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Published by the Wood~owWilson International Cente~for Scholars 8 RELIGIONAND THE WRITER A. G. Mojtabai Amitav Ghosk Faith and art once nurtured each other. Now the relationship is uneasy. Two writers ponder what has gone wrong.

46 THE FUTURETHAT NEVERCAME by Mitchell Reiss Contrary to most prophecies, nuclear weapons have not been used in anger in the 50 years since Nagasaki. What will it take to ensure another half century of peace?

32. America's Verdant Cross by Simon Schama The "discovery" of California's giant sequoias helped to reshape America's self-image at a time of national crisis.

68. All the Presidents' Words by Carol Gelderman

102. Music Against Gravity by Alan Neidle and Margaret Freeman

114. The Night of the Whales by William W. Warner

DEPARTMENTS 2. Editor's Comment 127. Periodicals 4. At Issue 154. Research Reports 80. Current Books 156. Commentary 97. Poetry 160. From the Center Cover: A hydrogen bomb ("Event Hood) is exploded from a balloon over the Nevada Test Site, July 5,1957. Printed in the U.S.A.

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

USPS 346-670 ]I!\ VOL. XIX No. 2

The WilsonQuarterly (ISSN-0363-3276)isp1iblisl1edi11fa~~~iary~Wi~~ter~,April(Spri~~g~,fuly(Su~n?ner~~ondOctober~Autumn~ by tke Woodrow WilsonJnfernational Center for Scholars at 901 D Street S. W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions: one yeor, $24; two years, 543. Air mail outside US.: one year, $39; two years, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: 57; outside US.and possessio~~s,$8; selected back issues: 57, including postnge and kandling; o~itside LlS., 58. Second-class postage paid at Wnshington, D.C., and additional mailing ofices. All unsolicited mnnuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Members: Send ckanges ofaddress and 1111 subscripti011correspo~~dence with Wilson Quarterly moiling label to Subscriber Service, The W'11son Quarterly, P.0. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0406. (Subscriber hot line: 1-800-829-5108.)Postmnster: Send all address chnnxes to The Wilson Quarterly, P.0. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142.0406, Microfilm copies are available fiom Universihj Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mickigon 48106. US.newsstand distriblition by Eastern News Distributors, Inc,, 2020 Sliperior Street, Sandus!q, Ohio 44870 (for information, cull 1-800-221-3148). Editor: Jay Tolson Deputy Editor: Steven Lagerfeld Managing Editor: James H. Carman Literary Editor: Jeffery Paine Associate Editor: Robert K. Landers Poetry Editor: Anthony Hecht Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano ifty years ago this summer, a new age announced its Design Consultant: Tawney Harding arrival when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Contributing Editors: Linda Colley, Fthe Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bring- Denis Donoghue, Max Holland, ing to a conclusion the Allies' long struggle with the last Walter Reich, Alan Ryan, Charles resisting Axis power. Scholars and others have debated the Townshend, Alan Wolfe, Bertram morality and necessity of these bombings ever since, most Wyatt-Brown recently in the controversy over the now largely scuttled Researchers: Natalie C. Gill, Enola Gay exhibit at one of our neighboring institutions, the Laura K. Smid Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. Librarian: Zdenek V. David Editorial Advisers: K. Anthony While passionate disagreements characterize the at- Appiah, Mary B. Bullock, Robert tempts to explain those distant events, most people in the Darnton, Nathan Glazer, Harry Cold War years shared at least one conviction when it came Harding, Elizabeth Johns, Michael to the bomb: Nagasaki would not be the last time atomic Lacey, John R. Lampe, Jackson Lears, weapons would be used for military purposes. The existence Robert Litwak, Frank McConnell, of two hostile nations, armed to the teeth with nuclear James M. Morris, Richard Rorty, Blair weapons, would see to that. No one thought that the Soviet Ruble, Ann Sheffield, S. Frederick Union would quietly close up shop and call for a truce. Some Starr, Joseph Tulchin people still can't believe that it did. Founding Editor: Peter Braestrup Perhaps just as surprising is the fact that even before Publishing Director: Warren B. Syer the Cold War ended, nations were beginning to discover Publisher: Kathy Read Business Manager: Suzanne Napper that possession of what one historian dubbed "the win- Circulation Director: Rosalie Bruno ning weapon" might be more a liability than a source of Direct advertising inquiries to: strength. The story of the nuclear Armageddon that didn't Kathy Read come, and of the ongoing effort to encourage more coun- 901 D Street S. W., Suite 704 tries to abandon their atomic arsenals, is one of the stories Washington, D.C. 20024 we offer in this issue. (202) 287-3000

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2 WQ WINTER 1995 Reform in Modern Russian History Money Slngs Progress or Cycle? The Changing Politics of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Theodore Taranovski, Editor Yaroslavl This volume provides a historical introduction to the Blair A. Ruble question of whether Russian state and society can be 'Blair Ruble haproducedprecisely what post-Sovietology reformed successfully for Russia to become a full- desperately need-a fiesh conceptual approach to Russian fledged member of the European community of politics and social l$ ... This book might well become a nations, or whether its attempts at modernization ckusic work in thejeld " are destined to suffer cyclical failures. -Harley Balzer, Georgetown University Contributors: Theodore Taranouski, Terence Emmons, Woodrow Wihon Center Press Series Valentina G. Cberukba, Boris K Anan'icb, Larisa G. 48242-9 Hardback about $47.95 Zakbaroua, Daniel Fie4 Auenir P. Korelin, DauidA.J Macey, David M. McDona4 Josqb Bradley, A@edJ Russia in Search of its Future Rieber, Peter Kenez, Neil B. Weissman, Daniel K Amin Saikal and William male^ Editors Orlousky, Ben EkloJ CarlA. Linden, Vitalii S. Lel'cbuk, These contributions analyze a Russia that is searching Giulietto Cbiesa, Robert K Danieh, William Taubman, Sergei B. Stankeuicb, Iurii M. Baturin, Blair Ruble, for its future amid a maelstrom of complex forces- Robert C. Tucker political, economic, sociocu1tura1, and international, Woodrow Wihon Center Press Series Contributors: Amin Saikal William Maley, A. K 451 77-9 Hardback $59.95 Obolonsky, Archie Brown, Robert F. Miller, Stqben Fortescue, Leslie Holmes, Sergei Serebriany, Peter Sawmk, John Miller, TH Rigby 48387-5 Paperback $14.95 Books in the Woodrow Whon Center Press Series 40 West 20th St., N.Y., NY 10011-4211 are available to Woodrow Wdson Associates Call toll-free 800-872-7423. at a 2OYo discount. MasterCaxdMSA accepted. Prices subiect to change.

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n the whole, the arrangement Of course there was no religious instruction wasn't bad. Sex you learned about in the public school, but there did exist a sub- mostly on the streets, long before merged religiosity, which I have since decided you were caught off guard one day was the well-meaning generic Protestantism that by a parentwho had found thecourage to be probably passed as an unofficial American reli- straight-faced about the mechanics and their gion for 150 years. This all-purpose religiosity, ("Take my word for it") spiritual dimension. The whose watchwords were a sourcebook for sam- details, such as they were, resembled what you plers-self-reliance, honesty, hard work, and already knew about as much as a stick figure re- respect for your neighbor-surfaced principally sembles a Reubens. at Tuesday morning school assemblies, where And religion you learned about mostly in exhortations to good citizenship alternated with school (theory)and church (practice).The Seven interludes of silent prayer and noisy song in Deadly Sins, how to tell a mortal sin from a ve- praise of a distant one-size-fits-all Creator. nial (the feathers of the former fan out like a Accustomed to a deity so close and invasive no peacock's), how to avoid specialized offenses piddling sin escaped him, I had difficulty warm- like sins against the Holy Ghost, how to ratchet ing to a God who would have needed the up an indulgence from partial to plenary with- Palomar telescope to spot a dirty thought. out exhausting yourself in the pro- The spare Tuesday ceremonies cess-none ofthese prickly matters were bland, well-meaning and , was a welcome guest at the dinner harmless (and the traditional vir- table. But they and their countless tues they endorsed by rote, let us thorny cousins were the second not forget, were yeast to the nation's family we consorted with at school, WQ mighty rise). Who knew we were between all the proper academic stuff like read- being unconstitutional? Shouldn't national ing and spelling and arithmetic and geography transgression have carried more of a rush? In the and history, which generally made their claims boundary-obsessed '90s, those vacuous weekly free of doctrinal bias or color. True, the size of assemblies would carry the emotional resonance the Catholic population of a country was inte- of Nuremberg rallies and educate even the Old gral to a geography lesson, and there was some- Testament God to the niceties of official wrath. times a trace of nunnish wistfulness about what Sex today has curricular status in public might have been had Spain or France K.O.'d En- schools, and parents are off the hook (though gland in the fight for North America. God's plan there will always be some who reserve to them- became notably inscrutable when it stiffed the selves the prerogative of showing kids the chill- Spanish Armada. ing, blurred Polaroids of the birth). If only a fair What else should one have expected in a exchange had outlawed religion to the streets! Catholic school but religious indoctrination, and "Psst, kid, over here in the alley. Ever wonder of a specific and dogmatic sort? Heaven was up, where gods come from? Wanna see a picture of hell was straight down; purgatory was down too the Buddha? And check out this Confucius." but not so far, and limbo a little over to the side, Even a back alley may be too public a place set off by a fence that screened all disturbance. for religion in America these days. Children who Immediate seating in all areas. Seven-and-a-half attend sectarian institutions, and Sunday years of this sublime marination were inter- schools or their equivalent, may still plot their rupted for me by six months in a New York City lives by the sacred road maps they learn to read public school, and I found the drying-out pro- in school and church. But what of children who cess oddly unsatisfactory. attend public schools and no church, whose

4 WQ SPRING 1995 parents are indifferent to religion and barely prejudiced. It believes in the superiority of its capable of New Age moral instruction? (Find own product and does not advocate that we your essence, ride the wave, live the dream.) sample others before making up our minds. What sense will they have of religion's power to There is no feel-good ethic of egalitarianism. master lives and to alter history? Martyrs have a cause, and those who kill them At a time when portions of the globe seem to implicitly recognize its threat when they pay be fracturing like pond ice along radiating lines them the caps-off tribute of death. of difference, even modest palliatives have a "And about what religions do you propose claim. So should we consider educating the to teach? Someone in the classroom is bound to young about religions-quite apart from the feel slighted-marginalized, demeaned, and liti- education many of them may receive in a religious." This is reasonably predictive, and not gion? Is there a case to be made not for teaching just because immigration has brought to religion in public schools, which is plainly America so many new residents from portions impossible, but for speaking formally about re- of the world beyond the boundaries that were ligions in a historical and cultural context, which once comfortable to the West. There is the addi- is merely very difficult? The goal is not to make tional risk of having in the classroom a sprin- the young better but only to make them smarter. kling of adherents to shiny neophyte faiths. Af- The consequences of belief-and refusal and ter all, what does it take to start a religion nowa- differenceare writ large in the histories of East days? A rule or two, a goal or two, a god or and West, and microscopically in the behavior two-and the god no longer has to inhabit of anyone who ever struck or shunned or went heaven but maybe just Beverly Hills. to the aid of another human being out of a So you begin to draw the lines: no class time determination to do God's will. Much of the for revelations that postdate World War II, or for world's history-past and current-is mean- a religion whose founder has appeared on a TV ingless without an understanding of the reli- talk show. A music appreciation course is likely gious motivations that fueled wars, toppled to overlook von Dittersdorf but not Mozart; a empires, and staked a claim to continents, or poetry course may slight Southey for Words- sometimes just to neighborhoods. worth; a fiction course forgoes Krantz for Kafka; And how does one make sense of Western a driver's ed class probably seats you in a Ford, cultural expression-in painting, sculpture, mu- a Chrysler, or a Chevy, but not in all three at sic, literature, architecture-without some un- once. Education is always about choices. There's derstanding of Christianity, if only as the pres- time for just so much, and the essential thing is ence that has inspired as much rebellion as def- that sane and defensible criteria inform the de- erence? Even religious art may hide mischief in cisions that give the nod to this and the hook to its mystery: the painter who inscribes the face of that. Limit religions instruction to religions that his catamite on a floating cherub tweaks the tra- have had some major historical impact. Sounds dition and extends it too. But you cannot notice simple enough. if you do not know. Objections to the notion of teaching religions n their imperialistic heyday, slick maga- in public schools leapfrog each other in their de- zines like Life would sometimes take on termination to be heard. "What need is there to topics that they decided were "important tamper with current arrangements?Let children enough to warrant an entire issue." Entire whose parents wish them to receive religious in- libraries would not have been space enough to struction attend the institutionsthat provide it- consider these topics adequately-among which and let public schools bus kids to museums if figured "The World's Great Religionsu-but the culture is the issue." But a sectarian school by editors were unfazed. They recklessly distilled definition pays no attention to other religions. It the essentials of each great religion-history, is a religion school, not a religions school. It does theology, influence-into a compact text and nothing to advance the larger cause. Its ethos, then scattered the words among pages of gor- one expects-one hopes--will be fundamentally geous pictures. We may marvel today at the

WQ SPRING 1995 5 editors' boldness, but instructive popularizing not deflect the sword from slicing the infidel deserves some admiration too. They didn't ago- who thought of himself as a harmless Anglican. nize over which religions have had the most Is the schools' project even remotely doable? profound consequences for civilizations; Bud- Good sense argues no. How do you present all this dhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, material without tipping your hand? What do you Islam, Judaism, and maybe Taoism are my do with even the most familiar, the Judaeo-Chris- clouded memory's candidates. I keep the list tian tradition? How do you incorporateJudaism in alphabetical to avoid hierarchical debate. its several varieties and Roman Catholicism and You could do worse than start with that list as Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism's extended the basis for a high school religions course. It seems family of sects not on speaking terms with one an- appropriate to recognize as well the religious prac- other?How summon equal measures of dispassion tices of native inhabitants of the Americas, whom for Christ, the Buddha, Muhammad, Henry VIH, European missionaries labored to convert, and of and Joseph Smith? Won't the least arch of an eye- the African peoples who were displaced and brow, however involuntary, signal a judgment fi- brought across the sea against their will. Remem- nal as Dante's? Who is qualified to teach these ber, we are not talking about instruction in theol- things, and, perhaps more important, who is quali- ogy or about setting in motion the engine of any fied to learn them? If students can't locate Turkey religion, which only faith can do, merely about ex- on a map, will it matter to them that there was once amining the locked components of the engine while an Ottoman Empire and that we live still with the they are quiet and cool: some dates, some doctrine, consequences of its collapse? If they can't find In- some sense of growth and accomplishment, of dia, will they notice the blood in Kashmir? claims on territory and the artistic imagination rather than on souls. he entire enterprise may be simply an- The goal is to understand a bit better not just other instance of the old wanting to how the world has worked but how it still take hold of the young by the shoul- works. The motive is not pious but rational. You ders to say, "Listen, there is so much cannot understand what is happening in Ameri- youT should know, so much you will learn too can politics even as I write if you ignore the re- late, so much you will never know. I know ligious impulse behind the enthusiasm of many things that will make your progress through the Americans who demand change. Nor will you world less puzzling and painful. Laws govern adequately comprehend events in other parts of physical nature, and to recognize them is to gain the world without a sense of their vital and im- a power over nature. Laws-religious, civic, pelling religious traditions. social, psychological-govern much of the rest We are suckers in America for the theme park of life, and they can be comprehended too. We sentimentality that insists "It's a small world- are talking of partial comprehension only, but and of harmonizing voices at that. If there is a that's not to say the understanding is trivial. For family of man, a lot of evidence, in Bosnia and example, civilizations have a lifeblood, and they India and Algeria and Iraq, argues for its being draw it richly from their notions of the divine." terminally dysfunctional. And religious differ- "Huh?" ence fuels much of the discord. Wistful and con- Ah, well. Thou shalt have a lot of strange ciliatory, we are apt to say "It's not important gods before you as you move through the world, what you believe but only that you believe." Ripe but thou shalt not admit any of them to your matter for Rodgers and Hammerstein, but it will neighborhood school.

-James Morris

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SATISFACTION IS GUARANTEED .I RELIGION AND

Faith and art have coexisted peacefully, even amicably, throughout most of history. In our day, however, relations between the realm of religion and the realm of literature are uneasy at best. As our contributors here suggest, the fault may lie with both sides-in the deafness of most contemporary writers to the religious yearnings of the average person; and in the aggressive intolerance of some believers who have gone the way of fundamentalism.

MOJTABAI

hen I'm not teaching or writ- One afternoon at the hospice, I was ing, I work at the inpatient summoned to a patient's room to straighten unit of St. Anthony's Hos- out a lifting apparatus-one of those hang- pice in Amarillo, Texas. It's ing hand pulls or grab bars, that are sup- a serious place. But not only serious: it's a posed to dangle over a patient's bed. The house that contains everything, including patient, an old man, was unable to speak, laughter, comedy, farce, pettiness, terror, struggling to breathe, but still trying to com- and peace, truly a house where, as Philip municate; he kept pointing overhead. The Larkin observed of churches, "all our com- young woman tending him, his grand- pulsions meet." daughter, thought the device was what he

8 WQ SPRING 1995 THE RITER

The Distress of Lot (1991) by Joel Sheesley. The artist enlists an intensely realistic style to capture flickerings of spiritual anxiety beneath the outward comfort and ease of contemporary suburban America.

noticeably less labored. He'd arrived at that moment I've seen many times shortly before death, a frozen moment when the eyes open wide and stare intently, unhurriedly, with perfect calm, lucidity, and impenetrability. Utter inscrutability. In the Bible Belt, they call it "angel gazing." All I can say is that his eyes were trained on something upon, or beyond, the ceiling. I thought of an antique word: Behold. He beheld-he seemed to; as to what he beheld, here my imagination would fly, but fails-I stumble. There was nothing much I could do before leaving the old man and his granddaughter for their precious last moments together except to fetch another pillow and try to realign the patient's head, now at an odd angle. Then-nothing more being asked of me-I went out. In due course, not long after that, the patient died. The granddaughter requested time alone with the body. "Whenever wanted. He was obviously too weak to use you're ready," we told her. We withdrew. it, but he was pointing directly overhead, Finally, the young woman emerged and all we could see directly overhead was from the patient's room and made her way the triangular hand pull knotted up in its to the nursing station to ask what came next. chain. So I struggled for long minutes, in- She seemed dazed, as shaken and confused tensely, absurdly, with that chain. as she was sad. It was quite futile, and typically myopic Before calling the funeral home, one of of me-a comedy of mixed signals, as I the nurses offered to accompany the grand- think back on it now. The man before me daughter back for a last visit to the patient's was dying, and pointing-pointing out room, to read a poem the nurse had written, what might have been the one thing need- a poem about letting go. The nurse made ful to see, and there I was completely en- her offer twice, the granddaughter not re- grossed in fiddling with the gadgets on his sponding, seeming not to hear, the first bed. time. But the second time, she looked up Then the old man stopped pointing; his and gave a clear, emphatic answer: "No.'' hand fell away. His breathing had grown Although the granddaughter seemed lost

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 9 and unsure about everything else, she was viously, I'm not disputing the right-even very sure about not wanting a poem. the obligation-of serious writers to criti- That young woman's emphatic "no" cize and move in advance of the culture, or has stayed with me and become the prompt- to make formal explorations of their me- ing for these reflections. I suppose her role dium. If the reader fails to connect in such was that of a merely proximate cause to a cases, it can't be helped. mind largely prepared for this news; her What I want to go on to confront, answer gave firm voice to something I although, is our failure as writers to connect ready more or less suspected, for, standing with the reader for reasons that can be there at the nursing station, overhearing this helped. What have we done to earn the exchange, I found myself thinking, "That's reader's distrust? how it is." However appropriate, or inap- The more I think about it, the more con- propriate, the nurse's timing or motive vinced I am that I've done my part to earn might have been, however fine or poor her it. A case in point: one of my closing rites at poem, the young woman's refusal-the part the end of each semester is to remind my of it I recognized, and took to heart-ech- students of the ceaseless challenge of liter- oed in my mind well beyond its original ary creation and our perpetual falling short hospice context. That echo said to me that by intoning from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets whatever we were writing nowadays was the lines from "East Coker" we all know: not expected to offer light in a dark place, an outstretched hand in a tight place. Trying to learn to use words and every That is the present state of expectation, attempt as I've come to see it, and I think, to a large Is a wholly new start, and a different extent, writers have earned it. We've kind of failure worked hard to establish it. Because one has only learnt to get the better of words realize that when I make a leap of gen- For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which eralization, as I'm doing now, I'm not One is no longer disposed to say it. taking into account numerous other And so each venture factors, such as the reader's (or Is a new beginning, a raid on the hearer's)I lack of preparation for meeting inarticulate serious literature, old or new, or the reputed With shabby equipment always current ascendancy of image over word, or deteriorating the aggressive crowding of bookstore In the general mess of imprecision of shelves with the dregs of the new, blunting feeling. . . the reader's judgment and turning good readers off anything contemporary; these But, of course, there's more in these factors have been discussed interminably by lines than a healthy chastening, more than writers and educators. Certainly, I'm not a salutary reminder of human frailty and trying to make a case for a literature that fallibility. Despite the quite traditional reli- makes the least demand on the reader. Ob- giosity of the context in which this passage

A. G. Mojtabai, an American novelist, is writer in residence at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of Mundome (1974), The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud (1976), A Stopping Place 0979), Autumn (1982), Ordinary Time (1989), Called Out (1994), and Blessed Assurance (1986), a nonfiction work about Cold War nuclear-weapons production and religious attitudes in Amarillo, Texas. Copyright 01995 by A. G. Mojtabai. This essay and the one that follows were adapted from talks given in the autumn of 1994 at a conference on the writer and religion sponsored by the International Writers Center at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

10 WQ SPRING 1995 is embedded, these lines are quintessential There's the word that tears up from the modernism: unprecedented candor and roots: "lekh 1ekha"-"Get yourself" or "Go boldness. And yet, look again: how hud- forth: The Lord said to Abram, "Go forth from dling-what a timid, fussy, piddling your land, the home of your kin, and from your around in the sandbox! And isn't there a father's house to the land that I will show you." certain relishing of our failure amid the (Gen. 12:l). And the word that rends in shifting shapes of ruins in retrospect, not to twain: "Choose. . . " -"u-vakhartat'-"and mention Samuel Beckett's "ruins in pros- now you choose": I have put before you life and pect," poking about with our shabby, al- death, blessing and curse. Choose life. (Dt. ways deteriorating little buckets and shov- 30:19). els? Dismantlement and then dismantle- And another conception of the word ment: there's a mood and a program here- persists. Recently, in the continuing wake of one can hardly call it a mission. Yet I had the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catho- been so attuned to the long echo of modern- lics have taken to speaking of the Mass as ism, with its dissonance, its sense of diffi- being celebrated at two tables: the table of culty, discontinuity, and fragmentation, had the word and the table of the bread. been so thoroughly schooled in irony, that Think of it: the table of the word. How these habits of mind had become second potent a conception of the word is en- nature, both invisible and ineradicable- shrined here: the word that nourishes, Music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at brings everlasting life. The cleansing, purg- all (Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"). And what- ing word, so sweet to swallow, so bitter ever has come along in the way of when it's down. The word that blesses, the postmodern advanced or retrenched word that binds. The radiant word. The gamesmanship couldn't do much in the way singing word. And joining the two tables as of releasing me from these habits, this mu- one: the incarnate word. sic, much less make the world whole again. 0 taste and see. Sandboxand table of Back in the days of my ancestors, there the word: contrast and compare. was an altogether different conception of the word: word and thing, word and deed were of a piece. Could I not reground myself, or, if not reground, then refresh, replen- ish, or fortify my spirit by gazing at this vision of maximal contrast? Consider Adam, Let me make my bias plain. It has been by the power vested in him by the Creator, suggested that the positive view I take of naming the animals: And the Lord God formed religion is a minority position among writ- out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the ers. I hope this is not the case, but if it is- birds of the sky, and brought them to the man so be it. A New Yorker born and bred, I live to see what he would call them: and whatever the now-by choice-out on the high plains of man called each living creature, that would be Texas, well beyond shouting distance of the its name. (Gen. 2:19). Think of the name cultural trendsetters on either coast. I live in "Adam," itself formed from the word for the heartland among so-called ordinary earth-"adamah." Thus: earthling, scooped people. I speak from this ground. I may be from the earth. Recall Jacob wrestling with out of step with the literati, but I don't think a strange being-with the human and the I'm out of touch. divine-to become, himself, a new being, It is my conviction that there exists to- with a new name: "Israel"-"Yisra-El," day a religious hunger in our country and from "El," one of the names of God, and in our world so widespread that writers "sarita"-"you have striven." (Gen. 32:28). ignore or disdain it at our peril. I'm not talk-

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 11 ing only about the peril of backlash, of censorship and repression from the outside, but of something even more deadly that eats away at us from within: untruthfulness, shutting out the voices we don't want to hear. I don't believe this hunger is encountered only in the Bible Belt; it's to be found even in the great cities of the coasts. To be sure, it's harder to make out in the midst of the clamor of a large city, and it's also easier for writers to wall themselves off in enclaves of the like- minded if the population is large and diverse. I heard Billy Graham say in a radio sermon once that there were more than 400 people claiming to be Christ in the city of Los Ange-

12 WQ SPRING 1995 The Garden of Eden Trilogy by Catherine Murphy (clockwise from upper left): Self-portrait with Apple (1989), Eric (1990), and Persimmon (1991).

literati, for the most part, have main- tained a defensive or indifferent silence, or taken satiric note, and I sus- pect that this slighting of a matter of vital concern to so many people around us is symptomatic of other important things we're diminishing with our disdain, or just plain leaving out. I preach to myself first of all- the "me" in the "we." Looking back over my first three novels and into my fourth, I've been struck by what these books have in common: views of a broken world, of lost connections . . . the future/ Futureless (Eliot again, "The Dry Salvages"). A bleak vision, accurate as far as it went, but incomplete, far too pas- sive and acquiescent a reflection. I had set forth, in my first book, a les alone. I believe it. And if that many vision of mind and body severed beyond Christs, how many Mary Magdalenes, reconnection, then turned, in my second, prophets, faith healers-and faith seekers? to a utopian community where science and art, reason and emotion, were mur- '11 go further. You'll laugh, but I'd like derously torn; in my next, I moved on to to suggest that something so seemingly a town divided first by the partition of a silly as our compulsion to plaster slo- subcontinent, then by religious hatred and gans on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and suspicion. Disconnection was my theme; walls testifies to a widespread hunger for it was what I saw. But it was not all that I belonging and belief. Even slogans such as saw. The connections were there all along, Save the Whales, Life's a Bitch, or I Love Dal- could I but reach for them. I was too busy las speak to a hunger for the proclamation indicting, documenting, with whatever of belief. So prevalent are these proclama- clarity I could muster, my corner on the tions that those of us without words embla- confusions of my time, too busy with the zoned on our chests may well begin to feel overriding demands of wordcraft to ask naked, undifferentiated-unreal. what sort of offering this made to the Contemporary Americans may have reader if served up in a steady diet of such garbled or lost much of the traditional lan- things. guage of religious belief, but we haven't lost In teaching we-I-don't talk much the yearning for that belief. About this real- about ends; more time is devoted to ques- ity, this intractable huge fact, the American tions of means. Students reflect these hab-

