Dieter Service officer, is the best overview; Europe Borchardt, is a compact account. Max 1992: A Practical Guide for American Beloff's The United States and European Business (US. Chamber of Commerce, Unity (Brookings, 1963) describes U.S. atti- 1989) is a readable (and optimistic) nuts- tudes towards European integration through and-bolts guide. American press coverage of the Kennedy administration; Richard J. Bar- European events has been spotty; The Econ- net's The Alliance (Simon and Schuster, omist, the British weekly which circulates 1983) is a more general account of Euro- widely in the United States, is the layman's pean-American political and economic rela- best source of up-to-date information.

WQ WINTER 1990 8 1 CURRENT BOOKS

SCHOLARS' CHOICE Recent titles selected and reviewed by Fellows and staff of the Wilson Center

Dixie's Dictionary

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOUTHERN number of professional football players; or CULTURE. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson that, in 1984, of the top 10 states in the and William Ferris. Univ. of North Carolina. purchases of new mobile homes, eight 1634 pp. $49.95 were in the South. Moon Pies and Moon- shine earn admission alongside such eso- ould any scholar try to prepare an teric topics as Chesapeake Bay Dialect, wEncyclopedia of Northern Culture? Drawl, and Conch (a linguistic oddity of Not likely. Yankeedom is too inclusive and the Florida Keys). Alphabetically arranged, too varied to qualify for such an enter- the Encyclopedia places a sketch of James prise. Southern culture, whether white or Madison on the same page that shelters a black, persists in the popular imagination lively piece about the Mint Julep. as a culture apart. But how should the Numbering 1,600 pages of text and southerners' apartness be defined? weighing close to ten pounds, the volume A leading conservative historian of the is not a book to take to bed. (Better rein- South, Clyde N. Wilson, recently suggested force the shelf it is placed on.) To portray that "the South has always been primarily "everything that has sustained either the a matter of values." True enough. But the reality or the illusion of [southern] re- values that he and other conservatives cel- gional distinctiveness," the editors present ebrate do not include the dissenting tradi- 24 thematic sections, including history, re- tion which C. Vann Woodward recorded in ligion, folklore, language, art and architec- his influential The Strange Career of Jim ture, recreation, politics, the mythic Crow (1955). Woodward showed that South, urbanization, literature, music, vio- southerners, both white and black, have lence, law, and the media. Open it any- periodically striven for racial and class jus- where, and chances are you'll land in the tice, even if those efforts almost inevitably midst of an interesting discussion, often miscarried (or ended up working at cross- enhanced with a pertinent illustration. purposes). Dangers of simplification and On page 1379, for example, is a striking the risks of distortion, both from the right photograph of an elderly white boss, in and the left, have plagued the history of the sparkling white shirt and suspenders, who South more than that of any other Ameri- has one short, Cat leg propped defiantly on can region. One notable accomplishment the bumper of his car, partly obscuring the of the Encyclopedia is that it avoids polem- 1936 Mississippi license plate. Seated def- ics, subtle or overt. erentially behind him in the shadows of a For other reasons as well, the Encyclo- clapboard grocery is a collection of dark- pedia Calls little short of a tour de force. clothed, black-skinned field hands. The With contributions from 800 specialists, photograph begins J. Wayne Flynt's sec- the book contains articles, long and short, tion on Social Class, which shows how some trivial, others serious, ranging from convictions about racial superiority made Hank Aaron to Zydeco (black Creole) mu- possible a sense of white social cohesion sic. Collectively, they make a kind of intel- that all but erased class consciousness. lectual fruitcake, each morsel of which is Relations between blacks and whites almost unfailingly rich. One learns, for in- are never far away anywhere in this ency- stance, that as of 1981, on a ratio to total clopedia. Consider Religion. White Chris- population, Mississippi leads the nation, as tians have generally held the conviction does the lower South as a whole, in the that morality should be approached indi-

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vidualistically. But in a South divided largely between two homogeneous groups, "whites" and "blacks," that conviction enabled white Christians to disdain confront- ing social and racial problems that required collective effort. African-Ameri- cans, by contrast, were denied the luxury of considering their moral lot an individual affair. And black churches have provided the leaders and masses to overturn centuries of racial oppression. To their credit, the editors never assume that only the whites' values are truly southern. Even with 1600 pages at their disposal, the editors had to make decisions. The Af- rican-American presence in the southern media, especially news publishing, is woe- fully scanted. Far too many current writers, such as Peter Taylor, Donald Justice, and Ellen Douglas, receive no mention at Even the regional literature has all. The section on Women's Life should changed. A new breed of writers-Madi- have been enlarged-perhaps at the ex- son Smartt Bell, Lee K. Abbott, Bobbie pense of Music, which has more rock stars Ann Mason, and Larry McMurtry-has than anyone over 16 need know about. succeeded the generation of Eudora Welty Nothing so differentiates the South as and Robert Penn Warren. Generally the its much acclaimed-and much criti- most recent fiction depicts characters suf- cized-social ethics. While no section of fering more from a sense of dislocation, the volume deals specifically with public alienation, and amnesia than from dreams values, the ingredients abound under such of past crimes and spurious glories, the headings as Violence, History and Man- cultural mood which William Faulkner ex- ners, Mythic South, and Hospitality. Such plored. The old southern code of honor articles suggest that Clyde Wilson is right has become a subject of ridicule, as in in saying that the South is best defined by John Kennedy Toole's satire, The Confed- its adherence to certain precepts. The eracy of Dunces (1980). In it, the "Night of problem is what to make of them. Joy" bar in New Orleans has a plantation So much has changed in the moral and decor with a comically mindless stripper cultural atmosphere of the South that dein easily unhooked crinoline billed as bating its particularity in the manner of "Harlot O'Hara." Clyde Wilson and C. Vann Woodward- and indeed the Encyclopedia itself-might n politics, too, the "Solid South" has seem at first a weary exercise in nostalgia. I vanished; old courthouse regimes disap- After all, the McDonald's in Coosawhat- pear with each election. As James Hodges chie, South Carolina, is just the same as observes, southern white political ideology the one in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. To has begun "to look suspiciously Ameri- further complicate matters, economic canu-and Republican. Since the Voting pressures and inducements in the South Rights Act of 1965, southern Democratic have pushed out rural blacks and pulled in aspirants rely ever more heavily on black hordes of Northern urban whites. Two- votes. African-Americans have gained thirds of all southerners now live in cities, many more state and local offices in the Yankeeized in their skylines and squalid South-some 3,233 by 1985, Darlene Hine downtowns. Only a fraction of the south- tabulates-than ever they controlled dur- em population still works the soil. ing "black Republican" Reconstruction.

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Under these circumstances, the ques- Southern politeness and unwillingness to tion of the South's inherent character (and hurt others' feelings, at least when unpro- its continuation) seems less a matter of voked, are not mere trappings of an obso- sectional separateness than of the lete gentility. Charles Wilson notes that southernization of the country at large. "Southerners have traditionally equated Now that cotton is no longer king, the manners with morals, so that unmannerly South's major export is "culture"-music behavior has been viewed as immoral be- and language, black as well as "redneck." havior." Common gestures, language, and A kind of country talk has invaded the na- tacit understandings have sometimes tional media. In politics, by waving the helped whites and blacks to achieve an ac- Stars and Stripes, not the old "Bloody cord that northerners might envy. Among Shirt," Ronald Reagan and George Bush southern blacks and whites there is, as sound more southern than earlier heirs of Frederick Douglass once said, "a rigid en- Lincoln's mantle. Southern-born black forcement of the law of respect for el- leaders like Jesse Jackson and Andrew ders," an etiquette (if it survives) that will Young have a national, not solely regional, become ever more pertinent as the Ameri- impact. can populace ages. Even newcomers Despite all these changes-and partly quickly learn to be southerners in spirit if because of them-the supposed advent of not in accent. Like the natives, they are en- a "New New South" has been too loudly tangled in the web of place and persistent proclaimed. The bedrock of the southern custom. Southern values, especially those temperament has included and today still surrounding family life, are at times the ex- includes these unhappy signs: continued emplary exception in a nation of growing insensitivity about matters of race and sex; homogenization. undue leniency in criminal justice toward In light of these factors, editors Wilson "justifiable homicide" and contrasting se- and Ferris offer stunning testimony to re- verity about "wrongdoers who threaten gional vitality. One need not be a conserva- the moral values, beliefs, and social mores tive to appreciate Melvin Bradford's no- of the general public"; "schizoid" attitudes tion that "a culture is made up of a set of toward alcohol, as David Courtwright calls habits or modes of conduct, 'of chairs and drinking in the Bible Belt. Forty percent of tables, songs and tales,' and also of famil- all adult southern males own guns, iar sights and sounds and smells, and fi- records Fred Hawley, some "16 percent- nally of manners." The South will con- age points higher than in non-southern ar- tinue to change, even drastically. eas." Atlanta, Houston, Tuscaloosa, Rich- Somehow, though, it promises to remain mond, and the South as a whole have had the South, for better or worse. greater rates of homicide per 100,000 than Colombia to the south and New York City -Bertram Wyatt-Brown, '74, holds the to the north. Richard J. Milbauer Chair of History Of course a brighter side exists as well. at the University of Florida

Portrait of the Poet as an Andalusian Dog

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA: A Life. By Ian ago, with my Hispanophilia freshly kindled Gibson. Pantheon. 551 pp. $29.95 by a stay in Cuba, I had as my Spanish professor the brilliant Don Augusto Centeno, eading this life of the Spanish poet who had been a classmate of Lorca's as R and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca well as Luis Bufiuel's at the University of (1898-1936) was for me a nostalgic adven- Madrid. His descriptions of Lorca's poetry ture. As a sophomore about half a century indelibly stamped my sensibility. Lorca's

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poem on Cuba evoked the myths of the is- tragedy of American life. land I had recently visited and caught with The Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, was, syncopated musical precision the "ritmo by contrast, an ardent admirer. In his de semillas secas," the dry chatter of the Memoirs, Neruda sketched a portrait of maracas. Lorca based on their months together in Buenos Aires and Madrid-a portrait When the full moon comes which is now amplified in Ian Gibson's I'll go to Santiago de Cuba, pages. Neruda said that he had never seen I'll go to Santiago such grace and genius, a heart so winged in a coach of black water. . . or a waterfall so clear. Oh Cuba! Oh rhythm of the dry seeds! Open-hearted and comical, worldly (Oh Cuba! Oh ritmo de semillas secas!) and superstitious, torn between spirituality and irrepressible carnal appetites, Lorca At the time I speak of, Lorca's work had felt himself to be a living embodiment of scarcely found a coterie in America. Today, duende. The notion of duende is, in fact, Lorca is more translated than any other essential to understanding Lorca. Accord- Spanish writer, including Cervantes. But ing to one traditional Spanish usage, du- 50 years ago, Lorca had barely begun his ende connoted a poltergeist-like spirit, but journey to becoming, in the world's eyes, to Lorca it represented Dionysian inspira- Spain's most popular poet and play- tion sprung from anguish, mystery, and wright-a reputation that gradually solidi- death. To most of those who knew him, fied despite his being as often assailed as Lorca appeared to be the supreme em- championed by other writers. bodiment of duende. To them, his talent Jorge Luis Borges, for example, ab- seemed inexhaustible, his expressiveness horred Lorca's poetry and dismissed him total: He excelled as poet, playwright, as a professional Andalusian with a "gift singer, musician, artist, actor, theater di- for gab." Borges charged that Lorca was rector. "Of Arabic-Andalusian roots," Ne- idolized only because "he had the good ruda wrote, "he brightened and perfumed luck to be executed." Their one conversa- like jasmine the stage set of a Spain that, tion together broke off when Lorca sug- alas, is gone forever." gested that Mickey Mouse exemplified the Yet even for Neruda, Lorca half remained an actor in that Andalusian pageant invented by French writers of the 19th century, a pageant performed to the gallicized gypsy tempos and ominous mo- tifs of Rivet's Carmen. But Lorca was more than an actor, and one virtue of Ian Gib- son's biography is that it digs beyond the surface brilliance of the Lorca legend into the life itself. Lorca is forever associated with the backward Spanish region of his childhood, Andalusia. Andalusia gave Lorca the gift of a living language, vivid and colloquial. (Without self-consciousness, Lorca's cousin could tell him to "put the eggs in when the water begins to laugh.") But Gib- son shows how Lorca meshed local inspi- ration with the encroaching modern world. Indeed, in his first successful book, Gypsy Ballads (1928), he scarcely men- tions the visible Andalusia; his verse is

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anti-folkloric and anti-flamenco, eschew- tute observers of the modem scene. At the ing the bullfighter's suit of lights or three- Residencia de Estudiantes, Lorca became cornered hat. What figures in the Ballads close friends with Dali and Bufiuel. (Later, is an invisible land where gypsies, horses, when their relations soured, Lorca sus- archangels, planets, rivers, smugglers, and pected Bufiuel of satirizing him in his sur- naked children all coexist. The province of realist film Un chien andalou of 1928. Andalusia and its city of Granada, popu- Lorca commented to a friend, "Bufiuel lated with impoverished peasants and mis- has made a tiny little shit of a film called fits, and once with Jews (from whom An Andalusian Dog-and I'm the Dog.") Lorca claimed partial descent), Moors, In Madrid, Lorca experienced and wel- and gypsies, have known a history of con- comed as liberating forces first cubism, quest and anguish that Lorca felt to be his then surrealism-the first as release from own story. History may pass, but for Lorca literal representation, the second as im- the doom and foreboding remain. mersion in the subconscious. Without surrendering totally to these movements, orca was born in the tiny village of Lorca learned to expunge romantic sensi- L Fuente Vaqueros in that critical year, bility, to shun verbal exuberance, and to 1898, when Spain lost the remaining ves- fix on the irreducible poetic image. (Most tiges of its empire-the Philippines, of Lorca's fellow artists, like Bufiuel, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Spain's loss was, would later flee Spain and Franco, to reno- for the infant Lorca, a double blessing. vate the intellectual life in Spanish Amer- First, his father, Federico Garcia Rodri- ica-a token recompense for the ravages guez, who had owned plantations in Cuba, of Spanish conquest.) Although innumera- now amassed an even greater fortune ble studies have analyzed the Spanish Civil planting sugar on his vast estates near Gra- War, few make so clear as Gibson does nada. His mother, a former village school- what a brilliant cultural renaissance per- teacher of humble background, domi- ished during the conflict. nated the family: To her Lorca attributes Lorca made his only trip to a non-His- his intelligence, to his father, his feelings. panic country, the United States, in 1929- (In Spain, practicality was considered a 30. Titles of his poems in Poet in New York feminine virtue, while the soul was seen as (1938) are evocative: "Poems of Solitude masculine.) Although Lorca called the An- in Columbia University," "Landscape of dalusian middle class the worst in Spain, the Crowd that Vomits (Coney Island his family's wealth gave him lifelong finan- Nightfall)," "Landscape of the Crowd that cial independence-a boon to any artist. - Urinates (Battery Place Nocturne)," "Mur- Spain's territorial losses had a large ef- der (Two Voices at Daybreak on Riverside fect on the country, particularly on its Drive)." But save for a drinking bout with intellectual life: Relieved of the burdens of Hart Crane and some sailors, and reading empire, Spain's leading thinkers and art- Eliot's "Waste Land" in translation, Lorca ists began to respond to fresh impulses. had little interest in, and few meetings And this was, for Lorca, the second bless- with, American writers. (Eliot, Lorca ing. In 1919, knowing the bird must es- wrote, squeezes the city like a lemon "to cape its cage, Lorca left Andalusia and extract from it wounded rats, wet hats and made his way to Madrid-no longer a river shadows.") His principal contact backwater of Europe but in full artistic with Americans was with Harlem blacks, flowering. Spain's leading visual artists- whose music he associated with the An- Pablo Picasso, Juan Mir6, Salvador Dali, dalusian cante jondo and whose predica- Juan Gris, Luis Bufiuel-had won or were ment he saw as an exacerbated form of the winning international recognition. The na- gypsies'. For Lorca, New York was not a tional constellation of poets that Lorca "new" experience but a translation into joined in Madrid-Alberti, Jimknez, Jorge modem, universal terms of what he al- Guillkn, Aleixandre, Salinas-were all as- ready knew. His odes to Walt Whitman and

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to a mythical "King of Harlem" and his that marked his life and writings, was play The Public all exemplify this expanded among the first to be immolated. In 1936, cognizance. They universalize the themes at the age 38, Lorca was killed by the of Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House Falangistes, anti-Republicans who hated of Bernarda Alba-plays in which a Sopho- him for his spoofs of tradition and his dis- clean fate works through the "Spanish" respect for authority. Lorca's was a need- ideas of honor, class, and family-plays less death, and what was lost is under- that were about to bring their author inter- scored by recalling that Lorca's youthful national recognition. friends, Dali and Buiiuel, were alive and New York was immediately followed by working into the 1980s. No one speaks three months of deliverance in "Andalu- with more authority on this grievous rnat- sian" Cuba. Then came the brief halcyon ter than Ian Gibson, whose previous book years of applauded production and perfor- on the poet is The Assassination of mance in republican Spain and triumphal Federico Garcia Lorca. visits to Argentina and Uruguay. But fascism soon closed in, and Lorca, in seem- -Richard Morse is former Director of the ing compliance with the death obsession Wilson Center's Latin American Program

How Different is Germany?

A GERMAN IDENTITY, 1770-1990. By Har- cratic government for 45 years, and terri- old James. Routledge. 240 pp. $25 torial conquest hardly seems desirable, much less feasible. With the borders be- he "German question" is with us tween the two sectors open, many political T again-more so, it seems, with each analysts are now anticipating that Ger- passing day. many will be reunited in a few years. But The looming possibility of German others with longer memories fear there is reunification has sparked a controversy something singular about the nation that within West Germany both among politi- makes reunification far less attractive. cal parties and in the press. More recently, This question of Germany's singularity in East Germany, we have witnessed the is the subject of Harold James's new book: collapse of the old government leadership an investigation of "German identity" for and the spectacle of East Germans freely the past 200 years. It is to the credit of crossing the once-impregnable Berlin James, a professor of history at Princeton, Wall. These developments-as well as that he casts new light on this much-de- shifts in East-West relations-speak louder bated subject. As an economic historian, than mere words that reunification is very he provides an intriguing thesis, namely, much an "open question." One recent poll that German unity has always rested on found that 73 percent of East Germans and the promise of economic growth, and that 79 percent of West Germans favored a sin- this peculiarity has made Germany gle state. uniquely volatile since the founding of the But if the issue of German reunification Second Reich in 187 1. stirs passions inside Germany, it frequently James argues that German sovereignty triggers panic abroad. For whenever Ger- was always fragile because it had only an many has been united and strong in the economic, and not a historical or a geo- past-as in 1871,1914, and 1939-war has graphical, basis on which to build a mod- never been far away. Today's situation, ern national identity. France and England however, appears significantly different: have rested on the same core of recog- West Germany has known a stable demo- nizable territory for centuries-centuries

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ment. The writers Goethe, Schiller, and Holderlin, the classicist Johann Winckel- man, and the historian Leopold von Ranke might have provided a cultural basis for "the building blocks of German national identity." But the founder of the Empire, Otto von Bismarck, distrusted intellectuals as much as he did democrats. Bismarck founded the new Germany on "blood and iron." Doing so, he developed what James calls a "mongrel state form" that held together competing interests with promises of economic prosperity and the security of a welfare state. As long as prosperity held, Bismarck's economic nationalism seemed to work reasonably well. But whenever economic prosperity declined-first during the 1880s, then notoriously during the 1920s-a cultural and racist nationalism, at odds with industrial civilization, challenged the Bismarckian achievement. Ironically, Hitler created an economic miracle only to sacrifice it to his racist and Otto von Bismarck, about 1876 anti-communist agendas. In 1945 a devastated Germany yearned during which "Germany" had no specific for nothing more than a return to eco- geographical meaning. Until the 19th cen- nomic stability. The occupying powers tury, the German-speaking Holy Roman agreed to give the Germans what they Empire consisted of 350 separate states; af- wanted, although on terms the powers ter the Congress of Vienna (1815), "Ger- themselves set. For "East" and "West" many" was 39 sovereign states dominated, Germany, yoked to economic and political from afar, by Vienna. By contrast, as James systems which limited their sovereignty, points out, England and France were ce- national unity seemed not only unrealiz- mented by institutions and constitutions-- able but undesirable. But now with the in- a single monarch, Parliament, the Na- fluence of the United States and the Soviet tional Assembly, the Magna Carta, the Union waning and the economic future in- Rights of Man-for which Germany had creasingly uncertain, cultural nationalism no historic parallels. has emerged once more. Given such considerations, James's question seems pertinent: How have Ger- et if the German question is with us mans conceived of Germany? The ques- Y again, one wonders whether it is as tion is more intriguing now than ever be- peculiarly German as James would have cause-whatever Germany is-if reunited, us believe: Is Germany's identity uniquely with a population of 80 million, it will faulty? After all, national identity is a con- dominate the European continent. cept invented in the 19th century as a As James shows, Germany has long means of understanding, and managing, possessed a rich cultural and intellectual the bewildering changes that the recent heritage. Indeed, during the first 100 years democratic and industrial revolutions un- which he briefly discusses-1770 to leashed. The historical profession, which 1870-German national identity rested on also took form in the 19th century, helped a sense of cosmopolitan cultural achieve- create a usable past for the new concept of

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nationalism. Jules Michelet (1798- 1874) James assumes that a "natural" German in France, Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) in identity would have made for a less tumul- England, and Heinrich von Treitschke tuous European as well as German history, (1834-1896) in Germany constructed no- but this is not a proposition that can ever tions of "la Nation," "the People," "das be tested. Volk" whose cohesion was seen as natural. If we look to those nation-states, like Furthermore, these notions supported Britain and France, which represent for projects (e.g., standardization of language; James normal national development, we national road systems; colonial adven- find them to be riven equally by class and tures) which the nation-building elites had gender conflict and subject to similar in mind. The creation of national muse- bloody ruptures. From the French Revolu- ums, monuments, and holidays reinforced tion onwards, the concept of nationalism the new myths of national consensus and itself has been, throughout Europe (and continuity. Even today, academic history is elsewhere), an instrument of power for still usually framed in national terms. elites who claim to represent the national Over the past decades, however, the interest. The very idea of one indivisible concept of national identity itself has come people can mask real differences and sub- under closer scrutiny. Historians and so- jugate the interests of working people, cial scientists now see that, like race and women, and ethnic minorities. The sup- gender, it is not so much an object as a posedly natural cohesion of the British and category of knowledge, whose relationship the French did not bring women and to the actual consciousness or behavior of workers to participation in political power the people it supposedly refers to is highly any sooner. questionable. The 19th-century Irish, for James is right in stressing the extent to example, enlisted more willingly in the which German stability is dependent on service of the British empire than they did economic growth but wrong in thinking in their own nationalist cause. Peasants in this exceptional. Today's uncertain inter- obscure comers of France became patri- national economy arouses anxieties that otic Frenchmen only in time to die in the cannot easily be satisfied within the First World War. The working-class "pals" present nationally oriented political order. who marched to English recruiting sta- Ecological catastrophes as well as eco- tions in 1914 had loyalties more local than nomic booms and busts do not recognize national. The Great War, once thought of borders; recent events in East Europe as being provoked by nationalist passions, testify to the fact that even political devel- is now viewed as helping create those na- opments are hard to confine within national identities. tional boundaries. Under these conditions James is aware of the constructed qual- it would be all too easy for German reuni- ity of national identity, which he calls fication to provide a convenient displace- "manipulated nationalism," but he seems ment for debates that other peoples, in- 'to think that it is a peculiar property of cluding Americans, should be facing more German history. When he talks of the 'lab- directly. Above all, we need to re-think the sence of a natural national cohesion," concept of national identity itself and to James seems haunted by a contrasting im- consider alternatives better suited to the age of a "normal" German identity. Yet late 20th century. what constitutes his vision of Germany's normal identity-classless, genderless, un- -John R. ~illii,'88, directs "The Historical burdened by generational tension-hardly Construction of Identities" project at the applies to or describes any existing nation. Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis