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 13 its of mind, habits reinforced by their read- scarcity of omniscient narrators in serious fic- ing of contemporary North American writ- tion today. To what does this scarcity testify? ers whom they tend to emulate. With my I suppose it points to the decline of the God most accomplished students, questions of idea among writers, and also-significantly? encompassing vision tend to be repressed as concomitantly?accidentally?-to a waning of distracting to aesthetic concentration. The our faith in our own ability to know. less skillful students might-and do, with much higher frequency-trouble about such matters. But, for the most part, there's a marked avoidance of those "eternal questions" (Why are we here? Where are we going? What is a truly human life?), a In a lecture entitled "Virtuous Lying: withering away of any significant sense of Imagining More Than One Knows and greatness. Indeed, the word "awesome" has Knowing More Than One Imagines," lately become one of the tamest of expletives. Monroe Engel laments the abundance of Passivity despite energy and constric- recent stories that, to a greater or lesser tion of aim strike me as tendencies for con- degree, "luxuriate in impotence," stories cern in contemporary North American fic- "content to tell us . . . that our lives are not tion. When I say "constriction," I'm not what we would like them to be-which is, speaking of scale but of a failure of vision. I after all, something we are likely to know recall somewhere in one of Ann Beattie's all too well already," and urges the writer novels-Falling In Place, I believe-a man to reach for "the exhilaration of imagining and a woman talking about a famous wish- more and better than he knows." Engel ing well he had visited in Europe. She asks highlights two stories in his argument: him what he wished for when he tossed in "The Blind Man," by D. H. Lawrence, and a coin. "The usual," he says. To me, this is "Cathedral," by Raymond Carver.* a terribly poignant and revealing moment. Readers will recall that both stories re- By a winking sort of irony, he masks his volve around the presence of a blind man. aspirations, distances, diminishes, and ef- (Each is differently constellated: in the fectively disempowers them. Lawrence story, the blind man is the husband, and the sighted man comes to visit; in assivity and constriction are most Carver's story, the husband and wife are obvious among our so-called sighted and the blind man comes to visit, minimalist writers, where they ap- but those are minor variations.) Minimally, pear to be elements in a conscious both stories involve a married couple, an aestheticP strategy, but constriction is to be evening visit-including dinner, an after- found also in the very idea of postrealist fic- math with the two men alone together, a tion, if I understand it, in its highly con- laying on of hands, and a transformation. In scious and strategic refusal to dream be- the words of one of my University of Tulsa yond the page, beyond the act of writing undergraduates when I pressed him to say itself. I believe that too many of our writers what the stories were about and what they are afflicted to some degree with passivity had in common: "They're about different and constriction, refusing to own up to the 'A later version of Engel's lecture was published as "Knowing full gamut of our dreams, or refusing to More Than One Imagines: Imagining More Than One Knows" dream beyond what we think we know. The in Agni Review, 31-32, 1990, pp.165-176. I shall continue to refer to Engel's original lecture because it bears an immediate boundaries are self-imposed: they may be connection with a living occasion, that of hearing Carver give a reading of "Cathedral," and is the cry of its occasion-full of those of the page, or of the limited first-per- admiration, but also bristling with uncomfortable, needed-to- son narrator. You have only to think of the be-asked questions.

14 WQ SPRING 1995 kinds of blindness." A terse answer-but a the most private, delicately nuanced per- good, true one, for in both stories the so- ceptions and thoughts, he creates a compos- called sighted are shown to be more de- ite, overarching intelligence, the illusion of prived than the blind. a nearly omniscient narrator brooding over Within their commonalties, the two sto- the scene, an illusion, as I've mentioned, ries are very different. Carver's "Cathedral" greatly absent from serious fiction today. is narrated in the first person, from the point And there is no mistaking Lawrence's of view of a very limited, unnamed indi- message; it is laid out programmatically. vidual. To grasp just how limited, listen, for Too programmatically, perhaps, but his a moment, to the opening lines: aspirations are large, prophetic, unafraid to inquire fully. Which is the more re- The blind man, an old friend of my deemed life? Why? He enters the intimate wife's, he was on his way to spend the world of the blind man and imagines what night. His wife had died. So he was vis- he does not know. His incidental details iting the dead wife's relatives in Con- are rich and luminous, none unliving, necticut. He called my wife from his in- from the glistening white tablecloth drop- laws'. Arrangements were made. . . . I ping "its heavy pointed lace covers almost wasn't enthusiastic about his visit. He to the carpet," to the rain and the wind was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came blowing in upon the horses in the stable, from the movies. In the movies the blind to the sweet roots crushed by the turnip moved slowly and never laughed. Some- pulper, to the "flattened grey head of the times they were led by seeing-eye dogs. cat." As Engel has noted, "At the quick A blind man in my house was not some- heart of Lawrence's story. . . is the essen- thing I looked forward to. tially religious belief that a life of feeling was, or could be, superior to a life of And here is the narrator-host sitting ideas." In Lawrence's story, Maurice, the down to dinner: " 'Now let us pray,' I said, blind man, goes on "into the darkness and the blind man lowered his head. My with unchanging step. . . .Life seemed to wife looked at me, her mouth agape." And move in him like a tide lapping, lapping here is his prayer: "Pray the phone won't and advancing, enveloping all things ring and the food doesn't get cold." darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth This is the characteristic flat, numb the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp sound of the narrator-protagonist. The it, and possess it in pure contact. He did maddening inadequacies of this man, ap- not try to remember, to visualize. He did parent from his first utterances, are, of not want to. The new way of conscious- course, part of the story's brilliance. So ness substituted itself in him." much unfelt, unnoticed, unsaid, creates a Here is Lawrence's blind man eating: lump in the reader's throat, a palpable ache of feeling, a longing for articulation. There are Maurice was feeling, with curious little great gaps-wide blank spaces-silences- movements, almost like a cat kneading between the lines. You have to scour those her bed, for his plate, his knife and silences between the lines where-if any- fork, his napkin. He was getting the where-meaning, hidden, lurks. whole geography of his cover into his Nothing could be in sharper contrast to consciousness. Lawrence's narrative strategy. In Lawrence, it's full illumination everywhere. Shifting Here is Carver's blind man eating: from one person's point of view to another's, spelling out everything, including The blind man had right away located

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 15 visitor and asks for permission to touch him, to know him through touch; the other reluctantly consents. Then Maurice lays his hand on the other man's head:

Closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm grasp, gathering it, as it were; then, shifting his grasp and softly closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the rough, short, mous- tache, the mouth, the rather strong chin. The hand of the blind man grasped the shoulder, the arm, the hand of the other man. He seemed to take him, in the soft, traveling grasp.

The sighted man, Bertie, is devastated:

his foods.. . . He'd cut two pieces of He had one desire-to escape from this meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and intimacy, this friendship, which had then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, been thrust upon him. He could not the beans next, and then he'd tear off a bear it that he had been touched by the hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He'd blind man, his insane reserve broken follow this up with a big drink of milk. in. He was like a mollusc whose shell It didn't seem to bother him to use his had been broken. fingers once in a while, either.

In the world of this Carver story, the Admittedly, there's a dangerous-or blind man is finer, but not all that differ- what could be a dangerous-exercise of ent from his companions; they are all power here. equally into scarfing and grazing. There's a pervasive leveling, a shared cultural im- arver's ending seems to be much poverishment. milder and has an affirmative feel The endings of the two stories are simi- to it. Left alone with the blind lar-and very different. Lawrence's ending man, having exhausted Scotch is dark, shattering, momentous. Maurice andc marijuana in repeated attempts at one- observes that he does not really know his upmanship with the blind man, the desper-

16 WQ SPRING 199 5 ate narrator-host is at the end of his re- Even though, as Engel has noted, "in sources. He turns on the television and 'Cathedral,' starting with the title itself, the finds nothing but a documentary on ca- religious context is strategic and surely thedrals. The narrator is questioned by highly conscious, it's all a matter of 'nega- the blind man as to what cathedrals look tive reference.' " Engel continues: like, then, failing to communicate with words, is asked to draw one while the Religious allusion suggests what is miss- blind man latches onto his sketching ing from the life depicted. It is not part of hand. The blind man asks the narrator to the present context of that life. The reli- keep his eyes closed while they're draw- gious suggestions of "The Blind Man," ing the cathedral, and the narrator com- by contrast, are less strategic, less inten- tional, and less overt, but Lawrence's in- plies. Inexplicably, he continues to keep tense experience of chapel in the mining his eyes closed even after the blind man village of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire tells him to take a look. Nothing really where he spent the first half of his short prepares us or accounts for the narrator's life informs both the language of his fic- change of heart. Nothing except for a sud- tion and his unappeasable appetite for den infusion of grace, or, perhaps, the transcendence. author's unease-a nagging sense that the limitations he has imposed upon his imag- Engel observes that "both stories con- ined character are intolerable, even- cern themselves with human deprivation could it be?-inhuman. and inadequacy-with the ways in which Listen again to the penultimate lines: our lives are not what we would like them to be. And each is evidence of the courage I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep required to look steadily at these painful them that way for a little longer. I conditions of deprivation." Nonetheless, thought it was something I ought to do. he feels "a kind of gratitude" for "Well?" he said. "Are you looking?" Lawrence's story that he cannot feel for My eyes were still closed. I was in my Carver's. For, Engel explains, "the Law- house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like rence story not only tells us that our lives I was inside anything. should be better than they are, it also suggests something of what 'better' might A sort of ex-stasis, then, a standing outside mean." This is not necessarily to attempt himself? Hard to tell-but his words seem to to create "alternative forms of life." suggest a bursting forth from his self-encapsulation-he's sharing blindness, if only for a Just imagining why our lives are not moment. He's also, albeit in a very small way, better than they are-why they do not sharing something of the experience of cathe- meet those expectations and hungers dral building, for the builders often did not that no amount of experience can lead live to see the completion of their labors. So, us to relinquish-is after all another again in a very small way, he's breaking out way of imagining more than we know. of his historical encapsulation. [The alternative] is to see our depriva- The narrator's final sentence, his best tions as inexplicable and beyond reach attempt at communicating his experience, is of that kind of imaginative inquiry that our best storytellers have so frequently thoroughly in character, as inarticulate as had the arrogance or virtue to exercise. anything he has come up with before: "It's really something," is all he can say. So we're left with either mystical ineffability or a re- And, finally, Engel puts the question: lapse into the old limitations. "Are we now in the hold of a morality or

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 17 an aesthetic that makes it difficult for a help but be, without diminishing our reason scrupulous writer to employ that virtue?" for being. What do I mean? I put that question to you as well. Clearly, I'm not thinking of the institutional-bureaucratic side of things; as a rule (a rule with notable exceptions) we don't do well there. But I'm not only thinking of the prophetic role. What I am thinking of is religion in its broadest signification. "Reli- If I could wish, toss my penny into the gion" from the root "ligare," meaning "to fountain, or better-since wishes are beg- bind." To bind into meaning. Or perhaps to gars-toss in my three pennies, and name rebind-to connect what is broken-the my nine and more wishes for myself as a known with the unknown, our one moment writer, for my country's writers, and for our with the eons, each of us with one another. literature, what would they be? I'd wish, first of all, to be able to name my wishes, to hilip Larkin's poem "Church Go- be able to avow them openly: to name them, ing," which I echoed a little at the to claim them, the better to act upon them. beginning, might well be speaking I'd wish upon most of us more ambition, a of literature-churches and the larger sense of possibility. I'd wish for a greatP literature of the past, which held sense of mission beyond identity politics- unspilt/ So long and equably what since is a wider healing. I'd wish as many of us were found/ Only in separation-marriage and birth/ as interested in healing as in indicting, and And death . . . / . . . In whose blent air all our if not able to name, at least willing to point, compulsions meet/ Are recognized and robed as or if not able to point, at least willing to destinies. . . search for what could make our lives better Is it impossible nowadays to recap- than they are. I'd wish for a serious literature that sense of things "unspilt?" It's ture less willfully inarticulate to spiritual been our fashion not to reach for it-or, at need, less deaf to spiritual summons, a lit- least, not to be seen reaching. Is it ever erature that looks to what has long endured possible to completely stop trying, as well as to the novelties of the moment, a though? Even those of us who would deny literature that seeks wisdom, that is un- any agenda for the arts beyond purely afraid to speak, without taking ironic cover, formal, internal fulfillments specific to the its full heart and mind. medium really can't stop there. Why But, of course, wishing makes nothing struggle so for precision and clarity-hon- happen. We choose our words-dim or ra- oring radiance, not murk? Why should the diant, clanging or choiring-and could formal coherence of the artwork matter choose differently. unless wholeness and integrity are to be There's a litany of theme, like some prized? Where does this prizing come Galtonesque algorithm for creative think- from? Read our revisions, our endless re- ing, that I can't get out of my head: writer visionings, not our manifestos. Despite and religion, writer on religion, writer in our loudest professed intentions, and all religion. I've come to the last part of this our inattention, we still can't help making litany, and it seems to me, finally, that the those ancient, barely explicable gestures writer is in religion-or should be-cannot of holding up and gathering in.

18 WO SPRING 199 5 CHALLENGE

BY AMITAV GHOSH

ith the benefit of hindsight, I am ever more astonished by the degree to which, overw the course of this century, religion has been reinvented as its own antithesis. At much the same time that one stream within modernism created a straw version of religion as a cloak of benighted ig- norance that had to be destroyed with the weapons of literary, artistic, and scientific progressivism, another stream within this same movement created a no less fantastic version of religion as a bulwark against the dehumanization of contemporary life. To a greater or lesser degree, most of us have felt the tug of both these currents. Indeed, it is hard to think of any contemporary, modern, or even not so modern thinker, writer, or artist who has not. Karl Marx, for instance, while writing his much-quoted sentence about religion being the opiate of the masses (itself not as dismissive as some of his followers have assumed), also wrote a less known passage describing religion as the heart of a heartless world. These are commonplaces, of course. We all know the stories of Traditional Islam bore no enmity toward the literary artist. To the modernist figures who have swum contra y, the writer was a respected figure. This illustration from from one of these currents into the an early-17th-centuy Mughal manuscript shows a scribe at work. other: a narrative best exemplified

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 19 by the career of W. H. Auden. At the heart Banna and al-Sayyid Qutb, were not edu- of these stories is a moment, often an ex- cated in traditional religious institutions. tended moment, of conversion, and it is Both were graduates of the Dar al-Uluum, this moment that puzzles me now-with or House of Sciences, in Cairo, an institu- the benefit of hindsight, as I said. It tion that has been described as a "modern- puzzlesme because it seems to me increas- ist teacher training institute." Al-Sayyid ingly that the intellectual pedigrees of most Qutb first made his name as a literary fig- versions of religious extremism around the ure, a writer of fiction and critic who was world today can be traced to similar mo- actively involved in debates centered on ments of conversion. questions of literary modernism in the Cairo of the 1930s and '40s. Like the Ana- et me cite a few examples: garika Dharmapala in Sri Lanka before Swami Vivekananda, the late- him, he began his career in the educational 19th-century thinker who is to- bureaucracy. His bosses in Egypt's Minis- day claimed by Hindu extrem- try of Public Instruction sent him to istsL as a founding father, was famously a America in 1948, apparently in the hope rationalist in the best positivist tradition, that he would be won over by American until he underwent a dramatic conver- ways. His discovery of his religious mission. Or consider the Anagarika Dharma- sion is said to have occurred as he stood pala, who laid the foundations of Bud- on the deck of the liner that was carrying dhist revivalism in Sri Lanka at the turn him to New York. I have cited figures of the century. The Anagarika Dharma- from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam; pala's early education was in Christian many similar figures could be cited from schools, and he is said to have learned the the Jewish and Christian traditions. Bible by heart at an early age. He was re- What do these moments of conversion converted to Buddhism by the American signify? In trying to answer that question, theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, who ar- we find ourselves reaching reflexively for rived in Sri Lanka in 1880. As with so the terms that float by on one or the other many such figures, the first popular side of the modernist stream. On the one movement the Anagarika Dharmapala led shore we find terms or phrases such as was social rather than religious in na- "atavism," "medievalism," "fear of uncer- ture-a temperance campaign. tainty" coming all too readily to hand; on In Iran, the figure who is thought to the other, our hands close upon "resis- have played the most important part in tance," "alternative," "search for commu- the radicalization of Shiite youth in the re- nity," "thirst for meaning." cent past was neither a mullah nor an aya- tollah but rather a Sorbonne-trained soci- o a greater or lesser degree, mo- ologist, Ali Shari'ati. In Shari'ati's writ- ments of conversion such as ings, religion often assumes the aspect of those I have referred to are all of a sociological instrument, a means to re- these things, but they are also sist the versions of modernity he had wit- somethingT. else: they also mark a crossing nessed in France. from one current of modernism to an- Similarly the intellectual progenitors other. It is all too easy to forget that these of religious extremism in Egypt, Hasan al- reinvented forms of religion are not a re-

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India, and was raised in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Iran, and India. He is the author of two novels, The Circle of Reason (1986)and The Shadow Lines (1988), and a work of nonfiction, In an Antique Land (1992). Copyright 0 1995 by Amitav Ghosh.

20 WQ SPRING 1995 pudiation of, but a means of laying claim broadest sense. For most of human his- to, the modern world. That is why the tory, religion and literature have been vir- advance-guard of these ideologies are tually inseparable, everywhere. I can never traditional religious specialists but think of nonreligious ideologies that have rather young college graduates or engi- thought of literature as an enemy; I know neering students-products, in other of no religion that has historically held words, of secularly oriented, modernist that position. That is why we must be rig- institutions. It is for this reason that we orous and unrelenting in our rejection of find the same things valued on both the claims of those religious extremists shores but in diametrically opposed ways. who try to invoke historical and religious Literature and art, for example, being re- precedents for their attacks on writers. garded as the ultimate repository of value These claims are offered in bad faith. In on one side, come to be excoriated on the fact, the roots of this hostility lie in the other, in exact and equal measure, so that eminently modern pedigree of their own their destruction becomes a prime article moments of conversion. The religions they of faith. invoke do not begin with a positive con- Where else are we to look for the tent of faith; they have their beginnings in sources of this antagonism except within acts of negation. the whirlpools that mark the meeting of I have been using the phrase "religious these two currents? Certainly the conflict extremism" with what may appear to be a cannot be ascribed to religion in the reckless disregard for differences among the

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 21 world's major religions. I do not do so tremists in the Middle East are contemp- unadvisedly. I do believe that the content of tuous of the traditional Sufi tariqas that these ideologies is startlingly similar, across have so long been a mainstay within continents and cultures. popular Islam; the political leadership of Consider, for example, that the rheto- the Hindu extremist movement treats tra- ric of religious extremism is everywhere ditional mendicants and ascetics as a centered on issues that would have been source of embarrassment. In both in- regarded as profane, or worldly, or stances, this hostility has its roots in pecu- largely secular a few generations ago: is- liarly bourgeois anxieties about respect- sues of state power, control of the bureau- ability and rationality. cracy, school curricula, the army, the law There is also much evidence to show courts, banks, and other such institutions. that as the concerns of the major religions Consider also that religious extremists are have grown more and more sociological, everywhere hostile to mainstream tradi- their doctrines and institutions have also tions of dissent within whatever religion increasingly converged. Yet while we they claim to be speaking for. Muslim ex- speak of doctrine, we are still within a domain that is recognizably religious. But the truth is that in those areas of the world that are currently beset by religious turmoil, one very rarely hears anyone speak of doctrine or faith. In many of these areas, by a curious inversion, the language of religious hatred is not a religious language at all. The voices that spew hate invariably draw on more incendiary sources. One of these is the language of quantity, of number-statistics, in other words, that famous syntax of falsehood. Such and such a group is growing too fast, they declare, its birthrate is so and so; it will soon become a majority, overtake another group that has nowhere else to go; that group will then be swamped, washed into the sea by the rising tide of enemies within. Equally, these voices borrow the language Salmon Rushdie brandishes a copy of the book that provoked Islamic mullahs of academic historiogra- in Iran to impose the death sentence on him. Rushdie remains in hiding. phy. They produce ar-

22 WQ SPRING 1995 chaeological data to prove that such and schoolteacher with fundamentalist lean- such a group has no right to be here, that ings had preached a fiery sermon in the they are invaders who arrived later than mosque, urging the men of the village to some other, more authentically located put an end to this custom. peoples, whose claim to the land is there- The image of that adolescent school- fore greater. boy lecturing his mother on what she could and could not do stayed with me for ne of the more curious ele- a long time. Where did he find that au- ments of these bizarre but all thority at the age of 15? Why did she al- too real discourses is what low him to speak to her like that? But might be called the logic of wasn't he also right to do what he did? competitive0 victimhood. Group X, incon- After all, is it not perhaps irrational to testably a majority in its own area, will visit graves? But still, did she resent hav- declare itself to be the real minority being to renounce her trips to the grave- cause it is outnumbered if the surround- yard? I don't know. The outcome in any ing regions are taken into account. Its case was that she stayed at home. That is ideologues will cite this as the reason how religious extremism seems to work. why, to preserve itself, it must drive members of Group Y off its territory: Group Y, he issues around which these which appears to be a minority, is actually fundamentalist discourses are a majority; the members of Group X are configured are not, of course, ex- the real victims. And so on. Tclusively the concern of religious Most of these ideologies share similar extremists. On the contrary, the concerns discourses on women: what women are precisely the same as those that ani- should wear, how they should comport mate certain kinds of conflict that have no themselves, when and if they should re- religious referents at all: language con- produce. And all this, we are told, because flicts, for example, or ethnic and tribal scripture or custom has ordained it so. I conflicts. In a sense, this is the most re- remember very well an incident that dates vealing aspect of these movements: that back some 14 years, to a time when I was they all have recourse to the same lan- living in a village in Egypt. One day a guage of difference-a language that is schoolboy of 15-one of the brightest and entirely profane, entirely devoid of faith most likable in the village-said to me: or belief. "Do you know what I did today? I gave This was brought home to me very my mother and the womenfolk of my forcefully a couple of years ago when I house a stern talking-to. I told them they was traveling in Cambodia. It so hap- could not go to the burial ground any pened that the United Nations was then more to pray at our family's tombs." conducting a large-scale peace-keeping I was taken aback by this. So far as I operation, and some 20,000 peace-keeping knew, the custom of visiting tombs was a personnel from all over the globe had very old one, and it served the additional been deployed throughout the country. function of providing women with a place The principal obstacle to the peace was to meet their kinfolk and friends. "Why?" I the Khmer Rouge, whose ideology had by asked the boy. "What made you do this?" that time been reduced to a nationalistic "Because it is against our religion, of form of racism, directed at the Vietnam- course," he said. "Visiting a grave is noth- ese and particularly the Vietnamese- ing but irrational superstition." speaking minority in Cambodia. A defec- It turned out, I later learned, that a tor who had surrendered to UN officials

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 23 keeping process, most of them directed against small Vietnamese fishing communities. I arrived in Cambodia in January 1993, just six or seven weeks after my own country, India, had faced what was perhaps its most serious political crisis since it gained independence in 1947. The crisis was precipitated by the demolition of a mosque in the city of Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. The demolition of the mosque was followed by a wave of murderous attacks upon Muslim-minority communities in India. In a series of pogroms in various In- dian cities, thousands of Muslims were systematically murdered, raped, and brutalized by Hindu extremists. In many respects, the language of the a few months before the elections de- Hindu extremists, with the appropriate scribed his political training with the substitutions, was identical to that of Khmer Rouge: the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It was against the background of these As far as the Vietnamese are concerned, tragic events that I found myself one day whenever we meet them we must kill in Siem Reap, in northwestern Cambodia. them, whether they are militaries or In this town, famous for its proximity to civilians, because they are not ordinary the glorious temple complexes of Angkor civilians but soldiers disguised as civil- Wat and Angkor Thorn, I came upon a ians. We must kill them, whether they group of Indian doctors who were run- are men, women, or children, there is ning a small field hospital for the UN. By no distinction, they are enemies. Chil- virtue of the camaraderie that links com- dren are not militaries, but if they are born or grow up in Cambodia, when patriots in a faraway place, I was invited they will be adult, they will consider to join them for a meal at their hospital. Cambodian land as theirs. So we make The doctors received me with the greatest no distinction. As to women, they give cordiality in their prefabricated dining birth to Vietnamese children. room. But no sooner had I sat down than they turned to me, smiling cordially The Khmer Rouge carried out several across the rice and daal, and one of them massacres of civilians during the peace- said: "Mr. Ghosh, can you think of a good