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NEW TITLES

History up and down the corridors of power. World War I1 proved his salvation. As British HAROLD MACMILLAN. Volume One: 1894- Minister Resident in Algiers, he worked closely 1956; Volume Two: 1957-1986. By Alistair with General Dwight D. Eisenhower and had a Home. Viking. 537 pp.; 741 pp. $24.95 each direct line to Prime Minister Winston Chur- chill. (Macmillan's background now paid off: Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), maestro of The fact that he had an American mother in- mid-20th-century British politics, would hardly creased his bond both with Churchill, whose fit today's stereotype of a statesman. He said mother was also American, and with Eisen- things when he spoke, for one, and unlike most hower.) His career took off. After the war, he politicians who restrict their reading to the played a key role in modernizing the post-Chur- newspapers, Macmillan read Homer's Iliad (in chill Conservative Party. When he became Greek) to keep himself civilized. Historian prime minister in 1957, he said he expected to Alistair Horne has hold office for only a spent 10 years re- few weeks. Instead, he searching the life of this enjoyed a six-year ten- inscrutable personality ure, leading Britain to of improbable accom- its peak of postwar plishment. prosperity. Charming Macmillan was born both Eisenhower and into the wealthy Mac- Kennedy, he rebuilt the millan publishing fam- Anglo-American "spe- ily, was educated at cial relationship." His Eton and Oxford, and nickname then-%- survived combat in permac-suggests the World War I with sev- confidence so improba- eral wounds and an bly associated with this abiding distrust of Ger- reserved scholar-politi- mans. A choice among clan. many possible careers Macmillan with JFK, 1961. In 1963, De Gaulle faced the young vet- vetoed British member- eran, but in 1924 he quit Macmillan publishers ship in the Common Market, and in the same to represent in Parliament Stockton-on-Tees,a year a sex scandal, the Profumo Affair, rocked decaying industrial town afflicted by massive Macmillan's cabinet. Even so, Macmillan cer- long-term unemployment. Macmillan came to tainly would have won re-election in 1964, but be as much affected by the conditions of the he miscalculated and resigned. A graver mis- working poor as he had been by the suffering calculation was his insistence on naming a suc- he witnessed during World War I. Although a cessor (Alec Home) so ineffectual that he paved Conservative, he became known as the "pink the way for Labor's Harold Wilson and, in turn, Tory"-and, before World War 11, was con- for Margaret Thatcher, both of whom Macmil- signed to near-oblivion-for his working-class lan detested. The prosperity of the Macmillan sympathies and Keynesian ideas. At the time, years has evaporated and, to some extent, so Macmillan's public countenance remained un- has the Supermac reputation. Dean Acheson's flappable, but privately he was tormented by biting phrase is sometimes applied to Macmil- his wife's infidelity, which was whispered about lan's years in office: Britain had lost an empire

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but had not yet found a role. tics held, then society It is the great strength of Alistair Home's should tolerate more avowedly Boswellian approach that we see individual expression. Macmillan plain at last. Full of sympathetic rev- If the female body is elations, particularly of his profound loneli- reckoned a lesser ver- ness, this compelling biography interprets Mac- sion of the male's-as millan essentially as a tragic figure rather than Caroline Walker as a heroic one. Bynum shows it was for the late Middle Ages, when the female geni- FRAGMENTS FOR A HISTORY OF THE talia were considered HUMAN BODY. Edited by Michel Feher with the male's pulled in- Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. Three ward-then male pri- volumes. Zone. 480 pp.; 552 pp.; 578 pp. $39.95 mogeniture and king- (cloth); $16 (paper) each ship descent are rational. Centuries later, Freud's "locating" the female orgasm in the va- History is made up of personalities, its actions gina instead of the clitoris-despite his know- performed by characters. The fact that these ing, Thomas Laquer argues, that the former had characters once had bodies has been consid- far fewer neural connections-endorsed a par- ered largely irrelevant: Anatomy may interest a ticular kind of "socially responsible" sexuality biologist, but not a historian. Fragments chal- and sexual relationships. Even whether a rotten lenges that assumption. These 48 essays, writ- tooth, symbol of vice, was pulled in public (in ten by scholars from five countries, attempt to the 17th century) or in private (in the 19th cen- establish the "historicity of the human body," tury) helped define, according to David Kunzle, to show how the body has influenced-and the emotional life of members of society. been influenced by-historical events. Fragments is like a banquet made up of many To get at this elusive subject, Fragments as- hors d'oeuvres but lacking a main course. His- sembles the most unlikely cast of characters: tory was once considered the stage where medieval woman, African Wodaabe nomads, statesmen and generals played their part; today, marionettes, Japanese ghosts, 16th-century au- the discipline considers material not only from tomata, Holbein's Christ, the embryo in the the social sciences but even from the physical Upanishads, Pascal on the incarnation, Dickens sciences. How is the historian to integrate it all? on bio-economics, gods, and animals. What can No clue here. Like the thin man struggling hold together such a menagerie? Dominated by vainly to get out of the fat man's body, a synthe- leading French intellectuals-the linguist Julia sis fails to emerge from these weighty volumes. Kristeva, the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, the historian Jacques Le Goff-these volumes, not surprisingly, are pervaded by the most fashion- HONORABLE JUSTICE: The Life of Oliver able, or faddish, idea in academia today: social Wendell Holmes. By Sheldon M. Novick. Little, construction. "The history of the body," the Brown. 522 pp. 824.95 editors write, "is not so much the history of its representations as of its modes of construc- When appointed to the Supreme Court in 1902, tion." In other words, forget anatomy. The way Oliver Wendell Holmes was already 61, but he a culture understands the human body-and sat on the bench long enough-from Roosevelt these ways vary amazingly-can, the editors (Theodore) to Roosevelt (Franklin)-to write point out, "naturalize a political institution, a more opinions than any other judge in its his- social hierarchy, or a moral principle." tory. And Holmes wrote them so eloquently Consider, for example, "head" and "heart". that Edmund Wilson named him among Ameri- If the head is the ruling organ, as Thomas ca's outstanding literary figures. Even today his Hobbes asserted, then the state's requirement dissents on behalf of individual freedoms are of a head can legitimize monarchy or authority; quoted nearly as reverentially as the Constitu- if the "heart" is the ruling organ, as the Roman- tion itself.

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Well over six feet tall, handsome, charming, that we hate." and brilliant, Holmes (1841-1935) was the Holmes is the only judge to serve on the Su- product of the best breeding and education preme Court past his 90th birthday, and Novick New England offered: His father was the much paints an endearing portrait of a man active, anthologized poet and author of Autocrat of the passionate, and playful till the end. The newly Breakfast-Table (1858). Young Holmes grew up inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt paid knowing Emerson and the Jameses, and he was a visit to Holmes and found him reading Plato. educated at Harvard, where he subsequently "Why do you read Plato, Mr. Justice?" "To im- taught law. Novick, a scholar in residence at prove my mind, Mr. President," replied the 92- Vermont Law School and the first to write a year-old Holmes. biography based on the enormous Holmes papers, has succeeded in making one person out of Holmes the complicated individual and Contemporary Affairs Holmes the jurist and legal philosopher. Novick is no hagiographer. Underlying much of ONE STEP AHEAD IN CHINA: Guangdong Holmes's Social Darwinism-such as his de- Under Reform. By Ezra F. Vogel. Haward. 510 fense of Virginia's law permitting mental pp. $29.95 defectives to be sterilized-was, Novick says, "a kind of fascist ideology." In China, as in France, 1989 was a year of com- Holmes, however, developed a defense of hu- memorations: It marked the 70th anniversary man rights that usually checked his own indi- of the May Fourth Movement (the intellectuals' vidual biases. His Common Law (1881) altered pro-democracy movement in 1919), the 40th the course of judicial and legal practice in the anniversary of the communist victory of 1949, U.S., Novick shows. Its opening words have and not least, the 10th anniversary of the post- echoed through the minds of generations of Mao reforms that introduced a qualified cap- law school students: "The life of the law has not italism into the land of communist funda- been logic; it has been experience." Before mentalism. Vogel, a professor of international Holmes, judges believed themselves adminis- relations at Harvard and author of Japan as tering impersonal right though pure reasoning. Number One, studies this past decade in Guang- Holmes argued that judges made the law as dong, the province where reform was the most they interpreted it, and they interpreted it in daring and the most successful. Written before terms of their own limited, conditioned experi- but published after the tragic events in ence. Venerable jurists at the time railed that Tiananmen Square, Vogel's book serves as a that was not the common Law they knew and sad farewell to a decade of unbridled optimism. applied, but so, eventually, we have come to A specialist on Guangdong, Vogel was the understand it. first Western scholar ever invited by provincial Holmes would not have sympathized with authorities for an extended visit to study re- the politicized courts of today; judges, he said, forms. The result, One Step Ahead, examines should actively counter their tendency to shape reform on every front: from the economy, decisions to their own personal, social, or eco- where Guangdong began controlling its own nomic views. Holmes's concept of "judicial re- foreign trade, to village decollectivization, straint" held that, unless the constitution was where households leased land as quasi-private clearly violated, the Court should stand back property. The successful Chinese diaspora in and let governments legislate what they nearby Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong in- deemed best. Holmes combined this judicial re- fluenced reformist ideas in Guangdong. In- straint, however, with an unparalleled defense deed, neighboring Hong Kong, which fur- of individual rights. During the 19 19 Red Scare, nished the capital and technology, and the Bolsheviks in America, he said. "had as Guangdong, supplying the entrepreneurs and much right to publish as the~overnmenthas to laborers, together formed a zone which Vogel publish the Constitution." "The principle of describes as one of the world's most dynamic free thought [means] not free thought forthose economic regions. who agree with us but freedom for the thought But what about the other side of this growth?

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New investments led to a loose money supply their numbers were already beginning to de- that created inflation (up to 30 percent in cline. Through the 1960s, American farming re- 1989); also, under "capitalism," state bureau- mained at the pinnacle of world agriculture. crats who controlled limited supplies enjoyed "The United States was number one in pro- unprecedented opportunities for corruption. ductivity, in the size of its food surplus, in its Corruption and inflation together spawned the export market share, available farm capital, ap- massive unrest that eventually led to Tianan- plied technology, transportation, processing men Square. Vogel barely deals with these vex- and refining, storage capacity," says Ulrich. ing issues. (He does mention that in one year What happened? The shift from smaller to there were a thousand executions in Guang- bigger farms brought in larger equipment and dong alone for economic crimes.) An optimist practices which, though profitable in the short himself, Vogel skirts basic structural problems, run, eroded topsoil faster than it could be natu- such as Beijing's growing inability to exercise rally replaced. U.S. government policies were control over Guangdong. Yet despite this limi- also, at best, contradictory: Pork-barrel irriga- tation, Vogel is-and will likely remain-the tion projects, for example, increased corn pro- authoritative guide to that first decade of reduction at the same time the Department of Ag- forms not only in Guangdong but in the Peo- riculture was jumping through hoops to reduce ple's Republic as a whole. it. And mounting competition abroad-millions of acres of soybeans planted in Brazil, the "green revolution" in India-reduced demand LOSING GROUND: Agricultural Policy and for U.S. crop surpluses. the Decline of the American Farm. By Hugh Things have only gotten worse in recent Ulrich. Chicago Review Press. 278 pp. $18.95 years, Ulrich shows. During the 1980s, world demand for U.S. farm exports dropped from a This informal history of U.S. farm policy begins 1981 high of nearly $44 billion down to $26 in the early 20th century, when one out of three billion five years later. Plunging sales abroad Americans were employed on farms. It con- meant increased commodity surpluses and cludes in the present, when less than two per- lower crop prices at home. Farmers who had cent of U.S. citizens still work the soil. As it gone deeply into debt during the 1970s to ex- unfolds, one leams about massive soil erosion pand their operations now found themselves in as well as bureaucratic inertia and the farm serious trouble. lobby's shortsightedness. Not everyone was sympathetic. "For the life "The story of how we got into the current of me," David A. Stockman, then director of the farm mess," writes Ulrich, a grains analyst and Office of Management and Budget, said in former member of the Chicago Board of Trade, 1985, "I cannot figure out why the taxpayers of "is a sort of 'How the West Was Won' in re- this country have the responsibility to go in and verse." By 1910, American farmers ranked as refinance bad debt that was willingly incurred the most productive in the world, even though by consenting adults." Ulrich thinks that Stock- man "made senseM-to a point. But Stockman came to "the more dubious conclusion that there were too many American farmers in 1985." On the contrary, Ulrich contends. Unlike Stockman, Ulrich would not leave agriculture to the free market's invisible hand. Al- though he believes present, "ruinous" govem- ment programs favoring large farms should be abandoned, he argues that they should be replaced by support for small, owner-operated farms that "have a far more desirable impact environmentally and socially." Ulrich outlines a detailed program for encouraging soil stabili- Iowa farmers protest foreclosure in 1985. zation, reforestation, and farm employment

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maintained at five percent of the total popula- Arts & Letters tion, all of which could help revitalize small towns and local industries. "No area of national ABRAHAM LINCOLN: Speeches and policy," he argues, "has the same kind of power Writings. Edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. Two for good or ill as does farm policy." volumes. Library of America. 898 pp.; 787 pp. $35 each

THE USES OF ADVERSITY: Essays on the Abraham Lincoln is only the second American Fate of Central Europe. By Timothy Garton president-after Thomas Jefferson-to be Ash. Random House. 335 pp. $19.95 "canonized" by inclusion in the Library of America's collection of "America's greatest It would seem foolhardy to publish a book writers." Does this mean that Lincoln, in addi- about Central Europe at a time when daily tion to being a great president, should be reck- newspaper articles about the region often oned among our great literary stylists? prove outdated by the time they hit the streets. Here are close to 1,700 pages of speeches, These 16 essays by the London Spectator's for- letters, messages, and even a few poems by eign editor originally appeared in The New which to arrive at a judgement. Certainly Lin- York Review of Books, Granta, The Times Liter- coln's status as a stylist and writer was harder ary Supplement, and the author's own publica- earned than Jefferson's. In his 1860 campaign tion; they date from the winter of 1983 to the autobiography, Lincoln reports that he never summer of 1989. Yet there is little that is stale entered a college or about them. They are saved, in almost every "accademy" [sic] until 1 case, by Garton Ash's historical intelligence, his he became a lawyer. acute readings of cultural politics, and his deft "What he has in the portraits of key political players, many of whom way of education," Lin- (particularly those on the Polish scene) he coln (a genius of under- knows first hand. The New York Review essays statement) writes of even entered directly into the political dialogue himself, "he has picked that helped shape the new Poland and the new up." Yet, for all his Hungary: Hastily translated, they enabled re- homespun, unassum- formers there to see events in their own coun- ing airs, he made him- try within the larger context of a collapsing So- self into a person of viet Empire. The tempo of "refo1ution"- genuine culture: He attended the theater and Garton Ash's neologism for the revolutionary the opera regularly, and he read widely. "Some reforms we are witnessing in Budapest, War- of Shakespeare's plays," he said, "I have gone saw, Prague, and East Berlin-has accelerated- over perhaps as frequently as any unprofes- dramatically since last summer. But this collec- sional readeru-a literary training that few poli- tion will endure because it depicts so exactly, ticians, or non-politicians, can better. and often presciently, the region on the brink At his best, Lincoln enters the company of of its most dramatic political transformation Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson; like since the early years of the Cold War. While them, he is a biblical prophet who has learned clearly enthusiastic about the prospect of a re- to use the American vernacular. The Civil War invigorated, democratized Central Europe, made Lincoln a stylist, because his biblical ca- Garton Ash remains soberly realistic about the dences were inspired by what was to him a holy dangers that lie ahead for an area with so trou- war: "He [God] gives to both North and South, bled a past: "Can Central Europe be put to- this terrible war, as the woe due to those by gether again. . . at the very point where it has whom the offence [slavery] came." Lincoln's most often, most horribly, and (from the point most remembered passagesÃ‘nFou score and of view of neighboring empires) most success- seven years ago" (from the Gettysburg Address) fully been divided-at the point where different and "With malice toward none, with charity for nations, races, cultures, religions try (or fail) to all" (from the Second Inaugural)-are reli- coexist?" gious, not political, rhetoric.

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Yet in sheer quantity the great speeches are Ruby I suppose the sweetest thing I'd ever outweighed by pedestrian addresses to interest asked a woman to do for me was to hold a mule groups like the Wisconsin Agricultural Society. still while I hitched him." Despite Jack's being What the reader finds in most of these two vol- a poor tenant farmer and 20 years older than umes is not art but the conditions for art-not Ruby, they build a good marriage. Yet it is always great speeches but the process of revi- hardly a match for life's sorrows-childlessness sion that makes great speeches possible. As and Ruby's cancer. During the terminal stages though in some enormous rough draft, Lincoln of the disease, she fills the freezer with enough kept reworking the same ideas over and over, meals to last Jack through the winter. "Then first in casual formulations, until at last-as in maybe he'll feel up to planting a garden, carry- the "House Divided" speech-they issued forth ing the whole thing through by himself." in concise, unforgettable expression. Obviously, Gibbons can border on senti- mentality, but she is saved by her vision of hard vicissitudes and necessary graces. More re- ELLEN FOSTER and A VIRTUOUS markable are Gibbons' spare sentences and WOMAN. By Kaye Gibbons. Algonquin Books paragraphs in which not a word can be of Chapel Hill. 146 pp.; 158 pp. $13.95 each changed without serious loss. From Madison Smartt Bell to Bobbie Ann Mason, contempo- To add the name of a new author to the com- rary southern writers describe a South shed- pany of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Por- ding its distinctive features-as though Faulk- ter, Tennessee Williams, and Thomas Wolfe is ner's mellifluous tragedies had washed up no small matter. Yet Kaye Gibbons, a house- somewhere between tract home and shopping wife from Raleigh, North Carolina, not yet 30, mall; these younger writers' language rarely has added a voice, original and recognizable, to sounds distinctively southern. But Gibbons' id- southern literature. iom-dry and practical as a farmer's skin, stud- Eleven-year-old Ellen Foster, the heroine- ded with cliches that somehow seem fresh, narrator of Gibbons' first novel, calmly de- semi-illiterate vet never so intrusive as dia- scribes her mother's illness: "You see when she lect-is recognizably southern and recog- was my size she had romantic fever I think it is nizably hers. And it is this, the creation of a called and since then she has not had a good voice, that makes her cousin to the "old mas- heart." Ellen suffers, after her mother's death, ters," Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and some of the worst relatives found outside a even Faulkner himself. Dickens novel. But Ellen represents the triumph of the decent and the practical over the tragic: "I fed myself OK," she says when her Science & Technology drunk father fails to appear for meals. "I tried to make what we had at school but I found the best deal was the plate froze with food already on it." ' Gibbons' new novel, A Virtuous Woman, set in a contemporary but unnamed southern state, is filled with the family love so painfully lacking in Ellen's story. In alternating chapters, Jack Ernest Stokes ("stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell!") and his WONDERFUL LIFE: The Burgess Shale and wife Ruby narrate their separate hardships, the Nature of History. By Stephen J. Gould. their unlikely meeting, and 25 years of living Norton. 347 pp. 119.95 together. Before Jack, Ruby had a disastrous first marriage: "I just hated that the first big de- In 1909 the prominent geologist and longtime- cision I ever made was the kind that can kill head of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles you if you make a mistake." Before Ruby, Jack Doolittle Walcott, was digging in a quarry in had "never come close to marrying. Until I met the Canadian Rockies when he uncovered a

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Pandora's box of fossils which would eventu- the conventional tale of steadily increasing ex- ally-more than 50 years later-turn upside- cellence, complexity, and diversity." The Bur- down the orderly Darwinian theories of evolu- gess Shale is thus appropriated as evidence for tion. the theory of evolution which Gould espouses, The Burgess Shale-"little taller than a man, called "punctuated equilibrium": Contingency, and not so long as a city block"-is a rock slab as much as "survival of the fittest," determines containing a plethora of early life: creatures evolution. When a catastrophe occurs, when an with more different body plans than there are ice age commences or an asteroid plows into in all the oceans, rivers, and lakes on the Earth the planet, some species perish and the luckier today. The shapes of fossil-creatures from the survive. Burgess Shale are more than passing strange. Gould writes for non-specialists, and he Close your eyes and imagine the Opabinia, a makes the Tale of the Shale an entertainment. worm with five eyes on stalks, back claw, and a But besides the entertainment is the sobering vacuum-cleaner nozzle up front. Or try to pic- reminder of how scientific theories make facts ture a huge Anomalocaris, two feet long, also quite as often as facts make scientific theories. with stalk eyes, a triangular and undulating By revealing how, in the Burgess Shale inter- fluted body, teeth, and curved, front-feeding ap- pretation, intellectual climate was as influential pendages-a true terror from the deep. as actual evidence, Gould challenges the com- Darwin described evolution as an inevitable fortable notion of science as being strictly sci- progression from worse to better, the weak giv- entific, an objective ordering of facts. ing way to the fit, extinct species having "fa- thered" the superior creatures we know today. But the Burgess Shale creatures are nobody's MACHINES AS THE MEASURE OF MEN. ancestors, and their body plans are unreflected Science, Technology, and Ideologies of in any existing species. One morning half a bil- Western Dominance. By Michael Adas. lion years ago, an underwater landslide or Cornell. 430 pp. $29.95 some similar catastrophe buried them. Yet Walcott, who spent years studying these strange When Europeans in the early 16th century ven- creatures, was determined to classify them as tured to far-off places such as China, India, and primitive ancestors of existing animals. Con- Africa, they were fascinated by the tools and vinced that evolution was both linear and pro- weapons they found. But, from the earliest con- gressive, Walcott had no choice but to "shoe- tacts, the European explorers judged these de- horn" his bizarre finds into existing categories. vices inferior to their own technological instru- Now let a half-century pass (not much time, ments. Such a comparison was not innocent; after all, when you're dealing in billions of- nor was it without political consequences. As years), and in 1972 three Cambridge University Adas, a Rutgers historian, relates, "scientific paleontologists-Harry Whittington, Derek and technological measures of human Briggs, and Simon Conway Morris-decide to worth. . . dominated European thinking on is- take a new look at the Burgess Shale fossils. sues ranging from racism to colonial educa- They bring to the task new "theories about the tion" for centuries and served as the irrefutable basis of natural order" and a healthy apprecia- justification for the "civilizing-mission" ideol- tion of chance and catastrophe in nature's ogy that led to Europe's global hegemony in the course. Aided by new techniques for re- 18th and 19th centuries. constructing the shapes of crushed fossil forms Instead of admiring China for its refined cul- in three dimensions, they find not Walcott's tra- ture, Europeans viewed the "Chinese failure to ditional arthropods and mollusks but a myriad develop the full potential of such key inven- of unimagined forms. In Wonderful Life, Har- tions as gunpowder and paper" as an indict- vard biologist Gould shows how this reclassi- ment of the stifling, "despotic Chinese govern- fication undermined the old Darwinian as- ment." By the same token, the "perceived lack sumptions. "The history of life is a story of of inventiveness and scientific curiosity on the massive removal followed by differentiation part of the Africans" allowed Europeans to con- within a few surviving stocks," says Gould, "not sider them as biologically inferior, an attitude

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that rationalized the Nehru (1889-1964) of India, hardly proved slave trade. champions of their own countries' historic sys- These feelings of su- tems of production. Nor did they heed develop- periority persisted into mental constraints imposed by local traditions the 20th century, Adas and resources. Instead, they pushed for full- notes. Their legacy has scale industrialization, deeming it essential for prompted many emerg- social and economic reconstruction. ing nations to try to de- Adas closes by arguing that, given the toll it velop the very technol- would exact on diminishing ecological re- ogy used so long to sources, world-wide industrialization "might dominate them. After not be in humanity's best interest." Adas thinks World War I, the Euro- the West should convince African and Asian pean powers began peoples that more modest strategies of develop- sharing their technical ment, rooted in their own traditions, are every (as well as organizational) know-how with their bit as valid. Yet he realizes that. to Third World former colonies. Adas suggests that "greater peoples, his argument may seem "obviously sensitivity to African and Asian thought sys- self-serving." And he admits that neither he nor tems, techniques of production, and patterns of anyone else has a truly workable "system to social organization" might have enhanced the propose as a replacement for the scientific-in- chances for economic success in the emerging dustrial order." Technology became the "mea- nations. But the first generation of leaders with sure of men" centuries ago; today humanity Western-style educations, such as Jawaharlal must deal with the consequences.

ANNUAL STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP

Statement of ownership, management, and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of The Wilson Quarterly, published four times a year at 370 L'Enfant Promenade S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024 for October 6, 1989. General business offices of the publisher are located at 370 L'Enfant Promenade S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Name and address of publisher is Warren B. Syer, 370 L'Enfant Promenade S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Name and address of editor is Jay Tolson, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, 370 - L'Enfant Promenade S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Owner is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for .: Scholars, Smithsonian Institution Building, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., Washington, D.C. 20560. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months (Section 41 1.3, DMN). The average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months is: (A) Total number of copies printed: 86,720; (B) Paid circulation: (1) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales: 1,600; (2) Mail subscriptions: 80,808; (C) Total paid circulation: 82,408; (D) Free distribution by mail, carrier, or other-means: 2,612; (E) Total distribution 85,020; (F) Copies not distributed: (1) Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: 200; (2) Return from news agents: 1,500; (G) Total: 86,720; The actual number of copiesof single issue published nearest to filing date is: (A) Total number of copies printed: 72,600; (B) Paid circulation: (1) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales: 1,600; (2) Mail subscriptions: 67,070; (C) Total paid circulation: 68,670; (D) Free distribution by mail, carrier, or other means: 2,330; (E) Total distribution: 71,000; (F) Copies not distributed: (1) Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: 100; (2) Return from news agents: 1,500; (G) Total: 72,600.1 certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. 1 (signed) Suzanne Turk, Business Manager

WQ WINTER 1990 97 "One of the most important books in WHOSE KEEPER? years, disturbing in Social Science and Moral Obligation the best sense of the Alan Wolfe word and fascinat- "By showing that the social sciences provide the operative ing. "-Michael moral philosophies of modern societies, Wolfe gives us a new Harrington, author of understanding of the fundamental predicaments of The Other America modernity."-Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart $25.00

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"One of the most elegant pieces of THE UNCHANGING political analysis I have seen in years."* AMERICAN VOTER Eric R. A. N. Smith "It challenges a generation of research on 'levels of conceptu - alization' and supposed change in the nature of the electorate, and it does so clearly, thoroughly, and convincingly." -Gary Jacobson, University of California, San Diego* $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper

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Will Deconstruction Be the Death of Literature?

Today, college students often describe their English courses in jargon that barely sounds like English at all. Hearing the word deconstruction, puzzled parents may suppose that their children are talking about urban renewal, not literary criticism. Yet deconstruction is the reigning school of literary theory. It is also the most difficult to comprehend, and the most controversial. Deconstructionist theory, Frank McConnell shows, not only challenges the way we think about "texts," authors, and readers: It attacks the ideal of tradition, even as it raises doubts about the notion of meaning itself. No wonder it has sparked debate in and around the academy. But, as McConnell reminds us, literary criticism since the time of Matthew Arnold has rarely been an innocent, ivory- tower pursuit. At stake in the "lit-crit" wars are our most cherished cultural values.

by Frank D. McConnell

popular joke defines com- professionals-is at the center of a vitu- edy as the second oldest perative debate that has been raging on profession, which, like the American and British campuses for at least first, has been ruined by am- a decade. ateurs. The debate may sound like an esoteric I would suggest that the academic squabble. But it has serious im- trulyA oldest profession is poetry-or plications for the future of humanistic storytelling, or mythmaking, or whatever studies in both countries and, for that mat- tag you put on people's habit of describing ter, throughout the West. It does because themselves, their experience, and their it touches on the sensitive connections be- mortality as if they all somehow mattered. tween our inherited culture and our politi- If this is so, then surely the second oldest cal lives. profession is that of critic, the interpreter, Quite apart from these larger implica- judge, and custodian of the primal fables. tions, however, the study of literature is it- And the question of whether the craft has self in crisis, as momentous a crisis as it been ruined by amateurs-or, indeed, by has known for a very long time. The cause

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is the school, or theory, or method, that cludes all but the initiated from penetrat- both its adherents and its adversaries- ing its arguments. And second, despite and a growing number of bewildered in- their obscurity, papers of a deconstruc- nocent bystanders-refer to as "decon- tionist bent dominate the proceedings of struction." such weighty assemblies as the annual As with most controversial terms, it is convention of the American Modem Lan- hard to say exactly what "deconstruction" guage Association. More to the point, the means. Trying to do just that, in fact, is people who deliver those papers are being largely the point of this essay. But let's be- hired, in increasing numbers, by the facul- gin with a caricature: Deconstruction is a ties of the most prestigious British and critical theory, deeply French at least in its American universities. origins, that finds the real significance of The interplay among economics, aca- literary and philosophical texts not in their demic politics, and "disinterested" explicit meanings, nor even in their im- thought should surprise no one. Frederick plied meanings, but in their unintentional J. Newmeyer's Politics of Linguistics (1986) meanings-in the slips, evasions, and false convincingly traces the rise and fall (and analogies that betray the text's "ideology." funding) of linguistic theories in relation It is a way of reading against the text, and to their usefulness to the American de- its aim is to achieve an unprejudiced, fense establishment, despite the "liberal" value-free vision of the societal and politi- or even anti-establishmentarian content of cal power-structures underlying the classi- many of those theories. Two distinguished cal "canon" of great works of Westem lit- scholar-critics, Lee Patterson in Negotiat- erature. Drawing its analytic technique ing the Past (1987) and Jerome J. McGann mainly from the methods of modem struc- in Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988), tural linguistics, deconstruction is suspi- similarly suggest that deconstruction, de- cious of, and sometimes openly hostile to- spite its radical critique of the humanist ward, the tradition of bourgeois liberal tradition, is, in its politically hygienic dis- humanism that has long dominated Euro- engagement, the perfect academic sup- pean thought. Many of its high priests are port-wing for an acquisitive, historically ir- French-the philosopher-critic Jacques responsible, and globally rapacious Derrida, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, society. Such claims, especially voiced in the social historian Michel Foucault; in rhetoric like this, can sound unduly parti- America, the priesthood includes the liter- san, if not shrill. Surely, deconstruction is ary critics Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, not necessarily the running-dog tool of an and Geoffrey Hartman. "insidious establishment." And yet the critics have a point. It is a 11 this, as I said, is a caricature. Decon- truism that systems which explain-or A structionists doubtless will find it dis- claim to explain-"everything" (consider torted and loaded with unjustified assump- German philosophical systems such as tions. They are very good at finding such Schopenhauer's and Hegel's) are usually things. But caricatures, while distortions, systems that leave the objective status quo are not necessarily falsifications. (Nixon unscathed. Deconstruction is profoundly did have bushy eyebrows; Reagan did have "conservative" if only because its con- a weirdly overtrained pompadour.) And centration on all human reality as some- not even the most insecure adherent of the how linguistic implies that the universe is school would deny two other facts. First, an infinitely complex but unchanging and deconstructionist criticism is almost in- unchangeable text. variably written in a convoluted style and Even the magisterial Derrida is sensi- with a specialized vocabulary that ex- tive to this charge. In 1987 he published a

Frank D. McConneU, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he received a B.A. from Notre Dame Univer- sity (1964) and a Ph.D. from Yale University (1968). He is the author of several books of fiction and non-fiction, including Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (1979). Copy- right 0 1990 by Frank McConnell.

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THE CRITICS: TWO FAMILY TREES

THE FRANCOPHONES

Matthew Arnold (1822-88) The critic serves as secular priest. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Ordinary language is, in reality, a code.

Thomas Steams Eliot Claude (1888-1965) Lbvi-Strauss Every great writer revises (1908-) the Tradition. Even cooking is a language, with its own grammar.

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) Literature is therapy, making the reader whole.

Paul de Man Roland Barthes (1919-83) (19 15-80) The critic creates A wrestling the book. match can be \ read like a book-and vice versa. Cleanth Brooks (1906-) & / Robert Penn Warren / / (1905-1989) / Irony, metaphor, ambiguity- the stuff literature is Jacques Demda made on. (1930-) Literary texts have no 'meaning." Northrop Frye (1912-) Books are old myths in new bottles.

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long essay on the imprisoned South Afri- comed the Vichy government as the fulfill- can black leader Nelson Mandela in an at- ment of historical destiny. There is no lack, tempt to demonstrate the political "en- in any nation at any period, of respectable gagement" of his method. But, perhaps intellectuals capable of rationalizing the predictably, Derrida's argument amounted unspeakable. to little more than the assertion that, un- Yet de Man had not merely rationalized der enforced silence, Mandela had be- it; he had suppressed the rationalizations, come a kind of mute text. It is hard to sup- and had done so while busily becoming press a sigh: Is this all the new school has the leader of a movement which argues to tell us about as clear and present an evil that history and politics are irrelevant to as apartheid? critical apprehension. It could appear, in Such charges against the deconstruc- other words, that de Man's exultation of tionists are serious. They amount, in fact, the critic as an intelligence somehow to a writ of mauvaise foi, or hypocrisy (the above or beyond the chaos of history was worst sin in the existentialist's index), really a way of reinventing himself, dis- against the theory's originators and espe- tancing himself from his real-and thor- cially the comfortably tenured, spouse-kid- oughly dishonorable-involvement in that and-Volvo practitioners who are paid to chaos. "Trust the tale, not the teller," said teach something called "literature" and D. H. Lawrence. And of course it is vulgar who achieve professional success by writ- to criticize an idea in terms of the conduct ing essays comprehensible only to fellow of the person who formulates or proclaims inductees. No anti-deconstructionist that I that idea: It would be difficult to take Ezra know of has yet applied the parable of Pound, or even Socrates, very seriously if "The Emperor's New Clothes" to decon- we did. And yet, as the puzzle-of-the-week struction, as tempting as the comparison panel on the Sunday comics page says, might be. But after 1987, the parable may something was wrong-quite wrong- no longer be needed. with this picture. That is because 1987 was the year of Something was wrong enough, anyway, the de Man scandal. Until his death in for the New York Times, Newsweek, and 1983, Paul de Man was the major propo- Time to feature the story as a sign of seri- nent of deconstruction in the United ous problems in the halls of academe. In States. It was de Man, a scholar of French Harper's (July 1988), Mark Edmundson, a and comparative literature at Yale Univer- professor of English at the University of sity, who established the dogma that the Virginia, wrote an article about the scan- difference between "critic" and "creator" dal entitled "A Will to Cultural Power." Lit- of a literary text was an illusory one. erary critics, explained Edmundson, Spreading the new gospel, the Belgian- trained on the largely American and hu- born scholar became the guru of hundreds manistic New Criticism and anxious to of bright Yale students, many of whom preserve their perceived role as ethical ar- went on to establish themselves as profes- biters, found in deconstruction a denial of sors of literature throughout the nation. the moral and political function to which But in late 1987, four years after his death, they were dedicated. Naturally, and some- history intruded upon de Man's reputation times with unbecoming glee, they wel- and influence. It was revealed-first in the comed the de Man revelations as evidence New York Times-that during World War of the moral bankruptcy of a position they 11, in his native Belgium, de Man had writ- were predisposed to loathe. ten essays for a pro-Nazi newspaper. Quite a few essays. he deconstructionists were equally Such discoveries, though disturbing, T quick to come to the defense not just are not that uncommon in the history of of the method but of de Man himself. Geof- this century. The great German philoso- frey Hartman in the New Republic and J. pher Martin Heidegger not only wrote pro- Hillis Miller in the London Times Literary Nazi essays but was a member of the Party; Supplement, among others, rationalized or in France, Paul Claudel, Franqois Mauriac, attempted to diminish de Man's culpabil- and even the mandarin Andre Gide wel- ity. In the spring 1988 issue of the journal

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Critical Inquiry, Derrida published an es- use of "Romantic" to describe Words- say which analyzed the style of de Man's worth, Shelley, and Byron), as witness to pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles, discovering the cultural and economic ravages of in- in them "incessant conflict. . . a double- dustrialism, and as a troubled victim of the edge and a double-bind." Derrida con- 19th-century religious crisis, Arnold found cluded that even while writing the articles in criticism the best antidote to the confu- de Man had also inserted "a counter-text," sion of his time. The inculcation of civi- anti-Nazi and anti-anti-Semitic. The de- lized values ("the best that is known and fense, to put it mildly, was ingenious. thought") would, he believed, help raise Even before the de Man scandal, how- his age out of the materialist morass into ever, many people in and around acade- which it was sinking. At the same time, mia thought something was at stake in the and in the conclusion to "The Function of debate over the latest French philosophi- Criticism at the Present Time," Arnold ac- cal import. Outsiders were a little more knowledged the sadness of his nobly-cho- sceptical: Could there really be that much sen task. "That promised land [a truly hu- at issue in what is, after all, only the way mane society] it will not be ours to enter," we read poems and novels and plays? he writes, "and we shall die in the wilder- The short answer, I believe, is yes. For ness; but to have desired to enter it. . . will the ways we read literature also affect the certainly be the best title to esteem with ways we read advertisements, and newspa- posterity." per articles, and ultimately the instructions in the voting booth. The answer in its mold imagined the critic as Moses, longer form, like the long form of the In- A the prophet and lawgiver. But the ternal Revenue Service, is both more com- critic was not the Messiah. According to plicated and more revealing. Arnold's scheme, the "Messiah" would be I earlier described criticism as the sec- the fully energetic, fully visionary poet- ond oldest profession. But in Anglo-Ameri- who the critic, by dint of his profession, can culture, the institution of the profes- could never be. The fact that Arnold was sion is fairly recent. In fact, it can be the first Oxford Professor of Poetry to lec- assigned a precise date. In 1857, Matthew ture on English rather than on classical lit- Arnold, the son of the headmaster of En- erature was a sign of his commitment to gland's famous Rugby School, was elected making the business of criticism relevant Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was the to the literature of his time. But as heir to first non-cleric elected to th'at position and all the clerics who had previously held the the first to lecture on the subject of Eng- post, Arnold, and his Anglo-American suc- lish literature. Both facts are significant. cessors, continued to regard their function Arnold (1822-1888) can justly be called as a quasi-clerical one, a theology in the "father" of Anglo-American literary search of objects of worship. criticism. One of the renowned poets of Arnold made this clear in his famous his age, an assiduous public servant (Gov- prediction of 1883, in "The Study of Po- ernment Inspector of Schools), and a man etry": "More and more mankind will dis- of impeccable moral virtue, he established cover that we have to turn to poetry to in- the model of the academic critic not just in terpret life for us, to console us, to sustain his writing but in his very presence: genial, us. Without poetry, our science will appear learned, open but judicious, perhaps a tri- incomplete; and most of what now passes fle stuffy (one would never say, "pomp- with us for religion and philosophy will be ous"), and very serious about the function replaced by poetry." Arnold's great precur- of literature. "I am bound," he wrote in sor among the English critics, Samuel "The Function of Criticism at the Present Johnson, would never have made such an Time" (1865), "by my own definition of assertion (or experienced the anxiety un- criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn derlying it). For all his internal conflicts, and propagate the best that is known and Johnson was a fiercely devoted believer thought in the world." and was not an officially sanctioned As self-conscious heir of the Romantic prophet of culture. vision (Arnold is chiefly responsible for the Arnold broke new ground. And in do-

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ing so, he introduced tensions into the crit- tablished affair. It was humane, generous, ic's role that have endured until this day- centered on a canon of "great works," and at least until the recent advent of decon- profoundly committed to the idea that, by struction. The critic's task, according to a proper "appreciation" of the canon, a Arnold, is to stand apart from the vulgariz- person participates in the life of the cul- ing, leveling spirit of the age and to guide ture altogether. It was, in short, Amoldian. it to finer, more humane attitudes by the example of his own sensibility. For while enial as this approach was, it never- Arnold shared in the religious skepticism G theless implied a certain class con- of his time, he fiercely maintained the sciousness, or, put bluntly, a certain snob- moral standards that had been upheld by bery. It implied that not being capable of the old, lost creeds. perceptions, and the right perceptions, Oscar Wilde, whose first volume of po- about art was a sign of the vulgar and the ems was published in 188l, the year after declasse. It barred one from the tribe of Arnold published "The Study of Poetry," is the elect. Not having the right perceptions a crucial example of the Arnoldian infly- left one in the category of the Texas mil- ence. If Arnold was a diffident poet, and a lionaire in the British Museum who com- trifle stuffy, Wilde was self-advertising and plained to one of the guards, "You know, almost unbearably flamboyant. "Would I've looked at all of these pictures, and I you like to know the great drama of my sure don't see anything so great about life?" Wilde once said to Andre Gide. "It is them." "But sir," replies the guard icily, that I have put my genius into my life-I "the pictures are not on trial." have put only my talent into my works." In fact, the title of his most brilliant play, The Zmpor- tance of Being Earnest (1895), is a send-up if not specifically of Ar- wort %no jy~t01 c@(-e<\L nold then of the whole Victorian ;+'< o cornme'ftky C"T> standard of "high seriousness," -HA oatwe. of c^reoi\-nw, of which Arnold was the chief c'e~<\\iwi,OIÃˆ\( voice. +he. But in his very aestheticism, Â¥Hieor riF ~a~\oi+;~Jy- in his inversion of the Arnoldian Free ddk, rb.3 idt. values, Wilde not only admits their force but in fact explores their further implications. "Art should never try to be popular," he writes in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891); "the public should try to make itself artistic." Beneath the flair and arrogance of this pronouncement lies the idea of the critic as culture- bearer carried to its logical con- Fwlly, Q b~eÃ§ttÃc~m~dq clusion. Wilde asks the question, so comple~Myow need "Is criticism really a creative a +heore+;cal apparfthA5to art?" He answers it by saying, "Why should it not be? It works di9est if. You yoti t want with materials, and puts them to if, yti'll j ~Ã‡S wÃˆA into a form that is at once new to reed it. A litertry tour de and delightful. What more can COW ?~ec>Kf&^t01^ b*! one say of poetry?" By the first decades of our century Anglo-American criti- The deconstructionist rage to reduce all things to "textuality" cism had become a fairly well-es- knows no limits, cartoonist Jeff Reid makes clear.