24 WQ SPRING 1995 reason why we Hindus should not demol- case, although articulated through differ- ish every mosque in India? After all, we are ent symbols. In several instances-Sri the majority. Why should we allow minori- Lanka, for example-extremist move- ties to dictate what is right for us?" I had not ments have seamlessly shifted their focus noticed until then that my hosts were all from language to religion. Hindus, from various parts of India. What then is this ideology that can Their line of reasoning was, of course, travel so indifferently among such dispar- far from unfamiliar to me: it was the stan- ate political groups? I believe that it is an dard majoritarian argument trotted out by incarnation of a demon that has stalked Hindu extremists in India. But here, in liberal democracy everywhere throughout this context, with the gunshots of the this century: an ideology that, for want of Khmer Rouge occasionally audible in the a better word, I shall call supremacism. It distance, it provoked an extra dimension consists essentially in the belief that a of outrage. In the first place, these doctors group cannot ensure its continuity except were not extremists, in any ordinary by exerting absolute cultural and demo- meaning of the term. On the contrary, they graphic control over a particular stretch of were the personification of middle-class geography. The fascist antecedents of this normality. Second, they were probably ideology are clear and obvious. Some not religious in any but the most private would go further and argue that national- sense. For them, most likely, religion was ism of every kind must also be regarded no more than a mark of distinction, defin- as a variant of supremacism. This is often ing the borders of what they believed to but not necessarily true. The nonsectarian, be a majority. In the course of the furious anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi argument that followed, I was amazed to or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a be- discover-though perhaps I should not lief in the possibility of relative autonomy have been-that these doctors actually for heterogeneous populations and had harbored a lurking admiration for the nothing to do with asserting supremacy. Khmer Rouge, an admiration that was in no way diminished by the fact that we o return to where I began: it is my were then under Khmer Rouge fire. belief that extremist religious I was amazed because I could not im- movements, whether in India or mediately understand why extremist Israel or Egypt or the United Hindu beliefs should translate so fluently States,T are often supremacist movements, into sympathy for a group that had no whatever their rhetoric. The movements religious affiliations at all, a group whose that fit the pattern least perhaps are radi- ideological genealogy ought to have in- cal Muslim movements. Of all the world's spired revulsion in these middle-class religions, Islam remains today the least professional men. It only became obvious territorial, the least, as it were, national- to me later, reading reports from Bosnia, ized. Yet it cannot be a coincidence that Croatia, Sudan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, and despite the critique of nationalism that is other strife-torn lands, that for this species inherent in some branches of radical Is- of thinking, religion, race, ethnicity, and lam, these movements have everywhere language have no real content at all. Their lapsed into patterns that are contained only significance lies in the lines of dis- within the current framework of nation- tinction they provide. The actual content states. Nor can it be a coincidence that in of the ideology, whether it manifests itself the Islamic world, as elsewhere, religious in its religious avatar or its linguistic or movements are at their most extreme in ethnic one, is actually the same in every countries with large minority popula-

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 25 tions-Sudan and Egypt, for example. In- charged with blasphemy.. . . A 13- deed, such is the peculiar power of su- year-old Christian boy in Punjab was premacist movements that they have ac- reported to have said that he had had tually conjured minorities into being a fight with the eight-year-old son of a where none actively existed before. Thus, Muslim neighbor. 'It all started with some pigeons. The boys caught my pi- in Algeria, Muslim extremists must now geons and they didn't want to give contend with an increasingly assertive mi- them back to me. . . . The little boy with nority Berber population. whom I had a fight said he saw me In principle, it is not unreasonable write [blasphemous words] on the that a population should have the right to mosque. . . .' [The boy], who has never live under religious law, with the proper learned to read or write, and two adult democratic safeguards. But in practice, in Christians were charged with blas- contemporary societies, when such laws phemy in May 1993. are instituted they almost invariably become instruments of majoritarian domina- How far we are here from a reverence tion. Consider, for example, the blas- for the spirit of scripture! phemy laws enacted in Pakistan in the 1980s. A recently published Amnesty In- would like to turn now to a novel ternational report tells us that "at present which, more than anything I have several dozen people are charged with read recently, has forced me to con- blasphemy in Pakistan." The majority of front the questions that contempo- these belong to the minority Ahmadiyya raryI religious extremism raises for writ- community. This sect, which considers it- ers. This is the Bengali novel Lojja self Muslim, was declared heretical by the (Shame), by the Bangladeshi writer country's legislature, and its members Taslima Nasrin. I believe that this book, were forbidden to profess, practice, or deeply flawed in many respects, is none- propagate their faith. According to Paki- theless a very important novel and a work stani human rights activists, in a period of of considerable insight. It is also a work five years 108 Ahmadis were charged that is literally much misunderstood, be- with blasphemy for practicing their faith. cause at the moment it is available to most Over the last three years, according to the of the world in an English translation that report, members of the Christian minority can only be described as appalling. As a in Pakistan have also increasingly been result the book has received many slight- charged with blasphemy. But here again, ing and dismissive notices in America and the meaning of blasphemy itself has Europe, probably because reviewers have changed. When a law such as this is avail- assumed uncritically that the translation able, it is unrealistic to expect that people provides an accurate indication of the will not use it in ways other than was in- book's quality. It happens that although I tended. I quote from the report: write in English, my own native language is Bengali, and having read the book in the original I know this assumption to be un- In a number of cases, personal grudges true. It seems more and more unlikely now against Christian neighbors seem to have led people to settle their disputes that the book will ever get a fair reading, by bringing blasphemy charges. An- partly because it has become a pawn within war Masih, a Christian in Sammundri the religious conflicts of the Indian subcon- in Faisalabad district, had a quarrel tinent, and partly because Taslima Nasrin is with the local Muslim shopkeeper over herself now a global "cause" for reasons a small debt and was subsequently that have little to do with her writing.

26 WQ SPRING 199 5 Charged with offending religious sentiments in Bangladesh, Taslima Nasrin now resides in Sweden.

Lojja was apparently written at uproar when it was published in great speed, being completed in a Bangladesh in 1993. It also became an in- couple of months. The book was later stant best seller on both sides of the bor- revised, but even in its revised version der: that is, in Bangladesh as well as in the it remains a short novel-the new Bengali-speaking parts of India. A few Bengali edition numbers 150 pages. The months after its publication the govern- narrative is simple: through its protago- ment of Bangladesh, in response to the nist, Suranjan Datta, it follows the for- demands of religious extremists, declared tunes of a Hindu family that finds itself a ban on the book and had it removed engulfed in a wave of violence directed from circulation. Shortly thereafter, an against the minority Hindu community extremist Muslim leader declared Taslima in Bangladesh. The events it describes Nasrin an apostate and issued a death occur in the aftermath of the demolition warrant against her. The warrant carried of a mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, a large bounty. A few months later, in re- 1992. The narrative is punctuated sponse to certain remarks Taslima Nasrin throughout with paraphrased news re- was alleged to have made in a newspaper ports, items from the files of human interview in Calcutta, the government of rights organizations, and other accounts Bangladesh charged her officially with the detailing actual instances of violence. In crime of offending religious sentiments particular it is a severe, because factual, and began criminal proceedings. Taslima indictment of certain groups of reli- Nasrin then went into hiding for a period gious extremists in Bangladesh. of two months. Thanks to the interna- As is well known, the book caused an tional outcry that followed, she was al-

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 27 lowed to leave Bangladesh in August What then was this context? I shall 1994. She is currently living in Sweden. try to sketch the chain of events as I see In her short career in exile she has con- them, very briefly. tinued to rock governments. Last Octo- ber the French foreign ministry refused n December 6, 1992, several her a visa, a gesture that created such an thousand Hindu supremacists outburst of public indignation that the tore down a 400-year-old ministry was soon forced to reverse its mosque in Ayodhya, claiming that0 the structure was built upon the decision. What I have sketched here is perhaps only the beginning of Taslima birthplace of their mythical hero Sri Rama. Nasrin's story. Even as I write, a gov- The Indian government, despite ample ernment prosecutor in Bangladesh is warning, was culpably negligent in not appearing before a court to demand that taking action to prevent the demolition. she be sentenced in absentia for the Thus, through CNN, the whole world crime of blasphemy. witnessed the destructive frenzy of a mob However, religious extremists were of Hindu fanatics attacking an archaeo- not the only people in Bangladesh who logical site, in the service of an utter de- objected to Lojja when it first appeared. lusion. (After all, a legendary world-be- Many nonsectarian, liberal voices were striding hero can only be diminished if his also fiercely critical of the book. Their birthplace comes to be confined to a cir- objections were important ones and cumscribed geographical location.) must be taken into account because- The destruction of the mosque was fol- and I cannot repeat this strongly lowed by tension and general unrest, in enough-nonsectarian, broadly secular- Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India. In ist voices do not by any means represent India this quickly escalated into violence a weak or isolated strand of opinion in directed against Muslims by well-organized that country. Bangladeshi culture in mobs of Hindus. Riots broke out in several particular, like Bengali culture in gen- major cities, and within two days 400 eral, has a long and very powerful tra- people had died. The overwhelming major- dition of secularist thought; Taslima ity of the dead, as always in these situations Nasrin is herself a product of this tradi- in India, were Muslim. There is evidence tion. For all their visibility, the religious that in many parts of the country the po- extremists represent a tiny minority of lice cooperated with and even directed the population of Bangladesh. At Hindu mobs. Within six days, according present, for example, they control no to the official reckoning, about 1,200 more than two percent of the country's people had died. Reports from all over the legislature. country attest to the unprecedented bru- Of the criticisms directed at Lojja by tality, the unspeakable savagery, of the liberal, nonsectarian Bangladeshis and violence that was directed against inno- Indians, perhaps the most important is cent Muslims by Hindu supremacists. A the charge that the novel, by limiting its month later, there was a second wave of focus to Bangladesh, profoundly dis- anti-Muslim violence centered primarily torts the context of the violence it de- in Bombay and Surat. The violence now picts. Taken literally, this is, I think, assumed the aspect of systematic po- true. By concentrating on the events in groms, with crowds hunting out Muslims Dhaka the book does indeed, by omis- from door to door in particular neighbor- sion, distort the setting and causes of hoods. I quote here a report from Surat, those events. written by a Dutch observer:

28 WQ SPRING 1995 In a refugee camp which I visited a edge that they are situated in the wings of small boy, hardly six years of age, sits the stage of violence, as it were, that far all alone in a corner staring in front of worse crimes are being visited upon mi- him. Before his eyes he has seen first his nority groups in India. Equally, the terror father and mother murdered by the of a middle-class Muslim family caught in mob, then his grandfather and grand- a riot in Bombay is in no way lessened by mother, and in the end three of his brothers. He is still alive but bodily not the knowledge that there is greater vio- unscathed with 16 stitches in his head lence still in Bosnia. To the Bosnian Serbs, and burns on his back. The men who in turn, the accounting of violence did it thought he was dead when they stretches back to the 14th century. To had finished with him. . . . Page after tinker with this calculus is really to enter page of my diary is filled with this sort into what I have called the logic of com- of atrocity. Women between seven and petitive victimhood: a discourse that ulti- 70 were up for grabs by male gangs mately serves only to fuel supremacism. roaming around the localities. . . . In inadvertently spotlighting events People were also thrown into the flames that were happening in the wings rather and roasted alive. A high-ranking official inevitably presents told me how he had seen furniture com- than center stage, Lojja ing down over the balcony from the op- a partial view. As it happened, Hindu su- posite multistoried apartment building: premacists in India seized upon Lojja with mattresses, chairs, and then to his horror undisguised glee. Pirated editions were small children as well. quickly printed and the book was even distributed free by Hindu activists in an Such was the nature of the horror that attempt to whip up anti-Muslim feeling. visited India in the winter of 1992, in the This in turn led to accusations that name of religion. Taslima Nasrin was a willing dupe of In Bangladesh and Pakistan, the de- Hindu supremacists in India, that she was struction of the Ayodhya mosque also led in the pay of a Calcutta publishing house, to violence. Temples were attacked and and so on. destroyed in both countries. In Bangladesh, which has a substantial n fact, Lojja is unequivocal in its con- Hindu population, a great many Hindu demnation of Hindu supremacists. It shrines were destroyed and desecrated; simply does not give them as much Hindu-owned businesses were attacked space as it does their Muslim coun- and looted; many Hindu families were terpartsI in Bangladesh, which is unavoid- driven from their homes. Yet it must also able given the book's setting. Just as im- be noted that despite all that happened in portant, Taslima Nasrin can hardly be Bangladesh, there was no actual loss of held responsible for the uses to which her life so far as I know. If accounts could be book is put. In passing into the public kept of such events, it would have to be domain, a book also passes beyond its said that the scale of violence in author's control. I know of no way that an Bangladesh was small compared to what author can protect his or her text against occurred in India. abuse of this kind. The only option really But here we have to ask whether is not to write about such matters at all. events such as these can be weighed at all We who write fiction, even when we on a scale of comparative horrors. For a deal with matters of public significance, minority family that is being harassed in have no choice, no matter how lush or ex- Dhaka (or wherever), the horror of the travagant our fictions, but to represent situation is not mitigated by the knowl- events as they are refracted through our

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 29 characters. Our point of entry into even Muslim friends of mine to rent houses un- the largest of events is inevitably local, der false pretenses or to buy train tickets situated in and focused on details and under Hindu names. In short, it has helped particulars. To write of any event in this me understand what it means to live under way is necessarily to neglect its political the threat of supremacist terror. contexts. Consider by way of example a Lojja can be read in this way because relatively simple kind of event: a mug- it is founded on a very important insight, ging, let us say, in the streets of New York. one which directly illustrates my main If we write of the mugging of a white man point. Almost despite herself, Taslima by a black man, do we not in some way Nasrin recognizes that religious extrem- distort the context of the event if we do ism today has very little to do with mat- not accommodate the collective histories ters of doctrine and faith, that its real texts which form its background? Conversely, are borrowed from sociology, if, in defiance of stereotypes, we were to demography, political science, and so on. make our mugger a white female bank For a book that is said to be blasphemous, executive, would we not distort an Lojja surprisingly contains no scriptural or equally important context? But where religious references at all. Even words would our search for contexts end? And such as "Hindu" and "Muslim" figure in would we not fatally disfigure the fic- it but rarely. The words Taslima Nasrin tional texture of our work if we were to uses are rather "minority" and "major- render all those broader contexts? ity." There is nothing in Lojja that the most fastidiously devout reader could possibly hat then are the contexts object to, from a theological point of view. that we, as writers of fic- That it succeeded nonetheless in enraging tion, can properly supply? extremist religious opinion in Bangladesh, It seems to me that they and bolstering opinion within the oppo- wmust lie in the event itself, the scene, if site religious camp in India, is a sign that you like: the aggressor's fear of his prey, it cut through to an altogether different the street lamps above, the paper clip that kind of reality. Yet it is a fact that, despite drops from the victim's pocket as he their outrage, the extremists could find no reaches for his money. It must be in some passage in it that could be indicted as blas- part the reader's responsibility to situate phemous. That was why, perhaps, they the event within broader contexts, to later fell so gratefully on her throwaway populate the scene with the products of remarks of doubtful provenance. his or her experience and learning. A reader who reads the scene literally or would like to return now to some of mean-spiritedly must surely bear some the considerations with which I part of the blame for that reading. started. In particular I would like to Read by a responsible reader, Lojja suc- go back to one of the images I offered ceeds magnificently. Through a richness of at the beginning of this essay: that of detail it creates a circumstance that is its W. H. Auden, breasting the modernist own context, and in this sense is imagina- flow and crossing between currents. In of- tively available far beyond the boundaries fering this example I did not mean to sug- of its location. I, for one, read Lojja not as a gest that Auden can in any way be asso- book about Hindus in Bangladesh but ciated with religious extremism as we rather as a book about Muslims in India. It know it today. To make such a suggestion helped me feel on my own fingertips the would be plainly ludicrous. If there is an texture of the fears that have prompted analogy here, it is a very limited one and

30 WQ SPRING 1995 it consists only in this: that a conversion ity of human beings will ever willingly such as Auden's to Christianity was- give their assent to the idea that the search among many other things-also an act of for profit should be the sole or central or- dissent, an opting out of what might be re- ganizing principle of society. garded as the mainstream of modernist By a curious paradox, the room for consciousness. dissent has shrunk as the world has It is finally undeniable, I think, that grown more free, and today, in this dimin- some kinds of contemporary religious ex- ished space, every utterance begins to tremism also represent a generalized, turn in on itself. This, I believe, is why we nebulous consciousness of dissent, an in- need to recreate, expand, and reimagine articulate, perhaps inexpressible critique the space for articulate, humane, and cre- of the political and moral economy of ative dissent. In the absence of that space, today's world. But the question remains, the misdirected and ugly energies of reli- even if this is true: why are these move- gious extremism will only continue to ments so easily pushed over the edge, flourish and grow. why are they so violent, so destructive, and why is their thinking so filled with 'hat then, finally, of religion intolerance and hate? itself? Must we resign our- Today, for the first time in history, a selves to the possibility that single ideal commands something close to religious belief has every- absolute hegemony in the world: the nowhere been irreversibly cannibalized by tion that human existence must be perma- this plethora of political, sociological, and, nently and irredeemably subordinated to in the end, profane ideas? It is tempting to the functioning of the impersonal mecha- say no, that "real" Hindus, Buddhists, nisms of a global marketplace. Realized in Christians, Jews, and Muslims continue to varying degrees in various parts of the hold on to other values. Yet if it appears world, this ideal enjoys the vigorous sup- that the majority of the followers of a reli- port of universities, banks, vast interna- gion now profess ideas that are, as I have tional corporations, and an increasingly said, essentially political or sociological, interconnected global communications net- then we must be prepared to accept that this work. However, the market ideal as a cul- is in fact what religion signifies in our time. tural absolute, untempered by any other Still I, for one, have swum too long in ethical, political, or spiritual ideals, is of- pre-postmodernist currents to accept that ten so inhuman and predatory in its ef- some part of the effort that human culture fects that it cannot but generate dissent. It has so long invested in matters of the is simply not conceivable that the major- spirit will not, somehow, survive.

RELIGION AND THE WRITER 31 America's Verdant Cross

National mythologies are based as much on features of landscape as on heroic individuals, ideals, and great events. Simon Schama here tells how the "discovery" of giant sequoias in the 1850s helped to confirm America's sense of manifest destiny "at a time when the Republic was suffering its most divisive crisis since the Revolution."

BY SIMON SCHAMA

't was Augustus T. Dowd's big joke. On a spring morning in 1852 he had been after a wounded grizzly, meaning to finish the brute off and provide the men of the Union Wa- 1ter Company with fried bear for the rest of the week.~h&was his job. As he was tracking the animal through the woods of sugar pine and ponderosa, the flickering light gradually dimmed. Without any warning, Dowd abruptly came face to face with a monster. It was maybe 50 feet around and,

32 WQ SPRING 1995 Grizzly Giant, by Carleton E. Watkins (1863)

as close as he could guess, nearly 300 feet high. It was a tree. Of course, no one at Murphy's Camp would believe him. They were more likely to credit a giant bear than a giant tree, he supposed. And so he told them the next day that the biggest grizzly there ever was was lurking right there, deep in the woods. And when he took them right up to the strange thing, a cinnamon-brown tower etched with deep furrows up its whole length, cavities a man's arm could disappear into, not a branch below 50 feet and its crown invisible, he could point and jump about and crow and laugh: "Boys, do you now believe my big tree story? That's the grizzly I wanted you to see. Now do you believe my yarn?"

hey did, and were quick, too, to figure out some way to profit from it. For the magnitude of what they beheld was not lost on a gang of laborers stuck out in the foothills of the western Sierra Nevada, digging canals and ditches for the mining camps of the Mariposa Estate. No one in Yosemite Valley in 1852 was there for the scenery; of that we can be sure. The miners who peopled the shacks and cabins that straggled over the hillsides were forty-niners whose dreams had soured. Panning the streams in the drenching days of spring, they survived by working for the soldier-explorer John C. Fremont, who set his mill machines to smashing quantities of quartz at the western end of the valley in the hope of extract- ing gold. It was not all high-altitude crazi- ness. Some mines, such as Princeton and Pine-Josephine, gave up real riches, for a few years at any rate. The Fremont workers would take the extracted ore, set it with quick- silver into bricks, and then transport them

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 33 (with all due caution and security)to the bank Naturally, a more picturesque account vaults in San Francisco. From there they of the etymology of the valley's name was ended up, duly assayed, in the U.S. Mint. needed. So the soldiers imagined that it Not much of this good fortune trickled derived from a Miwok term for "grizzly down to the scrambling, violent crowd of bear": uzumati. And the Big Trees in what Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Germans became known as the Calaveras Grove were inhabiting the shacks and tents of the Mari- almost immediately treated as trophy: posa. Along with the miners were the usual skinned, mounted, and displayed for brag- camp followers and hangers-on: hunters, ging and for cash. In the summer of 1854 loggers, ditchdiggers, cooks, and whores, another ex-miner, George Gale, who saw many of them practicing more than one gold in wood, rather than water or rock, trade. But if their life was precarious, it was picked out the biggest specimen he could nothing compared to that of the find, 90 feet around at its base and known Ahwahneechee Indians. As tribal cultures as the "Mother of the Forest." No sentimen- went, the Ahwahneechee were relatively tal respecter of maternity, Gale stripped the sedentary (and therefore particularly de- tree of its fragrant, dark-ridged bark to a spised by the Europeans), subsisting on height of 116 feet and shipped the pieces black oak acorns, grubs, and on the trout east, where they were stitched back together scooped from the river, belly up, after the and the hollow giant shown as a botanical Indians poisoned the water with soapweed. marvel. But a public already skeptical about The dazzling meadow-floor of the valley P. T. Barnum assumed this, too, to be a they called (in the Miwok tongue) Ahwahnee, crude hoax, along the lines of mermaids or "gaping mouth." Although its white eu- constituted from the head of a manatee and logists, such as John Muir, supposed it was the tail of a salmon. The lines at the box of- untouched and Edenic, it looked the way it fice shrank and George Gale's fortune did because of the Indians' repeated set- turned to fool's gold. Transcendentalists fires, which cleared it of brush and opened were delighted. the space for grazing. The Indians hunted a little too, and, driven from their food hile jaded, cynical New York sources by the guns of the mining camps, was refusing to suspend its they resorted to periodic raids to get some disbelief, the learned botani- of their birthright back, and liquor and cal community knew better. weapons too, if they could. Sometimes there Thew discovery of the Big Trees, originally re- was shooting and cutting. After one of these ported locally in the Sonora Herald, was re- affrays, Major James D. Savage's Mariposa printed in the London Athenaeum and the Battalion would thunder off after them, English Gardeners' Chronicle. Lectures were guided by Mono Indian pursuers, hounding given in short order at the Royal Society and the wretched Ahwahneechee from valley to the Soci6t6 Botanique in Paris, British and valley until there were no more to be seen. French botanists (as usual) competing with The few who survived dispossession and each other to see who could come up with dislocation called their tormentors Yo-che- the clinching classification and nomencla- ma-te: "some among them are killers." ture. The English, naturally, thought

Simon Schama is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. His books include Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813 (1977),The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987), Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1990), and Landscape and Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995),from which this this essay is drawn. Copyright 01995 by Simon Sckama. Reprinted by permission.

34 WQ SPRING 1995 Wellingtonia gigantea would be fitting. But than purely taxonomic significance. As the the French botanist Decaisne, believing the author of the official state Yosemite Book ex- tree to be related to the California coastal plained in 1868: redwood, the Sequoia sempervirens, decided instead on Sequoia gigantea for the giant of It is to the happy accident of the generic the Sierra. In actuality, the relationship is agreement of the Big Tree with the red- less close than might be supposed from ca- wood that we owe it that we are not sual observation. After it gets to 200 feet the now obliged to call the largest and Big Tree begins to expand its girth more most interesting tree in America after than its height, while the redwood keeps on an English military hero. going well beyond an average of 300 feet. The former's needles are dark green sprays, The Big Trees were thus seen as the the latter's blue and spiky. In fact, "sequoia" botanical correlate of America's heroic na- was an eccentrically inappropriate label for tionalism at a time when the Republic was either species, being the name of a half- suffering its most divisive crisis since the blood Alabama Cherokee (a.k.a. George Revolution. To a skeptical Englishman who Guess) who had invented a written lan- refused to believe that the bark he saw at the guage for the tribe. Its adoption by Asa Crystal Palace at Sydenham was from a Gray, the founder of Harvard University's single tree, an American visitor took special botanical garden, and his New York col- pleasure in "assuring the Englishman that league John Turrell, however, was of more he had stood in the grove . . . that there were

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 35 even larger trees in it than this one, that in was made into a dance floor for tourists spite of the fact that the bark had been com- where, Hutchings tells us, "on the 4th of July, pletely removed to the height of a hundred 32 persons were engaged in dancing four sets feet the tree was as green as any of the majes- of cotillion at one time, without suffering any tic fraternity." (It would not remain that way inconvenience whatever." for very long.) "The Englishman gave one By the end of the decade, Hutchings look of rage," the American tourist reported, had supplied the operational apparatus of "and bolted from the neighborhood." scenic tourism in the Calaveras Grove. Travelers could get from Stockton to San he phenomenal size of the sequoias Francisco either by a new railroad or by proclaimed a manifest destiny that steamboat up the San Joaquin River. From had been primordially planted, Stockton they would use coaches and wag- something that altogether dwarfed ons via Copperopolis and Murphy's Camp. theT timetables of conventional European Hutchings could then accommodate them and even classical history. They were, their in the Mammoth Tree Cottage Hotel, a first observers thought (wrongly, again, for pretty building five miles from the grove the less imposing bristlecone pines of the boasting splashing fountains, a balustraded Sierras had not yet been dated), the oldest balcony, and appointments comfortable living things on earth. Even Horace Greeley, enough for the ladies, who were already who saw them in 1859 and tried hard not to beginning to visit the fabled woods. be impressed, was startled by the thought Ironically, though, it was visitors (or, as that they had stood upright "when David they preferred to say, "pilgrims") from the danced before the Ark; when Theseus ruled East who transformed attitudes toward the Athens; when Aeneas fled from the burning sequoia groves, making them a place not wreck of Troy." just of curiosity but of veneration. The most In the first instance, though, it was the important was the Boston Unitarian (and commerce of novelty, not the cult of antiq- famous orator) Thomas Starr King, who in uity, that took up the "Mammoth Trees." By 1860 was dispatched to the Barbary Coast the time James Mason Hutchings, the En- of California to minister to his denom- glish-born publisher of Hutchings' California ination's First Church in San Francisco. King Magazine, took the first party of tourists to was a natural missionary and part of his the Calaveras Grove in 1855, the botanical vocation was to preach the virtues of the freak show was already well established. Union to Californians who might have been Iron pump augers were used to drill holes tempted by the demons of secession. But in trunks selected for felling, though even coming from the cradle of transcendental- after they had been severed from the base, ism in New England, he found the lure of a further series of wedges levered the tree the Sierra Nevada irresistible, considering away from its upright, suspended position. it both the visible face of divinity and the The whole process could take five men three purest American habitat. His sermon "Liv- weeks (two-and-a-half days alone for top- ing Waters from Lake Tahoe," for example, pling). "In our estimation," commented proclaimed that "this purity of nature is part Hutchings without much conviction, "it of the revelation to us of the sanctity of God. was a sacrilegious act." But at the end was It is his character that is hinted at in the a half-million board feet of lumber and an cleanness of the lake and its haste to reject instantaneous amusement park. A two-lane all taint." Moreover, by the time King took bowling alley was built (complete with pro- his vacation in the valley in the summer of tecting shed) along a planed-down surface 1860, a second and larger grove of Big Trees of a trunk, and the stump of a felled sequoia had been discovered, south of Calaveras,