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The very idea of a literary "canon" is historical "rank." This school of criticism borrowed from the study of sacred texts assumed that literature is a form of knowl- (the Bible, the Koran), where the texts edge completely different from our every- themselves tend to dictate the possible re- day, practical knowledge; that its ambigu- sponses to them. Not surprisingly, then, ity and irony (favorite concepts of the New the next important phase of criticism Critics) are much closer to our most inti- turned out to be a revision of the idea of mate experiences of life; and that learning the "canon" itself, and a shift of emphasis to read these ambiguities is to learn to deal from "appreciation" to "analysis." It was with the universal life experiences they de- what came to be called during the 1930s, scribe. The "high seriousness" of the 40s, and '50s the "New Criticism." Its in- Arnoldian plan is still there. But now lit- disputable fathers were I. A. Richards and erature is no longer the test of universal T. S. Eliot. civilization; instead, it constitutes personal Richards was a Cambridge, and later a civilization. This was an appropriate ideal Harvard, professor; he was also a distin- for a culture that was becoming increas- guished semanticist. Eliot, of course, was ingly fragmented and individualistic. the most unavoidable poet of the age, No one who took a college English widely perceived as the herald of modem class between 1945 and 1970 fully escaped poetry after the long Victorian-Edwardian the influence of the New Criticism. In twilight. What the two men had in com- America especially, the New Criticism mon was a reorientation of the critical amounted to a glorious revolution in the stance. Eliot, beginning with the essays in role and self-image of the English teacher. The Sacred Wood (1920), argued for a revi- Literature was not just a poor academic re- sion of the "tradition" in terms of its rele- lation of the sciences; it was a discipline vance to the sensibility of a modern with its own innate value, its own myster- reader. His enormous influence brought ies. Journals were founded and academic about a virtual revolution in taste, with careers were made. previously "minor" poets (e.g., John Donne) usurping the place of previously wo points must be made about this, on "major" ones (e.g., Percy Bysshe Shelley). T the whole, immensely valuable move- Eliot's cautious "modernizing" of the tra- ment. First, the requirements for interpret- dition to suit a contemporary intelligence ing the texts had been relaxed. One no was reinforced by Richards's books. In longer needed to be Matthew Arnold, a Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and carefully cultivated model of civilization; Practical Criticism (1929), Richards in- one needed only to keep one's head in sisted that the correct reading of poetry reading the text. The New Criticism repre- entails a careful attention to the verbal and sented a kind of democratization of cul- metaphoric structures intrinsic to the ture, and that is the second point to be poem (or novel or play) itself and not to its made about it. The demographics of the general cultural or historical resonances. profession of English altered radically af- A generation of young critics and ter World War II. People for whom the lei- teachers on both sides of the Atlantic de- surely sounding "profession of human- veloped these notions into the New Criti- ities" would previously have been out of cism. Among the New Critics were Wil- the question now found that such work liam Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, was within their grasp. The dominance of 1930), Kenneth Burke (A Grammar of Mo- the New Criticism was due not only to its tives, 1945), Cleanth Brooks (The Well ideological appeal but also to the coin- Wrought Urn, 1947), and Ren6 Wellek and cidence of its emergence with the passing Austin Warren, whose Theory of Literature of the G.I. Bill. Thanks to this piece of leg- (1949) achieved almost sacred status, at islation, a generation of young men-and, least among American practitioners of the with more struggles, women-found craft. themselves able to enter a profession The New Criticism insisted on the inde- which previously would have been beyond pendence of the literary work of art from their economic means. More important, considerations of political relevance or of they had at hand a critical approach which

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did not require readers of poetry to fit the was joking. Arnoldian mold of upper-class gentlemen. It is virtually impossible to say what de- The liberal arts had been liberated. construction is; indeed, it is the nature of But any school of thought, once estab- the beast to elude definition. "For it is pre- lished, begins to generate dissidents. In cisely this idea," observed Christopher 1957, the Canadian critic Northrop Frye Norris in his book Derrida (1987), "this as- published his Anatomy of Criticism, which sumption that meaning can always be at the time seemed a radical challenge to grasped in the form of some proper, self- the New Criticism. Frye, a former Angli- identical concept-that Derrida is most can cleric, took his cue from anthropology determinedly out to deconstruct." Norris and comparative religion rather than from here indicated one keynote of the school: semantics and stylistics. He argued that the denial or repression of nostalgia for the "meaning" of a literary work lies in the the idea of meaning itself, the denial of the way that work reincarnates one or another unity of utterance and intent upon which of the elementary mythic structures of Western criticism is founded. consciousness by which human beings An old parable says that the hare was have always understood their lives. Read- the fastest runner of God's creatures, until ing the poem is learning to re-read the he began to wonder how he ran. Similarly, myth behind it. But for all the controversy you are a natural deconstructionist if you it initially generated, Frye's approach now have ever, while reading a book, realized seems in the mainstream of Anglo-Amen- that you were reading a book, or, in the can assumptions about literature: There is middle of a conversation, realized that you still a text, there is still a method of ap- were having a conversation, and that part proaching and deciphering the text; and of your mind was scripting your role. Such there is still the belief that, somehow, to do moments, when they occur, as they do to this is good for you. all of us, we ordinarily suppress as bother- some interruptions of the business of read- nd now we can begin to understand ing or speaking. But what-asks the de- A why deconstruction tends to disturb constructionist-if these moments of so many critics trained in the mainstream vertiginous self-awareness are actually the English critical tradition-and why it in- reality of our life in language? tends to do so. What I have called the "unity of utter- "What is at stake," wrote Jacques ance and intent," Derrida calls by the Derrida in his seminal book Writing and much more resonant name "presence." Difference (French publication, 1967), "is Quite simply, the Derridean position is that an adventure of vision, a conversion of the such presence, an inviolate meaning in the way of putting questions to any object text, the sentence, or the word, is never posed before us." Derrida's statement is- really present. "It is only in God that not the definition of deconstruction-even speech as presence. . . is realized without deconstructionists admit that the method defect," he wrote in Writing and Difference is almost impossible to define. What it (and of course, for Derrida, "God" in this articulates is the fervor with which the sense is an untenable hypothesis). Derrida school announces itself, the sense that insists that language is an arbitrary chore- something grand and definitive is about to ography of symbols. And to say this is to be achieved. Derrida's chief American dis- say that what language teaches us is pre- ciple, de Man, wrote in his last book, Alle- cisely that we are linguistic animals. gories of Reading (1979), that deconstruc- If one were to search history for a pa- tion "will in fact be the task of literary tron-saint of deconstruction, a suitable criticism in the coming years," and that choice might be the pre-Socratic philoso- "the distinction between author and pher Parmenides. Parmenides had an ex- reader is one of the false distinctions that cessive, almost mad faith in the evidence deconstruction makes evident." De Man's of language over the evidence of experi- statement recalls Wilde's aphorism that ence: Deconstruction returns to that one should either be a work of art or wear Parmenidean sense of the unity of all be- a work of art. But Wilde, unlike de Man, ing in language. In Allegories of Reading,

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de Man implies that man's whole universe ing-at first blush violates everything we is encased in various levels and kinds of know about human evolution. Decon- language, or at least language-like struc- structionists would not be unduly dis- tures: "Literature as well as criticism. . . is turbed: Their concern is not human evolu- condemned (or privileged) to be forever tion in an objective sense but human the most rigorous and, consequently, the self-perception as reflected in the universe most unreliable language in terms of of human speech. In fact, discussion of the which man names and modifies himself." artificiality of the word derives from Ferdi- nand de Saussure's posthumous Course in n his two great books of 1967, Writing General Linguistics (19 13)-the text that I and Difference and On Grarnmatology, serves as the cornerstone of 20th-century Derrida argues for this essential emptiness structural linguistics. In describing lan- at the heart of all Western discourse and guage as a code understandable only in its bases his argument on a critique of the own terms, without reference to a myth of very founder of that discourse, Plato. It "meaning," de Saussure not only founded was Plato's "invention," Socrates, who not modem linguistics but made possible the only perceived the Idea-the pure truth science-or technique-of structuralism. which lies behind all thought-but spoke When practiced by de Saussure's most it in dialogue. Derrida points out that brilliant followers, Michel Foucault and "Socrates" only exists for us because Plato Claude Levi-Strauss, there was something wrote about him. That paradox, of course, strikingly anti-humanistic about the "new is almost as old as the study of Plato him- science" of structuralism. In The Savage self. But for Derrida it suggests something Mind (1966), L6vi-Strauss declared "the ul- besides paradox. It suggests that writing, timate goal of the human sciences" was the artificial production of meaning, is "not to constitute, but to dissolve man." prior to speaking. And Foucault, surveying the origins of hu- This assertion-the primacy of writ- manism in Les Mots et les Chases (The Or-

A (SORT OF) RETURN TO HISTORY

Deconstructionists have not been alone in challenging the received idea of the humanistic tradition. A group of scholar-critics calling themselves the New Historicists have, in the last decade, mounted an attack upon the authority of the text from what initially seems a quite different perspective: not the denial or the escape from history, but rather an insistence on the pressure of history upon the creation of art. The New Historicism insists that an individual work of art is comprehensible only within the context of the economic, behavioral, and political forces of the culture out of which it arises. This is not really a new approach-Confucius insisted that from reading a poem one ought to be able to deduce the poet's own province and personal habits. Nor is it especially historical-these are mainly English professors who rely largely on secondary sources and catchy anecdotes. Nevertheless in the work of clever, thoughtful critics like Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, and Mark Rose, the New Historicist impulse-it can hardly be called a method-has produced suggestive re-readings of classic texts, especially from the Renaissance. And yet the New Historicism, as a movement, may be only a more Anglocentric version of the deconstructionist enterprise. In both cases, the critic or interpreter-the second oldest professional-usurps the place of the first. And if the text disappears into a haze of semiological abstraction, or if it disappears beneath catacombs of historical complexity, the result is the same. Like Alice according to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, it isn't really there anymore. So are we again confronted with a new literary criticism that betrays the very idea of literature?

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der of Things, 1966), argued that, "in every blessed by a vision of the meaning within culture, between the use of. . . the order- the meaning of the text he pretends to be ing codes and reflections upon order itself, discussing. Text becomes, once and for all, there is the pure experience of order and pretext. It is not that there are no values. It of its modes of being." In other words, the is that to ask about values is to betray a point of studying the codes as codes-of deplorable enslavement to history and studying systems of signals as signals while lack of taste. dispensing with the reality being "sig- This is the real significance of Derrida's nailedv-is to allow you to grasp the na- most important term, diffirance. There is ture of codification itself: to see that all hu- no such word in French. By the invented man activity is somehow "encoded," French term diffirance, Derrida means to organized according to rules that may lie imply the inescapable difference, gap, or far below the surface of behavior. And to void between sign and signified ("word" think this way, at least implicitly, is to free and "thing" in old-fashioned terms). yourself from the codifications of your Diffirance suggests the way meaning is al- own culture-to become that Cartesian ways deferred. In later writings, Derrida ideal, an unconditioned intellect. and Derrideans have even taken to the use Levi-Strauss and Foucault thus origi- of a new typographical sign: as in nally represented a liberating endeavor, a tree, jviske, &e-h$dfa~t, or elass- shattering of encrusted cultural and intel- st~viggle.In each case, the ---- is sup- lectual prejudices. Likewise Roland posed to indicate the simultaneous ab- Barthes, that most generous and gentle of sence and presence of the concept in the literary critics, structuralized or written sign for the concept, suggesting "semiologized" culture as a way of freeing that the text can never really say what the or making "unconditional" our enjoyment text seems to want to say. As with so much of it. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of deconstructionist theory, the concept of of Semiology at the College de France absence-in-presence implied by those - - - - (1977), Barthes identified the tyranny of (or "erasures," as deconstructionists like cultural codes by saying that, "In every to call them) can be demonstrated through sign sleeps a monster, a stereotype: and I the work of Lewis Carroll. In Through the can never speak without dragging along Looking Glass, Alice meets Tweedledum what my language implies." He went on to and Tweedledee, good deconstructionists, apply semiology to everything from Ra- who insist that she is only a figment of the cine and the Gospels to fashions of dress Red King's dream, and that if he awakens and professional wrestling. Barthes's in- she will disappear. She is, in other words, tentional playfulness had the ironic effect not Alice but Altee. But "I am real" says of making "anti-humanist" structuralism Alice, beginning to cry, and leaving herself (or semiotics) into a covert from of hu- open for a masterstroke of deconstruc- manism: He devalued "the tradition" in tionist argument: "You won't make your- order to rediscover it as a living thing. self a bit realer by crying," Tweedledee remarks: "There's nothing to cry about." ut the danger that lurks in this kind of We have come a long and twisting way B approach to the "textH-whether an from a "disinterested endeavor to learn individual book or a whole culture-is and propagate the best that is known and that the "text" may disappear or, worse, thought in the world." But the fact is that become irrelevant under the self-serving an original, quasi-revolutionary movement complexity of the analysis applied to it. in French intellectual life has taken firm Derrida's emphasis on the "primacy of root among those safe and conservative writing" can in fact lead to the assertion, people, Anglo-American academics. Why glamorous but suicidal, that "writing" is this has happened is a matter for sociolo- all there is, that the world of references no gists. However, since the question affects longer matters. At one extreme of decon- not just the internecine feuds of literary struction, all dictionaries become thesau- intellectuals among themselves-about ruses. Everything is destroyed but the which nobody wisely cares much-but the voice of the critic himself, presumably very nature of literary education in Amer-

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ica and England, it is a question worth cisely the liberation of the self; their use of examining. the text to that end was more important Matthew Arnold may or may not have than the "historical" reality of the text it- been right, but he was certainly righteous. self. The gnostics thought the unity and Anglo-American universities still honor his stability of the world a delusion, beyond idea that a literary education somehow which lay a greater reality, pure Being it- contributes to good citizenship. Decon- self. In analogous fashion, deconstruc- struction not only challenges the idea that tionists find the unity and stability of the it does so contribute but argues seriously text an illusion, but now the greater reality, that the idea itself is a form of institutional- the true being, is the critic's or reader's. ized conditioning-or, to put it in a The deconstructionists' debunking of the Derridean way, a form of humanism. Yet text's supposed meanings and coherent deconstruction presents an approach to patterns, in effect, liberates the critic- literature almost void of any connection reader-like the gnostic "self set free- between what we read and what we do, from all orthodoxies of language, text, and between literature and the so-called "real interpretation. world." Does this gap, as a number of crit- Without the gnostics, the history of ics have suggested, violate the idea of criti- Western thought would have been immea- cism and constitute a betrayal of the sa- surably poorer. For all the censorship of cred texts by the very people charged with their ideas, they directly or indirectly pro- protecting those texts? duced figures as essential as St. Francis and Martin Luther and SGren Kierke- lthough I am not myself a deconstruc- gaard. They kept alive, against orthodoxy, A tionist, my answer is no. Economics, the essential tension of dissent, without tenure, and faddism aside-a very large which orthodoxy inevitably degenerates aside-I think the current deconstruc- into a lifeless formation. tionist vogue can be seen as a necessary That is a comforting, reassuring evalua- phase in the history Arnold set in motion tion of the deconstructionist invasion of over a century ago. Since literature, in American literary criticism. About histori- Arnold's vision, had assumed from reli- cal necessity, about the elementary impor- gion its functions of illumination and in- tance of reading great (or trivial) books, struction, it seemed almost a corollary that about the best that has been known and literary critics establish a canon. By the thought, the younger practitioners of de- mid-20th century, however, mainstream construction seem to know and care noth- Anglo-American criticism had not only a ing. And yet the very energy of their un- mission and a canon, it had settled into an conventionality is a stimulant, and even orthodoxy. Yet orthodoxies inevitably pro- the arrogant complacency of their insular- duce countermovements of dissent, -or ity is a challenge. What they may have to heresies. And to some extent, deconstruc- teach us, even in their final failure, is that tion can best be understood as a literary the enterprise of criticism still matters, heresy paralleling Christendom's best- that reading is training for thinking, and known religious heresy-gnosticism. that however hard we try to deface the Suppressed by the official Christian canon-however hard we deny the ideal, Church, the early' gnostics were philoso- bourgeois-humanist picture correlating pher-mystics who found in the scriptures a what we say and what we do-one equa- meaning beyond, or sometimes counter tion nevertheless holds. Literature matters to, the public, "canonical" meaning of the to us, because we are the matter of litera- text. Re-reading or misreading the estab- ture. In our culture, in the beginning was lished Christian texts, the gnostics were, in the word, whether written or spoken. And a fashion, deconstructionists. And the as deconstructionists would put it, the point of their "deconstruction" was pre- werd is not on trial.

WQ WINTER 1990 109 AMERICA DURING THE '80s

Summing Up the Reagan Era

What really happened to America during the Reagan era? Answering that question will occupy historians for years to come. But now that the decade Reagan dominated has come to a close, statistical data and trends are beginning to provide at least a preliminary answer. Karl Zinsmeister, who makes it his business to find out what numbers are saying, here offers a numerical portrait of America during the 1980s.

by Karl Zinsrneister

or all the academic ink de- lot less than you've been told." voted to the subject of revolu- At its self-proclaimed core, the revolution, history is rarely discon- tion was a clear underachiever. For an ep- tinuous, rarely an affair of och supposedly characterized by its back- dramatic leaps or breaks. lash against government spending, While rhetoric and the emo- government intrusion, and government tionalF environment can shift quickly, the presence in national life, there was far less actual workings of a society usually action than fanfare. Not a single public change at about the same rate as the pro- housing project was privatized. The sage- verbial freight train. Just the same, there brush rebellion didn't pry any western are occasional turning points in any na- lands out of Uncle Sam's grasp. Zooming tion's life, when the engine crests a hill or farm subsidies and protections cost a total enters a deep curve. The train remains a' of $200 billion during the 1980s, by far the train-momentum intact-but thanks to a highest figure in our history. Enterprise thousand small changes in pressure and zones, school prayers, and "the anti-com- direction among its moving parts a differ- munist resistance" in Nicaragua were so ent hum rises from the tracks. real to White House staffers as to have Since we now find ourselves at the end earned their own function keys on the of a decade, the question naturally speechwriting computers. But to average presents itself: Were the 1980s such a time Americans they remained just slogans. Not for America? a single tuition or social-service voucher Viewed presidentially, the '80s were was ever handed to a poor person over the one part Jimmy Carter, eight parts Ronald head of a bureaucrat. And not only is there Reagan, and one part George Bush. The still a Department of Education, it spent decade seems destined to be known, how- one-and-a-half times as much in 1989 as it ever, as the era of the "Reagan Revolu- did ten years earlier. tion." Just how revolutionary a time it was In fiscal year 1980 the federal budget depends upon where you set your gaze, totaled 22.1 percent of U.S. GNP. By 1989, but the range of sub-possibilities extends the figure had dropped all the way to 22.2 from "More than you might think," to "A percent. No axe job! Not even any whit-

WQ WINTER 1990 110 AMERICA IN THE '80s

tling! No decrease at all! (For ancient history buffs, the figure was 16.0 percent in 1950.) That's the revenge of the Neanderthal conservatives? Even on the narrower front of federal taxes, where it is constantly claimed that the Reagan administration made cuts of "irresponsi- ble" proportions, the changes were distinctly mouse-like: Over the decade, the proportion of national output channeled into the federal till went from 19.4 to 19.3 percent (compared with 14a8 per- President Reagan sometimes had trouble explaining his budgets to cent in 1950). And if state the nation. During his budget speech of April 29, 1982, he couldn't and local taxes are taken get his red marker to work on his charts. into consideration, one can only conclude that during the 1980s the Canadians, Austrians, and Spanish were American people took a little more gov- also overspending their allowances by a ernment onto their backs. larger portion than the United States, and Mathematicians in the audience will the Italians, Irish, and Belgians, heaven detect a mismatch between the taxes-in help them, actually had double-digit defi- and spending-out figures cited above. That cit/GNP ratios. discrepancy is called "the deficit," a defi- If we sharpen our focus on U.S. budget nite growth sector and the favorite subject figures even further and look toward the of the policy class during most of the last supposed heart of the Reagan hit list-so- decade. The federal deficit stood at $74 bil- cia1 welfare spending-we still see little lion in 1980, peaked at $221 billion in evidence of any adherence to an anti-bloat 1986, and weighed in at $115 billion by diet. Federal spending on Social Security, decade's end. So much for fiscal prudence Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and other pinched Republican concepts. health, housing, education, and anti-poverty measures totaled 4.9 percent of GNP ccumulated and metamorphosed over in 1960, 7.8 percent in 1970, 11.3 percent A the years like so much sea-bottom silt, in 1980, and 11.3 percent in 1987. Much federal deficits eventually become federal ballyhooed overhauls of the Social Secu- debt, an increasingly plentiful quantity in rity and welfare systems, replete with America during the 1980s. On New Year's "blue-ribbon" commissions, presidential Eve 1979 the national debt stood at $834 task forces, and "shadow committee" pro- billion. Ten Auld Lang Syne's later it hit posals resulted in the end in two distinct $2.3 trillion. These figures inspired rare "Poofs!" that could be heard hundreds of harmonic caterwauls from both the right miles from the nation's capital. Both re- and the left. form efforts ultimately carried far more Recent U.S. binging, however, appears fingerprints of steady-as-she-goes Demo- only routine when viewed against the be- cratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan havior of other big-spending national gov- than of the would-be earthquake inducers ernments. The U.S. deficit has lately in the Reagan administration. amounted to a little over 3 percent of GNP. The Reagan presidency was not with- The Japanese-they of the mystical disci- out its effect on the budget, however. Rais- pline, the sober frugality-were running ing spending is a lot easier than reducing up tabs half again as large, as of 1987. The it, naturally, and in the area of national de-

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA IN THE '80s

fense a notable expansion was accom- ably solid right-leaning justices, has been plished. From its 1980 level of just under transformed from a clearly liberal institu- $200 billion, defense spending was in- tion of more than 20 years standing to creased to slightly more than $300 billion what most observers describe as a "mod- in the late 1980s (both figures in 1989 dol- erately conservative" one. (The same is lars). Here too, though, ephemerality was true for the federal judiciary generally.) the byword. Defense outlays, which had Again, however, the transmogrifymg jump represented 9.5 percent of GNP in 1960, was distinctly un-quantum like. 8.3 percent in 1970, and 5.0 percent in But the federal fisc and Washington are 1980, bobbed up to a peak of 6.5 percent not the nation. In the myriad private uni- of GNP in 1986 before dribbling back un- verses of America, movement during the der six percent again by the decade's end. last 10 years was much more rapid. In- deed, change ranging between gradual eople who understand physics claim and dizzying was virtually the rule. P that entropy is the law of the universe, For one thing, the pace of technical in- but in Washington, D.C., inertia domi- novation-which accelerates largely with- nates. Truth is, the alleged "political re- out regard to ditherings beyond the labora- alignment" of the 1980s produced rela- tory-continues to defy most people's tively minor alterations of policy, and it expectations. Scientific advances initiated resulted in almost no lasting change of in the 1980s include the first higher-tem- casts. Following the relatively short-lived perature superconductivity, the first anom- dominance of Republicans in the Senate alous indications that nuclear fusion may (1981-87), the iron rule of the incumbents be possible at sub-stellar temperatures, (which in Congress means Democrats) recreation of the first genetically altered ani- asserted itself. In recent elections, incum- mals, and the first field tests of genetically bents in the House of Representatives have engineered plants. been victorious in literally 99 percent of It must be remembered that personal their races. (Early in this century it was computers and workstations-of which common for half of all Congressional in- there are nearly 60 million now in opera- cumbents to be replaced in an election tion-were only invented in the 1980s. year. As recently as the late 1940s, about Likewise cellular phones (a couple million one-fifth got dumped.) Competition has ef- in motion), laser printers (more than 3 fectively disappeared from national repre- million), any number of new drugs, and a sentational politics. host of other daily-life-changing products. The two lasting political effects of Undoubtedly, though their significance is Reaganism are disparate: Party identifica- often hard to grasp at the moment of tion has taken a so-far enduring swing to- breakthrough, the advances now sweeping ward the GOP, with self-described Republi-' electronics, biotechnology, chemistry and cans even becoming a majority among other hard sciences will eventually cause some young voting cohorts. Among 18- to our era to be thought of as an epochal one 29-year-olds, for instance, 52 percent in- in human civilization. clined to Republicanism in the first quar- The results of these quiet marches can ter of 1989, versus 33 percent in 1980. be seen in fundamental indicators like life (While young voters tend to be tompara- expectancy. Average life expectation for a tively liberal on issues like race and gen- child born in the United States was 70.8 der, they toe a more conservative line on years in 1970, 73.7 in 1980, and 75.0 in economics, crime, and foreign policy.) 1987. With each passing year during the And the Supreme Court, with five reason- 1980s, average life spans increased 67

Karl Zinsmeister is a Washington, D. C. writer and an Adjunct Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Born in Syracuse, New York, he received his B.A. (1981) from Yale University. He has written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and The National Interest, among other publications, and he is currently at work on a book titled The Childproof Society: Are Americans Losing Interest in the Next Generation? Copyright @ 1990 by Karl Zinsmeister.