36 WQ SPRING 1995 magic to the oak groves of Greece and Germany, "the evergreen," he noted, was "so much softer in [itsl stock and far deeper and more serious in [its] music. . . . The evergreen is the Hebrew tree." And the diz- zying thought that their age could be measured in millennia, and thus literally be coeval with the whole Christian era, only reinforced this sense of native holiness. "Tell me," King imagined himself whisper- ing to the Big Tree, "whether or not your birth belongs to the Christian centuries; whether we must write 'BC' or 'AD' against your infancy?" And the correspondent of the Boston Daily Advertiser, in a rap- ture usually associated with tabernacle revival meetings (many of which, In the Woods, by Asher Brown Durand (1855) in mid-19th century New England, were being held in open-air groves), actu- toward Mariposa itself, and King along ally linked the nativity of the trees to the with his high-minded friends and col- birth of the Savior: leagues determined that the "wretched drudgery of destruction" that had over- What lengths of days are here! His taken the Calaveras trees should not be years are the years of the Christian era; visited on the second forest. "The Mari- perhaps in the hour when the angels posa stands," he wrote in his articles for saw the Star of Bethlehem standing in the Boston Evening Transcript, "as the Cre- the East, this germ broke through the ator fashioned it, unprofaned except by tender sod and came out into the air of fire." the Upper World.

he Big Trees, in short, were sacred: The pious notion that the Big Trees were America's own natural temple. "I somehow contemporaries of Christ became think I shall see nothing else so a standard refrain in the hymns of praise. beautiful till happily I stand within John Muir counted the rings on one martyr theT gates of the Heavenly City," wrote to the axe and discovered that "this tree was Sydney Andrews in the Boston Daily Adver- in its prime, swaying in the Sierra winds tiser. And while Starr King assigned pagan when Christ walked the earth." It was as if

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 37 contemporaneity banished geographical Goupil Gallery in New York in 1862 and distance, that this immense botanical mys- were a phenomenal success. Those who had tery was part of what Muir called the "Holy ridiculed George Gale's pieces of bark were of Holies" in Yosemite. And like all things now converted to the stupendousness of the touched with divinity the sequoias were sequoias. Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing immortal, never actually decaying as they in the Atlantic Monthly, extolled the pictures stood but falling only to the celestial forces as fully the equal of the greatest productions of lightning-conducted fire, or the axes of in- of Western art and their subjects as the au- fidel loggers. The crowns that had been thentic, living monuments of pristine stripped away by lightning were proof of the America. Suddenly Yosemite became a inconceivable antiquity that guaranteed that symbol of a landscape beyond the reach of someday they would be struck by a bolt. sectional conflict, a primordial place of such It was one of these blasted patriarchs transcendent beauty that it proclaimed the that filled the frame of one of Carleton gift of the Creator to his new Chosen People. Watkins's glass-plate stereographs. More than any other images, Watkins's heroic nly the sense that Yosemite and prints shaped American sensibilities toward the Big Trees constituted an Yosemite and the Big Trees. They were not overpowering revelation of the the first photographs of the valley. To drum uniqueness of the American Re- up business, the ever-enterprising Hutch- public0 can explain why Abraham Lincoln, in ings had hired a painter, Thomas Ayres, the midst of the Civil War, signing an un- and a photographer, Charles Weed, both of precedented bill on July 1, 1864, granted whose work was then engraved as promo- them to the state of California "for the ben- tional lures in Hutchings' California efit of the people, for their resort and recre- Magazine. Watkins had been working as a ation, to hold them inalienable for all time." carpenter in San Francisco but had become The bill, creating the world's first wilder- known as an amateur daguerreotypist and ness park, had been introduced by photographer of the Mariposa mines and California senator John Conness, with the landscape, which had also attracted pio- backing of Governor Frederick Low and the neers of the new medium such as Robert influential state geologist Josiah Whitney. Vance and Eadwaerd Muybridge. In 1861 And there is no doubt that the landscape Watkins visited Yosemite and, using a architect Frederick Law Olmsted (then "mammoth frame," created the icons of the thwarted in his plans for Central Park and valley: Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks, and El working as the superintendent-manager of Capitan, along with parties of gentlemen the Mines) also had an important role in its and hoop-skirted ladies (including the promotion. Named to the Yosemite Com- widow of the British Arctic explorer John mission along with Galen Clark and Franklin) demurely dining off wooden Whitney, Olmsted issued his first report in tables in the great outdoors. His Big Tree 1865. It still contains the clearest articulation stereographs posed tiny figures, probably of public, federal responsibility for denying including the Mariposa guide, Galen Clark, areas of natural beauty to the use of private against the immense trunk and captured the enterprise. heroically mutilated quality of the "Grizzly It was the aura of heroic sanctity, the Giant," storm-racked but defiant and en- sense that the grove of the Big Trees was during, a perfect emblem for the American some sort of living American monument, a public on the brink of the Civil War: a bo- botanical pantheon, that moved Lincoln and tanical Fort Sumter Congress to act as they did. The impression Watkins's pictures went on show at the of a pantheon was reinforced when the

38 WQ SPRING 1995 mightiest sequoias began to be baptized as trip to Yosemite in 1863. Ludlow's articles "Daniel Webster," "Thomas Starr King" for the Atlantic Monthly perfectly reflect the (who also rated a mountain), and "Andrew quizzical easterner dryly scrutinizing Eden Jackson." ("General Sherman" is still with us, but then surrendering to transports of the biggest vegetable in America.) The se- conversionary amazement. Reporting the quoias seemed to vindicate the American na- sequoias, Ludlow begins with a mere statis- tional intuition that colossal grandeur spoke tical report of circumference but then con- to the soul. It was precisely because the red fesses that "we cannot realize time images columns of this sublimely American temple as we can those of space by a reference to di- had not been constructed by human hands mensions within experience, so that the age that they seemed providentially sited, grow- of these marvelous trees still remains to me ing inexorably ever more awesome until an incomprehensible fact." Accustomed as God's new Chosen People could discover New Englanders were to their own scaled- them in the heart of the Promised West. down version of heroic botany, Ludlow There was another reason why the Big nonetheless noted that some of the Mam- Trees seemed an American godsend. A gen- moth Trees "had fulfilled the lifetime of the eration earlier, the forest had been repre- late Charter Oak (at Hartford) when sented in the popular imagination as the en- Solomon called his master-masons to re- emy. The eastern woods, after all, had been freshment from the building of the Temple." the habitat of the godless Indian. To make a By the same token, he thought it impossible godly settlement, then, required that both the for his fellow travelers (for Ludlow and wilderness and the wild men be comprehen- Bierstadt were accompanied by two other sively cleared. Beauty lay in clearance; danger painters, Virgil Williams and Enoch Wood and horror lurked in the pagan woods. The Perry) to convey anything but a pygmy rep- clearances were so extensive and so indis- resentation of the sequoias: criminate, though, that even as early as 1818 President James Madison was protesting the The marvellous size does not go into "injurious and excessive destruction" of tim- gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree and it ber. To a generation reared on James Feni- only looks like a common tree in a more Cooper's forest romances, the miracu- cramped coffin. To be sure you can put a live figure against the butt for com- lous appearance of western woodlands parison; but unless you take a cane of seemed a sign of God's forbearance, a second the size of Haydon's your picture is chance for America to understand the divin- likely to resemble Homunculus against ity inscribed in its landscape. an average tree and a large man against Sequoia gigantea. t did not strike the artist Albert Bierstadt as particularly hypocritical to Perhaps it was these daunting technical paint the Big Trees as embodying both problems that account for the absence of sur- national magnitude and spiritual reviving Bierstadt Big Tree paintings from this demption.I He had made his reputation as a first trip to Yosemite. But when he returned landscapist largely as a result of having pro- from his second trip, 1871-73, Bierstadt evi- duced huge, grandstanding panoramas of dently felt that there would be a market for the Rockies, based on sketches made on a grandiose icons of the veterans of the ancient western trip in 1859. Some were exhibited American woods, for at least six such paint- at the Goupil Gallery, and it seems likely ings are known from this period. His star as that it was Watkins's stereographs that in- a fashionable painter was, however, already fluenced Bierstadt and the popular writer dimming, and every exhibition of new work and lecturer Fitz Hugh Ludlow to make the was met with a merciless fusillade from the

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 39 Giant Redwood Trees of California, by Albert Bierstadt (1874) critic of the New York Tribune, Clarence Cook, Yosernite, the criticism had much merit. But who upbraided Bierstadt for his addiction to Bierstadt's Big Tree pictures were in fact aim- vulgar, flashy, and visually meretricious ef- ing for something other than sheer magni- fects. Directed at the immense light shows of tude. The diminutive figure set against The

40 WQ SPRING 19 9 5 Grizzly Giant, for example, obviously estab- extension of his own heroic American per- lished the immensity of the scale for the be- sonality, was deep red rather than gray, and holder. But the pose was taken directly from above all it spoke of an elemental chronol- Carleton Watkins's plates and reshot for the ogy: not the chronology of classical Euro- official Yosemite survey and guidebook, in pean civilization, but the chronology of wild which Watkins posed Galen Clark in front of nature, America's own time scale, inherited that particular tree. directly from the Creator, without the su- pervening mediation of human pretensions. lark had been appointed "guard- The truly venerable nature of American his- ian" of the protected Mariposa tory, as the explorer Clarence King put it Grove under the terms of the after seeing the Big Trees, could be mea- 1864 California statute (which sured in what he called, oxymoronically, providedc a niggardly $2,000 a year for the "green old age." Earlier in the century, writ- maintenance of Yosemite's entire area).But he ers such as Charles Fenno Hoffman, had also become, in the writing of the period, traveling in the valley of the Mississippi, a symbol of the idealized affinities between seemed to shame the American tourists who American nature and American people: de- thronged Rome and Paris by comparing cent, hospitable, enduring, hardy, but also "the temples which Roman robbers have hiding great nobility and wisdom behind a reared" and "the towers in which feudal weather-beaten exterior-Natty Bumppo oppression has fortified itself" unfavorably with a library. Olmsted wrote admiringly that with "the deep forests which the eye of God Clark "looked like the wandering Jew but has alone pervaded and where Nature in spoke like a professor of belles-lettres." And her unviolated sanctuary has for ages laid Fitz Hugh Ludlow described him as her fruits and flowers on His altar!" What was the Colosseum beside the immense and prehistoric Grizzly Giant, a nobler ruin than one of the best informed men, one of the Parthenon, the epitome of heroic endur- the very best guides I ever met in the Californian or any other wilderness. ance over millennia: scarred, burned, rav- He is a fine looking stalwart old griz- aged by time, and decapitated by lightning. zly-hunter, a miner of the '49 days, And unlike those heaps of stone, the Giant wears a noble full beard hued like his was yet alive with the vigorous green shoots favorite game, but no head covering of a new age. It exactly linked prehistorical of any kind since he recovered from antiquity to American posterity. No won- a head fever which left his head intol- der, then, that Bierstadt chose to exhibit his erant even of a slouch. He lives version of The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove at among folk near Mariposa in the win- the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, ter and in the summer occupies a her- where it could proclaim that the first 100 mitage built by himself in one of the years of the American Republic were but the loveliest valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travelers a surprise by the nic- political twinkling of an eye. est poached eggs and rashers of ba- The Big Trees also proclaimed the sa- con, homemade bread and wild credness of American time. And it is con- strawberry sweetmeats which they ceivable that Watkins's albumen print was will find in the State. not the only source for Bierstadt's heroic treatment of the ancient and weathered tree. Clark then was himself a grizzly, posed It is distinctly possible that he would have beneath the grizzly sequoia in the valley seen Caspar David Friedrich's Oak Tree in named for the grizzly bear. But the great Winter in the National Gallery in Berlin, column that towered above him, almost an which he had visited between the two trips

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 41 to Yosemite. Bierstadt might well have had been born in Solingen, but had been had an immediate understanding of, and taken to the United States as an infant and particular sympathy for, Friedrich's own had grown up in the prosperous Massa- versions of arboreal salvation. He himself chusetts whaling port of New Bedford.

42 WQ SPRING 1995 But like others of his generation, in par- sion of the pious cliche of the "cathedral ticular the Hudson Valley painter Worth- grove." ington Whittredge, he had returned to Germany for his studies. The center of n his own Giant Redwood Trees of their training, it is true, was the California, Bierstadt transposed this Dusseldorf Academy, which boasted the ecclesiastical reading of the primordial least Romantic and most studiously natu- woods to a sequoia forest. Indeed, the ralistic techniques in landscape. But as art treesI look more like the Sequoia sempervirens historian Barbara Novak has persuasively of the coastal forests than the Big Trees, and argued, it seems unlikely that the intensity the red light, reflecting off the bark, suggests of German Romantic idealism, still far the luminous dimness of the much denser, from moribund, would not have rubbed darker redwoods of Mendocino and off on a group of American artists who Humboldt counties. But the painting reiter- were, in any case, extremely prone to a kind ated all the standard motifs of sequoia ico- of visual transcendentalism. nography: antiquity, reverence, and magnitude. And instead of the sentimental, inani- 0th Bierstadt and Whittredge, mate elegy for the vanished redwood during their time in Germany in redskin, Bierstadt includes three Indians, a the 1850s, produced a number of brave with his son seated by the pool and a landscapes in which great trees squaw returning with a basket on her back, (usually oaks) figure as both heroic and a native American version of the Georgic spiritual actors in the scenery. And it was idyll. Most crucially, the tepee-like triangu- not long after his return that Whittredge lar opening in the side of the foremost tree painted one of the most successful and is evidently the Indians' dwelling place. It powerful of all his landscapes, The Old is the most literal translation of what John Hunting Grounds. Backlit in exactly the Muir (who himself underwent a kind of Friedrichian manner, Whittredge's birch- theophany in Yosemite) meant when he es rise like fluted columns to the arched, wrote of returning to the American woods darker foreground trees that frame the as "going home." Bierstadt's painting is syl- composition. The effect is obviously archi- van-domestic: the ancient residence of the tectural, almost an illustration of the tra- most indigenous Americans. dition which located the origin of Gothic Both Bierstadt's and Whittredge's pointed arches and vaults in the sponta- paintings paid homage to the patriarch of all neous interlacing of tree limbs. But the American forest interiors, Asher Durand. title of Whittredge's forest interior was President of the National Academy of De- not casually given, for the painting is also sign in New York, Durand was, in effect, the loaded with the spiritual associations theologian of the second generation of the standard to the Hudson Valley painters. A Hudson Valley school. By his lights, the ruined canoe eaten with decay lies in whole point of landscape was expressive pond water as a memorial to the Indians, veneration. In 1840, during a trip to En- banished and vanished, "whose hunting gland, he had spoken of his decision not to grounds" these once were. The broken become a minister of the church, "the bet- stump and the trembling birch leaves, em- ter to indulge reflection unrestrained under blems of death and new life, echo the ca- the high canopy of heaven." His famous nonical, anthemlike quality of the paint- "Letters on Landscape Painting," published ing. Along with two other equally famous in The Crayon, had appeared in the same American forest interiors, Whittredge's year that he exhibited In the Woods, which painting became the literal visual expres- also featured birches bowed together in

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 43 Gothic inclination. It was the exact illustra- ours) revealed the American forests as the tion of the diluted transcendentalism birthplace of the nation. To repair to the preached in his essays-American nature woods was to be reminded of two features shaped as the archway to divinity: of the national personality: its liberty and its holiness. An anthology published a year The external appearance of this our after Cole's death included two important dwelling place, apart from its won- poems in which the primitive antiquity of drous structure and functions that min- the forests was presented as a corrective to ister to our well-being, is fraught with the national passion for novelty. In "The An- lessons of high and holy meaning, only tiquity of Freedom" the poet stands amidst surpassed by the light of Revelation. It "old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines . . ./ is impossible to contemplate . . . [them] without arriving at the conviction that . . . In these peaceful shades/ Peaceful, the Great Designer of these glorious unpruned, immeasurably old/ My thoughts pictures has placed them before us as go up the long dim path of years/ Back to types of the Divine attributes. the earliest days of liberty." Freedom was not "as poets dream/ A Fair young girl with Durand's most famous painting-a vir- light and delicate dreams," but a hoary tual manifesto of Hudson Valley sublim- warrior, "scarred with the tokens of old ity-was Kindred Spirits, conceived as a wars," in fact, a grizzly, cut about, blasted, memorial to Thomas Cole, the founding fa- and shaken, but always with the power to ther of the school, who had died in 1848. A throw out new life. The woods, then, pro- fictitious composite of two of Cole's favor- claimed the true natural constitution of free ite sites-the Kaaterskill Falls and the America, beside which a manmade docu- Catskill Clove, drenched in a radiant, ment was merely the sapling of philosophi- golden light-it was also a comprehensive cal invention. inventory of its stock symbols and emblems. Even more important, though, the for- The broken tree in the foreground signified est supplied America with the visible form Cole's premature demise, the evergreens his of the primitive church: immortality, the hanging rock ledge the pre- cariousness of life, the eagle flying toward The groves were God's first temples. the horizon the liberation of soul from body, Ere man learned and the river the voyage of life, which Cole To hew the shaft and lay the architrave had himself made the theme of one of his And spread the roof above them-ere most ambitious series of allegorical paint- he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back ings. The very composition of the painting, The sound of anthems; in the darkling a swooping circular route for the eye, some- wood what reminiscent of Brueghel, was surely a Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down, formal expression of the cycle of eternity. And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks Standing on the ledge are Cole himself, And supplication. holding palette and maulstick, and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who had delivered The idea of the "venerable columns" the funeral eulogy for the dead artist at the and the "verdant roof" supplying the origi- Church of the Messiah in New York and nal place of worship and then suggesting whose own work testified not merely to kin- the actual form of spiritual architecture in ship between like-minded souls but to the the Gothic already had a long tradition by essential naturalness of American identity. the time Bryant got around to giving it an Bryant's poems (immensely popular in American accent. But in the New World it had their day, almost unreadably plodding in a special resonance. James Fenirnore Cooper

44 WQ SPRING 1995 artf ford, 1636, by~redericEdwin Church (1846) begins one of his more successful Leatherstocking proclaim. In so doing, they self-con- tales, The Pathfinder, with the reader suspended sciously turned their back both on the like an angel and looking west above the rolling classical contempt for woodland bar- canopy of the virgin forest: barism and the long Puritan legacy that equated the forest with pagan darkness an ocean of leaves glorious and rich in and profanity. Instead, for his first im- the varied but lively verdure . . . the elm portant painting the young Frederick with its graceful and weeping top; the Edwin Church chose for his American rich varieties of the maple, most of the Moses the Reverend Thomas Hooker, in noble oaks of the American 1636 leading a flock westward, away from forest. . :forming one broad and seem- the heavy hand of Old World authority ingly interminable carpet of foliage that stretched away toward the setting sun represented by the Bay Colony govern- until it bounded the horizon by blending ment. And the Promised Land, it is appar- with the clouds as the waves and the sky ent, is a dense woodland, not forbidding meet at the base of the vault of Heaven. or packed with heathen terror but a sanctuary in the literal sense of holy asylum. It is from this primordial vegetable Its foliage trickles with sunlight; its waters matter, celestially sanctified and un- run sweet and clear. It is the tabernacle of spoiled as yet by the touch of man, that liberty, ventilated by the breeze of holy America was born, the writers and freedom and suffused with the golden painters of the first native generation radiance of providential benediction.

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 45

In August the world will solemnly mark the 50th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their devastation in 1945 inaugurated an age fraught with doomsday anxieties: the fear of Armageddon, of uncontrolled proliferation, and, more recently, of nuclear terrorism. Yet even before the Cold War began to fade, many countries were quietly retreating from the nuclear temptation. n~itchell Xeiss explains why-and what can be done to encourage the trend.

alf a century ago, World War II used in war since Nagasaki. Never before in ended in two blazing flashes of military history have countries exercised H heat, light, anddevastation. The such restraint with the destructive power at radioactive clouds that rose over their disposal. Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those two fate- Nor have nuclear arms proved to be the ful days in August 1945 cast a dark shadow irresistible temptation that many feared over what historian John Lewis Gaddis has they would be. Not only have nations such called "the long peace" that followed. as Germany and Japan eschewed them, but Within seven years, the United States tested some countries that possessed either the a fusion device 1,000 times more powerful weapons or the means to build them have than the atomic explosive that flattened quietly land without much fanfare in the Hiroshima and killed more than 100,000 press) retreated. Even North Korea, the Japanese. By then, the Soviet Union also greatest saber rattler of recent years, has possessed its own atomic bomb and would avoided all-out confrontation on its sus- soon explode a thermonuclear bomb. It pected nuclear weapons program. seemed a foregone conclusion that many Instead of the dreaded global nuclear other countries, in the quest for national conflagration, the 50 years since Nagasaki securityand internationalmilitary and tech- have provided the world with an unex- nological prestige,would seek and, inevita- pected nuclear education. These weapons bly, obtain nuclear weapons. have proved much less useful and far more During the darkest periods of these 50 costly than anybody expected. The impera- years, there seemed to be only one question tive now is to recognize these lessons and to on many people's minds: when and where apply them in the post-Cold War world. would the next Nagasaki occur? Few could have believed that every advanced country o the nuclear physicists of the early in the world would not want the bomb, and the future had an ominous few would have imagined that such a "win- T1940s,cast. Scientists working on the ning weapon" would not again be used in wartime Manhattan Project military conflict. Yet despite the wars and quickly recognized the dangers of un- innumerable crises that have embroiled the bridled postwar competition in atomic nine countries known or believed to have arms. They knew far better than their politi- acquired nuclear weapons (India, Israel, cal masters that science knows no borders and Pakistan remain officially mute on the and that the American nuclear monopoly point), and despite the creation of nuclear could not last. warheads numbering in the tens of thou- The Manhattan Project itself was a co- sands, not one of these weapons has been operative venture among the United States,

NUCLEAR FUTURE 47 the United Kingdom, Canada, and scientists seemed to bear out some of the worst fears from France. Its distinguished international of the scientists. The poet W. H. Auden de- cast, including Denmark's Niels Bohr, clared the postwar era an "age of anxiety." Germany's Hans Bethe, Hungary's Leo The bone-chilling prospect of a hundred Szilard, and Italy's Enrico Fermi, was a liv- Hiroshimas prompted policymakers to give ing example of the cosmopolitan nature of serious thought to dispersing America's scientific inquiry. The United States might population to the countryside and even to keep its own atomic secrets (and even that building cities underground. The world-re- proved impossible), but it was inevitable nowned British philosopher and pacifist, that other countries-perhaps many oth- Bertrand Russell, was so alarmed by the ers-would eventually penetrate the mys- nuclear peril that he recommended in 1946 teries of the atom on their own. The British that the United States launch an atomic at- physicist James Chadwick, whose experi- tack against the Soviet Union if Moscow re- ments in the early 1930s revealed the inner fused to help form a world government. structure of the atom, described his thoughts during the war: "I realized that a t first, hopes ran strong that nuclear bomb was not only possible-it was atomic energy could be placed inevitable. . . . Everybody would think under international control. In a about them before long, and some country speech at the United Nations in would put them into action." June 1946, financier Bernard Baruch, the Even before the end of the war, these U.S. representative to the United Nations fears prompted Leo Szilard and other scien- Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC), tists working at the Metallurgical Labora- proposed to transfer control of all the tory of the University of Chicago, where world's "dangerous" atomic activities, in- history's first controlled-fission chain reac- cluding fuel-production facilities, to just tion took place in a squash court under such a supranational authority. "Nondan- Stagg Field in December 1942, to propose gerous" activities, such as the use of radio- that the United States share its special active isotopes in medical research, would knowledge with the world through a remain in national hands, monitored by the supranational organization. In return for new agency. But only after these controls receiving the peaceful benefits of the atom- were in place would the United States relin- chiefly, "energy too cheap to meter," in the quish the bomb. This plan, which now phrase of the day-these nations would seems either hopelessly utopian or thor- forgo autonomous nuclear research and oughly cynical, was a serious attempt to development projects. The alternative was prevent global disaster. "Let us not deceive almost too horrifying to contemplate. Philip ourselves: we must elect world peace or Morrison, a physicist who worked on the world destruction," Baruch declared. Manhattan Project, wrote immediately after The Baruch plan foundered on growing the war: "If we do not learn to live together Soviet-American tensions. The Soviets of- so that science will be our help and not our fered a fundamentally different plan: the hurt, there is only one sure future. The cit- United States would eliminate its nuclear ies of men on earth will perish." stockpile within three months, and an inter- The first two decades of the nuclear age- national control scheme would be devel- Mitchell Reiss, a Wilson Center Guest Scholar, was special assistant to the U.S. national security advisor from 1988 to 1989. He is the author of Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities, which has just been published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and is distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is currently writing and consulting on the relationship between technology and foreign policy. Copyright 0 1995 by Mitchell Reiss.

48 WQ SPRING 1995 extends a special offer to the readers of WILSON QUARTERLY You are invited to sample the next two issues of FW for free.

'is 'is a unique combination of business and investment news. Each issue includes in-depth features, profiles and analysis of major corporations and industries, as well as timely investment ideas about stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investment vehicles. You'll get an exclusive take on the pulse of the market with Company Watch, Mutual Fund Watch and Market Watch. In FW'S Financial Planner, you'll find better ways to lower your taxes and increase your returns through features covering everything from investing in art to 401 (k) advice to estate planning. You'll also appreciate our hallmark Independent Appraisals (a regular feature) containing statistics and rankings of over 1,300 NYSE and ASE issues, and 800-plus OTC issues. Just fill out the attached postpaid card to receive your two free issues of FW. Read them, use them and evaluate them. If it's not for you, just return the invoice marked 'cancel." You'll owe nothing and the free issues are yours to keep. But it's our bet that once you read FW,wild horses couldn't drag you away. If you agree, then pay just $19.95 and we'll send you 23 additional issues, 25 in all. That's 47% off the regular subscription price! So take advantage of the special offer by mailing the card today! Or for faster service, call 800-829-5916. oped in later negotiations. Two years of Earth Stood Still (1951), a Hollywood Cold desultory political jousting followed before War fantasy in which a benevolent visitor the UNAEC suspended its work in frustra- from outer space lands a flying saucer in tion. After Moscow exploded its first atomic Washington to warn humanity of its peril: device in August 1949, several years earlier the human race will destroy itself and per- than expected, most remaining enthusiasm haps the universe if it does not bring an end for international control died, as did most to the arms race. talk in the U.S. scientific community of "one Great Britain became the third member world or none." of the atomic club in October 1952, detonat- Other countries, it was recognized, soon ing a bomb on board a ship near the Monte would be able to uncover the technological Bello Islands off the coast of Australia. (No mysteries for themselves. As German physi- Americans were invited to observe the test, cist Werner Heisenberg warned in February in retaliation for Washington's curtailment 1947, the development of atomic bombs was of the flow of nuclear information to Lon- "no longer a problem of science in any coun- don after World War 11. The test, declared try, but a problem of engineering." In 1950, the British defense minister, showed that tens of millions of people around the world Britain was "not merely a satellite of the signed the Stockholm Appeal, a petition United States.") Later that month, at demanding that atomic bombs be outlawed Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, the United as "weapons of terror and the mass destruc- States exploded the world's first hydrogen tion of whole populations." Audiences in bomb. It was built despite the opposition of the United States flocked to see The Day The some top nuclear scientists, including

50 WQ SPRING 1995 Hiroshima after the blast, August 6, 1945. The bomb killed 140,000 people, about half of the city's inhabitants. Aftereffects killed another 60,000 by 1950.

sizing the use of battlefield (tactical) nuclear weapons to repel an attackf the New Look accelerated "vertical" proliferation: the en- largement of superpower arsenals. Now there would be nuclear artillery shells, demolition mines, and short-range missiles. At the outset of Ike's presidency, 20 countries possessed independent nuclear- research projects that might allow them eventually to build the bomb. Eisenhower won worldwide applause in December 1953 when he announced his Atoms for Peace initiative before the United Nations. Coupling partial disarmament with the expansion of peaceful uses of the atom around the world, he proposed that the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom "make joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and fissionable material to an Interna- tional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)." This would have the effect of reducing the amount Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, of material available for the manufacture of who objected that such a "superbomb" weapons-though it would handicap the So- could serve only as a weapon of genocide, viet Union more than the United States. The not as a useful military device. "Mike," as IAEA would act as a kind of nuclear-materi- it was called, gouged out a crater three als bank for countries with peaceful nuclear- miles wide and half a mile deep. Less than energy programs. a year later, the Soviet Union exploded its By the time the IAEA came into exist- own crude H-bomb. The arms race was on ence in 1957, however, Eisenhower's origi- in earnest. nal disarmament idea was all but forgotten. The IAEA, based in Vienna, was now de- inaugurating their famous "doomsday signed to promote the peaceful uses of clock" in 1947, the scientist-editors of atomic energy and to act as a watchdog to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had ensure that nuclear technology was not di- set the minute hand at seven minutes to verted to military ends, an important func- midnight; after the Mike test it edged five tion that it still performs today. minutes closer. President Dwight D. Another potential route to disarmament Eisenhower, concerned about the growing was a ban on nuclear testing. The idea cost of the U.S. defense effort and by the gained impetus when American H-bomb inability of the Western European countries tests at Bikini atoll in 1954 showered radio- to muster sufficient military forces to active fallout over a broad swath of the Pa- counter the Soviet threat, authorized in 1953 cific, forcing the highly publicized evacua- a "New Look" defense strategy. By empha- tion of several islands. To the horror of the

NUCLEAR FUTURE 51 world, the crew of the Lucky Dragon, a Japa- to slow either nuclear testing or the bomb's nese tuna trawler that chanced to be nearby, spread. The chief U.S. test-ban negotiator, contracted radiation sickness, and one of the Averell Harriman, later lamented that it men died. In Japan fear spread that fish, a was merely an environmental-protection staple of the national diet, had become con- measure. taminated. Forty million Japanese signed Meanwhile, other hurdles to nuclear petitions calling for the abolition of nuclear proliferation, such as scientific expertise weapons. Traces of fallout were later found and engineering competence, were being in milk and other substances in the United lowered; the global diffusion of civilian States and elsewhere. nuclear research and power reactors by the The public's sudden awareness of ra- United States, Great Britain, France, and dioactivity raised a new kind of alarm, the (with much tighter controls) the Soviet threat of insidious nuclear contamination. Union was another cause for concern.

manded a total ban on nuclear testing. specialists used the ~omb~aka~e In January 1958, a petition signed by 11,000 Effect Computer to estimate such things as scientists from around the world calling for the extent of fallout and the size of an end to nuclear tests was presented to UN fireballs produced by bombs of different sizes. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. But the agreement that emerged five years later, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibited Without Arms Control, predicted that "by tests only in the atmosphere, in outer space, 1970, most nations with appreciable military and underwater. Because underground strength will have in their arsenals nuclear tests were still permitted, the treaty did little weapons-strategic, tactical, or both."

52 WQ SPRING 1995 Two years later, in February 1960, an and Soviet Union announced the beginning explosion in the Sahara made France the of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks fourth member of the nuclear club. The Brit- (SALT). ish scientist and writer C. P. Snow predicted But several countries that had no inten- that "within, at the most, 10 years, some of tion of swearing off the atom did not sign these bombs are going off. . . . That is the the NPT. With French help, Israel had de- certainty." veloped a nuclear capability years earlier. In India, Prime Minister La1 Bahadoor Shastri peaking before the United Na- had concluded in 1964 that China's nuclear tions in 1963, President John F. blast left him no option but to permit re-

I Kennedy voiced the apprehension search on "peaceful" nuclear explosives. On felt by many of his contemporar- May 18,1974, the Indians got their bomb. ies: "I am haunted by the feeling that by (Prime Minister Indira Gandhi received 1970 . . . there may be 10 nuclear powers news of the successful test in code words: instead of four, and by 1975,15 or 20. . . . I "the Buddha smiles.") From China and In- see the possibility in the 1970s of the presi- dia, the chain reaction led to Pakistan. Prime dent of the United States having to face a Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had already world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may vowed that his country would acquire have these weapons. I regard that as the nuclear weapons if India did, even if his greatest possible danger and hazard." people had "to eat grass or leaves, even go In 1964, China became the world's fifth hungry" to free up the necessary resources. nuclear power. By this time, every country New Delhi's nuclear test energized that was technically competent to build Pakistan's quest for an "Islamic bomb." South nuclear arms, save Canada, had done so. Africa decided that it too needed nuclear China's test, the first by a member of the arms. The world appeared well on its way to developing world, accelerated international fulfilling Kennedy's nightmare vision. efforts to halt the bomb's spread. New trea- ties restricting weapons in space and in Latin America were drawn up. In the United Nations, the Eighteen-Nation Disar- II. mament Committee abandoned its work on comprehensive disarmament and turned instead to nonproliferation. Its efforts led to The Cold War, however, ended not the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of with the expected bang but a whimper-or Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed by 61 at least a long, exhausted exhalation. Its countries in 1968. passing has eased the world's most extreme Under the NPT, the non-nuclear states anxieties about the nuclear age. Less than a pledged to forswear nuclear weapons and decade ago, Armageddon seemed even to accept IAEA safeguards on their peace- more imminent to some than it had in ful nuclear programs. The members of the Kennedy's day. "The world is moving in- nuclear club formally agreed not to help exorably toward the use of nuclear weap- other countries to arm themselves. (China ons," wrote a commentator in the Journal of and France, however, did not sign the treaty the American Medical Association during the until the 1990s.) In Article VI, they agreed early 1980s, expressing a fairly common to pursue negotiations on "cessation of the view. By 1984, the editors of the Bulletin of nuclear arms race at an early date, and to the Atomic Scientists, alarmed by the Reagan nuclear disarmament." The day the treaty administration's military build-up and by was signed, July 1,1968, the United States the superpowers' increasingly bellicose

NUCLEAR FUTURE 53 rhetoric, had inched their famous minute an atomic bomb. In late 1992, the IAEA un- hand to three minutes to midnight, as close covered (with the help of U.S. spy satellite to apocalypse as it had been since the early imagery) anothercase of nuclear cheating, 1950s. Visions of "nuclear winter," a new this time in communist North Korea. Earlier nightmare scenario of how the world would this year, news reports suggested that Iran slowly die in the aftermath of a nuclear war, was perhaps only five years away from de- terrified the public, much as On the Beach veloping a bomb, much closer than previ- had 30 years before. Critics warned that the ously estimated. According to a 1988 study arms race was propelling the world toward chaired by veteran military analysts Fred C. disaster. Dd6 and Albert Wohlstetter, 40 countries will Then, suddenly, it was over. be able to produce nuclear weapons by 2000. The disintegration of communism and of the Soviet Union itself after the Berlin o borrow the metaphor used by R. Wall fell in November 1989 brought the James Woolsey, former director of quickest imaginable end-short of war it- the U.S. Central Intelligence Agen- self-to the old fears. True, there had been T cy, the Soviet bear may be dead, significant change before 1989. Modest but the forest is still full of poisonous arms-control agreements during the 1970s snakes. The sprawling nuclear archipelago that placed ceilings on certain categories of of the former Soviet Union, a complex of nuclear systems were replaced in the latter laboratories and factories employing almost half of the 1980s with ambitious agreements one million physicists, chemists, metallur- that cut deeply, such as the 1987 Intermedi- gists, engineers, and technicians, could well ate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. But today turn out to be a breeding ground for new the superpowers can't disarm fast enough nuclear snakes. Highly skilled scientists to suit themselves. now earn less in a month than what an In the fall of 1991, George Bush and American teenager brings home after a day Mikhail Gorbachev announced sweeping working the cash register at McDonald's. reciprocal unilateral reductions in deployed The temptations of going to work for a for- tactical nuclear weapons. The 1991 START eign power or even a terrorist group must I Treaty virtually halved the number of U.S. be considerable. and Soviet strategic nuclear warheads. If Amid squalid military and deteriorat- START I1 is fully implemented, the super- ing political conditions in Russia, there is powers will cut their strategic nuclear arse- also reason to worry about the safety and nals by more than 80 percent from their security of stockpiles of nuclear warheads Cold War peak. The United States and Rus- and the fissile materials that can be used to sia will dismantle more than 15,000 war- make bombs. This is not an idle fear. To take heads. The chief drag on disarmament now one especially rich cache of bomb material is not military or political but technical: the out of circulation, operatives in a covert U.S. limited number of U.S. and Russian facili- effort code-named "Project Sapphire" spir- ties equipped to dismantle these warheads ited 600 kilograms of highly enriched ura- and safely and securely store the leftover nium (HEU), enough for perhaps 30 to 40 nuclear material. nuclear bombs, from a storage site in a re- Yet there has scarcely been time to cel- mote and desolate corner of Kazakhstan. ebrate. From the allied victory in the Persian (However, 300 kilograms of HEU stored Gulf War, barely more than a year after the nearby was inexplicably left behind.) fall of the Berlin Wall, came the sobering Nuclear smuggling from the former Soviet discovery that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was Union to the European black market is well well advanced on a secret project to build documented. In one of the most alarming

54 WQ SPRING 1995 cases, police in the Czech Republic acting on an anonymous tip last year seized six hile the news media have fo- pounds of highly enriched uranium, about cused with grim fascination one-sixth the amount needed for a bomb. on the new nuclear-night- Three men were arrested at the time, but mare scenarios of the post- who was behind the plot and where the Coldw War world, several countries pos- uranium was bound remain a mystery. sessing nuclear weapons programs or har- But the great and still largely unrecog- boring nuclear ambitions have, almost un- nized surprise is that contrary to what sci- noticed, stepped back from the brink. entists, statesmen, and ordinary people They have slowed, halted, or even re- have assumed since Hiroshima and versed their activities. Even North Korea, Nagasaki, the countries of the world have the most xenophobic and isolated country not rushed to arm themselves with nuclear in the world, recently agreed to measures weapons. Some have recognized the draw- that promise over the course of 10 to 12 backs and limitations of these weapons; oth- years to eliminate its ability to build ers have gone so far as to conclude that they nuclear weapons. These developments are are a liability. without precedent in the nuclear age.

NUCLEAR FUTURE 55 The Nuclear World

The "laboratory research"countries are three to 10 years from acquiring nuclear weapons. 0 All are NPT signatories but show political and scientific signs of interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. Many other countries have nuclear energy programs and research, notably Armenia, Indonesia, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain. Most countries with large civil 0 nuclear capabilities could produce nuclear weapons in a few months or years. - 0 - 0 Source: Institute for National Strategic Studies, Strategic Assessment 1995: U.S. Security Challenges in Transition.

Very often people talk about the per- Pakistan clash of 1990 have provided the ils of proliferation as if nothing has world with a profound nuclear education. changed during the course of the world's The fact that an arsenal of some 30,000 long experience with nuclear weapons. strategic and tactical nuclear weapons But this half-century of "mutual assured could not preserve the Soviet Union, and destruction" between the superpowers as may even have hastened its collapse, has well as nuclear crises in Cuba in 1962, the raised new questions about the value of Middle East in 1973, and during the India- nuclear arms. The deep cuts scheduled by

56 WQ SPRING 1995 the environmental damage caused by more than 50 years of weapons research and production is huge. The United States will have to spend between $30 billion and $100 billion to clean up various installations, including production facilities at Rocky Flats, Colorado, Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Caro- lina. In the former Soviet Union, the bill could reach $300 billion, although it is unlikely that anywhere near that amount will be found. And who knows what other costs of this radioactive legacy remain to be discovered? It is equally difficult to gauge the "opportunity costs" incurred by having generations of skilled scientists, engineers, and technicians devote their talents to building bombs instead of the gross national product. All of these lessons have Suspected Nuclear bred new attitudes toward Weapon State nuclear weapons. In December Relinquishing Nuclear 1991, when the Soviet Union Weapon Programs was in its death throes, the world was confronted with the - Laboratory Research uncomfortable reality that three countries it had scarcely heard ::::: Large Civil m.a.. of-Ukraine, Belarus, and ::::: Nuclear Capability Kazakhstan-with leaders whom it hardly knew, now each possessed the means to Moscow and Washington, moreover, have devastate the United States, Europe, or any lowered the weapons' prestige value. other target they chose. Thousands of Soviet The stunningly large (and unex- tactical and strategic nuclear weapons were pected) bills that have started to fall due located on these three countries' soil. Yet each from the arms race also give other nations of them agreed to surrender these arms over pause. The cost of dismantling nuclear the next few years. weapons, storing excess plutonium and Quickest to act was Belarus, site of more other dangerous materials, and repairing than 1,000 nuclear weapons. Stanislav

NUCLEAR FUTURE 57 Shushkevich, a physicist-turned-antinuclear A nuclear arsenal rarely promotes do- activist after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, mestic prosperity, fosters better relations used his largely ceremonial position as with neighbors, enhances national security, chairman of the Belarus Supreme Soviet to or wins international prestige. Nuclear push a more rapid withdrawal than even weapons programs are more likely to si- Moscow wanted. In the West there was phon off scarce scientific and engineering dread that the Muslim leaders of talent, trigger a costly nuclear arms race Kazakhstan might transfer some of its fear- with a regional adversary, sow mistrust ful nuclear inheritance-including 104 huge among allies, inhibit the transfer of sensitive SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each technologies needed for economic develop- code named "Satan"-to their radical ment, and invite international ostracism. coreligionists in the Middle East. Eager for This "winning weapon," moreover, turns U.S. aid and investment and wary of anger- out to be almost too terrible to use. ing Moscow, Kazakhstan pledged in 1992 to That is one reason why the popular fear return the SS-18s and other weapons to Rus- of nuclear terrorism, while not wholly un- sia. realistic, is greatly exaggerated. Nuclear Ukraine was a little more recalcitrant. blackmail is a staple of international spy The country's stolid president, former Com- thrillers such as Dominique Lapierre and munist Party ideology chief Leonid Larry Collins's Fifth Horseman (1980), in Kravchuk, understood that the weapons which Libya's Muammar Qaddafi tries to would not be terribly helpful in defending force the United States to support the estab- Ukraine or improving its appalling eco- lishment of a Palestinian state by threaten- nomic conditions. But they could be bar- ing to blow up New York City. But terror- tered for Ukrainian membership in useful ists and leaders of "rogue" nations face international organizations such as the many of the same constraints limiting oth- North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Part- ers who seek to promote a political agenda. nership for Peace. Ukraine's assent was fi- Would a nuclear blast advance their cause, nally purchased in 1994 at the cost of hun- or would it unify a horrified international dreds of millions of dollars in U.S. denucle- community against them? If one is bent on arization assistance and, among other violence, isn't it far easier to strike at a sym- things, Russian promises to forgive bolic target with conventional means? The Ukraine's multibillion-dollar oil and gas terrorists who attacked the World Trade debt and to provide fuel for the country's Center, after all, made their explosive from nuclear power plants. a mixture of fertilizer and diesel fuel. This For each of these three countries the nu- is not to mention the still-daunting techni- ances were slightly different, but the funda- cal tasks of manufacturing and safely han- mental calculations were essentially the dling a nuclear bomb. same. Their leaders recognized that nuclear weapons are largely irrelevant to the most nly one country in history has pressing problems of the late 20th century: unilaterally and voluntarily civil war, ethnic and tribal conflict, mass mi- eliminated its own fully devel- gration, AIDS, economic backwardness, oped nuclear arsenal: South Af- and international terrorism. More and rica. That it was done virtually without fan- more, these weapons appear to be elaborate fare or international acclaim and headlines and expensive anachronisms. There is not is regrettable, since South Africa's experi- even much scientific prestige to be gained ence illustrates some of the new realities of by building a bomb-now, after all, a 50- nuclear weapons. Immediately after becom- year-old technique. ing president in September 1989, F. W. de

58 WQ SPRING 1995 Klerk ordered that the country's nuclear not merely a matter of rhetoric. Countries weapons program, including an arsenal of that insist on maintaining nuclear programs six nuclear devices that had taken a decade pay a price in the international arena. They to build, be dismantled. By July 1991, the are excluded from international organiza- highly enriched uranium from the war- tions such as the IAEA. They may be denied heads had been removed and melted down loans and other assistance by the World and most of the non-nuclear components Bank and other multilateral institutions, as had been destroyed. well as the Japanese and some other aid giv- These extraordinary steps were part of ers. They are also subject to formal and in- a much larger design. The coming transfer formal embargoes on the transfer of a vari- of power to the black majority certainly ety of sensitive technologies, ranging from helped sway de Klerk, but so did South supercomputers to civilian nuclear power Africa's growing sense of security from ex- plants to induction furnaces used in the fab- ternal threats following the negotiated re- rication of high-tech metals. Some countries moval of Cuban troops from Angola in De- (such as Belarus) now clearly hope that cember 1988 and the dwindling of Soviet there may be as much prestige to be gained influence in southern Africa. A nuclear ar- from forgoing nuclear weapons as from senal, moreover, would hinder South Af- possessing them. rica's efforts to become a respected member International standing was a powerful of the international community. consideration in the slightly less dramatic The power of international opinion is December 1991 decision by two long-time

NUCLEAR FUTURE 59 and, not incidentally, for themselves. And that meant currying favor with the international community, especially the United States. Brazil, in addition, faced a threat from its long-time financial supporter, Ger- many, to cut off economic assistance by 1995 if Brasilia did not abandon its nuclear pretensions. Whereas Argentina's Raul Alfonsin could declaim to popular approval in the mid-1980s that he would break before he would bend to the wishes of the United States and the industrialized West, his successor, Carlos Menem, stated that he would much prefer Argen- tina to be the last country in the First World rather than the first country in the Third World. (The Argentine foreign minister put the idea more colorfully when he declared that he wanted ties Publication of schematic plans for a fusion bomb in 1979 created an international furor. Building a bomb is still a considerable feat of between Argentina and the precision engineering. A major challenge: the creation of fissile materials. United States as intimate as "relaciones carnales.") For Ar- gentina and Brazil, the price rivals, Argentina and Brazil, to accept inter- of full admission to the international com- national safeguards on all their nuclear ac- munity was placing their nuclear programs tivities. During the 1980s, both countries under IAEA safeguards. seemed intent on producing nuclear The United States had a hand in all bombs-more for prestige purposes, appar- of these success stories, directly cajol- ently, than because one posed any threat to ing, convincing, or coercing some coun- the other. Although relations between the tries and more indirectly influencing two countries improved in mid-decade, the others through its support for interna- breakthrough came in the late 1980s with tional export controls, the NPT, and the accession to power of two dynamic ci- IAEA safeguards. But Washington vilian leaders, Carlos Menem in Argentina probably played its most important role and Fernando Collor in Brazil. The two in May 1990, when the world may have presidents were eager to carve out larger come as close to nuclear war as it had roles on the international stage (and in the since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. international economy) for their countries, That spring, the explosive issue of

60 WQ SPRING 1995 Kashmir was again agitating India and India can assemble 15 to 25 nuclear Pakistan. Amid strikes, bombings, and weapons on short notice and Pakistan assassinations by Muslim separatists can assemble six to eight, probably and fundamentalists in the Indian state within a few days, according to U.S. of Kashmir, Indian prime minister V. P. government estimates. If nuclear war Singh ordered a crackdown. Singh's ever breaks out in the world, many de- government accused the Pakistanis of fense analysts believe, the Indian sub- aiding their Muslim brethren; there was continent is the most likely location. an exchange of hot rhetoric and before A more familiar "draw" is Israel, long there were military maneuvers whose opaque nuclear posture was per- along the India-Pakistan border. In fectly expressed by strategist Yigal May, U.S. intelligence concluded that Allon's remark in the mid-1960s: "Israel Pakistan had assembled nuclear bombs. will not be the first to introduce nuclear President Bush instantly dispatched weapons in the Middle East, but it will Deputy National Security Advisor Rob- not be second either." Although widely ert Gates to mediate. suspected of having as many as 200 In Islamabad, Gates was blunt: "Our nuclear weapons, Israel has neither de- military has war-gamed every conceiv- ployed nor detonated one, although able scenario between you and the Indi- some observers believe it was behind a ans, and there isn't a single way you mysterious flash in the South Atlantic win," he informed Pakistan's leaders. detected by a U.S. satellite in September Gates then visited New Delhi, where he 1979. warned that Indian air strikes against insurgent training camps in Pakistan- ven nonproliferation success held Azad Kashmir might prompt Is- stories remain unfinished. lamabad to use nuclear weapons imme- Backsliding may yet occur; po- diately rather than as a last resort to Elitical commitments can be re- save the regime. Gates was successful; nounced and legal obligations can be both sides pulled their troops back. flouted. Nuclear recidivism is a possi- In the annals of nonproliferation, bility, with North Korea the most likely however, the story of India and Paki- candidate. A small number of countries stan must be counted a draw rather than will undoubtedly persevere in seeking a success. The two countries have not to acquire nuclear arms or holding onto halted their nuclear programs, even those they already have. Nuclear weap- though over the years they have exer- ons are still thought by some to confer cised some self-restraint. India has not international status and enhance na- detonated a nuclear device since its first tional security. For others, they remain explosion more than 20 years ago. Paki- useful tools for intimidating neighbors stan has never conducted a nuclear test and regional rivals. These countries will and reportedly stopped producing pay the price of being hated in return weapons-grade uranium in 1990 when for being feared. President Bush cut off U.S. military and There are military defenses against economic aid to Islamabad. Neither such transgressors-the United States, country has deployed nuclear weapons for example, is developing ballistic mis- or ballistic missiles or even officially de- sile defenses. But nuclear weapons can clared that it has nuclear weapons. be delivered by boat, truck, or several Nevertheless, the subcontinent re- other means. Over the long term the mains a potential nuclear flash point. most effective defenses are political.