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA IN THE '80s

days. (To lay a prominent Reagan-attack to competence stood at 903 as the decade rest, infant mortality rates also continued ended, compared to an average score of to improve steadily during this period, fall- 958 in 1968. ing from 12.6 deaths per 1,000 births to 9.9 To return for a moment to the subject in the first eight years of the decade.) of life and limb, there is one very troubling To put improvements of this magnitude 1980s retrogression that must be noted. in perspective, consider that when my still- Life expectancy for black Americans has living grandmother was born in 1900, U.S. actually fallen since 1984, an unprece- life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years (10 dented occurrence. Given the health-care years below the current level in India). The spending surge and all the countervailing nearly 28-year improvement in longevity technological factors regularly pushing life in her lifetime is more than occurred dur- spans up, only a serious breakdown in the ing the previous 10,000 years of human social arena could drag the figure lower. history. Unfortunately, such a breakdown exists to- It takes serious exertion to achieve day, in the form of the drug abuse and ho- progress like that, and the United States micide epidemics which are tragically has spared no expense. In 1980, health ex- sweeping black communities across the penditures represented 9.2 percent of our nation. Jesse Jackson has taken to saying Gross Domestic Product. By 1986, they that dope is doing more damage to Afri- had jumped up to 11.1 percent and are still can-Americans than KKK ropes ever did, climbing. We spent $1,926 on health for and on this critical statistical axis he is lit- every man, woman, and child in the coun- erally correct. try in 1986-far more than, for instance, But the crime and drug waves which so the $831 invested by the Japanese, or the damaged underclass communities during $1,031 per capita expended in West Ger- the 1980s went against society-wide many. trends. U.S. overall crime victimization We also poured a lot of money into our crested in about 1979, and fell 14 percent education system during the 1980s. Spend- for violent crime, 23 percent for personal ing per elementary and secondary school thefts, and 28 percent for household thefts student zoomed up 26 percent from 1980 in the nine years following. The national to 1988, and the average salary of public- trendlines on drug use by high school stu- school teachers rose 23 percent (both fig- dents peaked at about the same time. The ures in constant dollars). Our high-school fraction of high school seniors reporting drop-out rate edged down a couple per- use of an illicit substance within the previ- centage points-among blacks it was ous 12 months declined 29 percent from down about a third from 1980 to 1987. the class of '79 to the class of '88. And college attendance continued to in- Tougher law enforcement during the crease to an all-time high of 55 percent of 1980s may have had something to do with all high-school graduates in 1986. these shifts. There were 29,000 criminal It's not clear, however, that all the extra defendants convicted in U.S. District effort improved the quality of education. Courts in 1980 (about the same number as During the 1980s, employment in school in 1970). By 1988 the number had jumped administrative bureaucracies grew two- to 43,000. Likewise, the number of federal and-a-half times as fast as employment of and state convicts behind bars increased instructors. Barely half of all school em- from 3 16,000 in 1980 to 674,000 eight-and- ployees today are full-time teachers. And a-half years later. judging by test results, not all of those teachers are teaching that well. The na- f gradual progress was ironically ac- tional average combined Scholastic Apti- I companied by a public sense of worsen- tude Test score bottomed out at 890 (out of ing crisis in the areas of crime and drugs, 1600) in 1980. When the figure rebounded in another area almost the opposite phe- to 906 by the mid-1980s, backs were nomenon took place. The 1980s were the thumped everywhere. But average scores decade when the family arrived as a politi- commenced to fall again after 1987. Our cal issue. The public saw infant strollers best assessment of nationwide educational clogging neighborhoods full of baby-

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA IN THE '80s

boomers and concluded that the return to decade one-quarter of all children born in traditional family values the president was America arrived without benefit of mar- calling for had actually taken place. Not ried parents. Literally a majority of them so. The divorce rate did finally level off in will depend upon welfare payments in- the early 1980s, but that is mostly because stead of a contributing father. the marriage rate had fallen so low. And The combined result of 1980s divorce divorce has stabilized at a level more than and illegitimacy patterns is that 27 percent double the pre-1970s norm. (Current rates, of all children in this country now live extrapolated into the future, suggest that apart from one or both of their parents. (In half of today's marriages will eventually Japan, 96 percent of all children live in break up.) two-parent families. Could broken homes, As for the birthrate, it has not risen with known negative effects on "human from the low, less-than-population-replace- capital," be part of our competitiveness ment level it hit in the mid-1970s. All those problem?) An even more frightening fact strollers you are seeing are just a conse- is this: At some point in their childhood, at quence of the aging of the baby boomers. least 60 percent of all American young- An entire, large generation has hit the sters born in the 1980s will spend time in a swollen-belly stage, but per couple they single-parent home. are having relatively few offspring (an average of 1.8 per woman, which doesn't f family salvation and shrunken govern- even fill the places of mom and dad). I ment were Reaganisms that just didn't Since the mid-1980s, for the first time in happen, a few other battle cries translated our history, the number of childless house- more successfully into reality. While crit- holds in the United States has exceeded ics worried that greed and self-interest the number containing children. would overwhelm the voluntarism and in- And traditionalism is hardly on a roll. dividual accountability called for by the During the first seven years of the 1980s, president, Americans remained very gen- right in the midst of a supposedly calm and erous during the 1980s. Private giving for conservatizing era, the number of births philanthropic purposes increased from out of wedlock soared 40 percent. The $49 billion to $104 billion in the first eight astonishing result is that by the end of the years of the decade. More than four-fifths of that was comprised of individual donations. Corpo- rate giving also jumped, by 66 percent in seven years. Mutual aid and fraternal cooperation are alive and well in the United States, as further indicated by the jump in national non-profit associations, from 14,726 in 1980 to 21,911 in 1989. The Reaganites always insisted that the best aid program in the world was economic growth, and of that there was a surprisingly large measure during the 1980s. As this is being written in the waning weeks of 1989 the United States is en- tering its 85th straight Live from Heritage Village Church near Charlotte, N.C. Scandals month of economic growth, have shaken "televangelism," but religious TV viewers increased the second longest expan- from 42 percent of Americans in 1980 to 49 percent in 1989. sion since record-keeping

WQ WINTER 1990 114 AMERICA IN THE '80s

began in 1854, and one that economist Durham, N.C., Burlington, Vt., Provi- Herbert Stein characterizes as "the longest dence, R.I., Anaheim, Calif., Poughkeepsie, and strongest noninflationary expansion in N.Y., Madison, Wis., Rochester, Minn., San our history." Francisco, Calif., greater Washington, D.C., In addition to confounding economists Boston, Mass., and the huge Nassau/Suf- of varying hues, this long expansion did folk counties region on Long Island had nice things to the pocketbooks of Ameri- late 1980s unemployment rates between 2 can citizens. Median family income, in and 3 percent (about as low as these things constant 1988 dollars, stood at $29,919 in can possibly go given normal job turn- 1980. The decade-opening recession over). The minimum wage has become a pushed it down to $28,708 by 1982. Then fiction in many places (pizza deliverers for over the next six years it zipped up to the Domino's chain are now paid between $32,19 1. Income per capita, in many ways $8 and $12 an hour in the nation's capital), a purer indicator because it is not dis- and employers throughout the land are torted by changes in family configuration finding it hard to fill positions with quali- over time, grew even more strongly: up a fied workers. total of 17 percent from 1980 to 1988, or an annual rate of 2 percent since the ex- vidence of the rising prosperity of pansion began. E American private lives in the later Two percent annual growth sounds un- 1980s could be seen in everything from exceptional, until you realize that it would skyrocketing housing demand (median double your standard of living in 35 years. sales prices of existing homes up 25 per- For most of human history, an increase in cent from 1985 to 1989) to record life quality of that magnitude would have moviehouse admissions ($4.5 billion in taken many generations. Today it is the leg- 1988 versus $2.7 billion in 1980) to all- acy of a single presidential term. time highs in the fraction of American Growth like that also has a way of eat- meals eaten out at restaurants (38 cents of ing up surplus labor. Early in the decade every food dollar in 1987, up from 32 the air was full of talk of long-term "struc- cents in 1980). Forty percent of Americans tural" unemployment. By late 1989 unem- now attend an art event in the course of a ployment was just a bit over 5 percent, and year, 49 percent partake of live sports, 48 a record 63 percent of all Americans 16 percent visit amusement parks. (We now and over were in harness. The raw aggre- spend the same amount attending cultural gates too are quite impressive: As of 1979, events as we do on athletic events. Twenty 100 million Americans were earning a pay- years ago it was only half as much.) The check. In 1989 it was up to 119 million. number of painters, authors and dancers There has been a whole lot of shaking go- has increased more than 80 percent over ing on in the world of job creation. - the last decade. The number of U.S. opera Perhaps the best indicator of the companies rose from 986 to 1,224 in just progress made on this front is the fact that the first seven years of the 1980s. unemployment stories almost never show Book purchases are up, national park up on news programs anymore. Which is visits and trips abroad have soared, cable not to say we don't have a serious employ- TV hook-ups are climbing, wine sales have ment problem in this country. We do. As jumped, big-ticket athletic shoes are huge one Vermont state labor official puts it, sellers. Nearly one out of every five houses "You've heard of the discouraged worker now standing in the U.S. was built since effect; what we're seeing is the discour- 1980. Numbers of motor vehicles and aged employer effect." numbers of phones have risen toward New England, with 13 million resi- saturation (more than one of each for ev- dents, had a late-1980s unemployment rate ery adult in the country), and video cam- of 3.1 percent. In the Maryland/D.C./Vir- eras, microwave ovens, personal comput- ginia region (home to 11 million), the fig- ers, food processors and other gadgets ure was 3.5 percent. In many areas, grave have come out of nowhere since 1980 to labor shortages exist. Eight different states take their places right next to the toaster and such diverse jurisdictions as Raleigh- and other "necessities."

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA IN THE '80s

Expanded choices and new services States. Their best estimate: about 200,000 confront even the reluctant consumer. per year. (This was prior to passage of the Anyone spinning the FM radio dial in 1989 Simpson-Rodino bill in 1986, which tight- encountered a great many more stations ened things up. Presumably there are than he or she did in 1980 (a thousand fewer these days.) more nationwide, up 30 percent). New re- The Census Bureau also attempted to gional and specialty magazines fill every quantify out-migration from the country niche from Organic Farmer to PC World. (most of it by foreign-born Americans re- Just about any item that a person desires turning to the country of their birth) and can now be purchased from catalogs came up with a figure of around 160,000 which slip conveniently through our annually. When the Immigration and Nat- mailslots every day. uralization Service conducted its amnesty program for illegals in the later 1980s,just ne example of the increasingly riot- 1.8 million individuals applied for perma- 0 ous variety that bubbled through nent legal status, confirming that the "un- American life in the 1980s: The number of documented" population in this country is different fresh fruits and vegetables much smaller than the 5 to 20 million fig- stocked by the average supermarket tri- ure sometimes bandied about. pled in ten years. Visiting Soviet legislator A factual survey like this necessarily Boris Yeltsin went home raving that the concentrates on subjects that can be mea- Americans HAVE 30,000 ITEMS IN THEIR sured and expressed statistically. But many GROCERY STORES! The fact that before of the most important shifts of the 1980s returning he converted all his lecture fees fell in softer categories, loosely organiz- into hypodermic needles-one of thou- able under the topic "cultural attitudes." sands of vital low-tech commodities that In the long run, the new cultural thinking Mother Russia has found it impossible to that coincided with the Reagan era (I do produce in adequate supply-indicates not wish to make a case here concerning how grotesquely fantastical these material cause and effect) may be more significant riches must seem to people in countries of to the life of the nation than anything that low economic creativity. happened in, say, the governmental or fi- Perhaps out of frustration, many tal- nancial realms. ented residents of those less creative na- There was, for instance, a pronounced tions decided to vote with their feet during religious revival, with most of the action the 1980s. Nearly 6 million legal immi- taking place within evangelical and theo- grants came to our shores during the dec- logically conservative churches. Even ade, a little less than half from Asia, some- though the total percentage of Americans what under 40 percent from Latin who attend church weekly is about the America and the Caribbean, and most of same today as it was in 1939-40 per- the rest from Europe. The number of peo- cent-the number of persons reporting ple of Hispanic origin in the United States they watch religious television rose from rose from 15 million in 1980 to 20 million 42 percent in 1980 to 49 percent in 1989. in 1989, and the ranks of Asian-Americans A network of thousands of religious book- grew from 4 million to about twice that. stores has spread across the country. Measures to draw immigrants from vari- Twenty-five hundred retail stores were ous continents in somewhat fairer relation members of the Christian Booksellers to the existing make-up of the U.S. popula- Association in 1980, versus 3,000 in 1989. tion were wending their way through Con- If sales figures from such shops were in- gress as the '80s drew to a close. cluded by the tabulators, religious books One of the biggest statistical "dud" sto- by authors like James Dobson, Charles ries of the 1980s concerned our supposed Swindoll, Frank Peretti, Jeanette Oke, invasion by illegal aliens. After years of Robert Schuller, and Rabbi Harold hearing alarmist guessers make alarming Kushner would have appeared promi- guesses, the Census Bureau in 1986 finally nently on U.S. best-seller lists during the undertook an official calculation of the ex- 1980s (with around 30 million books sold tent of illegal immigration to the United among them).

WQ WINTER 1990 AMERICA IN THE '80s

In other comers of American culture On television and in film, too, new val- there has been a pronounced turn toward ues-or at least a new wistfulness for old traditionalism. Our buildings, for instance, values-became apparent. Among the are once again being built with columns, movies that American audiences con- ornaments, and gold leaf. On our stages, sumed most hungrily during the 1980s screens, political podiums, and playing were ones like "Chariots of Fire," "Top fields, hairy-chested masculinity has Gun," "Hoosiers," and "Trading PlacesH- roared back as an American ideal. In the films that treated religion sympathetically, music industry, classical recordings began that frankly admired military values, that to sell like rock recordings for the first celebrated small-town virtue, that were time during the 1980s. Luciano Pavarotti's anti-communist, that were pro-entrepre- "Oh, Silent Night" went Platinum (one neurial and anti-bureaucratic. Among the million or more sales), the Mozart most popular television fare was "The Bill soundtrack for Amadeus hit Gold (500,000 Cosby Show," with its full embrace of tra- or more sales), and other pressings like ditional bourgeois family values (top rated "Horowitz in Moscow," RCA's "Pachelbel for four of its five full seasons to date), and Canon," and Leonard Bernstein's "West the attacks on liberalism in criminal jus- Side Story" on Deutsche Gramophone are tice on "Hill Street Blues" (winner of 25 all approaching bullion status. Many of the Emmy awards). most influential new pop artists were The currents and crosscurrents of the dubbed "New Traditionalists" because of 1980s had their cumulative effect in subtle their affinities for both older musical styles but significant ways. Toward the end of the (acoustic instruments have made a big decade an extremely average American comeback, for example) and older lyrical woman named Anita Folmar, one of many themes. Love of family and flag, expres- conservative Democrats whom Ronald sions of faith, and praise for independence Reagan had induced to become a Republi- and hard work were among the favorite can, was quoted in an unimportant little songwriting topics of the 1980s. newspaper piece praising the president for Conservatism played well in the na- bringing a "return to morality. . . wearing tion's bookstores as well. Allan Bloom sold jeans where jeans should be worn, not all around 850,000 copies of The Closing of the time." That is about as good a sum- the American Mind, a book which may best mary of the most important presidency be described as a declamation against the since World War I1 as we are likely to get. 20th century. The two most influential Ronald Reagan-himself more a cultural public-policy books of the decade were a icon, an embodied idea, than an actual defense of supply-side economics by motive force-was important mostly be- George Gilder and an attack on the Great cause he presented an altered picture to Society by Charles Murray (the former, America in the 1980s. Wealth and Poverty, sold 114,000 copies in In his own daffy way, Reagan charac- hardbound alone; the latter, Losing terized the decade perfectly. He wasn't Ground, 56,000 copies). After 52 weeks on quite the man he claimed to be, and he, the fiction best-seller lists, The Bonfire of like us, didn't carry through on a lot of his the Vanities. Tom Wolfe's conservative cri- boldest resolutions. Few molds got tique of urban collapse, continues to broken during the 1980s. But ~ea- sell briskly. Even writers of a usually gan projected an idealized image leftish inclination started behaving that was rather different from what uncharacteristically. In 1986, at a we had become used to, and he quite Poets, Essayists, and Novelists sincerely aspired to fill it. He, and (PEN) conference in New York, we, deeply wanted us to be the old none other than Norman Mailer shining city on the hill. surprised his audience with a de- His was a wishful era. And fense of Reagan's Secretary of wishes, we know, are very im- State, George Shultz. portant.

WQ WINTER 1990 117 PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN

Lawyer Sam Boorstin

The Emersonian dictum-that there is "properly no history; only biography''-finds few better illustrations than the work of Daniel Boorstin. While most historians in the 1960s and '70s quantified and correlated, Boorstin, in such prize-winning works as The Americans, recreated the richness and diversity of individual lives. In this memoir of his father-a Jewish lawyer in love with the frontier town of Tulsa-Boorstin brings his relish for historical detail to his own family's past.

by Daniel J. Boorstin

never knew anyone quite like my ings confined the family's social life. For father, but then I never really knew most of our years in Tulsa we lived in a my father either. He was a man "duplex" apartment, with my mother's sis- without a single vice, but with a ter Kate and her husband and daughter liv- hundred foibles. He was a "de- ing below. My mother's only friend was voted" husband in a miserably un- this sister, but my father was everybody's happyI marriage. He was embarrassingly friend and spent his spare hours in the proud of me and advertised my small aca- lobby of the Tulsa Hotel, and later the demic triumphs by stopping fellow Tul- Mayo Hotel, chatting with acquaintances sans on the street to show them newspaper or strangers or simply reading the newspa- clippings, and he thermofaxed my letters per and hoping to be interrupted by a home to give to passing acquaintances. strange or friendly voice. My mother was Yet he never once praised me to my face: suspicious of anyone who was not a blood When I won my Rhodes Scholarship to go relation (including especially her brothers' from Harvard to Oxford, he had no com- wives), while my father's suspicions (with ment, but noted that a neighbor boy had some reason) fell especially on the blood been given a scholarship to send him from relations themselves. Except for two or Tulsa Central High to the University of three occasions when we entertained at Oklahoma. My mother was one of the dinner a local merchant who was my fa- world's best cooks, not in the gourmet cat- ther's prize client, I cannot remember a egory, but in the Russian Jewish style, single occasion when we had nonfamily spending endless hours in the kitchen to guests in our house or were in another make her cheesecake or her blintzes just Tulsa home. Everything about our life- right. Then when my father came to dinner including our coming to Tulsa-seemed from his office (always later than expected) dominated by my mother's family. I never he seldom failed to say that he "would just understood how two people so ill suited to as soon eat a bale of hay." "Man should eat each other could ever have married. But to live, and not live to eat." the story of how my father and mother first Still, there was never any doubt that my met was supposed to explain it. And be- mother ruled the roost, and her tribal feel- hind that was the story of the last years of

WQ WINTER 1990 AN AMERICAN MEMOIR

my father's independence, back in Atlanta. When Sam Boorstin received his LL.B, de- My father always spoke with a warm gree he was still under 21, and when he and soft Georgia accent. His father was appeared before the judge to be admitted one of the many Jews who emigrated from to the bar, it was objected that he was un- the Russian pale in the late 1880s to es- derage. He won his first case when he per- cape pogroms, military service, and persuaded the judge to admit him anyway, secution. This Benjamin Boorstin came on and so became the youngest member of his own and for some reason, never ex- the Georgia bar. In Atlanta he began prac- plained, settled in Monroe, Georgia. His tice as junior member of one of the most brother came about the same time. But prestigious old law firms. He spent his the immigration officers spelled his broth- spare time joining every fraternal organi- er's name Boorstein, and so he remained. zation that would let him in. These in- The two brothers had stores on opposite cluded the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Red sides of the street in Monroe, where their Men, and the Masons. I still have the fine differences of name were constant re- Hamilton gold watch with the Masonic minders of their recent arrival. Benjamin emblem engraved on the back which was Boorstin sent for his wife, who came over given to him when he became the youn- with their infant, Sam. My father went to gest Worshipful Master in the United school in Monroe. While working in a gen- States. He kept his hand in as a beginner in eral store in his svare time he managed to Georgia Democratic politics, which be- collect the premium tags attached to the little bags of cigarette tobacco he was selling. He sent off a stack of these tags and received one of the primitive plate cameras. This camera changed his life, for he used it to earn his way through college. Ar- riving in Athens, Georgia, the site of the state university, he quickly found his way into the office of the president. He showed the president his photographs of the cracked walls and peeling ceilings of the university classrooms. These pictures, and more like them, he said, would persuade the state legislature to grant appropriations for repairs and for new university buildings. With that he applied for the novel job of university photographer and got it on the spot. Then he worked his way through by helping the president with his campaign for larger appropriations and The Boorstins were still living in Atlanta in 1916 when this picture by taking class pictures. (inset) of their two-year-old son, Daniel, was taken. Before the year In those days law was an was out, they moved to Tulsa, where Sam established his law prac- undergraduate subject. tice. Here, many years later, the lawyer poses in his library.

WQ WINTER 119 AMERICAN MEMOIR

came easier when Governor John Mar- cumstances. She had come down from shall Slaton engaged him as his private New York City to visit her brothers in At- secretary. One of Sam Boorstin's qualifica- lanta. The handsome and promising Sam tions-in addition to personal charm and Boorstin began courting the attractive an outgoing manner-was his elegant Dora Olsan from the "East." The society handwriting. He had acquired a beautifully section of the Atlanta Constitution carried rotund and flourishing hand by attending a a picture of the pretty visitor with the story penmanship school. His flamboyant signa- of a dinner held at the hotel in her honor. ture was one of the first mannerisms that I Governor Slaton was present, and at the tried to imitate-without any success. end of the dinner he arose, offered a toast, and said, "Sam Boorstin, if you don't e might have had a career in Georgia marry that beautiful girl, I'll see that politics, even though he was a Jew. you're disbarred." Sam married Dora. But unpleasant events surrounding the in- The Frank case impelled my mother's famous Leo Frank case intervened and three brothers-along with my father and made this impossible. In 1913, the inno- the husband of her sister-to leave At- cent pencil manufacturer Leo Frank was lanta. They went to Tulsa (then still pro- railroaded on a charge of raping and mur- nounced Tulsy), Oklahoma, a frontier dering one of his employees in a turbulent town in what only nine years before had trial that roused the ugliest passions of rac- still been Indian Territory, set aside for the ism and anti-Semitism that Georgia had so-called Five Civilized Tribes. In 1916 ever seen. The case became a newspaper Tulsa had few paved streets and fewer sensation. My father, though still one of the paved sidewalks. My three uncles opened most junior members of the bar, lent a 10- a bank, and the husbands of the two sisters cal hand to the defense, as aide to several tagged along, with Kate's husband joining eminent imported Eastern lawyers, includ- the bank. My father opened a law office, ing the distinguished Louis Marshall. slightly separating himself from the family, When, to no one's surprise, Frank was and he soon became one of Tulsa's most convicted, my father had the bitter assign- energetic boosters. ment of carrying that word to Frank's wife. After settling in Tulsa-which my In 1915, afier his death sentence was re- mother despised (and never stopped de- duced to life imprisonment, Frank was spising)-my father never really took a va- seized and lynched by a raging mob, who cation. He made a few business trips and had the shamelessness to have their photo- once came to England to visit me when I graphs taken standing proudly beside the was at Oxford. But he thought Tulsa was a dangling body of the innocent Frank. good enough year-round place. My mother There followed in Atlanta one of the worst (usually with her sister) left town at the pogroms ever known in an American city: first crack of summer heat, usually to go to an unpleasant reminder of the Russia from Atlantic City or some other resort. which the Boorstin-Boorstein brothers It is still hard for me to understand- had fled. My mother's brothers then much less explain-my father's love affair owned a men's clothing store in Atlanta, with Tulsa. He thought, or at least said, it whose store windows, like those of other was the greatest place on earth. In fact, Jewish merchants, were smashed in the af- Tulsa was a frontier village translated into termath of the Frank case. The prospects the architecture and folkways of the 1920s. were not good for a young Jewish lawyer With endless prairies stretching around, interested in politics. there was no good reason for skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in 1912, my father had Still, Tulsa built the Philtower, the Phil- married my mother under legendary cir- cade, and the Exchange National Bank

Daniel J. Boorstin is Libraric~iz of Coilgress E~~zerit~lsand a former Wilson Center trListee. Bo~Y~in Atl~~ilt(~,Georgia, he received aiz A.B. fro~nHanmrd (1934) and a J.S.D. froin Yale (1940). A foi7ner Rlzodes Scltolar, lte is the u~ttltorof t7zaity books, incl~tdittgThe Image (1962), The Discoverers (J983),md (1 tltree-ijol~tnzeseries entitled The Americans, tlze third vol~(i77eof ~vlzich,The Democratic Experience, 1von the P~ilitzerPrize in 1974. Copyrigltt @ 1990 by Daniel J. Boorstin.

WQ WINTER 1990 120 AN AMERICAN MEMOIR

Progress coines to Main Street. Tize three pizotograplzs, froin left to riglzt, clzart the rapid clzange of downto~,vnTulsa during the early 20th ceiftut:?. Tlze dirt road of 1907 was a bricked boulevard by 1 909. By 191 7, the year after Sam Boorstin settled iiz T~~lsa,Main Street was paved- and tlze Iz~lbof aiz increasitzgly modern- looking city.

Building, all of which cast their many-stoned shadows across the bar- ren plain. That was where I first understood the American booster's defense against critical overseas visitors. "No reason not to boast, just because the great things have not yet gone through the formality of taking place." As for culture, there wasn't much. Only practitioner." He never had a partner (my a Carnegie library, the annual visit of the mother never would have tolerated it!), Metropolitan Opera Company-heavily but through his office came a stream of sponsored by the best ladies' "ready-to- young lawyers just out of law school wear" clothing stores-and Kendall Col- whom he trained in the old apprentice lege, a Baptist missionary school to which style. They adored him, but found him dif- none of the wealthy local citizens sent ficult to work for. Many of them became their sons and daughters. district attorneys and judges, or they

My father joined in the manic optimism founded nrosnerousL i law firms that far out- ,for the future of Tulsa, which soon called shone his own. He had his own way-his itself "the Oil Capital of the World." Oil very own way-of doing everything. This was mother's milk to all of us raised in included the way you use an index, the Tulsa. And the gambling spirit infected my way you hold a pen, the way you talk to uncles, who played for, and won and lost, clients. Each of these apprentices stayed fortunes in oil. Would their next well be a for a few years and then went on-much "gusher" or a "dry hole"? Was it possible wiser in the law and how to practice it, but to open a new "oil field" on this or that relieved at not being told how to do every- farmer's land? This was the adult jargon thing, I personally suffered more than most familiar to me. once from my father's insistence on doing While my father was a booster for things his way, After I had been shaving for Tulsa, he never became an oil gambler. In- many years my father still insisted on my stead he became a species of lawyer now running the razor against the grain of my nearly obsolete. He was a lone "general facial hair as "the only way to get a close

WQ WINTER 1990 AN AMERICAN MEMOIR

shave." His golf lessons, offered in a warm far my father's biggest case-which still spirit of paternal helpfulness, made me gives me a warm feeling for the Soviet hate the game, and I've never gone near a Union. But from a family point of view golf course since. there was a price to pay. I don't think my father ever told my mother how much of a y father would have been happy to fee he had received in this case. But I do see a "Samuel A. Boorstin and Son" remember my mother's frequent question: shingle outside his office, and to that end "Whatever happened to all the Kapalush- he really hoped I would go to the Univer- nikov money?" sity of Oklahoma. My mother's insistence My father's law office was a piece of that "only the best" was good enough and Americana. The place of honor went to a that I must "go &st" to Harvard helped pen-and-ink drawing of a mythical judge save me from all that. representing the Majesty of the Law- Still, my father's law practice was ex- which mv father had me trace from a tic- emplary for those who believe that the law ture thai impressed him-and a ph6to- is a public-service profession. The big graph of the justices of the hallowed Su- money was in oil, and he had a share of preme Court of the United States. On the corporate oil practice. But what he en- walls and under the glass on his desk were joyed most, and talked about most, was his mottoes, uplifting aphorisms, and lines of "general" practice. This was more like the verse. The most poignant message (and work of a village curate than that of a city now the most obsolete) in those days of lawyer. He was especially proud of the oc- breach-of-promise suits was the framed casion when he saved a hapless girl from commandment: "DO Right and Fear No disaster. He prevailed on her mother not Man; Don't Write and Fear No Woman." to seek annulment of a quickie marriage There were some Edgar Guest poems and until several months had passed-and so Kipling's "If-" in an ornate version ensure the legitimacy and the financial printed by Elbert Hubbard's press. And provision for the baby he wisely suspected then: "When the One Great Scorer comes to be on the way. This despite the mother's to write against your name-He writes- and the girl's protests that "nothing had not that you won or lost-but how you happened." There were countless occa- played the game." His favorite modern lit- sions when he prevailed on irate husbands erature was Elbert Hubbard's "A Message and wives not to go for a divorce. And to Garcia." there was the time when he helped secure My father still seems to me to have the acquittal of one of his clients on a mur- been the most unmercenary man in the der charge for shooting a rival merchant world. He took cases because he thought on Main Street. he could somehow help someone. He As a prominent Democrat he was natu- never pressed for his fees and took cases rally the best general counsel for the Tulsa without thinking whether the client could T~bune,an outspoken, violently right-wing ever pay him-which of course infuriated Republican daily. He defended the T~bune my mother. He also loved to give gifts, and against numerous libel suits, and despite never worried about the cost. There was a their provocative and belligerent postures, particular kind of loose-leaf address book he never lost a case for them. bound in leather which he thought (and He never got rich in the practice, but insisted) that everyone should use. If a ce- he had one profitable piece of good luck. A lebrity came to lecture at Town Hall, after- representative of Amtorg (the Soviet oil ward he would send him one of these combine), who had come to Tulsa to im- books and try to begin a correspondence. prove his knowledge of oil-well technol- Each address book must have cost over ogy, was run over by a truck and had to ten dollars and they added up. He trea- spend weeks in a local hospital. My father sured the letters of acknowledgment he re- took his case and won one of the largest ceived from the celebrities, which he personal-injury verdicts on record in Tulsa pasted in a book and showed to visitors to at that time. The damages awarded were in his office, the neighborhood of $75,000. This was by His law practice required a good deal

WINTER 1990 122 AN AMERICAN MEMOIR

of reading-in the extensive law library Orthodox on the impecunious North Side which he maintained in his office. He in- and the Orthodox and Reform synagogues vited other lawyers-especially the young on the prosperous South Side. My father ones just beginning-freely to use this li- was active in the Anti-Defamation League brary, which must have been one of the and in various inter-faith activities. But I best and most up-to-date law libraries in can never remember his presence at a reli- town. His nonlegal reading was myopi- gious service. Very different from my pa- cally focused. If he found a book that he ternal grandfather was my mother's father, really liked he would give it Biblical status. who lived with us for many years and was One particular biography of Judah P. Ben- scrupulously Orthodox. Jacob Olsan went jamin-the first professing Jew elected to to "shul" every day, did no work on Satur- the U.S. Senate (1852-1861), who held days, and was the reason for our maintain- high office in the Confederate States of ing a kosher kitchen with a separate set of America and at the end of the war emi- dishes for Passover. The status of Jews in grated to England, where he prospered as Tulsa was curious. For Tulsa was a head- a barrister-caught his fancy. He never quarters of the Ku Klux Klan, which was failed to refer to it whenever any question responsible for burning down the Negro of history or literature arose, and pressed sections of town in one of the worst race me to read and reread it. riots of the 1920s. The Klan had no pa- He was an early champion of gummed tience for Tulsa Jews, but the Jews some- and printed name stickers and Scotch how paid little attention to their gibes. My tape, which he affixed to everything- father and his Jewish friends looked down books, golf clubs, hats, tennis rackets. He condescendingly on them and their like as could never understand why I preferred a bunch of "yokels." the pristine book. This was only one expression of his love of gadgets, his booster don't know how much life in Tulsa had faith in the next way to do anything, in- I to do with it. But just as my father was cluding laxatives and the latest electronic totally without vice-he never smoked, belts and exercise machines to cure all ills. drank, or to my knowledge womanized- As an optimist he was a ready victim for so he was an irritatingly tolerant man in visiting book salesmen and their multivol- his opinions. I could never get him to ex- ume subscription sets, often in "simulated press an adverse or uncharitable judgment leather." I remember particularly the un- on anyone-including the Man bigots and broken (and mostly unopened) sets behind the rising Nazis. He always tried to make the glass doors of our living-room book- allowances for why people did what they case, which included the Works of Theo- did. He was a living example of how immi- dore Roosevelt, the World's Great Oratioqs, grant, mobile, westward-moving Ameri- Beacon Lights of History, and the speeches cans wore off the edges of their convic- and writings of the notorious atheist Rob- tions-how the West saved some people ert G. Ingersoll. from bigotry but provided a fallow ground My father's enthusiasm for Robert G. for bigots. I will never forget his conta- Ingersoll did not interfere in the least with gious enthusiasm for the novelties of his public stance as a Jew. We were mem- American life, and for the undocumented bers of a11 three Jewish synagogues-the halcyon hture.

WQ WINTER 1990 123 Oxford The Insecure Alliance information shapes both culture and social Energy Crises and Western Politics structure."-Richard L. Bushman, Since 1944 Columbia University ETHAN B. KAPSTEIN, Brandeis University 1989 384 pp.; 4 maps $39.95 "A theoretically astute and well-researched study of the wiys in which the Western States of Siege allies have cooperated and clashed over U.S. Prison Riots, 1971-1986 energy issues since 1945, of the role American hegemony has played in BERT USEEM and PETER KIMBALL, resolving conflicts in this area, and of the both of the University of Illinois, Chicago degree to which friction among the allies "Represents a major advance in thinking has contributed to the decline of American about prison riots.. . .Based on a careful predominance."-Stanley Hoffmann, comparative study of disturbances in Harvard Uiziverity several systems, this book is must reading 1989 272 pp.; 3 maps 535.00 for anyone who desires a fresh, realistic perspective on prison violence and how to prevent it."-John J. DiIuIio, Jr., Princeton University Knowledge Is Power 1989 292 pp.; 8 photos $29.95 The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 RICHARD D. BROWN, University of Prices and piiblicatioi~dates are subject to cl~ai~ge Coni~ecticut and good 0121 in the U.S. 7" order, send checfor inorley order to: "Sets everything about early American Department MG culture in a new light.. . .Richard Brown's To order by phone usin major credit cards, sensitive commentary on every form of please call (212) 879-7300 at.7106 communication from personal conversation to published books and newspapers makes Oxford University Press us realize how the control and diffusion of 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

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Continued from page 22 these empires were converted to the reli- of the New World to adopt their culture gion and thus inherited the culture. than it was for the French to supplant the It also helps if an empire is the only civi- peoples' powerful ties to Islam in their lizing force in a region. As Issawi points North African colonies. out, "Rome was dealing with relatively In almost every case that Issawi studied primitive peoples and Greece with highly "it was the culturally less creative people civilized ones, strongly tenacious of their that imprinted a large area." Good fortune, old cultures." Likewise, it was easier for not merit, he believes, is the stuff of which Portugal and Spain to persuade the natives lasting legacies are made.

-- PRESS & TELEVISION

TV'S Critics "Real and Perceived Effects of 'Amerika'" by Dominic L. Lasorsa, in Journalism Quarterly (Summer 1989), Univ. of S.C., 1621 College St., College of Journalism, Columbia, S.C. 29208- 025 1. Liberal critics were hopping mad in 1987 to the influence of television assume that when ABC broadcast its tedious seven-part others are such utterly helpless prey to it? miniseries, Amerika. The miniseries' grim Lasorsa suggests an answer. Of the 523 depiction of life in a Soviet-occupied people he surveyed about Amerika, 3 1 per- United States, they exclaimed, would turn cent felt that the program had much the American people into raving anti-So- greater impact on others than on them- viet Rambos. Although Lasorsa, a profes- selves. Social scientists call this the "third sor of journalism at the University of Texas person effect." What was the distinguish- at Austin, does not mention it, ABC aired ing characteristic of this group? Lasorsa the miniseries partly to mollify conserva- found that many thought of themselves as tive critics, who were hopping mad over "political experts." But when he tested all ABC's broadcast of The Day After in 1983. 523 respondents for "real" political knowl- These critics were convinced that ABC's edge, he found that only 22.5 percent of dire portrait of life in the United States af- those "high" in real knowledge exhibited ter a nuclear war would turn the American the "third person effect" while 34.7 of public into pacifist sheep. those who were "low" in knowledge did. As we all know, Americans became rrei- Lasorsa is rather polite in his conclu- ther Rambos nor wimps, and Lasorsa has sion: "Perceived political knowledge the opinion poll data to prove it, at least in rather than real political knowledge fuels the case of Amerika. But the controversies the third-person effect." In other words, do raise an interesting question: Why do when it comes to television, those who critics who consider themselves immune know least criticize most.

NO More "When Unnamed Sources Are Banned by Felix Winternitz, in The Quill (Oct. 1989), 53 W. Jackson Blvd., Ste. 731, Chicago, Deep Throats? 111. 60604-3610. In 1988, George Blake, editor of the Gin- close to the investigation." News stories cinnati Enquirer, voiced the anxiety of that rely on anonymous sources, Blake many news executives when he criticized said, are "trust-me" pieces that make it the widespread use of anonymous "difficult, if not impossible, for the reader sources-the ubiquitous "high administra- to evaluate the accuracy of the information official" or the mysterious "source tion presented." Unlike his peers, how-

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ever, Blake did something. He banned three Ohio newspapers. most anonymous sources from stories in Anonymous sources were vital to the the Enquirer. development of all three stories. If every The result, according to Winternitz, edi- journalist shared Blake's high standards, tor of Cincinnati magazine, has been disas- Winternitz says, these shenanigans would ter. The Enquirer (circ: 195,000) has been have gone undisclosed. scooped time and again on local stories. The Enquirer's George Blake insists that Last summer, television's 60 Minutes keeping anonymous sources to a mini- broke the story of illegal wiretaps by local mum is essential to maintaining journalis- policemen and Cincinnati Bell employees; tic credibility. But Winternitz argues that a a Columbus, Ohio, television station re- newspaper that misses big stories "will vealed Representative Donald "Buz" lose the trust of its readers a whole lot Lukens's (R.-Ohio) alleged sexual miscon- faster than a newspaper that relies on un- duct; the gambling charges against Pete named sources on a daily basis." In his Rose, manager of baseball's Cincinnati opinion, the Enquirer's policy is "a noble Reds, surfaced in Sports Illustrated and experiment that has failed."

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

Praise and "In Praise of Punishment" by Stanley C. Brubacker, in The Pub- lic Interest (Fall 1989), 11 12 16th St. N.W., Suite 530, Washing- Punishment ton, D.C. 20036.

Americans were outraged to discover last genetic endowments, conceptions of the May that Representative Jim Wright (D.- good, personal talents and traits. Rawls Texas), then Speaker of the U.S. House of reasoned that in this "original position" Representatives, had a convicted criminal people would be "risk averse." They on his staff. In 1973, before he became would choose two principles: 1) maximum Wright's aide, John Mack had assaulted a individual liberty that is compatible with young woman with a hammer, stabbed her the liberty of others and 2) social and eco- five times, then slit her throat and left her nomic inequality arranged so that the least for dead. Miraculously, the woman sur- advantaged would be most favored and so vived. Mack served only 27 months in jail that offices and positions would be open to for his deed. all under conditions of equal opportunity. After the story came out, Mack resigned The problem, Brubacker argues, is the from his Capitol Hill job. Wright, who had assumption in the "original position" that long known of his aide's crime, declared, all differences among people are morally "I have never regretted giving John an arbitrary, or undeserved. If that is so, one opportunity all these years. I don't suppose can justify creating rational rewards and anybody is immune from mistakes." Un- penalties to shape behavior in the future- wittingly, writes Brubacker, a Colgate po- that is in everybody's self-interest-but not litical scientist, Wright was reflecting the punishment (or praise) for past deeds. ideas of the contemporary liberal political Criminal sanctions, in Rawls' words, are philosophers grouped around Harvard's not "primarily retributive." Many jurists, John Rawls. These thinkers "cannot take notably Justice Thurgood Marshall, take crime seriously." the same position. In his now-classic work, A Theory of Jus- But punishment must be given its due, tice (1971), Rawls argued that to construct Brubacker insists, "for it reminds us of hu- principles of justice we must forget every- man responsibility as well as the limits of thing that is allegedly morally arbitrary- human choice."

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"The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Perspective" by Norman Golb, Whose Scrolls? in The American Scholar (Spring 1989), 1811 Q Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. When Edmund Wilson published The culture "than writers have been wont to Scrolls from the Dead Sea in 1955, he pop- suggest." ularized-and, indeed, helped to ce- But why were documents containing ment-the established scholarly interpre- this important, if only transitional, shift in tation of their origins. Only 8 years before, Jewish thought buried throughout the Ju- in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd boy daean wilderness and the plain of Jericho? had been roaming through the Qumram In an effort to preserve them, Golb argues. caves near the Dead Sea when he chanced When the scrolls were buried during the upon seven Hebrew scrolls. Many ar- first century A.D., the Second Jewish Com- chaeologists and historians quickly con- monwealth was fighting and losing a war cluded that they were the work of a tiny with the Roman Empire. Between the fall renegade Jewish sect called the Essenes. of Galilee in 67 A.D. and the siege of Jerusa- Noted for their extreme ascetism, the lem in 70, Golb suggests, Jerusalemites Essenes embraced doctrines, including the duality of flesh and spirit, that re- Joseph Campbell's Mythology sembled early Christian beliefs-one reason why The list of unlikely bestsellers from the academic world some historians propose grows ever longer. Add The Power of Myth, based on Bill that Jesus himself was an Moyers' dialogues with Joseph Campbell on public TV. In Essene. True or not, Essene The New York Review of Books (Sept. 28, 1989), Brendan Gill speculates about Campbell's sudden popularity. doctrines represented a de- parture from mainstream Some of his listeners assumed that the message was a Jewish teachings. wholesomely liberal one. In their view, he was encouraging But were the Dead Sea his listeners not to accept without examination and not to scrolls really written by the follow without challenge the precepts of any particular reli- Essenes? Golb, professor of gious sect, or political party, or identifiable portion of our Jewish history at University secular culture. . . . of Chicago, has doubts. For What I detect concealed within this superficial message one thing, many more and ready to strike like one of the serpents that are such scrolls of similar doctrinal conspicuous inhabitants of the Campbell mythology is another message, narrower and less speculative than the -first. cast have been discovered And it is this covert message that most of his listeners may since 1947, some as far have been responding to, in part because of its irresistible away as the fortress of Ma- simplicity. For the message consists of but three innocent- sada. Scholars, with pro- sounding words, and few among us, not taking thought, crustean zeal, have forced would be inclined to disagree with them. The words are "Fol- the new evidence to fit the low your bliss. . . ." Essene thesis. But Golb pro- Plainly, to follow one's bliss is advice less simple and less poses a more elegant ex- idealistic than it sounds. Under close scrutiny it may prove planation: The scrolls, writ- distasteful instead of welcome. For what is this condition of ten in Jerusalem, contained bliss, as Campbell has defined it? If it is only to do whatever makes one happy, then it sanctions selfishness on a colossal a new strain of thinking scale-a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in within mainstream Judaism the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is that was "radically different the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized?) rationale of from its biblical predeces- that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond sor and the rabbinic Juda- dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the ism that followed." If that is most conspicuous members of our society. Have they not all so, the scrolls are far more been following their bliss? important in the history of

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tried "to sequester the city's wealth as well the east and south of the cityÃ‘Utha area, as literature and other possessions of a in other words, where Hebrew scrolls spiritual nature." And after the spring of were discovered in the third, ninth, and 68, the only areas open to them were to 20th centuries."