NUCLEAR FUTURE 61 surances, which are vows by the nuclear powers that they will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against other countries and will come to their defense For four weeks this spring, delegates should they face nuclear aggression. from 172 countries will meet in New York The NPT and the IAEA safeguards City to decide the fate of the Nuclear Non- system are not panaceas and they are cer- proliferation Treaty. The conference can tainly not fail-safe. They do not determine be seen, in effect, as a global referendum decisions by countries on whether to ac- on the nature of the international system quire nuclear weapons. But this harsh for the next century. truth overlooks the positive influence they The absence of any solid security ar- do exert. Submitting to comprehensive chitecture to replace the Cold War's bipo- IAEA safeguards and taking NPT mem- lar system has already contributed to a bership are earnests of the intent not to de- general unease in the world. Regional ten- velop nuclear weapons. Although the sin- sions have increased in many areas; an- cerity and durability of these pledges may cient antagonisms, ethnic strife, and reli- be questioned in some cases, such as Iraq, gious hatreds have resurfaced, literally Iran, and North Korea, they are an accu- with a vengeance in some cases. Without rate barometer of the nuclear intentions of vigorous international regimes to control the vast majority of countries. the spread of nuclear arms and other Many of the states not possessing weapons of mass destruction, the world nuclear weapons that will participate in will certainly become an even more dan- this spring's conference complain that the gerous place. nuclear powers have not kept their side of Since it took effect in 1970, the NPT the original bargain, notably their prom- has been the most important means of eas- ise to share the benefits of peaceful ing nuclear anxieties around the world. It nuclear technology-chiefly nuclear provides countries with reasonable assur- power. They are threatening to block the ances that their neighbors, potential ri- treaty's renewal or extend it only for a vals, and enemies are not arming them- limited period. They believe, as Ambassa- selves with the world's ultimate weapon. dor Makarim Wibisono of Indonesia, the Along with the inspection and verifi- leader of the 77-member Non-Aligned cation system provided by IAEA safe- Movement at the NPT conference, ob- guards (which would end with the NPT's serves, that "efforts to combat the danger demise), the treaty is a vital strand in a of proliferation have been used to pre- web of interlocking, overlapping, and serve and promote a technological mo- mutually reinforcing political pledges and nopoly in the hands of nuclear supplier legal commitments. This web also in- states and relegate the developing coun- cludes strict export controls that deny tries to a position of continued depen- sales of sensitive technologies, such as dency." Some of the nonnuclear states also supercomputers, that can be helpful in want speedier superpower disarmament, building nuclear weapons; nuclear weap- or even a firm target date for the total ons-free zones, such as those established elimination of nuclear arsenals. in Latin America and the South Pacific At the heart of all of these concerns is (and soon to be created in Africa); strong the worry that if the treaty is extended in- multilateral alliances; ballistic missile de- definitely and unconditionally this spring, fenses to protect U.S. and allied forces; the non-nuclear states will lose a valuable and "negative" and "positive" security as- (and, for many countries, their only)

62 WQ SPRING 1995 for a short period, countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Germany would be tempted to hedge their bets against the treaty's eventual collapse by in- creasing their ability to build bombs. Analysts at the RAND Corporation have dubbed this ratcheting up of nuclear potential "virtual proliferation." Total collapse of the NPT would have more clear-cut results. Gradually but inexorably, the bomb would spread. Perhaps the treaty's demise would gal- vanize the leading states to devise new institutions and arrangements to halt proliferation. But a failure to agree on extension would itself suggest a breakdown in the global consensus against proliferation. The stakes ultimately go beyond nuclear weapons. The treaty's demise would cripple efforts to re- strain the spread of other weapons of mass destruc- An Indian engineer at a nuclear facility in Trombay. India has made tion. Specialists warn that it the difficult step from civilian nuclear power to military capability. could doom the Chemical Weapons Convention, which means of leverage in their quest for wider has been signed butnot yet ratified by many technology transfer and nuclear disarma- countries, and vastly complicate efforts to ment. But the consequences of following strengthen the verification provisions of through on their "nuclear extortion" the Biological and Toxin Weapons Con- would be very serious for these countries: vention. (The Central Intelligence Agency without an NPT, their security would be estimates that 25 countries currently have at far greater risk than that of the states programs to build nuclear, chemical, or with nuclear weapons. biological weapons.) Even under the best Anything less than the extension of of circumstances, controlling these weap- the treaty indefinitely (or for a very long ons in the future will probably prove even time) would be a failure. Even if the NPT more difficult than the regulation of is not canceled outright but only extended nuclear arms. A world that cannot agree

NUCLEAR FUTURE 63 on the latter will be very unlikely to the United States dedicate itself to the achieve the former. elimination of all nuclear weapons. In fact, under both domestic law and international treaty, the United States is already obligated to eliminate all of its nuclear weapons. The legislation that established the U.S. Arms Control and Dis- armament Agency in 1961 and Article VI In the early 1960s, a young physicist of the NPT both stipulate this goal. Is it named Herman Kahn published a pro- really a desirable one? vocative book on thermonuclear war chal- Even among the dry policy analysts, lenging the world to "think about the un- there is serious discussion of moving to- thinkable." But it turned out that war, ward a nuclear-free world. The end of the even with thermonuclear weapons, was U.S.-Soviet rivalry, it is said, has vastly re- easy to contemplate. The truly unthink- duced the need for nuclear weapons. able challenge, as Kahn's critics noted, Their role in the Pentagon's war planning, was to map out a realistic path toward a for example, has greatly diminished. The nuclear-free world. Until recently, this United States, moreover, is highly un- kind of thinking was casually dismissed, likely ever to be the first to use these left to the liberal fringes of the peace and weapons in a conflict. Indeed, one former disarmament community. Hard-headed U.S. official argues that Washington professional nuclear strategists, armed would not likely use them even if the with their RAND Corporation "bomb United States were attacked first. Nuclear wheelsu-which allow them to estimate weapons, in other words, are moving to- the size of the crater and the extent of the ward obsolescence. fallout from a blast of a given nuclear At the other extreme, strategic analyst yield-preferred instead to discuss throw Kenneth N. Waltz of the University of weights, MIRVs, and the seemingly ever- California at Berkeley contends that gaping "window of vulnerability." "more might be better." The further Yet some especially visionary (or cyni- spread of nuclear weapons to many coun- cally calculating) politicians envisioned a tries might have a stabilizing influence on different future. In January 1986, Mikhail international life, he believes. Waltz's Gorbachev called for a nuclear-free world thinking is based on the Cold War expe- by 2000. Nine months later at Reykjavik, rience of deterrence, the "balance of ter- Iceland, Ronald Reagan, the quintessential ror" that helped keep the peace between Cold Warrior, called for the elimination of the United States and the Soviet Union. all nuclear weapons (although his horri- "The likelihood of war decreases as deter- fied advisers quickly qualified his state- rent and defensive capabilities increase," ments). In 1988, Prime Minister Rajiv Waltz argues. "New nuclear states will Gandhi of India proposed before the UN'S feel the constraints that present nuclear Special Session on Disarmament a phased states have experienced." disarmament that would lead to a world Waltz's theory has been much dis- without nuclear weapons by 2010. Re- cussed among academics during the past cently a number of retired senior U.S. of- decade, and its flaws have been thoroughly ficials, including former secretary of de- vetted. It is not at all clear, for example, that fense Robert McNamara and General An- other countries could reconstruct the same drew Goodpaster, former supreme allied delicate balance of deterrence-and even commander in Europe, have urged that the Soviet-American stand-off was full of

64 WQ SPRING 1995 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Again

Some U.S. analysts argue a new military strategy is needed to deal with nuclear threats in the post- Cold War world. In the National Interest (Winter 1993-94), Eliot Cohen of the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University offers one such view.

Three forces have come together to increase sile will prove a more difficult challenge yet. the danger of proliferation in the 1990s. First, As for the talk of pre-emptive war, would that over the decades technological know-how has the United States were willing to engage in it, diffused, putting nuclear potential within the should the need arise. But really, who can range of a number of states. Second, the col- imagine a president authorizing a large-scale, lapse of the Soviet Union has created a vast unilateral air and possibly ground attack pool of scientists available for hire to work on against a country that has done no direct harm such programs. It has also, in all likelihood, to the United States or its allies? The days of made nuclear material, including weapons, Osirak-type raids on a single, easily located available for sale to potential proliferators. At and above-surface nuclear facility are over. the same time, the implosion of the Soviet Secrecy, camouflage, deception, and disper- state has removed from the world stage a sion will make preemption a far more exten- major military power that had come to see the sive and uncertain operation than ever before. benefits of preventing nuclear proliferation. It is altogether proper to be gloomy about Third, and ironically, the Persian Gulf War the proliferation problem. In addition to un- has make it clear that no country can match dertaking [other measures], the American the United States in a conventional conflict. To government needs to prepare itself, materi- a hostile general staff, nuclear weapons look ally, organizationally, and psychologically, increasingly attractive as means of deterring for the day after the first nuclear weapon is either the Yankees or (more likely) their local used in anger. . . . The material preparation clients, who provide the necessary bases from requires, among other things, a renewal of which American military power operates. investment in the development of sophisti- It is hard to see how any American strat- cated nuclear weapons which the United egy, no matter how clever the conception or States might use to destroy a nascent nuclear assiduous the implementation, could do more arsenal. It is technically feasible to develop than meliorate the fundamental problem. . . . nuclear weapons that could do useful work Of course it makes sense to pursue mar- against such limited targets, without inciner- ginal remedies [such as anti-missile defenses ating cities or blasting into the air large quan- and more aggressive efforts to help dismantle tities of radioactive dust. The organizational the Russian nuclear arsenal] as energetically preparation entails a kind of war planning un- as possible. . . . But both technically and po- familiar to the armed forces in the recent litically they can achieve only limited success. past-crippling, punitive strikes against op- The problem of detecting mobile missiles dur- ponents whom the United States cannot dis- ing the Gulf War offers a good example. Even arm, or sudden, preemptive blows thrown at if American pilots had received instantaneous very short notice. The psychological preparation warning of Scud launches (and some did, will prove the most difficult of all, however, for when they witnessed the actual firing of the it will require a confession that none of the clev- missiles), they simply could not locate the erly conceived arms-control efforts (export con- launchers with sufficient accuracy to bring trols, buy-back plans, and international agree- weapons to bear on them. . . . If ever the United ments) will do more than defer the dark day on States manages to defeat the ballistic missile, which, for the first time since Nagasaki, a coun- the low-flying (and soon, stealthy) cruise mis- try uses an atomic bomb as a weapon of war.

NUCLEAR FUTURE 65 perils. There are many other difficulties: a nuclear weapons can be taken off alert, de- nuclear power might, for example, have an activated, and disassembled. Such a step incentive to strike pre-emptively at a neigh- would greatly lengthen the "nuclear bor just developing a bomb. And as the fuse." It would fall short of total nuclear number of nuclear powers rises, so does the disarmament. It could, however, be a sig- chance of a classic "madman scenario" or, nificant way station on the long road to- more likely, a fatal error in the more mun- ward a goal that seemed hopelessly uto- dane command-and-control systems of the pian only a short while ago. Before it can weapons. be reached, we will need to reduce the Yet there is some wisdom in Waltz's role and number of nuclear weapons in in- argument, at least insofar as it applies to the ternational affairs and, ultimately, render current line-up of nuclear powers. Nuclear them irrelevant to political life. weapons do generally promote prudence and caution, in their possessors as well as in n this path to zero, perhaps the others. They deter others from using not greatest danger is not from the only nuclear arms but perhaps chemical and spread of the weapons them- biological weapons as well. Under some cir- selves but from our forgetting cumstances, they may even prevent conven- how very different they really are. For this tional warfare among the states possessing reason, Harold Agnew, the former director nuclear weapons. of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, There are, in other words, benefits to once suggested that a nuclear bomb be deto- be reaped from these ultimate weapons. nated in an isolated part of the ocean once But these benefits would survive even if each decade with world leaders in atten- the United States and other nuclear pow- dance. Then they would hear, see, and feel ers vastly reduced their arsenals. Borrow- its awesome power. The danger is that as ing a page from India and Pakistan, it may the echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grow be possible to move to what specialists more distant with the passing of time, the call "non-weaponized" deterrence. It is devastation and unspeakable horror of too late to "disinvent" the bomb, and im- those events may fade from our collective possible to lock its "secrets" away. But memories. We forget at our peril.

66 WQ SPRING 1995 BACKGROUND BOOKS

THEFUTURE THAT NEVER CAME

iroshima (1946), John Hersey's ac- "win" such a conflict. Brodie elicited a host of count of the bombing based on in- responses, including Thomas Schelling's The terviews with six survivors, re- Strategy of Conflict (1960); Herman Kahn's On mains a good starting point for any Thermonuclear War (1960, repr. Greenwood, discussion of nuclear weapons. The Making of 1978); and Henry Kissinger's The Necessity for the Atomic Bomb (Touchstone, 1988), by jour- Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy nalist Richard Rhodes, tells the scientific and po- (1961). These books' authors argued that presi- litical story of the bomb's creation. Biographies dents needed a host of intermediate military of the leading scientists involved include Ge- options. Among the results were a new emphasis nius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo on tactical nuclear weapons and the concept of Szilard, the Man behind the Bomb (Univ. of graduated response in war-an idea that was ap- Chicago, 1994), by William Lanouette and Bela plied to conventionalwarfare in Vietnam. Much of Silard; James Conant and the Birth of the this history is surveyed in The Wizards of Arma- Nuclear Age: From Harvard to Hiroshima geddon (Stanford, 1991), by Fred Kaplan. (Knopf, 1993),by James Hershberg; and The Ad- The New Yorker's Jonathan Schell gained ce- visors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Super- lebrity with his alarming evocation of the con- bomb (Stanford, 1989), by Herbert F. York. sequences of nuclear war, The Fate of the Earth Was the United States justified in dropping (1982), but his much more thoughtful consider- the bomb? Paul Fussell's answer is obvious from ation of the ways nuclear weapons can be tamed, his book's title: Thank God for the Atom Bomb The Abolition (Avon, 1986), was ignored. (Ballantine, 1990). His is the prevailing view. Its A flurry of new books suggest that the debate leading critic is Gar Alperovitz, author of over what to do about nuclear proliferation is com- Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam ing to a boil. Critical Mass (Simon and Schuster, (Penguin, 1985). 1994), by journalists William E. Burrows and Rob- The bomb's impact on American life is the ert Windrem, offers an alarming tour of today's subject of Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early nuclear world, emphasizing the need for controls Light: American Thought and Culture at the on technology exports. Mitchell Reiss's Bridled Dawn of the Atomic Age (Univ. of N. Carolina, Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their 1994) and Spencer C. Weart's Nuclear Fear: A Nuclear Capabilities (Wilson Center, 1995) stresses History of Images (Harvard, 1988).William L. political and diplomaticmeasures. The 10 contribu- O'Neill's American High: The Years of Confi- tors to New Nuclear Nations: Consequences for dence, 1945-60 (Free Press, 1986) is another U.S. Policy (Council on Foreign Relations, 1993), sturdy survey. Sensational charges of Soviet edited by Robert D. Blackwill and Albert Camesale, atomic spying contributed to the Cold War at- emphasize the need to devise military responses. mosphere at home. Revisionist historians have Michael Klare, in Rogue States and Nuclear Out- argued that these charges were exaggerated. laws (Hilland Wang, 1995) critiques the Pentagon's Much scholarship suggests otherwise. The nascent "counterproliferation" strategy. Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (Vin- Kenneth N. Waltz's argument that a world tage, 1984),by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, with more nuclear-armed countries would be deals with the era's most celebrated case. Also more peaceful appears in The Spread of noteworthy is David Holloway's Stalin and the Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (Norton, 1995). Bomb (Yale, 1994). Waltz's co-author and sparring partner, Scott D. Serious thinking about nuclear war began Sagan, argues that the root problem with prolif- with Bernard Brodie's The Absolute Weapon: eration is all too human: the high likelihood that Atomic Power and World Order (1946). Brodie someone, somewhere, will someday make a di- argued that it is a contradiction in terms to think sastrous mistake in handling these most destruc- of waging nuclear war since it is impossible to tive weapons known to humankind.

NUCLEAR FUTURE 67 All the Presidents' Words

Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the "bully pulpit" as one of the grandest prerogatives of the presidency. But the pitfalls of serving as the nation's voice have contributed to the undoing of more than one of his successors.

BY CAROL GELDERMAN

n Saturday, November 13,1993, funerals. He warned that the victories of the President William Jefferson civil rights movement were being under- Clinton stood in the Memphis mined by a "great crisis of the spirit that is pulpit where Martin Luther gripping America today," that while Mar- King,0 Jr., had preached the night before his tin Luther King would take pride in the elec- assassination. Speaking in Dr. King's very tion of black Americans to political office rhythms and cadences, the president ex- and in the growing black middle class, were horted the 5,000 black ministers and leaders he to speak today, in all probability he at the Temple Church of God in Christ, and would express utter dismay. Clinton even by extension all citizens, to look squarely at imagined the words King might have used: both how far the country had come in the struggle for racial equality and at the great I did not live and die to see the Ameri- distance it still must travel. In chilling de- can family destroyed. I did not live and tail, he described the violence and drug traf- die to see 13-year-old boys get auto- ficking that ravage cities in which children, matic weapons and gun down nine- afraid of random killing, plan their own year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not

68 WQ SPRING 1995 'Yes," Theodore Roosevelt wrote, ". . .most of us enjoy preaching, and I've got such a bully pulpit!"

ment alone cannot rebuild whole communities, Clinton said. Each American has an obligation to help turn the country's permis- siveness and violence around, he concluded. This was moral suasion on a grand scale, and in the finest tradition of presidential moral leadership. Rising above party and ideology, the president summoned Americans to their highest ideals, and to their personal and collective responsibili- ties, even as he reminded them of certain home truths. The speech was educational, moral, inspirational-political in the finest sense of the word. Yet after an early flurry of favorable comment in the national press, the president's words seemed to vanish from the national consciousness. The fate of Clinton's words is only partly the result of problems particular to his presidency. It is symptomatic of a larger challenge facing the presidential speech and the presidential speechwriting process. Clinton's difficulties are at least in part a result of his failure to come to grips with what political scientist Jeffrey Tulis has called "the rhetorical presidency." Until the early 20th century, American presidents addressed themselves chiefly to live and. die to see young people de- the other branches of government, not to the stroy their own lives with drugs and people-and even then, most communica- then build fortunes destroying the lives tions were written rather than spoken. The of others. That is not what I came here Constitution requires only that the presi- to do. I fought for freedom, he would dent "shall from time to time give to the say, but not for the freedom of children Congress Information of the State of the to have children and the fathers to walk away from them . . . as if they don't Union." Presidential reticence was not amount to anything. merely a matter of custom. As Tulis writes, it reflected a fundamentally different view The underlying cause of this social de- of the office. The president was not a popu- cay is unemployment, Clinton continued. "I lar leader who sought to rally the public and do not believe we can repair the basic fab- promote a policy agenda. Even Abraham ric of society until people who are willing to Lincoln rarely addressed the public. Indeed, work have work. Work organizes life." Ev- Tulis points out, during a rare speech on the ery institution needs to help. Government eve of the Civil War, Lincoln was cheered alone cannot nurture a child, and govern- enthusiastically when he declined to utter a

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 69 word about "the present distracted condi- television and other mass media. Gerald Ford, tion of the country." not generally remembered as a man of many The rhetorical presidency began with words, delivered a speech on average every six Theodore Roosevelt, who famously called hours in 1976 (includingsuch things as press con- the office a "bully pulpit." TR established the ference announcements as well as formal idea that the president has a direct relation- speeches).Jimmy Carter addressed his country- ship with the people. With his successful pub- men even more often, adding 9,873 single- lic campaign for a 1906 railroad regulation spaced pages to the Public Papers of the Presidents measure called the Hepburn Act, which he of the United States. Ronald Reagan increased this waged over the heads of Congress and de- bulk with another 13,000 pages, and Bill Clinton, spite the opposition of a majority within his in his first year as president, spoke publicly three own party, he showed for the first time how times as often as Reagan did in his first 12 the bully pulpit could be used. Roosevelt did months. Indeed, such garrulousness is the es- not influence much other legislation through sence of Clinton's rhetorical problem. his public speaking. Nevertheless, with his All of these presidents could have learned penchant for self-dramatization and his need from the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the to occupy center stage, he made Washington undisputed master of the rhetorical presidency. a major American news center. Yet constraints Although most people suppose that FDR took to remained. Tradition still barred him, for ex- the microphone every couple of weeks, the ample, from taking to the stump for his own record shows that he delivered only 28 of his fare-election in 1908. mous fireside chats during more than 12 years in the White House. (There were, in addition, ot until Woodrow Wilson took messages to Congress and other addresses, some office in 1913 was the rhetorical spoken, some not.) He used his words wisely by presidency institutionalized. using them sparingly. Earlier in his career, the Brevity of this sort has been the exception. PrincetonN professor of political economy and Presidents since Richard Nixon have relied upon progressive reformer had developed a thor- an assembly line of writers capable of churning oughgoing critique of the older idea of govern- out words for them to say on every conceivable ment. Wilson argued that the only national voice occasion. To be sure, even in the earliest days of is that of the president, and that the executive, the republic presidents called on others for help not Congress, is the branch most capable of gov- with their speeches~AlexanderHamilton and erning a large modem society. The president, James Madison helped Washington draft his Wilson argued, should use his words to woo Farewell Address. But until relatively recently public opinion, for he "has no [other] means of most presidents, most of the time, wrote their compelling Congress" to accept his initiatives. own words. Jefferson, the two Adamses, Madi- Although Roosevelt and Wilson wrote their son, and Monroe were all highly literate, and Lin- own speeches, the plebiscitary presidency they coin was probably the master wordsmith of the introduced gave rise to a new speechmaking Oval Office. They wrote speeches that are still a machinery in the White House. A president who pleasure to read. Others, before and after the leads a nation rather than only a government Civil War, could have profited from ghostwrit- must be a loquacious president, and most recent ers but gamely penned their own dreary pro- ones have been loquacious to a fault. This change nouncements. has been abetted but not caused by the rise of The earliest "ghosts" were kept hidden

Carol Geldeman is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. She has written biographies of Henry Ford, Mary McCarthy, and Louis Auchincloss, and is now working on a book about presidential speechwfiting. Copyright 0 1995 by Carol Gelderman.

70 WQ SPRING 1995 in the presidential closet. The idea of a presi- to the word "ghostwriting." dent speaking in anything but his own Since Franklin Roosevelt's time, presi- words was unacceptable. Judson Welliver's dential rhetoric makers have been openly title was "literary clerk when he began employed, though their function has White House service for Warren Harding in changed radically. A number of these high- 1921. Few Americans then or later knew profile draftsmen have gone on to become anything about him or his job. He is remem- media stars in their own right/ including bered chiefly/ if at all, for coining the term public television's Bill Moyers and William "the Founding Fathers." Describing his ca- Safire of the New York Times, former aides reer in Who's Who in America, Welliver to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, re- wrote: "attached to White House organiza- spectively. Safire's former colleague, Pat tion, occupying confidential relation to Buchanan/ has larger aspirations. presidents Harding and Coolidge until November 1, 1925, resigned." Herbert here is nothing inherently wrong Hoover's speechwriter was a man named with the kind of speechmaking French Strother. The president denied using machinery that the rhetorical Strother's words, yet as many as 21 years af- presidency has brought into being. ter Strother's death they still were showing Ideally,T crafting a speech is a learning and up in Hoover's prose-giving new meaning synthesizing process. It allows a president

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 71 to acquire information, sort through issues, dent never kept their literary activities se- and come to conclusions about national cret. Knowing how intimately involved goals and policies. And it helps him find the Roosevelt was in their work, the public words to persuade his fellow citizens to fol- gradually began to take presidential low. FDR and his immediate successors speechwriters for granted. showed that a full collaboration with Despite the crises that followed one af- speechwriters could produce those benefits ter another in relentless succession during at least as well as solitary speechwriting FDR's occupancy of the White House, the once did. Indeed, collaborative efforts may president set aside five or six nights a month now be essential. As a rule, the more that to work on speeches. "With his sense of his- contemporary presidents have avoided tory," Sherwood said, "Roosevelt knew that working closely with their speechwriters- all those words would constitute the bulk of even when, like Clinton, they do a lot of the estate he would leave posterity and that their own writing-the more they have his ultimate measurement would depend tended to find themselves in various kinds on the reconciliation of what he said with of political trouble. what he did." Roosevelt also understood that as the urrogate speechwriting came fully leader of a democracy, he could move only into its own under FDR. After an- as far and as fast as the people would let nouncing his intention to seek the him, and that speechmaking was the indis- presidency in 1932, he began culti- pensable tool for widening his scope of ac- vatings an informal "brain trust" of advisers tion. By nudging public opinion forward, who contributed ideas and helped with retreating when he was too far ahead, speeches, including Columbia University Roosevelt succeeded, for example, in shift- professors Raymond Moley, Rexford ing the country's mood from isolationist to Tugwell, and Adolph Berle. Several of these internationalist. It took three-and-a-half brain trusters went on to help run FDR's years of carefully constructed speeches to New Deal agencies, even while they main- achieve his purpose, from his quarantine tained speechwriting roles. Samuel Rosen- speech of October 5, 1937, which stirred a man, who conceived the brain trust idea, nearly unanimous negative response, to the served as presidential speechwriter during signing of Lend-Lease on March 11,1941. all four of FDR's terms, yet he did not draw On speechwriting nights the president a federal paycheck until 1943. Before that he and his writers gathered at 7:15 in the Oval served as a judge on the New York State Office for drinks, which Roosevelt mixed Supreme Court, commuting to Washington from a tray on his desk. After a half-hour of to serve the president on his own time. small talk, dinner was served at 7:45. Din- During the war years (194145), most of ner over, the president moved to a sofa near the speeches were drafted by a trio of the fireplace and read aloud the most recent Roosevelt confidantes: Rosenman, play- speech draft while a secretary sat ready to wright and presidential troubleshooter Rob- take his dictated revisions and addenda. ert Sherwood, and Harry Hopkins, a close Together he and his writers tightened and FDR adviser who also held a number of top simplified phraseology, eliminated sen- jobs in the government, including secretary tences, paragraphs, and often whole pages, of commerce. FDR's speechwriters, in other and dictated fresh passages to take their words, were not merely verbal technicians place. The president often drew material but presidential aides with close contacts from his own speech file, a miscellaneous with the president and real policy respon- collection of items that he had been accumu- sibilities in the administration. The presi- lating for many years. It included items

72 WQ SPRING 1995 from his correspondence, notes from his impossibility of separating writing and reading, memoranda, clippings, and tele- policy. Policy is made of words, they knew, grams, as well as suggestions submitted by and words shape thought. members of Congress and others. Some- For example, Eisenhower, who as a times a call went out to poet Archibald young army officer had penned several ~ac~eish,who served as librarian of Con- speeches for Douglas MacArthur, spent gress during the 1940s, or some other close much energy and time during the first year adviser, to come in and lend a hand. of his presidency working on his Atoms for Peace speech, the 1953 address at the United fter the president went to bed, Nations in which he proposed a plan for the Rosenman and Sherwood and international control of nuclear power. Its often Hopkins worked most of preparation set off a debate within the ad- the night to produce another ministration on atomic energy, necessitating draft,A which was placed on the president's 33 drafts of the speech over a seven-and-a- breakfast tray the next morning. If there was half-month period. The drafts circulated time during the day, they conferred again among senior advisers in the Atomic En- and got further reactions and instructions ergy Commission, State Department, Penta- from Roosevelt. In the evening, they re- gon, and White House. Eisenhower ap- sumed work in another after-dinner session pointed C. D. Jackson, his special assistant in the Oval Office. This process continued for Cold War strategy, to take charge of day and night until they agreed on a final what would otherwise have become an un- reading copy. Major speeches went through wieldy process. Uniting important policy- a dozen or more drafts, each of which the making and speechwriting functions in one president had studied, added to, trimmed, trusted adviser was, Ike learned, a key to read aloud, and subjected to searching criti- mastering the rhetorical presidency. cism. By the time he delivered the speech, ennedy and special counsel and Roosevelt knew it almost by heart and chief speechwriter Theodore Sor- needed only occasional glances at the manu- enson did not have the luxury of script as he spoke. He was often persuasive seven- and-a-half months to de- and sometimes eloquent, displaying a termineK the American response to the Soviet power won in large part by his meticulous installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba in involvement in his speeches. Just as impor- 1962. When he learned of their presence on tant, the men who helped him thoroughly October 16, Kennedy summoned his closest understood his thought and rhetorical style and most trusted advisers. They and the as well as his politics. The speeches were a president conferred for the next 13 days and collaboration, with the president playing a nights. Sorenson played a leading role not major role. only because he wrote the speech but also FDR's next four successors followed because he was assigned to draft a summary very much in his speechwriting footsteps by of all the meetings. Entrusting this respon- adopting his collaborative method. Writers sibility to a single person, he later said, is the for Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisen- only way to ensure that the president gets hower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. a clear sense of the emerging policy. Johnson, by advising and consulting closely When dozens of meetings reduced the with the president, participated in decision options to two, Kennedy told Sorenson to making. These presidents, notwithstanding write two speeches. Drafting, however, led their considerable differences in personal to further questions and meetings. This pro- and political style, all took for granted the cess, in which each participant repeatedly

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 73 Johnson was not so certain. On March 22, a group of officials including McPherson met with him to discuss once again the possibility of limiting or ceasing all bombing of North Vietnam. Without the impetus of any discernible change in the president's thinking, McPherson wrote a memo on March 23 recom- mending a bombing cessation at the 20th parallel with the promise that all bombing would stop if North Vietnam agreed to end military activity in the demilitarized zone. Discussions continued. On March 26 the president chose prodded, questioned, and elicited alterna- March 31 for the speech; on the 28th he told tives, led finally to a consensus that be- his principal advisers to meet in Secretary came the basis of the president's plan, of State Dean Rusk's office to polish the which he announced to the world on Mon- speech. The men worked all day. day night, October 22. "The answer in the Knowing that Rusk and National Secu- Cuban missile crisis," Sorenson told a rity Advisor Walt Rostow were unsympa- National Journal reporter 10 years later, thetic to a bombing halt, Secretary of De- "was not resolved until it was effectively fense Clark Clifford, as a last resort, burst worded." forth in an emotional, tightly reasoned, In like manner, Lyndon Johnson radi- hour-long appeal for jettisoning the speech cally revised his thinking during the as written. "It can't be polished; it's all war," course of 14 drafts of his historic March he concluded. By late afternoon, his position 31,1968, speech on U.S. policy in Vietnam. had prevailed. To bring Johnson around, the The president convened cabinet members, group directed McPherson to begin anew military chiefs, experts among the White with a conciliatory speech. The general coun- House staff, retired generals, and elder sel sent the first alternate draft to the president statesmen for a series of meetings to con- at 6 P.M. and then reconvened the group at 6:30 sider how best to respond to North for an hour with LBJ, who still gave little in- Vietnam's surprising Tet offensive, dication of his position. Nonetheless, launched at the end of January. The presi- McPherson wrote a second alternate draft, dent made it clear from the start that his dispatching it to the White House at 9 P.M. special counsel and chief speechwriter, Johnson agonized, trying to fix on a Harry McPherson, was to serve as every- course of action. Not until the morning of one's conduit. March 29 did he finally make up his mind. The president made no bones about his He endorsed the second alternate draft. In stand: "Let's get one thing clear! I'm telling the little time remaining, he and McPherson you I am not going to stop the bombing." wrote three more drafts, trying to make McPherson had already written six drafts of each word as precise as possible. The sur- a speech along those lines. But privately prise partial bombing halt, opening the way

74 WQ SPRING 1995 for peace talks, was topped by Johnson's nearly 550 White House staffers, 20 percent unexpected peroration: "1 shall not seek, were connected, directly or indirectly, with and I will not accept, the nomination of my public relations. party for another term as your president." To script the president's effort to "establish the mystique," Nixon established the his was modern presidential first formally structured White House speechwriting at its best. For more speechwriting office, called the Writing and than a month, the president and Research Department. Its 12 writers and his top civilian and military advis- eight researchers were the first Americans ersT reasoned together in what amounted to to be listed as such on the executive branch a kind of exalted brainstorming. Because all payroll. Nixon referred to his writers as the information and opinion were funneled "PR group." In addition to drafting through McPherson, it worked. The con- speeches, they analyzed opinion, drew up tinuing debate, discussion, and refinement lists of remarks for the president to use "ex- of ideas clarified the choices and pushed the temporaneously" in public appearances, president and his advisers toward decision. and composed letters to the editor under With LBJ's successor, Richard Nixon, real and assumed names. They even col- everything rhetorical became a way of mak- lected and indexed anecdotes for the so- ing image rather than policy. By the time he called Richard Nixon Human Interest Pro- ran for president in 1960,14 years into his gram. (Under "Strength in Adversity" was public life, Nixon had become convinced filed a vignette about Nixon as a young fa- that the perceived image of what a president ther falling on the ice while keeping two- is and does is far more important than the year-old Tricia safe in his arms.) reality. Scattered throughout his presidential memos are comments that reflect this et for all this, the writers rarely perspective: "Taft infinitely more effective assumed a consultative role in than Teddy Roosevelt, but Roosevelt had policy matters. Unlike their pre- personality"; "Ike had been distant and all decessors, from Rosenman to business but appeared warm and kindly"; McPherson, these writers had no regular "JFK did nothing but appeared great while access to the Oval Office; they dealt instead LBJ did everything and appeared terrible"; with Haldeman as intermediary. Raymond "Kennedy was colder, more ruthless than Price, for example, rarely spoke directly to [Nixonl, but look at his PR." Endless entries the president when he was head of writing in the Haldeman diaries deal with staff ef- and research, as Haldeman made clear in a forts to "create a more friendly image of the January 9, 1970, diary entry: "reviewed P," as Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman rou- Price's first real draft of the State of Union, tinely referred to Nixon. . . . a complete disaster. . . led to a new ha- Although he surrounded himself with rangue for a speechwriter who can write a advertising and public relations men such Nixon speech. Hard for Ray to hit it right as Haldeman, Nixon made himself the ar- when he has no direct contact with P and no chitect of his presidential image as well as real guidance." his presidency. He created an Office of Nixon depended on his writers, but he Communications, an entirely new public re- controlled the content of every speech, lations arm of the White House that fed ma- spending "incredible hours alone" on terial to the press beyond Washington. The drafts, according to Haldeman. But Nixon's new Officeof Public Liaison coordinated the understanding of the purposes of the presi- White House "line of the day": the story that dential speech was fundamentally different would be emphasized to the press. Of from that of past presidents who did their

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 75 own writing. Nixon frequently wrote state, Cyrus Vance, and hawkish National speeches (and made policy) in response to Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The data supplied by his speech researchers and result was an unhappy amalgam of saber pollsters. His method represented an abrupt rattling and soothing rhetoric. The Washing- departure from what had been the accepted ton Post accurately described it as "two dif- purpose of presidential speechmaking. Be- ferent speeches." fore Nixon, the speechwriting process was used to formulate policy and attain "so reachy, disjointed, and poorly de- much of it as will receive general support by livered, Carter's public talking, teaching," as FDR said. Nixon used it which had landed him in the chiefly to manipulate public opinion. White House, just as surely pro- The new focus on public opinion often pelled him out of it. Had he given at least created a disconnect between thought and one of his highly talented writers continual word. The examples are endless. Nixon access and the mandate to act as a Sorenson speaks of the urgency of passing the Fam- or a McPherson, he likely would have con- ily Assistance Plan but tells his chief of staff structed more convincing, focused, that he "wants to be sure it is killed by the speeches-and, perhaps, policies to match. Democrats and that we make a big play for Nixon's true heir in matters of public it, but don't let it pass." He publicly praises utterances, Ronald Reagan, enlarged civil rights and privately tells Haldeman he Nixon's fully synchronized approach to "does not believe in integration." rhetoric. He, too, relied on an amply staffed speechwriting department, as well as an t may seem odd to speak of parallels Office of Communications, an Office of Pub- between Nixon and Jimmy Carter, but lic Liaison, an Office of Public Affairs, and there were striking similarities in their an Office of Communications Planning. His approaches to speechwriting. Like staff also produced a "line of the day" for Nixon,I Carter kept his writers, including the nightly television news, either with James Fallows and Hendrik Hertzberg, at a scripted remarks or packaged events. Ac- distance and allowed them little role in policy. cording to Jeffrey Tulis, Reagan "spent more Having never had a speechwriter until his of his day in photo opportunities and greet- presidential campaign, Carter also insisted on ing dignitaries than in policy discussion." writing for himself as much as time allowed. As during the Nixon years, pollsters His experience underscores an important played an important role in the higher coun- truth about the perils of the rhetorical presi- cils of the Reagan administration. According dency: who writes presidential speeches- to speechwriter Peggy Noonan, chief pollster even if it is the president himself-is less im- Richard Wirthlin made it clear to the writers portant than how and why they are written. that he had a better "read on what the pub- Unlike the calculating Nixon, who used lic wanted than they did-a point he made in speeches to define his public image more the Oval Office in Reagan's presence. He ana- than his public policies, Carter managed to lyzed a recent speech during which members blur both. He had a penchant for combining of a focus group were instructed to press a his own engineer's lists of policy initiatives button when Reagan's words struck an emo- with a speechwriter's efforts and other ma- tional chord. Wirthlin pointed out that early terial. His most famous speech is probably in the speech, when the president said "reach his disastrous address on Soviet-American for the stars," everyone squeezed. The word relations at the U.S. Naval Academy in June "free" is a good word, Wirthlin said, espe- 1978, in which he jammed together pieces of cially "free man from nuclear terror. . . .When memos from his conciliatory secretary of you speechwriters talk about tax reform, that

76 WQ SPRING 1995 is good. It's pro-family, pro-jobs, pro-future, period of years. Yet when he reached the pro-America. Pro is positive." White House, he delivered a packet of past The parts of the speech that did not talks to the speechwriting office with the work, he continued, were those that lacked instructions that the writers learn to imitate a positive note. He singled out a section in his style and substance. which the president spoke about the free- What communications scholar Kathleen dom fighters in Afghanistan, Angola, Cam- Hall Jamieson asked about Reagan may just bodia, and Nicaragua. "The listeners didn't as well be asked about other presidents: know where these countries arevirthlin "Why should we expect someone who em- groused, "and anyway it sounds like we're braces the words of others to suddenly be- launching a four-point war. Part of the prob- come an active, inquiring, scrutinizing man- lem seems to be that the language was so ager of information when offered a plan powerful it put people on edge. It made [such as that] for aiding the Contras?" Had them feel 'down.' It wasn't positive." Reagan's successor George Bush been more Like presidential writers before them, actively engaged in the writing of his own Reagan's were responsible for the style, syn- words, for example, he might have thought tax, and accuracy of what the president more carefully about his ill-advised "read said, and in executing these editorial duties, my lips" pledge not to raise taxes-and he they necessarily served as brokers between might still be president. policymakers. At times, they influenced policy more than the president probably et, for all that, Reagan was called intended. Sometimes, they unintentionally "the Great Communicator." One initiated policy. "What is the policy on con- reason he won the label was cer- servation?" Peggy Noonan wondered be- Y tainly that he stayed "on mes- fore starting a speech on that subject. "Lack- sage" during the eight years of his presidency. ing certainty, we intuit." Noonan recounted From the night of his first presidential-norni- the frustration of having her prose go nation acceptance speech in Detroit's Cobo through a 25-station review. "It would come Hall to the day he turned over the Oval Of- back tapioca," she recalled in What I Saw at fice to Bush, he stuck to a few simple themes the Revolution (1990), "so I would use the and repeated them with force and conviction. 'hand grenade' technique. I would write a Not incidentally, Reagan was a great admirer statement embodying an unambiguous, his- of FDR, even if his overarching goal was to tory-making commitment, throw it into the dismantle Roosevelt's coalition and pro- policy making machinery, and sooner or grams. Reagan had come to maturity during later somebody would knock it down or the Roosevelt era, listening to the president's pick it up. Then we would find out what the fireside chats and memorizing some of their president's policy was." best passages. He looked to his predecessor to What is astonishing about Reagan's in- teach him how to reach people effectively- sulation from the men and women who even though his rhetoric, unlike FDR's, fre- wrote for him and about how little he par- quently did not match reality. ticipated in the preparation of speeches is Right after Bill Clinton's election, his that he launched his political career with a senior aides procured memos written by speech, variations of which he delivered Reagan's transition team in late 1980. In- starting in his early years as General cluded was a proposal by Wirthlin and Electric's spokesperson in the mid-1950s. speechwriter David Gergen for the Here was a man who had experienced un- president's day-by-day schedule during his paralleled success from a speech that he had first 100 days in office. The success of their mulled over, written, and rewritten over a plan largely depended on political consult-

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 77 ants and pollsters. Clinton uses these hired use polling data to substantiate the essential hands to an extent that goes far beyond any- wisdom of positions they champion." thing Reagan did, and their influence is re- sented within his administration. resident Clinton's wordsmiths, like "Speechwriting is not on their minds; im- virtually all of their predecessors age-making is," said one speechwriter. of the past quarter-century, be- Clinton, however, understood all too well moan their lack of access to the how Reagan had brought Congress to heel manP for whom they write. Yet in this White (for a time) by mobilizing such broad sup- House the result has not been the un- port that it seemed unsafe to thwart him, planned policy influence of writers. As po- and he hoped to do the same. litical journalist Elizabeth Drew observes in What Clinton and Reagan seemed to On the Edge (1994), Clinton "had thought have been looking for from the Nixon model through the nation's essential problems was approval of the presidential person as more thoroughly than any of his recent pre- a way to win support for policies. This rep- decessors,'' and, more than any president in resents a reversal of the earlier approach. recent memory, he speaks for himself. The Make good policies, Truman said, and good night before the signing of the Mideast relations will follow; Eisenhower declared policy accord in the fall of 1993, for ex- that "the job is to convince not to publicize." ample, he stayed up until 3 A.M. combing the But today "presidents have become so audi- Book of Joshua for inspirational references ence-driven,"communications scholar Roder- to use in his address. As former Clinton ick Hart has written, that "they unconsciously writer David Kusnet says, "this is a man

78 WQ SPRING 1995 with knowledge of the basic texts of Ameri- how much and what kind of persuasion was can oratory." Clinton can quote from needed to bring the people along. Roosevelt memory large passages of Jefferson, Lincoln, believed that the relationship between the FDR, and JFK. He knows the Bible and president and the people was direct but not Shakespeare.He has all the "right stuff" to be reciprocal. an important national voice. But he has failed to make himself heard. t is possible that we have reached the Early in his administration Clinton told end of the rhetorical presidency, that Washington Post columnist David Broder that Bill Clinton, for all his words, is because the nation is "awash with newshe America's first post-rhetorical presi- must work harder at being communicator in dent.I In an age vastly more complicated chief than his predecessors did. But to Clinton, than FDR's, an age overwhelmed by elec- working harder seems to mean talking more. tronic words and images, it may be that no He gave 600 speeches in 1993, and was an single person can serve as the national ubiquitous presence on television, in print, voice. But it is more likely that the age sim- and on radio. This very strategy undermines ply requires a leader who understands how his message. Just as putting too much money to use words wisely and well, who does not in circulation causes inflation and diminishes feel compelled to "feed the beastu-who is the value of a currency, too much presiden- the master (but not the manipulator) of tial talk cheapens the value of presidential what might be called the media complex. rhetoric. Television reporters tell Clinton's Television, as Peggy Noonan suggested, story over his mute gestures; radio talk-show must be put in its place. Only by recovering hosts pummel his policies. As the White the strengths of an earlier and quieter rhe- House itself recognizes, the definition of the torical presidency can that be done. president and his policies is now largely in the To reclaim the bully pulpit, a president hands of others. He has lost the ability to (and it could still be Clinton) will need to do shape public understanding, which is the es- away with the public relations folderol and sence of the bully pulpit's power. the separate speechwriting departments. He Clinton makes matters worse by trying will need to cultivate a trusted speechwriting to get back on track with speeches that play alter ego-a McPherson or a Rosenman. He to public opinion, creating new disconnects will need to remember that to be truly effec- between past proclamations and present tive a speech must clarify thought and policy, ones. Responding to public opinion in a and that he must educate his listeners rather democracy is no disgrace-FDR was a mas- than merely pander to them. That kind of ter of it. He probably had a better grasp of president could join the small band of public opinion than any other president America's best presidents, who "were leaders before or since. His habits of reading, listen- of thought at times when certain historic ideas ing, consulting, and yes, even studying pub- in the life of the nation had to be clarified,"as lic-opinion polls, were not a means of decid- the second Roosevelt, echoing the first, de- ing which way to veer but of discovering fined moral leadership.

THE PRESIDENTS' WORDS 79 Farewell to Modernism

THE ORAL HISTORY OF MODERN ventional notions of ornament and decora- ARCHITECTURE: Interviews with the tion and instead found inspiration in such Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Cen- industrial prototypes as factories, steam- tury. By John Peter. Abrams. 320 pp. $67.50 ships, and airplanes. Their aim, insofar as it was possible, was to make buildings ma- ess is more," Ludwig Mies van der chinelike. The results, from the Centre Rohe supposedly said, thus sum- Pompidou in Paris to Boston's City Hall, L ming up his severe, minimalist ap- were sometimes refreshing, sometimes proach to the art of building. To which the merely bizarre, often functionally implau- architect Robert Venturi impishly replied, sible, but always strikingly original. "Less is a bore." Venturi's postmodernist Despite the stylistic cliches that are manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in commonly associated with modern archi- Architecture, was published in 1966, a year tecture-flat roofs, pipe railings, and blank as good as any to date the end of what is white walls-the Modern Movement was commonly called the Modern Movement in more than a fashion. It was truly a move- architecture. This movement is remarkable ment, that is, a loose grouping of people for its pantheon of heroic figures-Mies, with a broad range of ideas. This diversity Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd is made evident in historian John Peter's Wright-and its equally heroic buildings. It Oral History of Modern Architecture, a collec- is also distinguished by its brevity: begin- tion of interviews with 59 of the most no- ning roughly in the 1920s, the Modern table architects of the Modern Movement. Movement held center stage barely 40 What is surprising in Peter's Oral History is years. not how much agreement there was among Forty years is not a long time to reinvent different modernist architects, but how architecture. But that is precisely what the early modernists set out to do. Their aim was to design buildings that owed nothing to the past and belonged distinctly and un- mistakably to the 20th century. This ambition was in great part a reaction to the Vic- torian revivals of historical styles that had characterized architectural design during the late 19th century. Although the public generally liked neo-Elizabethan and neo- Flemish homes as well as classical public buildings such as the National Gallery in Washington, many architects were dissatis- fied with combining and recombining styles from the past. They felt that a modern age called for its own modern architecture. To this end, they generally ignored the well- established Classical architectural tradition that had nurtured architects as disparate as Freidrich Schinkel, Stanford White, and Edwin Lutyens. They did away with con-

80 WQ SPRING 1995 little. The Modern Move- ment was a very big tent, indeed. Practicality, for example, is generally held to be integral to modernist design, and the Swiss designer Max Bill piously tells Peter that "what influenced all my thinking in doing architecture is always the human need." Mies, however, had a very different opinion: "The sociologists tell us we have to think a^-.,-tutthe human beings who are living in that building. That is a sociological problem, not an architectural one." "Ornament is a crime," the Viennese transforming Philadelphia through the use modernist Adolf Loos famously wrote- of enormous parking structures, thankfully a sentiment echoed by Le Corbusier's "I never built. Wright, who, despite his 80-odd have been at war with decoration for a years, understood that cars, telephones, and long time." But Willem Dudok, a Dutch television may have made the traditional early Modernist, is less doctrinaire: "Or- city obsolete, proposes a horizontal automo- nament is so elementary in the human bile city. "It's inevitable," he proclaims. desire," he observes. (Forty years later, San Jose, Phoenix, and "Form follows function," wrote Louis Houston have proved him right.) Under- Sullivan, but even this tenet was not uni- standably, most of the architects do pay lip versally followed. "I don't think that ar- service to the need for formal planning. But chitectural form always should be practi- Mies is less sanguine on this point: "There cal or so," says the Finn Alvar Aalto in his are no cities, in fact, anymore. It just goes on fractured English. "There exists practi- like a forest. . . . It is gone forever, you cally no culture in the world where it's know, the planned city." only utility that commands." The conversations with Peter also sug- any interviews Peter recorded gest that, though city planning was a preoc- in his Oral History make unsat- cupation, here too there was no agreement. isfactory reading because the Le Corbusier denounces cities such as New ideas expressed are so banal. Great archi- York, London, and Paris as monstrous and tects, while they are often great talkers, proposes instead an urbanism of tall build- are not necessarily great thinkers. Many of ings and parkland. But his disciple, the Bra- the conversations deal with abstractions- zilian Oscar Niemeyer, who built many of pious political ideals, vague generalities, the public buildings in his country's new half-baked social theories-rather than capital, Brasilia, seems unable to summon with the specifics of architecture and con- great enthusiasm for that soulless city, ex- struction. Architects are trained to build cept to praise it for its lack of pollution. buildings, not new societies, and while the Louis Kahn orates unintelligibly about Modern Movement heralded the new age,

BOOKS 81 and Johnson had built a spate of museums that were defiantly neo-Classical in composition and used not raw concrete but hand-carved travertine.

ut it was the mercurial Saarinen, the most gifted designer of his gen- B eration (he was only 51 when he died), who probably deserves the greatest credit for pushing design beyond the confines of the Modern Movement. He it also seriously misinterpreted it. achieved this in a set of extraordinary Progressive in their aesthetic theories, buildings: Dulles International Airport, modernist architects steadfastly held on to the CBS Building in New York, and the a principle that was, in effect, medieval: TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport. In the the ascendancy of the Master Builder. (An Stiles and Morse Dormitories at Yale Uni- oft-repeated image in Bauhaus publica- versity, not his best work but ambitious tions was the Gothic cathedral.) In their sorties into historicism, he created a kind minds, at least, architects stood at center of Italian hill village in New Haven. As stage, ready to make-and unmake-the early as 1956, Saarinen told Peter: "God world around them. knows I am very, very enthusiastic about Mies van der Rohe and the almost com- ut modern consumer society is much mon vernacular style that he created and too complex, dynamic, and discor- that we all accept as a fine thing. How- B dant to be guided by an individual ever, I cannot help but think that it's only vision, let alone the individual vision of the ABC of the alphabet, that architecture, someone as autocratic as Le Corbusier or if we're to bloom into a full, really great Wright. Moreover, consumers are not pas- style of architecture, which I think we sive; they impatiently make demands, often will, we have to learn many more letters." unexpected demands. They are not inter- Saarinen was right. The orthodox ar- ested in being lectured to, and they want chitectural vocabulary that fills The Oral more choices, not fewer. The inability to an- History of Modern Architecture was, finally, ticipate the volatile and heterogeneous na- too meager to carry the Modern Move- ture of consumer society was, finally, the ment into the future. I don't think Modern Movement's fundamental flaw. Saarinen understood, however, that there It did not take long for the improvised was no going back once the apple cart was ideology of the Modern Movement to be- upset. As soon as architects started ques- gin to unravel. One already senses in tioning the narrow tenets of modernism, Peter's interviews with younger modern- it was every designer for himself. Having ist architects such as Minoru Yamasaki, severed its links with the past, modernism Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen the be- left architects with little to fall back on. ginnings of postmodernism, that is, a dis- The schools of architecture, which had satisfaction with dogma, a tentative ac- already once drastically remade their cur- ceptance of the past, and a desire to ricula to suit the Modern Movement, were broaden the architectural palette. By the not much help. The result has been a sense 1960s, Yamasaki (designer of New York that anything goes. A bewildering array of City's World Trade Center) was already architectural ideas confronts the public on producing a kind of neo-Gothic modern, every street corner: buildings that meticu-

82 WQ SPRING 1995 lously recreate bygone styles, buildings much complexity and contradiction as that try to remain faithful to Modern confusion and anarchy. Movement ideals, buildings that resemble Braun toasters, and buildings that look -Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and like they fell out of the sky and never quite Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism got pieced together. Less may have been at the University of Pennsylvania. His a bore, as Venturi claimed, but the re- latest book, City Life, will be published placement has turned out to be not so this fall by Scribner.

Midmorning in the New World Order

TEMPTATIONS OF A SUPERPOWER. By have assented to America's foreign policy, Ronald Steel. Harvard. 144 pp. $18.95 both past and present. WORLD ORDERS, OLD AND NEW. By Though he does not share Chomsky's Noam Chomsky. Columbia. 311 pp. $24.95 indignation, Steel does wonder whether the United States can "find a way back from the istory seems to allow no time-outs. Cold War." After all, in American political With unnerving rapidity, the win- life the Cold War was, he writes, "our H ning of the Cold War has already society's central focus" for three genera- turned to ashes in the mouths of the "victors." tions. America's all-consuming effort to The "New World Order7'-that glad, confi- contain communism revealed its underlying dent morning-is now clouded over with missionary character. (Revolutionary doubts and fears more shapeless than those France, Steel points out, possessed a simi- that darkened the days of superpower con- lar sense of unique destiny.) But this evan- frontations. The Cold War, it seems, was the gelical zeal aside, the Cold War occurred at good war. As well as stifling ethnic and reli- a unique historical moment in the interna- gious conflicts worldwide, it gave the pro- tional power system, when America's reach tagonists a clear sense of purpose. Yet obvi- was-or seemed to be-global. ous as it may seem, Americans have had Immediately after World War 11, trouble grasping the point made in both of America arrived at a definition of national these books: the Cold War was more an ad- security that was practically without prece- vantage than a menace to the United States. dent. Throughout history, great powers Beyond making that point, however, have defined their security essentially in these two books could hardly be more differ- terms of neutralizing immediate military ent. Ronald Steel, a professor of international threats. But to the formulators of postwar relations at the University of Southern Califor- U.S. policy, national security meant shoring nia, displays a cool, skeptical pragmatism as up democracy wherever it was threatened he discusses America's efforts to define its in the free world. Here was, quite possibly, new world mission. Noam Chomsky, known an historical first-traceable to what Steel almost as much for his anti-establishment unkindly calls the "loose rhetoric" of political commentary as for his pioneering Woodrow Wilson-in which national secu- work in linguistics, practically bristles with rity, the ideal of universal peace, and a lib- outrage at the politicians, public, and-to him, eral-democratic world order were all inex- most unacceptable of all-intellectuals who tricably linked.