Rome's Crusade "Catholicism and Democracy: The Other Twentieth-Century Revolution" by George Weigel, in The Washington Quarterly For Democracy (Autumn 1989), 1800 K st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20006. It seems entirely natural today to find the convinced that religious liberty "would in- Catholic Church in the forefront of the evitably lead to religious indifference and, struggle for human rights everywhere given the right circumstances, to hostility from Poland to South Korea. In fact, toward religion on the part of govern- writes Weigel, the president of the Ethics ments." Thus it favored the restoration of and Public Policy Center in Washington, close church-state ties, along the lines of the Church's "conversion" is relatively re- Europe's traditional altar-and-throne mon- cent, and it is not without problems. archies. In 1895, for example, Pope Leo As late as 1864, Pope Pius IX rejected XI11 acknowledged that the Church was out of hand in his Syllabus of Errors the thriving in America but added that "she notion that "the Roman Pontiff can and would bring forth more abundant fruits if, should reconcile himself to and agree with in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor progress, liberalism, and modem civiliza- of the laws and the patronage of the public tion." And Pius IX was considered a re- authority." former! Ultimately, the American experience, The Vatican was appalled by the French along with the rise of communism and fas- Revolution, and the idea that man rather cism and the decline of anti-clericalism than God was the proper focus of earthly among European liberals, persuaded the government. Above all, says Weigel, it was Vatican to reconsider. An important step came in 1931 with a social encyclical by Pope Pius XI recognizing the importance of what sociologists call "civil society." Pius called it "both a serious evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a larger and higher society what can be performed successfully by smaller and lower communities." But the threshold was not crossed until 1965, when the Second Vatican Council officially embraced freedom of con- science, abandoning once and for all state- sponsored religion. Today, Polish-born Pope John Paul I1 stumps for democracy around the world. It is, Weigel notes, a secondary mission. And the Pope advocates a Whiggish sort of democracy that might make some Americans squirm. As Weigel puts it, the Pope believes that "freedom is not a matter of doing what you want, but of having the right to do what you ought." Pope John Paul ZI's visit to Gdansk, Poland in Some issues remain to be worked out. 1987: Religion or politics? How do various theologies of liberation fit

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in? And what comes first when the Church of the faith? Such questions, Weigel says, faces hostility in the Third World: insurethattheChurch'sintellectualstmg- "inculturation" of democratic norms, or gle with democracy will continue.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Cosmic Anarchy? "Through the Looking Glass" by George Greenstein, in Astron- omy (Oct. 1989), 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Wau- kesha, Wise. 53187. Is our universe only one among many? Is becomes liquid. That would cause Guth's it theoretically possible to create a new "inflation." It would also explain the ori- universe in a laboratory-from 20 pounds gin of matter. All of that energy would not of chopped liver? merely dissipate after inflation, Greenstein Not long ago, scientists would have explains, but would be transformed via scoffed at such questions. Now, reports Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, into Greenstein, an Amherst astronomer, astro- matter: "Lots of matter." physicists and others have begun taking That is why a new universe might, in them seriously because of the work of an theory, be created out of a tiny "seed" (the MIT physicist named Alan Guth. 20 pounds of chopped liver, or anything In 1981, Guth formulated a new theory else) subjected to powerful forces. that explained certain nagging gaps in the It also suggests that nature may regu- half-century-old Big Bang theory of the ori- larly create new universes, which stream gin of the universe. Suppose that during outward from ours like "bits of fluff blown the Big Bang the expanding universe sud- from a dandelion in spring." Or that our denly underwent a quantum "inflation" universe is a bit of fluff from an earlier far greater than hitherto imagined, and in one. These other universes could be or- the space of only seconds. Drawing dered on completely alien principles. For on the highly speculative "grand unified example, they may be built without atoms. theory of particle physics," Guth suggested We might perceive these parallel universes that during the Big Bang, the expanding only as "black holes" in space. (and cooling) universe experienced a sud- Finally, Guth's theory raises the possibil- den vast release of energy, just as water ity that, if "inflation" occurred unevenly vapor releases energy when it cools and during the Big Bang, even the far reaches

Onward to Mars! In Harper's (Aug. 1989), the poet Frederick and monuments. What was more impracti- Turner proposes a modest cure for the mal- cal, wasteful, impossible than the pyra- aise of affluence. mids?. . . How are we to employ the beautiful and terrible heroic spirit of humankind, We need a project that will allow us to pur- ready for suffering and sacrifice, when we no sue beauty and truth on a grand scale-a vi- longer have war and nationalist myth to sion as "impractical," "wasteful," "impossi- spend it on? How are we to use those billions ble" as the cultivation of Mars. The most of dollars and rubles, which employ millions stable and perhaps the most contented soci- of workers and serve as a fiscal and techno- ety in the world, I would say, has been that of logical flywheel, to keep the economy going? ancient Egypt, which for thousands of years Garden Mars! The enormous scale and ex- poured its surplus wealth straight into the pense of such a project can, in this light, be ground, in the form of grave goods, tombs, seen as one of its great advantages.

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of our own universe might be ordered on stein cautions. But even if Guth is wrong different principles. If so, the laws of phys- he has moved us forward to "a great junc- ics are not truly universal. ture in the evolution of our ideas about the All of this is purely speculative, Green- cosmos."

A New Andromeda "The VIRAL Advantage" by Rick Weiss, in Science News (Sept. 23, 1989), 1719 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Strain? What if the AIDS virus could spread as eas- Tenn. "There are millions of us 'chickens' ily as the common cold? just waiting to be infected." (The AIDS vi- That horrifying possibility is not ruled rus, which has infected five to 10 million out by medical researchers, reports Weiss, people worldwide, was apparently once a Science News correspondent. Viruses carried only by African monkeys.) have recently been found to possess an Far more common than mutation, but alarmingly high propensity to mutation- every bit as threatening, is the spread of once in every 10,000 replications. In 1983, existing viruses from hitherto isolated locales. Recently, for example, Lassa fever erupted in Nigeria after a "diamond rush" in the interior put humans in contact with a virus-carrying mouse. Dur- ing the 1960s, several West German polio researchers died from a mysterious disease that caused bleeding and blood clots. The reason: They had been working with Ugandan monkey cells infected with a previously unknown organism now called Marburg virus. In 1977, Rift Valley virus jumped from South African sheep and cattle, its usual hosts, to humans. Making its way to Egypt, it infected millions of people and killed thousands. The great "Spanish flu" influenza epidemic of 1918-19 claimed 20 Bearing everything from million lives worldwide, including 500,000 in the United States. new strains of the flu to AIDS, viruses continue to a benign virus present in chickens mu- confound scientists. he^ are not at all cer- tated into a deadly avian influenza in a tain that they can contain new viruses in Pennsylvania poultry farm. Before the epi- the future. They do agree on one thing: demic ended six months later, 17 million More research laboratories are needed in chickens were dead. "The [I9831 chicken the tropical countries where new out- population in Pennsylvania is like the breaks most frequently occur. With these world as it is in this moment," warns Rob- "listening posts" and proper planning, ert G. Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Chil- Weiss says, medical researchers might be dren's Research Hospital in Memphis, able "to nip the next Big One in the bud."

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Space Junk "The Junkyard in Orbit" by Bhupendra Jasani and Martin Rees, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 1989), 6042 S. Kimbark, Chicago, 111. 60637. Space may be the Final Frontier, but it is Britain's Royal United Services Institute also fast becoming the Ultimate Junkyard. and its Institute of Astronomy, respec- In addition to the roughly 350 active sat- tively. In July 1983, for example, the U.S. ellites orbiting the Earth in "inner space," space shuttle Challenger was hit by a speck there are some 7,000 hefty pieces of space of paint (0.2 millimeter in size) that garbage-including upper stages of chipped one of its windows. Several mys- launchers, booster motors, and dead satel- terious satellite failures over the years may lites. Far more hazardous are the 30,000- well have been caused by collisions with 70,000 pieces of junk, ranging in size from space trash. It is only good luck that no one to 10 centimeters, that are too small to lives have yet been lost, the authors say. track from Earth. These include fragments Jasani and Rees favor a treaty among the of exploded satellites, screwdrivers left be- space-faring nations to stop the expansion hind by absent-minded astronauts, and as- of Earth's Junk Belt. Much of the space sorted other detritus. Then there are bil- junk is needlessly lost in space: spent rock- lions of even smaller bits and pieces from ets are left in orbit, and defunct satellites the same sources. are frequently blown up for security rea- It's an accident that's not waiting to hap- sons. In the future, such leftovers could be pen, write Jasani and Rees, researchers at safely returned to Earth.

RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT

"The End of Nature" by Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker (Sept. 11, 1989), 25 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036, and "A Reconnaissance-Level Inventory of the Amount of Wilderness Remaining in the World" by J. Michael McCloskey and Heather Spalding, in Ambio (No. 4, 1989), Pergamon Press, Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford, N.Y. 10523. "I believe that we are at the end of na- the landscape-forests will retreat, deserts ture," announces Bill McKibben, a fre- grow-will transform the very workings of quent contributor to the New Yorker. "The the world. Heat waves and hurricanes, for rain will still fall and the sun will still instance, will no longer be seen as "natu- shine," he says, but as the greenhouse ef- ral" occurrences but man-made phenom- fect inevitably reshapes the earth's cli- ena. The idea of nature as an untamed mate, and the face of the world itself, "our force, "such as man never inhabits," as sense of nature as eternal and separate" Thoreau put it, will cease to exist. will be overturned. As McKibben observes. environmental- Automobiles, industrial smokestacks, ists have warned of various global ecologi- coal-burning powerplants, and the burn- cal catastrophes ever since Rachel Car- ing of forestland in Brazil and British Co- son's famous Silent Spring (1962). He lumbia all contribute to the build-up of tends to agree with those optimists, such carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is as economist Julian Simon, who believe chiefly responsible for the greenhouse ef- that human ingenuity will ultimately pre- fect. There is little doubt, McKibben as- vail over such challenges as pesticides, nu- serts, that the average global temperature clear wastes, and even the greenhouse ef- will increase by three to 10 degrees Fahr- fect. But the solutions, he believes, are enheit within the next 80 years. part of the problem. We can invent new The change in climate and its impact on ways to keep ourselves alive on an increas-

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ingly inhospitable planet, for example, by (about 19 million square miles) still be- !genetically engineering "supercucum- longs to nature. However, 41 percent is bers" to thrive in severe heat or "inject- found in the Arctic or Antarctic and only ing" sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to 20 percent in the temperate regions. Most reflect the sun's rays back into space. But of the settled continents, except Europe, the closer we move toward finding salva- are between one-quarter and one-third tion in a "macromanaged" world, the wilderness. The United States is only five more we hasten the end of nature. percent wilderness; nearly two-thirds of But is there any way to quantify this dire Canada, one-third of the Soviet Union, and forecast? one-quarter of China remain wild. As it happens, McCloskey and Spalding, Of the dwindling stock of wilderness, chairman and researcher, respectively, at less than 20 percent is being protected. the Sierra Club, recently completed a sur- But there is still a chance, these authors vey of the world's remaining wilderness. believe, "to maintain some measure of bal- They report that one-third of the globe ance between 'man and nature.'"

Water Wars "Trouble on Tap" by Sandra Postel, in World*Watch (Sept.- Oct. 1989), 1776 Mass. Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.20036.

Like the proverbial free lunch, the bottom- Now, many neighborhoods in New Delhi less well is becoming a thing of the past. receive running water only sporadically. From the American West to the North Mismanagement of a different sort China Plain, governments are struggling to plagues the Soviet Union. To irrigate the come to terms with the fact that there is orchards and cotton fields on the fertile only so much water to go around. plains of Soviet Central Asia, Moscow has The situation is most severe in the arid tapped two rivers that feed the Aral Sea. As Middle East, reports Postel, a vice presi- the Aral shrinks, drying salt is swept by the dent of the Worldwatch Institute. Israel's wind onto nearby farmland, where it set- Meir Ben-Meir, former minister of agricul- tles like a poison. Restoring the sea to its ture, predicts that a war over water is "un- pre-1960 condition would require a 60 avoidable if the people of the region are percent reduction in land under irrigation, not clever enough to discuss a mutual so- a loss worth $30 billion annually. lution to the problem of water scarcity." "Common to these tales of shortage is Egypt's foreign minister, Boutros Ghali, the near-universal failure to value water fears a war over access to the waters of the properly," says Postel. Allowing users to Nile. Rapidly growing Egypt, which relies buy and sell water rights, as they now can on the Nile for virtually all of its water, has in much of the American West, is part of water-sharing agreements with Sudan, the solution. That will encourage a more where the Blue and White Niles meet, but rational use of water in places like Califor- not with other nations farther upstream. nia, where irrigated cattle pastures con- What happens when upstream users such sume as much water as all of the state's 28 as Ethiopia and Tanzania begin drawing million residents. (Even the Soviet Union on Nile headwaters more heavily? is planning to begin charging water users In India, the problem is not so much by 1991.) Conservation should also in- scarcity as poor management of water. crease. Lining irrigation canals with im- The government has spent $12 billion on permeable materials, drip irrigation, and dams to capture runoff during the June- other techniques can cut farm water use September monsoon season, but it has by 20 to 30 percent. A California conserva- also allowed massive deforestation in tion effort is expected to save enough wa- many watersheds. As a result, under- ter to serve 800,000 people. (In the United ground aquifers are not being replenished. States, a family of four consumes about

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160,000 gallons annually.) tions will be needed in many parts of the But economic incentives alone won't do world. Ultimately, water shortages are go- the job, Postel believes. Population con- ing to force many governments to rethink trol, reforestation, and political negotia- national needs and wants.

ARTS & LETTERS Birth of a Genre "Astounding Story" by Frederik ~ohl,in American Heritage (Sept.-Oct. 1989), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011. Americans today are swamped by inforrna- number of science fiction novels pub- tion and speculation about science and lished soared until, by the 1980s, nearly technology. It was not always so. Fifty one new novel in four was either science years ago, there was no Carl Sagan, no fiction or fantasy.

Nova (indeed, no television),,, no Discover Along the way, the genre shed its image magazine. Radio and newspaper coverage as the sole property of pimply teenaged of science was skimpy. Pohl, a noted sci- boys. Academic critics like Leslie Fiedler ence fiction writer. speculates that "a ma- began paying attention to it as early as the r A jority of the world's leading scientists to- 1950s; today, for better or worse, seminars day were first turned on to their subjects on science fiction are a regular feature of by reading science-fiction stories." the Modern Language Association's an- Science fiction traces its ancestrv as far nual meetings. By the 1960s and '70s, back as Jonathan Swift, but it developed as mainstream writers such as Kurt Vonne- a distinct genre only during the 1930s in gut and Doris Lessing were trying their pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories hands at science fiction. and Astounding Stories of Super-science. Book publishers ignored science fiction and Hollywood's few ventures into the field bombed. The genre was transformed after 1937, when a young writer named John W. Campbell took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine (later renamed Analog). Campbell insisted that his writers deal with more than scaly green space monsters and exotic machinery; he said he wanted "stories which could be printed as contemporary fiction, but in a magazine of the 25th century." From Astoundine's" stable of writers came such now-famous science-fiction novelists as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Their day finally arrived after World War 11, when book publishers realized that science fiction was different from other pulp genres. Unlike readers of westerns and war stories, science fiction's consumers were a devoted bunch, enthusiastically forming fan clubs and thronging sci-fi con- Modem science fiction was pioneered by Jules ventions. In other words, they were a natu- Veme (1828-1905). Among his bestsellers was ral market. From near-zero in 1945, the From the Earth to the Moon (1873).

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Science fiction no longer monopolizes pessimism during the 1960s, obsession the attention of science-minded laymen, with the self today. Samuel R. Delany, Ur- but Pohl notes that plenty of opportunities sula K. Le Guin, and others "are showing remain for what is now sometimes called us possible future worlds in which human "speculative fiction." As always, these re- beings change their appearance, and even fleet the mood of the day-technological their gender, almost at will."

"The Crisis in Movie Narrative" by Richard Schickel, in the The End Of Gannett Center Journal (Summer 1989), Columbia Univ., 2950 The Story Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10027. Consider the life cycle of a Hollywood film cable narrative, something endlessly open today. It begins with the selling of a brief to whatever interpretation we care to story "concept" over drinks in Los Angeles place on it." Only Batman and a few other and ends some years later as "word of films, such as Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyn- mouth," when one moviegoer delivers a don (1975) and David Lynch's Blue Velvet plot summary to her neighbor over the (1986) have seized this new potential. backyard fence. What Batman is really aboutÃ‘Un kid- All this talk of stories is a delusion, ding," Schickel assures us-is urban de- writes Schickel, a Time film critic. The tra- sign. Director Tim Burton's Gotham re- ditional narrative film is dead. Most of to- casts the popular art deco architectural day's movies, even critically acclaimed style into a landscape of menace, showing ones like Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, audiences that even urban design, the last are nothing more than collections of vi- best hope for the salvation of our cities, is gnettes and gimmicks, haphazardly strung a mirage. together, barely resembling a story. The death of film narrative is the result Schickel believes that the absence of per- of the rise of television during the 1950s. suasive storytelling explains the absence of Television deprived Hollywood of the mar- the adult population from movie theaters. ket for its staple genre films (westerns, de- Only kids can stomach such thin gruel. tective stories), and thus the tradition of Schickel sees filmmaking today as a kind finely-wrought narrative; it also encour- of free-for-all, where everybody from mar- aged scriptwriters to create short, punchy keting experts to film stars tinkers with a sequences. Finally, the death of the studio film's "concept," destroying any possibility system removed the discipline that kept of narrative coherence. Even directors, actors and directors from tampering with who now think of themselves rather stories. grandly as auteurs (authors), are usually Unfortunately, says Schickel, the "new" only bit players who further burden plots Hollywood is conducive only to chaos. with their "personal statements." Films like Batman are accidents that slip At most, says Schickel, a director today through the Hollywood mill, not the begin- can hope to create a '"shimmering ning of a historical transition to a new and forcefield,' not a coherent or fully expli- wittier style of filmmaking.

"Seduction and Betrayal in Contemporary Art" by Cleve Gray, Art by the Yard in Partisan Review (No. 3, 1989), Boston Univ., 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, Mass. 02215, It appears that anybody who doubts the made by one successful young painter in near-universal degradation of contempo- Vogue last year: "Suckers buy my work." rary art need only consult a contemporary Artists, laments Gray, himself a painter, painter. Consider the aesthetic declaration have only themselves to blame. Today's

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-- cynicism, he says, has its origins in the aes- more than objects of consumerism. thetic theories of the Dadaist painter Mar- A booming art market and a generation cel Duchamp (1887-1968), who declared greedy for quick riches and fame have during the 1950s that artists produce only speeded the decline of art, Gray says. But a raw product; "it must be 'refined' as pure his particular peeve is the reproduction of sugar from molasses, by the spectator art in 35-mm. slides now used by curators through the change from inert matter into and critics and in competitions and art a work of art." Duchamp's notion that life schools. Paintings so reproduced, he says, and art are inseparable was more revolu- are reduced in scale and stripped of their tionary than anything Picasso did, Gray character. "To an ever increasing degree," says, "for the final and inescapable conclu- the critic Walter Benjamin observed in sion to be drawn from it was that art could 1936, "the work of art reproduced be- be entirely dispensed with." No longer an comes the work of art designed for re- expression of the painter's spirit, art in- producibility." The result is art intended to creasingly became just another market- shock and startle rather than to invite place commodity. A few contemporary contemplation. And in the end, says Gray, critics, notably Jean Baudrillard, encour- that is the difference between most con- age artists to think of their work as nothing temporary art and what went before.

. . OTHER NATIONS

Latin America's "Speaking in Latin Tongues" by David Martin, in National Re- Protestant Ethic view (Sept. 29, 1989), 150 West 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016. "Close to the tall iron tower [in Guatemala through the barrios there is a storefront City] commemorating the 187 1 liberal church every two or three hundred yards: revolution are a converted cinema with Calvary, Jerusalem, Bethesda, Galilee, Ta- 'Jesus salva' on its marquee and the tent- bor, Ebenezer, Prince of Peace." They are like structure of an independent church not Catholic churches, writes Martin, a so- called Verbo. As you trundle and bump ciologist at the London School of Econom- ics and Southern Methodist University. Latin America, A Disneyland for Moralists he says, "the great Catholic continent, home of almost Southern Africa, as described in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1989) by Chester A. Crocker, who was Assistant Secretary of State half the Catholics in the for African Affairs in the Reagan administration. world, is swarming with evangelicals, above all with Southern Africa is a beautiful region, magnificently endowed Pentecostals." with human and natural resources, the potential economic Since 1960, Martin re- engine of a continent and a place whose web of racial and ports, perhaps one Latin civil conflict tears at our hearts, urging us to engage our- American in 10 has con- selves. But at another level, southern Africa can become, as verted to Protestantism. In former ambassador to Pretoria Ed Perkins put it, a sort of Brazil, where the Catholic "political vending machine" into which we insert our coins Church has been weakened to receive moral hygiene or instant ideological gratification. Featuring almost every form of odious human behavior- by the importation of for- racism, brutal oppression, Marxism, authoritarianism, terror- eign priests, there are some ist violence, organized butchery of unarmed villagers and 25 million converts; a third gross official corruption-the region became a moralist's of Guatemala's population, theme park. perhaps a fifth of Nicara- gua's, and three percent of

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Mexico's have converted. Fifty million soul, and a network of mutual support. souls in all. A case of gringo cultural im- What they demand is discipleship and dis- perialism? Apparently not. While mission- cipline, at work, in the family, and in the aries from the United States have helped church." spread the faith, Martin says, Protestantism Just as the rise of Protestantism in Eu- has gone native. rope after the 16th century fostered the What is the attraction? The converts, personal discipline and attitudes that mostly poor people, leave behind "a Ca- launched the industrial revolution, as Max tholicism reduced to one or two external Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and markers, to godparenthood and the fiesta," the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), so, in Martin writes. They join churches which Martin's view, the evangelical revolution offer "participation, a healing of body and bids fair to transform Latin America.

"Ethnic Politics in the USSR by Paul Goble, in Problems of Gorbachev's Ethnic Commu nism (July-August 1989) U.S. Information Agency, 301 Surprise 4th st. 5i.W., Washington, D.C. 20547.

Mikhail Gorbachev must dread reading Russian-born Gennadiy Kolbin in 1986, Pravda. Each day brings fresh news of eth- the appointment sparked mass demonstra- nic unrest in his country, whether it be tions. But Kolbin himself was soon forced Baltic states demanding their indepen- to become "more Kazakh than his Kazakh dence or Armenians and Azerbaijanis predecessor," amplifying the crowds' de- clashing over the Nagorno-Karabakh re- mands for more regional autonomy. Gor- gion. Is the Soviet Union disintegrating? bachev has found himself bound by his Have Gorbachev's policies of perestroika own democratic style to permit such and glasnost opened a Pandora's box of adaptability to ethnic demands. turmoil that ultimately will topple him as Three of Gorbachev's policies have con- party leader? tributed to the growing dissent in the re- Gorbachev clearly was caught off guard publics. First, glasnost revealed past sins of by the level of unrest. As Goble, a State Kremlin leaders. As Goble says, "collectiv- Department analyst, points out "Gorba- ization looks very different in Ukraine and chev had little experience or expertise on Kazakhstan-where millions died as a di- nationality questions before coming to rect result of it-than in Moscow, where power" in 1986. Now that the lid is off, Russian workers were guaranteed some Goble thinks Gorbachev can avoid disas- food." Second, Gorbachev's call for mass ter, and he may be able to use the troubles participation in national politics has raised to advance his own agenda of loosening expectations of a larger role for the repub- Party control over Soviet society. lics. At the same time, his plan to reduce More than 100 separate ethnic groups- some republic ministries has prompted a ranging from the vast Ukrainian commu- scramble among party chiefs to protect nity of more than 50 million down to the their own turf. Small Peoples of the North (26 micro-na- Ironically, the mass demonstrations tionalities each numbering fewer than have created two misconceptions in the 2,000)-are clamoring for a say in what West. Goble asserts that they are often the happens in their respective homelands. sign of a group's last-ditch desperation, not The party chiefs in the 15 republics for the its power. What occurs behind the scenes first time are having to listen to the voices is still what matters most. And although of their people or risk being rendered inef- Moscow has seemed to let unrest get out fective. A telling example: When outspo- of hand-albeit repressing it brutally at ken Dinmukhammad Kunayev was re- times, as in Azerbaijan-Gorbachev may placed as Kazakhstan's party chief by be using the demonstrations to force the

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Party to respond to citizens' complaints. like adjustments of freedom and repres- What lies ahead? Goble foresees "a pe- sion, as both Moscow and the other actors riod where there will be a series of ratchet- feel the situation out."

YOUSay Tomato. "Of Skylarks & Shirting" by Sarvepalli Gopal, in Encounter . . (July-Aug. 1989), 44 Great Windmill St., London W1V 7PA, Great Britain.

In 1937, the Malagasy poet Jean Joseph Rabearivals killed himself in despair over his inability to reconcile his nationalism with his need to write in French. The reac- tion was extreme, but similar to that suffered by people in many colonial lands, writes Gopal, a historian at Nehru College. India has been an exception. The use of English has caused Indians no great discomfort in part because the elite has always spoken a second tongue- first Sanskrit, later Persian, then English. After the British withdrawal from India in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru bore English no special malice but expected it to die a natural death. After all, Three kinds of English, India Today noted re- Gopal observes, it was a language of "scep- cently, often add up to bad English. tered isles and country churchyards" which touched little in the Indian soul. So One reason, says Gopal, is that after in- in 1950, Nehru supported a constitutional dependence, English "began to sink roots provision which called for phasing out into the upper layers of the Indian soil." English as the nation's official language by Increasingly, the subcontinent's English- 1965 and replacing it with Hindi, the na- speakers have made the language their tive tongue in much of northern India. own. Men carry "bucks" or "chips" (m- But it turned out that Hindi replaced pees) in their wallets; sneakers, called English only as the nemesis of non-Hindi "plimsolls" in Britain, are called speakers in southern India, and actually "fleetfoots" in India. "Plenty of Indian stirred more political protest. Recognizing writers of talent and passion find English a the threat posed to national unity, and the language in which they can deal ade- fact that Hindi "was neither graceful, artis- quately with the special realities of their tic, nor generally understood," Nehru de- country," says Gopal. clared in 1959 that no single language He believes that Nehru was right to let would be imposed. events shape themselves. Now that lan- The result has been an expansion of guage has been depoliticized, radio and English, writes Gopal. Some 35 million In- television are spreading all of India's lan- dians (four percent of the population) guages. He expects that English will re- speak and write it; India is also the world's main the language of the growing middle third largest producer of books in English. class, but will gradually give way to re- English remains the language of the Indian gional tongues as the language of Indian Establishment, "the unavoidable avenue to politics. The media, Gopal says, "are status and wealth," and the only language achieving imperceptibly what govern- spoken by members of the elite every- ments and politicians have struggled in where in the country. vain to do."

WQ WINTER 1990 137 RESEARCH REPORTS

Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform." Cornell Univ. Press, 124 Roberts Pi., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850. 219 pp. $12.95. Author: Anders &Ad Nobody is more skeptical GNP.) Yet, Aslund notes, "it is changed somewhat since about Mikhail Gorbachev's difficult to find any informed Aslund completed this study, chances of reforming the So- Soviet citizen who believes in his essential point holds: The viet economy than Anders earnest that it is less than . . .22 top leadership is badly split Aslund. to 30 percent." over what to do about the So- "The Soviet economic sys- Looking back at the Soviet's viet economy. tem has been counted out last major attempt at economic Gorbachev and several allies many times before," writes the reform, in 1965, Aslund says favor radical reform predi- Stockholm School of Econom- that some stumbling blocks cated on some democratiza- ics scholar, "but never has it have been removed. The 1965 tion. But Aslund discerns four appeared so devoid of advan- reforms, under Leonid Brezh- other camps: moderate re- tages." He believes, along with nev, failed for several reasons: formers, technocratic "stream- a few other deeply pessimistic Soviet leaders could still de- liners," neo-Stalinist advocates analysts, that Soviet economic ceive themselves about the of increased discipline, and growth "appears to have state of their economy; the leg- Brezhnevite "stand-patters." ceased in 1978." acy of Stalinist thinking was Without unanimity at the Meanwhile, Soviet military still overpowering; and com- top, Aslund predicts, Gorba- expenditures continued to munism was on the upsurge chev will find it next to impos- grow by two percent annually around the world. sible to design a coherent re- through the early 1980s. The But the 1965 reforms failed form program or to make the U.S. Central Intelligence chiefly because there was no Party bureaucracy do his bid- Agency estimates that the So- consensus among the Soviet ding. In any event, Aslund con- viet military now consumes a leadership. And Gorbachev to- cludes, it will be another year staggering 15 to 17 percent of day faces essentially the same before whatever reforms the Soviet gross national prod- problem. Gorbachev does achieve begin uct. (US. military spending Although the composition of to have an impact on the So- amounts to six percent of the 12-man Politburo has viet economy.

"Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness." Univ. of Chicago Press, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, 111. 60637. 288 pp. $15.95. Author: Peter H. Rossi Only a decade after the home- States during the Great Depres- Today's homeless are in far less first began to creep into sion; in 1950, there were at more dire straits. public awareness, they have al- least 100,000. Today, says To compare the homeless ready been counted, analyzed, Rossi, the homeless population then and now, Rossi contrasts and debated over to the point is 250,000 to 350,000. (Some his own study of the Chicago of diminishing returns. The well-publicized and misleading homeless in 1985-86 and so- great saving virtue of this study "guesstimates" have gone as ciologist Donald Bogue's 1958 by Rossi, a sociologist at the high as three million.) survey in the same city. University of Massachusetts at The greatest changes in In 1958, the homeless of Chi- Amherst, is that it lends histori- homelessness, according to cago (and other cities) were cal perspective to today's emo- Rossi, have been qualitative. In largely confined to Skid Row. tion-charged debates. the past, for example, few of The vast majority were white Overall, Rossi shows, the the homeless actually slept in males; their median age was number of homeless people parks or on the streets. They 50. Most worked intermittently has not changed vastly over the could find cheap shelter on at low-wage jobs. About a quar- years. There were 200,000 or their own in flophouses and ter of them were retirees, just more homeless in the United single-room-occupancy hotels. barely scraping by on Social

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Security. Surprisingly, only a users or ex-addicts. cago, as in other cities, Skid quarter of the Skid Row inhab- Most are young, in their Row gave way to downtown itants were alcoholics, but they twenties or thirties. (Thanks to redevelopment beginning in had plenty of other problems: Social Security, the elderly the 1960s; the cheap hotels and 20 percent suffered a physical have disappeared from the flophouses were destroyed, disability, 20 percent were ranks of the homeless.) their residents dispersed. At mentally ill, and 10 percent Most are black. the same time, public drunken- suffered what Bogue called In part because demand for ness and other minor infrac- "social maladjustment." unskilled labor has dried up, tions were decriminalized. Today's Chicago homeless they are much less likely than But the homeless, Rossi are like yesterday's in several the homeless of 1958 to find warns, are simply the most vis- respects. Alcoholism remains even occasional work. And ible members of the "ex- common. And while the "dein- they are much poorer. The tremely poor": the four to stitutionalization" of the men- Chicago homeless of 1958 had seven million Americans with tally ill beginning in the 1960s annual incomes of $1,058; incomes below $4,000 annu- is frequently blamed for to- their counterparts today earn ally. Any of these people can day's homeless problem, only only $383 (in 1958 dollars). tumble into homelessness at 25 percent of Rossi's subjects About 25 percent are any time. reported previous episodes as women. Most have had chil- How can the homeless be mental health patients (though dren, but relatively few have helped? Few of them now re- 33 percent showed signs of their children with them. As ceive welfare benefits they are mental disorders)-not a before, homeless families are entitled to, says Rossi; they much greater proportion than rare: More than 90 percent of must be aggressively enlisted. Bogue found in 1958. the Chicago homeless are But in the long run, he argues, What's new about today's alone. only generous public employ- homeless? The homeless are more visi- ment and housing programs About 20 percent are drug ble than ever before. In Chi- will do the job.

"50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth." Earthworks Press, BOX 25, 1400 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94709. 96 pp. $4.95. Authors: The Earth Works Group World salvation may be a bit that are the likely cause of the nually. much to expect from the 50 "greenhouse effect." What about junk mail? modest conservation measures Like nagging mothers, they Americans receive almost two suggested in this slim volume. note that you can waste 10 to million tons of it every year- But it is encouraging to be re- 15 gallons of water simply by and promptly discard 44 per- minded that some of the letting the tap run while brush- cent of it unread. The junk world's environmental prob- ing your teeth: "A household mail Americans receive every lems can be addressed without can save up to 20,000 gallons day could produce enough en- radical legislation and ecologi- of water each year by getting a ergy to heat 250,000 homes; cal policemen. grip on its faucets." the paper in the junk mail the The authors note, for exam- Or consider the lowly auto- average family receives in a ple, that adding one passenger mobile tire. About 500 million year represents one and a half to every commuter car in the of them are now on the road trees. The authors note that nation could daily save 600 and 50 to 80 percent of them one can have one's name re- million gallons of gasoline and are underinflated. The cost in moved from mailing lists. reduce by 12 million pounds fuel economy is close to two Overall, Ben Franklin would the carbon dioxide emissions billion gallons of gasoline an- have approved.

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We ~velcoinetimely letters from readers, especially those who wish to amplify or correct information published in the Quarterly and/or react to the views expressed in our essays. The writer's telephone number and address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usua~llyedited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

Reading Reconsidered ten remarked on the enlarged diet which printers supplied to bookworms. And of course, "intensive Robert Darnton ["Toward a History of Reading," reading" is evident among fundamentalists right WQ, Autumn '891 has a remarkable gift for seeing now. Well before the late 18th century, Francis Ba- possibilities in unpromising material and for inject- con had observed that some books are to be tasted, ing new life into overworked fields of study. His some to be swallowed, some to be chewed and di- treatment of the history of reading offers a case in gested. Diverse forms of reading (no single dichot- point. But to anyone working on book history, the omy makes sense) had long gone hand in hand. idea that reading has undergone transformations There had been silent reading in antiquity. Only will come as no surprise. The topics Darnton cov- after printing, however, would it become the stan- ers and the case histories he cites do not lead to- dard mode-at least until the appearance of the ward uncharted territory but take us back over fa- book cassette right now. miliar ground. At times, Darnton's treatment seems too airily Indeed, there may be some danger of prema- dismissive of the difference between Catholic and turely plunging into archives before taking inven- Protestant practices. The single observation that tory of work already done. For example, after sur- "family Bible readings took place on both sides of veying the literature on the issue of reader the great religious divide" scarcely does justice to response to The New Eloise, which reaches from the issue. Daniel Mornet's study of 1925 to Claude Labrosse's Given the largely Anglophone readership of the monograph of 1985, one may feel that the time has WQ, and the author's preoccupation with that elu- come not to take another look at archives but to sive figure the "ordinary" or "common" reader, it give that particular topic a rest. is a pity we spend so much time in France and Labrosse's most recent work suggests that a fresh none across the Channel. Something ought to be look at non-archival material can also yield unex- said about all the work that's been done on Elizabe- pected rewards. It shows how book reviews in than readers, Puritan readers, working-class read- 18th-century periodicals guided readers' reactions ers, fiction readers, coffee-house readers, self- to new fictional forms. Given the importance of pe- taught readers, newspaper readers and all the rest riodicals from the late 17th century on, one is in- covered in studies by Altick, Webb, Spufford, clined to agree with Darnton that historians of Leavis, Hoggart et al. reading need not limit themselves "to great books Instead we are told to probe the experience of or to books at all!" "ordinary readers" by looking at book margins for It is too bad that literary journals have been ex- - clues. A puzzling allusion to printed versions of me- eluded because they seem so relevant to the ques- dieval glosses which presumably steered the reader tion of "intensive" versus "extensive" reading. In "through humanist texts" (didn't humanists oppose my view, the question needs reformulating to make glosses?) is followed by mention of Gibbon's foot-

room for the coexistence of diverse readingu. orac- notes and John Adams's marginalia. But were tices and uneven book distribution within a given many "ordinary readers" likely to own copies of culture at a given time. That David Hall's New En- the Decline and Fall? Zoltan Haraszti's book on glanders and Rolf Engelsing's Bremen merchants Adams's marginalia does give us one reader's im- had to get by on few books until the late 18th cen- mediate reactions to the writings of the philo- tury scarcely provides adequate basis for stating sophes. But wasn't John Adams too exceptional as that "a fundamental shift in reading" marked "the a reader to be useful for the purpose at hand? end of an old regime." Reading a single book It is also surprising to find resort to a "great might be equivalent to reading many if the single man" theory of history in Darnton's final para- book was an anthology-such as John Dunton's graph. To be asked to think about the way Luther, YoqStudent's Library: Extracts and Abridgements Marx and Mao "changed the course of history" is of most valuable books printed in England and the bad enough; to be asked to ponder how their read- foreign journals (1692). Certainly we need not wait ing of certain books turned the trick is too much! until the 18th century to find evidence of "exten- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein sive reading." Sixteenth-century commentators of- University of Michigan (Emerita)

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Muslim Diversity under Attack? phy of Dewey's British counterpart, Bertrand Rus- sell, I was intrigued and amused by the similarities Mahnaz Ispahani ["Varieties of Muslim Experi- and differences between Diggins's hero ["John ence," WQ, Autumn '891 is right to emphasize the Dewey: Philosopher in the Schoolroom," WQ, Au- immense variety of contemporary Islamic experi- tumn '891 and mine. The similarities, of course, are ence which defies generalization, and demon- many and obvious; both were ardent defenders of strates the gap between "normative" Islam and Is- an education in which the child learned by doing, lam as the living faith of nearly one billion people. both began by doubting the need for any authority Yet this diversity is under a relentless assault by in the classroom other than the discipline of the Muslims themselves. It is doubtful whether the subject matter itself, and both came to think in Muslim world has ever been so effectively wired Hobbes's memorable words that children "are for the rapid transmission of ideas and influences. born inapt for society." Both, again, were hard to The Muslim world is shrinking, and so is the space place on the spectrum that runs from left-wing lib- that shelters unique understandings of Islam. eralism to moderate socialism; Dewey, as Diggins The process reveals itself to the casual eye. remarks, thought FDR by no means went far Mosque architecture is cited by Ispahani as a visual enough in reconstructing the American economy measure of Islam's diversity, and so it is. But much after the Depression, while Russell all his life contemporary mosque architecture is divorced hoped that mankind would become rational and from all local influence. It mimics aesthetic forms adopt the decentralized Guild Socialism to which employed in Islam's cities of pilgrimage in Arabia, he and Dewey had both subscribed in optimistic which draw legions of airborne pilgrims. On their pre-war days. return, they demand edifices of worship which pro- What is more striking than their similarities is claim their affinity to a center of Islam. A mosque the absolute barrier that divided them. Diggins only under construction today in Jakarta is as likely to touches on it when he observes that critics of prag- resemble a mosque in Kano as anything else. matism "believed that pragmatism simply confused The same process shrinks the world of ideas. truth with the process of its verification." For Rus- There are "electronic mosques" of widely popular sell at any rate, pragmatism was a sort of secular sermonizers, whose preaching has avid viewers blasphemy. With God gone and most ethics shaky, and listeners in manv countries. Muslim voliti- all mankind had left was a concern for the truth- cians, intellectuals, and activists ply the skies be- not a concern for what it would "pay to believe," tween conferences and seminars-on Muslim mi- but a concern for how things really were. norities, Islamic banking, Islamic medicine, By bringing philosophy back into the market- Islamic information services. Missionary organiza- place, Dewey closed the breach that Russell had tions based in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, and Egypt opened between the concerns of the intellectual support a bewildering array of Muslim associations and the duties of the plain man. By the same token across national frontiers. The new activists, utiliz- he lost something important. It is not only, as ing modern technologies of communication, Diggins says, that critics like Van Wyck Brooks and spread definitions of truth from aspiring new cen- Lewis Mumford could complain that he exalted the ters. The sheer reach of these techniques became practical at the expense of the spiritual. It is more evident in the aftermath of the Saudi-Iranian pil- that Dewey's passion for closing all gaps and reject- grimage clash in 1987, when both countries mobi- ing all dichotomies is ultimately less true to life lized vast transnational networks in support of their than Russell's insistence on the tragic dimension of rival interpretations of the pilgrimage. everyday existence. A strong sense of the useless- The varieties of Islam carried by the air lanes and ness of truth and its unrelatedness to human affairs airwaves hardly touch the lives of all Muslims. But still strikes manv of us as an indisuensable element in the wired capitals of Islam, local forms are rein the psycholo& of the serious philosopher. treating before the advance of a limited set of trans- Alan Ryan national forms. The diversity of the many soon may Department of Politics yield to the hegemony of the few. Princeton University Martin Krainer Wilson Center Fellow Int'l Security Studies Program What about Piaget?

Walker Percy ["The Divided Creature," WQ, Sum- Dewey and Russell mer '891 offers a prodigious analysis of psychology, with emphasis on psychology's failure to connect Having only recently published a political biogra- the knowledge of the physical world (e.g., neurons

WQ WINTER 1990 COMMENTARY

and biochemistry), to the mental world (e.g., the Finally, it is my contention that Piaget's stages of self and consciousness). development of waking-state schemes-schemes While he has a clear grasp of the fundamental in a state of relative connectedness to the periph- schools of psychology, conspicuous is the absence eral nervous system-permit us to understand the of any reference by Percy to the work of Jean Pia- entity we call consciousness as the child's con- get. Piaget's basic interest was developmental epis- struct of (his giving meaning to) the connectedness temology, how the child constructs his knowledge of an active scheme to the peripheral nervous sys- of the world at different ages. Through simple ex- tem, at first quite undifferentiated, later divisible periments with children, such as noting when they into thought and perception. will knock aside one object to obtain another or A. J. Malerstein, M.D. when they will search under a screen for an object, Associate Clinical Professor Piaget was able to infer the quality of their mental Univ. of California, Davis structures. He traced stages in development of such structures, which he called schemes, and which the present-day neuroscientist may readily Corrections translate into neural nets. At birth these schemes are global, with no distinction among subject, ob- A box on page 45 of Bernard Lewis's article ["State ject, or their interactions. In steps, the child's undif- and Society Under Islam," WQ, Autumn '891 ferentiated schemes interacting with the environ- mislocates the Atlas Mountains to the north of ment reorganize themselves until a percept Mecca. Actually, the mountains are in Morocco, scheme of an object is distinct from a mental im- way to the west. age scheme of that object and until a scheme of The WQ apologizes for its failure to credit the one object is distinct from that of a different object, Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli as co-sponsor of the including the self as an object. Wilson Center conference, "Italy: Political, Social, In Piaget's system the triad is constructed, rather and Economic Change since 1945," held in Febru- than given. Instead of starting with Peirce's triadic ary 1988. The planning for this conference pro- state-object, vocalized word, and that which vided invaluable background for the cluster of arti- brings them together, the symbolic function-Pia- cles on Italy that appeared in our spring 1988 issue. get started with an undifferentiated state in which

subject and object schemes are merged and any Credits: Cover courtesy of Tatistcheff Gallery Santa Monica; p. 10, 27, sound coincident with activity of such a subject- Reproduction from the Collections of the Library of Congress; p. 14, object scheme is a part of it. Reprinted with permission of the News-Leader, Springfield, Mo.; p. 19, Courtesy of Union Pacific Museum Collection; p. 21, Photo: Joe Wrinn; While Piaget did not address clinical findings, p. 24, Courtesy Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York and Chicago; p. 31, 59, e.g., psychotherapy, some of his findings assist our 1l I, AP/Wide World; p. 32, Courtesy of Melvin Simon & Associates, Inc.; p. 32, [inset] Photo: Kelly Glass; p. 34, Drawing by W. Miller, I clinical categorizations since age-appropriate cog- 1989 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.; p. 38, Courtesy of Washington nition parallels styles of cognition found in clinical Stock Photo; p. 40, Copyright @ 1979 Los Angeles Times, reprinted groups. For example, delinquents usually choose with permission; p. 43, Copyright I The Frank Lloyd Wright Founda- tion 1958, Courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives; p. 47, Paolo glitter over substance. This type of social cognition Soleri, Arcology: The City in the linage of Man, The MIT Press; p. 51, is comparable to the five- to seven-year-old's,as he Courtesy of the British Museum; p. 53, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; p. 54, Courtesy of Jayne H. Baum Gallery, New prefers juice in a narrow glass (which appears like York @ Patrick NagataniIAndrke Tracey; p. 56, Courtesy of the Isabella more) rather than in a wide one. Piaget offered a Stewart Gardner Museum; p. 65, Courtesy of the European Community Delegation, Washington, D.C,; p. 66, Universal Pictorial Press &Agency new, very general understanding of two determi- Ltd.; p. 71, Cartoon by Sergue'i, Le Monde; p. 83, from Encyclopedia of nants of consciousness. First, having found that re- Southern Culture, the Univ. of North Carolina Press, photo: Dorothea pression and distortion occur not only in social/ Lange; p. 85, Courtesy of Jose Choin Castro, photo: Rogelio Robles Saaverda; p. 88, 94, 133, The Bettmann Archive; p. 90, 93, UP11 emotional cognition but also in physical cognition, Bettmann Newsphotos; p. 91, originally published in 1947 by Henry he proposed that repression and distortion of Serouya in La Kabbale, taken from Fruginenf'i for a History of the Hit- man Body: Part One, Zone Books', p. 95, Drawing by Marianne Collins, knowledge occurs when that knowledge conflicts taken from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and The Nature of His- with a prevailing cognitive organization, not just lory. Copyright @ 1989 by Stephen Jay Could; p. 97, from T'ien Hung K'ai Wn, by Sung Ying-Hsing; p. 101, Left, de Saussure: Reproduction when knowledge conflicts with the superego. Sec- from the Collections of the Library of Congress; Levi-Strauss: AP/Wide ond, by discovering that in certain tasks (such as World; de Man: Photo Ken Laffil; Barthes: Photo Arthur Wang; Right, using a sling to throw a ball at a target) a child may Arnold The Bettmann Archive; Eliot: AP/Wtde World Photos; Rich- ards: Courtesy of Dr. John Paul Russo; Brooks: Courtesy of Yale Univer- be able to do the task before he understands how sity Press: Jeff Lect photographer; Warren: AP/Wide World Photos; he did it, Piaget proposed that consciousness flows Frye: Roy Nicholls Photography Limited, Toronto; p. 104, Copyright I 1989 J.A. Reid; p. 114, Steve McCuny/Magnum Photos; p. 117, from from awareness of intent and the result of action Working Together: The In.sti1ution.s of the European Community by toward awareness of the behavior of the self and Emile Noel; p. 119, C urtesy of Daniel J. Boorstin; p. 121, Courtesy of The Beryl D. Ford Coylection; p. 128, Reuters/Bettmann Newsphotos; object (awareness of how the child acted on the p. 130, Courtesy of the National Library of Medecine; p. 137, Copyright object and how the object acted). I 1987 Living Media India Limited, cartoon by Ajit Ninan.

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