BOOKS 83 Chomsky has a word for this policy: "in- less, impossible agenda in world affairs. terventionist." Its key article was summed up But such principles may prove useful in in Winston Churchill's assertion that "the the future, Steel thinks, if they are rationally government of the world must be entrusted analyzed rather than, as in the past, waved as to the satisfied nations, who wished nothing battle flags. Leadership, if it is not too jealous more for themselves than what they had." of its status, can be a good thing. Stability, like Chomsky will not allow that Churchill's noble peace, is clearly a good thing unless manipu- expression was ever anything more than a jus- lated to obstruct necessary change. America's tification for the strong to oppress the weak. great weakness in the past-and here He never entertains even the theoretical pos- Chomsky is surely right-was its reluctance sibility that a great-power system could be to tolerate or accept as democratic anything beneficial or provide a fruitful stability. To it found disagreeablebeyond its borders. This him, the concept of stability has been so per- monopoly of definition, if it persists, is bound verted by the governments of the satisfied to foster endless problems. nations-preeminently by the United States- Steel's concluding chapter is fittingly as to have blighted its value altogether. titled "What America Can Do." What America can do, what it should do-these homsky is alternately enraged and are questions that many others besides mystified by what he sees as the self- Steel are asking. Was there a legitimate righteousness of mainstream Amer- principle behind America's (and other ica.c His passionate defense of the weak nations') intervention in Iraq, and, if so, against the strong crudely reverses the old when and how should it be applied else- realist maxim, Might Is Right. To him, the where? What role, if any, should America weak are never in the wrong, the strong al- assume in Bosnia or Rwanda? "Do we ways are. Up to a point, his constant rever- have any obligations to these troubled sal of mainstream assumptions is bracing. lands?" Steel asks. Beyond that point (which is reached quite To begin to answer this large ques- soon), it is simply paralyzing. His relentless tion, he lays down a couple of general attack on American altruism also compels principles: it is not America's responsibil- him to take a dim view of the future. The ity to counter aggression everywhere in only way America can become good, in the world, but genocide should not be tol- Chomsky's view, is by becoming weak. And erated. Yet his gloss of this no-genocide even if the United States ceases to be a su- rule shows the difficulty of translating perpower, it will remain too strong for its even so basic an imperative into physical own or anyone else's good. action. America should have intervened in Steel's prognosis is hardly so pessimis- Rwanda and Cambodia, he argues, but it tic. Yet if the problems of superpower sta- is right not to do so in Bosnia because the tus during the Cold War were great, he sees genocide there takes place "in the context those of a lone superpower as being even of a traditional war over territory." Such greater. The value of Steel's work lies in his a distinction seems ready-made for confu- attempt to find reasonable guidelines, rea- sion and deception. Likewise, by asserting sonable limits, for international action in the there is "no unconditional right of self-de- post-Cold War world. To assay those lim- termination," Steel leaves the problem of its, he investigates the "shibboleths"-sta- deciding under what conditions America bility, leadership, and democracy-that re- should act as intractable as ever. cently guided American foreign policy. Steel's minimal prescriptions do not sup- Those principles, uncritically followed, will, ply the United States much of an international he believes, burden America with a limit- agenda in the post-Cold War world. But then

84 WQ SPRING 1995 he believes America does not need much in strange kind of superpower." the way of a huge global agenda. Of the ana- Finally, what are Steel's hopes for this lyst at the Brookings Institution in Washing- international order in which America so ton, D. C., who wants "to defend legal order strangely operates as a superpower? His at the far reaches of the globe" on the grounds search for a viable future leads him ulti- that "massive breakdowns in the civil order mately not forward but backward, into the are too dangerous for the entire [global] sys- past. The phrases "concert of Europe" and tem," Steel scathingly remarks, "Perhaps this "balance of power" have an archaic 19th- distinguished scholar has not noticed the century ring to them, but Steele finds them 'massive breakdowns in the civil order' that the brightest beacons for the 21st century. have taken place a few blocks from his impos- The role of global policeman is dangerous, ing office." but that of traditional "great power," for all Chomsky's labeling of it as naked imperial- teel minces no words when he says ism, is actually quite useful. If security in- that America's overriding duty is to terests can be redefined less extravagantly, face up to its internal problems. After as was done within the balance of power, all,s America's rivals today-the industrial and if groups of powers can cooperate re- megalith of Japan, the nimble trading states gionally, as was achieved in the concert of of Southeast Asia, the emerging colossus of Europe, there is a genuine prospect for a China, the giant emporium of a uniting Eu- "new world orderu-one, Steel believes, rope-do not want to bury capitalism. To that will not be vitiated by ideological po- the contrary, they want to do it better than larization. Oh come back, you satisfied na- Americans do. "While we struggle with our tions Churchill spoke of, come back. role of superpower," Steel comments, "they concentrate on productivity, market pen- -Charles Townshend, a former Wilson etration, wealth, and innovation: the kind of Center Fellow and a historian at the Uni- power that matters most in today's world. versity of Keele in England, is the author In this competition we are-with our of Making the Peace: Public Order and chronic deficits, weak currency, massive Public Security in Modern Britain borrowings, and immense debt-a very (1993).

ists, can at least agree that pornography represents the worst and most reactionary forces THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF of society. Yet, venturing into an 18th-century PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE. By underworld of penurious hack writers, ner- Robert Darnton. Norton. 409 pp. $27.50 vous publishers, and police-dodging ped- dlers, Princeton University historian Darnton Pornography exploits women-and men, chil- has discovered a forbidden erotic literature dren, and dogs. Such, at least, is the conven- that was, in fact, enlightened, philosophical, tional wisdom today, and people who agree and progressive. on little else, feminists and fundamentalists, For two decades Darnton has been elabo- right-wing conservatives and gay rights activ- rating a thesis about the French Revolution

BOOKS 85 with the forward-looking title The Year 2240; and a libel (one of many) of Louis XV's mis- tress, Anecdotes of Madame the Countess du Barry. Clearly, the line between smut and "serious" thinking was less sharply drawn at that time than today. In Thirise philosophe, women and their lovers (usually priests) discuss fine points of materialist philosophy and utilitarian ethics between bouts of mutual masturbation, thus putting into practice John Locke's proposition that all knowledge comes from the senses. The question that Darnton gingerly circles is whether books, these or any others, actually make revolutions. His cautious, indirect answer goes something like this: books can offer readers stories that they understand in relation to their own "cultural frames," which in turn may affect their behavior. The political slander aimed at Louis XV, his mistresses, and his hated ministers influenced readers' perceptions of the political upheavals of the late 1770s, and in this indirect way possibly-but only possibly-contributed to the onset of revolution. Darnton's "indirect causation" does not, in fact, much alter our basic understanding of that is itself somewhat revolutionary: the French Revolution. But by resurrecting namely, that the cultural origins of the works too explosive to have been included Revolution lie beyond the witty politesse of in the classical anthologies-yet works that the canonical Enlightenment, in the smutty, 18th-century readers found nearly as scandalous, and highly popular works of the philosophiques as Montesquieu's political so-called Rousseaus du ruisseau (Rousseaus theory or Diderot's Encyclopidie-Darnton of the gutter). In The Business of Enlighten- has permanently altered our understanding ment (1979), Darnton described how respect- of the Enlightenment that preceded the able publishers in France or just beyond its Revolution. border sold illicit reading matter through such techniques as "marrying" or "larding" (splicing the pages of, say, Fanny Hill in THE DE-MORALIZATION OF SOCIETY: French in between those of the New Testa- From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. ment). Now Darnton advances beyond the By Gertrude Himmelfarb. Knopf. 314 pp. $24 mechanics of book production and distribution to analyze the contents of these "hot" In the nine previous books that established her best sellers. The most popular illicit books as a leading historian of the English Victori- of the pre-Revolutionary period (1750-89) ans, Himmelfarb insistently but discretely were strange hybrids of materialist philoso- held up the Victorian past as a mirror to our phy, explicit pornography, political slander, modern ills. There is similar scholarship in The and radical utopianism. Darnton scrutinizes De-Moralization of Society, but the reticence is three books in particular: an ultra-racy gone: now the past argues openly with the novel, Therise philosophe; a political utopia present (and wins). We have, Himmelfarb

86 WQ SPRING 1995 pointedly suggests, a lot to learn from the Vic- moralization" to what Friedrich Nietzsche torians, and we are only in second grade. in the late 1880s called the death of God. In elegant prose, the professor emeritus of Nietzsche, she says, foresaw that this history at the City University of New York "would mean the death of morality and the shows how thoroughly we have misunder- death of truth-above all the truth of any stood the Victorians-their family life and morality." Henceforth there would be no sexuality, their feminists and reformers, and virtues, only "values"-one pretty much as much else. It was, she emphasizes, a society good as any other. united, despite class fissures and other flaws, In reality, the Victorians were already be- in its belief in "hard work, self-help, obedi- ginning to live off dwindling religious and ence, cleanliness, orderliness," and in its pur- moral capital when their queen took the suit of that all-important social glue, "respect- throne in 1837. G. K. Chesterton observed ability." The Victorians, in other words, that the Victorians were the first generation agreed on the virtues. that "asked its children to worship the Thus even those who pushed against Vic- hearth without the altar.'' Which leads to a torian orthodoxy-and they were numer- question: to achieve the re-moralization of ous-accepted and honored the larger values society urged by Himmelfarb, would it be of Victorian society. The novelist George Eliot enough to learn from the Victorians and, as insisted on all the proprieties of married life- she suggests, to apply their lessons to pub- including the title "Mrs. LewesU-even lic policy, requiring welfare recipients, for though Mr. Lewes, with whom she lived for example, to work? Or does the restoration of 24 years, could not marry her. (He was unable a moral society require a renaissance of re- to obtain a divorce from his wife.) "If there ligious conviction? That important question was one common denominator among" femi- is never really engaged in this otherwise nists of the period, Himmelfarb writes, "it was wise critique of our de-moralized society. the belief that liberation-whether by means of the suffrage, or work, or education, or property and divorce reforms, or birth control- THE NIXON MEMO. By Marvin Kalb. Univ. should not be purchased at the expense of of Chicago. 248 pp. $19.95 'womanliness' and the 'domestic virtues."' THE HALDEMAN DIARIES. By H. R. The Victorians presided over a century of Haldeman. Putnam. 698 pp. $27.50 social progress, including not just a rising standard of living but even declining levels "There are no second acts in American lives," of crime and illegitimacy. Again, Himmel- F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed. Obviously farb argues, it was the Victorians' extraordi- he never met Richard Milhous Nixon. The nary moral consensus that allowed this to only president ever forced to resign, Nixon happen. Under the New Poor Law of 1834, (1913-94) by the time of his death was eulo- for example, they carefully distinguished gized by the news media as "the most impor- between the independent but impecunious tant figure of the postwar era." How Nixon poor and the completely dependent pauper. managed his apparent metamorphosis from The poor man could still claim a measure of dishonored ex-pol to elder statesman is respectability; the pauper was stigmatized, chronicled with righteous gusto by Kalb, a and was entitled to relief only at the work- former diplomatic correspondent who was houses (which were not quite as bad as those once placed on Nixon's "enemies lists." depicted in Dickens's harrowing portrait, Fittingly for a politician who rose to Himmelf arb says). prominence as a redbaiter, Nixon's post- Himmelfarb says that it is our "reluctance Watergate road to rehabilitation led through to speak the language of morality, far more Moscow. Using the same genius for self-pro- than any specific values, that separates us motion and disregard for ideological consis- from the Victorians." She traces this "de- tency that had allowed him to begin normal-

BOOKS 87 izing U.S. relations with the People's Repub- lic of China in 1972, Nixon in 1992 reversed his opposition to aid packages for Boris Yeltsin's Russia (which he had previously denounced as "counterproductive Western painkillers"). Essential to Nixon's strategy was his uncanny ability to manipulate the media. Kalb unravels the symbiotic relationships that Nixon cultivated with news out- lets such as Time (where current Deputy Sec- retary of State Strobe Talbott called himself Nixon's "case officer"), the New York Times op-ed page (which swallowed Nixon sub- missions as if they were bon-bons), and the TV networks (where Ted Koppel said "inter- blacks and Jews, both individually and in gen- viewing Nixon is one of the most fascinat- eral, is recorded here in detail; more surprising political experiences"). ing is his sheer lack of knowledge of both do- The "Nixon memo" of Kalb's title refers to mestic and foreign policy. Almost every ma- Nixon's carefully orchestrated dispatch on jor domestic innovation for which the Nixon March 10,1992, to 50 opinion makers blasting administration is credited-from education to the Bush administration's Russia policy as welfare, from environment to consumer pro- "pathetically inadequate." Given Nixon's tection-was passed, Haldeman reveals, de- growing stature and his proven access to the spite Nixon's secret opposition. The mystique media, neither President Bush then nor Presi- of Nixon's second act, as Kalb shows, might dent Clinton later dared to alienate an elder have been new and improved; under the statesman capable of asking the politically rhetoric, Haldeman reveals, the substance had damaging question, Who lost Russia? While not changed. history may discredit Nixon's acuity as a Rus- sia analyst (in 1991 Nixon was observing, "I doubt that Yeltsin wants Gorbachev's job"), Arts & Letters his stage-management of the Russian question put Nixon, Kalb writes, "finally back in the big WALTER PATER: Lover of Strange Souls. leagues." By Denis Donoghue. Knopf. 347 pp. $30 Kalb's analysis would likely not have dis- pleased Nixon, who once told his chief of staff Hearing of Walter Pater's death, Oscar Wilde H. R. Haldeman that "mystique is more im- reportedly said, "Was he ever alive?" portant than content." There is an odd irony Donoghue might answer, "Why, he lives here. Kalb, for all his animosity toward Nixon, still." In this eloquent and wonderfully nu- has not only explained but contributed to the anced book, Donoghue makes large claims for former president's rehabilitation. Haldeman, Pater, the languid 19th-century Oxford don who professed to admire Nixon and whom who smuggled subversive Continental no- Nixon in turn said he "loved," may have all tions of art for art's sake into traditional Brit- but ensured that the 37th presiden's rehabili- ain and, in so doing, helped conjure into ex- tation will be temporary. Each evening istence artistic modernism. Haldeman repeated into a tape recorder what Donoghue, who holds the Henry James Nixon had said and done that day, and there Chair of Letters at New York University, never has been a portrait of a president such writes against the current fashion in biogra- as those tapes reveal. (These 700 pages are, in phy, in which the accreting volumes can fact, but a fraction of the "diaries" available on double as doorstops. His book is not only of CD-ROM.) Nixon's well-known dislike of relatively modest size; it gets the proportions

88 WQ SPRING 1995 right. The discussion of Pater's works, twice technology." This is ingenious, as is his asser- as interesting as his personality, fills twice the tion that Pater's truest existence was lived out space of the formal biographical section. For, in prose: "He was, sentence by sentence, a tex- in truth, there was little outward excitement tual self in the act of becoming, of making it- to Pater's life. He was born in London in 1839 self, improvising itself from one intense mo- and educated at Oxford, where, after becom- ment to the next." For many readers, though, ing a fellow of Brasenose in 1864, he remained a Pateresque sentence approximates pushing till his death in 1894. Occasionally he visited a large rock up a hill and wishing finally, in the Continent with his two sisters. But these exhaustion, that the thing will simply roll were brief interruptions in the routine of the backward, flatten you, and end the ordeal. quintessential-cartoonish even-homosex- But there is other evidence to argue the ual Victorian don, the type of committed man's enduring importance. Donoghue be- nonbeliever who nonetheless toys with the lieves that Pater, more than any other English idea of taking holy orders. His outward life writer, made available the disjunction of sen- might be compressed into a single sentence: he sation from judgment and thereby intuited the taught, he thought, he wrote. Displaying rnini- form of modern literature we find in the early ma1 social charm, he was the taciturn guest work of Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot. Pater was you would have dreaded sitting next to at din- modern literature's first act, Donoghue ar- ner. But do not mistake the scale of the physical gues, and "the major writers achieved their life for its true dimensions. In his mind, on the second and third acts by dissenting from him page, Pater made a life of continuous event. He and from their first selves." In the end created himself as a work of art. Donoghue appears to surprise even himself Pater is most famous as the author of Stud- by advancing the claims of aestheticism, "for ies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; later all its risk of triviality, exquisiteness, solip- retitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Po- sism," against our dominant contemporary etry). The conclusion to his Studies was critical theory that understands every work of thought, in Victorian England, nothing short art as merely illustrative of a certain ideologi- of dangerous. Pater's essentially pagan fervor cal formation. Finally Donoghue admires the might mislead young men, it was worried, as shy Oxford don for his audacity in proposing when he argued for the importance of self-re- a so-called "higher morality," which was "to alization, of experiencing the moment pro- treat life in the spirit of art." foundly: "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy," Pater wrote in phrases that became famous, "is suc- THE BIRD ARTIST. By Howard Norman. cess in life." That so wan and self-effacing a Farrar, Strauss. 289 pp. $20 personality should have measured his worth against fire and Dionysian transport is ironic "My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, indeed. Newfoundland. You would not have heard of Why should we still care about Pater? To me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, begin with, he is reckoned by some a master though; I am a bird artist, and have more or of English prose, and by some measures he less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the indisputably is: the form is prose, the words lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and this is are English, and Pater is masterful at putting an equal part of how I think of myself." them together in certain lush, idiosyncratic With these sentences, short, flat, and unpre- patterns. Whether today's reader will take tentious, begins what may be the past year's pleasure in the patterns is another matter. most successfully realized novel. The Bird Art- Donoghue makes the strongest case for their ist, like Norman's earlier The Northern Lights appeal. He explains that the techniques of (both were nominated for the National Book delay in Pater's sentences "mark refusal to live Award), are novels of the unfamiliar, transpir- by the rhythms of public life, commerce, and ing in a terrain simpler, harsher, and stranger

BOOKS 89 than the one most readers call home. Here the from emotion, naturally, but emotions have to landscape is Newfoundland at the start of this be tempered and forged by sheer discipline, century, and Norman fills it with characters all for the sake of posterity." (Fabian Vas, his parents Alaric and Orkney, Romeo Gillette), with places (Witless Bay, Richibucto, Trespasey), and even birds (teals, THE HOUSE OF PERCY: Honor, Melan- kittiwakes, mergansers) whose peculiar- choly, and Imagination in a Southern sounding names reverberate exotically, to Family. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Oxford suggest a world apart. Each page is a reposi- Univ. 454 pp. $30 tory of the sensory images of bygone New- foundland: villagers in the crabapple light of According to some of its more legend-prone dawn, dressing fish for salting, the odor of members, the Percy family in America was codfish blowing down from the flats. But The descended from Harry Percy, the Hotspur of Bird Artist is, foremost, a novel for the ear. Shakespeare's Henry IV. Even if they have Norman favors pared-down sentences and been deluded in that belief, the saga of this broken dialogue, most of which convey some talented and tormented southern family be- odd, savory turn of phrase that salts-her- trays a grand Shakespearian sweep. The six metically seals-the story in its own packing generations of Percys that Wy,att-Brown of language. This language, at once simplified studies enact a tale full of sound and fury- and oddly poetic, creates the temporal of senators, military heroes, and literary rhythms of an earlier time, and that time, that writers, of honor and bigamy, of eminence different rhythm in human relationships, is and madness and early death. the real subject of this novel. In his earlier Southern Honor: Ethics and Curiously, the most lauded novel of 1993- Behavior in the Old South (19821, Wyatt- Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-, National Book Brown, a historian at the University of Award-winning The Shipping News-is also Florida, established himself as the authority set in Newfoundland. This may be more than on the traditional values of the South. Here a coincidence. Literature is filled with ideal- he focuses on the Percy family-a clan he ized, semifictionalcountries-Blake' s Golgon- likens in some ways to the Yankee ooza, Yeats's Byzantium, Rilke's Russia Adamses-because in it he finds southern (glimpsed from the speeding train compart- culture writ small. If myth making, the eth- ment of a six-month visit)-that, at best, seem ics of honor, and the pathology of depres- like places you might look up in an atlas. In sion obsessed the Percys generation after this comedy about a semirecluse, a remote generation, they have characterized south- land, and a slower-paced era, Howard Nor- ern preoccupations at large. Examining this man has also created a mythic, visionary extended group of relatives, beginning with country, a weather and terrain of his own, Charles in the late 18th century, Wyatt- where human society is reduced to essentials, Brown anatomizes history in its smallest people are stoic and humorous, and decency particulars, showing how general cultural and integrity are the meaning behind every- values are recapitulated in families and in- thing. Most characters in The Bird Artist-ex- dividuals and at what cost. cept Fabian's mother in her ill-fated adultery The House of Percy illuminates, above all, with the lighthouse keeper-have learned the the process of writing, of how for many hard lesson that Fabian's drawing instructor Percys creative expression eased the pain of has drummed into him. "Granted, cormorants an inherited predisposition toward melan- can look eerily like a fossil bird come alive in choly. Writing allowed brilliant Percy your harbor, there," the instructor says of women, such as Sarah Dorsey (1829-79), re- Fabian's draftsmanship. "Nonetheless, they lease from the confines of southern culture are worthy of everything but your poor draw- when there were few other avenues of es- ings of them. Bird art must derive its power cape. Both the father and the grandfather of

90 WQ SPRING 1995 the novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) commit- style for a language that no one conversed in. In ted suicide, but Walker wrestled a similar large measure, Alter argues, this made' possible depression to fruitful issue in The Movie- the birth of Zionism and the modern tongue. Goer, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Alter's essay on the nusakh offers not just Syndrome. In such novels he resolved his literary analysis but restored history. Even ambiguous feelings toward two father-fig- in Israel, few know that modern Hebrew lit- ures-his guardian-cousin, Will (a poet and erature did not result from Zionism but pre- memoirist), and his real father, LeRoy-by ceded it. In other essays, Alter analyzes inditing rather than indicting them. Rarely modern Israeli novelists such as S. Y. Agnon have the interconnections among family his- and David Grossman and the poet Yehuda tory, regional history, depression, and creativ- Amichai, to discover how an ancient mode ity stood more clearly delineated than in of expression has been converted to modern, Wyatt-Brown's efforts to trace how an Ameri- colloquial literary uses. Indeed, Alter sug- can family-whether descended from the gests, if "postmodern" literature typically Northumberland earls or not-turned itself unites different, even discordant perspec- into an aristocracy of conscience and talent. tives, voices, and eras in one work, then Hebrew, in which ordinary conversations can carry echoes of Ecclesiastes or the Book HEBREW AND MODERNITY. By Robert of Judges, makes a surprisingly congenial Alter. Univ. of Ind. 192 pp. $27.95 medium for postmodern poetry and fiction.

The rebirth of the Hebrew language is popularly considered a tale at once thrilling and Philosophy & Religion weird: an ancient tongue, lost as a living language two millennia ago, fossilized in lit- THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH: J. G. urgy, was resurrected from the dead by a Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irratio- few enthusiasts on the soil of modern Israel. nalism. By Isaiah Berlin. Farrar, Strauss. But as Alter, a professor of Hebrew and 144 pp. $21 comparative languages at the University of California at Berkeley, makes clear, the story Johann George Hamann (1730-88) is an 18th- is more comvlicated and. if vossible, century ~ermanthinker that nobody, or at even weirder. He tells of a lan- least nobody since Goethe, appears page that, far from having to remember. The very titles of his died out of daily usage, works hint why. IA New Apol- lived "a flickering intense ogy for the Letter H, for ex- half-life" through all the ample, Hamann attacked a years of Diaspora, respected German theolo- which began in 586 B.c., gian who had suggested a language in which omitting- the letter h wher- Jews continued uninter- ever it was not pro- ruptedly to compose nounced. Hamann, to the not just prayers but 1 contrary, celebrated the secular literature and ghostly h as embodying poetry. Oddest of all, the unpredictable, the ele- during the 18th century a ment of fantasy in God's group of dedicated Yid- world, the beauty of every- dish-speaking writers 7 thing incomprehensible. Giv- called the nusakh began to en the nature of his preoccupa- compose realistic novels in He- tions, the puzzle is not why brew, inventing a conversational Hamann was forgotten but why Sir

BOOKS 91 Isaiah Berlin, the Magus of Oxford, the octo- Contemporay Affairs genarian historian of ideas, has devoted a small book to reviving him. BLACKS AND JEWS: ALLIANCES AND At the very moment Diderot and his fellow ARGUMENTS. Ed. by Paul Berman. Encyclopedists in Paris were erecting their edi- Delacorte Press. 303 pp. $22.50 fice of rational knowledge, in Konigsberg JEWS AND BLACKS: Let the Healing Hamann was advocating the idiosyncratic over Begin. By Cornel West and Michael Lerner. the systematic, the bizarre over the daily, and the Grosset/Putnam. 226 pp. $24.95 scarcely believable over the commonly accepted. And it is exactly this contrariness that Of all "emigrant groups" in America, blacks interests Berlin. Hamann was the first European and Jews have come closest to sharing a com- thinker to formulate a rebuttal of the Enlighten- mon sociological experience: both historically ment that was not grounded on strictly religious were victims of persecutions, and both mi- premises. His fundamental insight was that the norities were long regarded as outcasts by the supposed universality of Enlightenment ratio- dominant culture. For much of this century nality tends not only to deny religious faith but American Jews and blacks co-operated in an to negate the validity of what all individuals unofficial alliance, one that began with the uniquely see, hear, and feel for themselves. Con- supporting links between W. E. B. Du Bois's sequently, Hamann opposed science, and even The Crisis and Abraham Cahan's Jewish Daily common sense, even when they produced use- Forward and continued through the close ful results, fearing their suffocating effect upon friendship of those moral prophets, Abraham the individual's autonomy. Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr. At times Hamann comes off sounding Why, then, since the late 1960s, did black-Jew- like an early D. H. Lawrence, offering the ish relations go so bad? same heady cocktail of antiscience, roman- ticism, and individualism. However, readers of this small volume will likely find Hamann's intelligence less intriguing than Berlin's. Berlin's complexity of mind, neither strictly Enlightenment nor "Counter- Enlightenment" (a word he coined), enables him to hold contradictory ideas simulta- neously. He thinks that Hamann's irratio- nalist spiritual vision (so unlike Berlin's skepticism) does possess "intrinsic value," even though Hamann carried it into a fanaticism that imperils social and political life. Hamann's brand of fanaticism-a dangerous mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti- Semitism, fideism, and populism-would grow over the next two centuries "until it finally reacheid1 a point of violent hysteria in Austro-German racism and National So- cialism." Yet it is for his positive as well as his negative qualities that "Hamann repays study," Berlin concludes. "He struck the first blow against the quantified world; his attack was often ill-judged, but he raised some of the greatest issues of our time by refusing to accept their advent."

92 WQ SPRING 1995 Paul Berman's anthology helps answer blacks," he writes, "they would be em- that question. Its essays show how the bracing a worldview that is indistinguish- black-Jewish consensus of the civil rights able from the rest of American life-so in era (perhaps romanticized even then) that case, why bother to stay Jewish, with broke down amid acrimony over affirma- all the attendant hassles, risks, and sepa- tive action, black nationalism, and the fear rations from others?" of crime. Black and Jewish intellectuals in the 1960s began to articulate diverging visions. Set forth here are the classically ART LESSONS: Learning from the Rise and inflammatory essays-Norman Podhor- Fall of Public Arts Funding. By Alice Goldfarb etz's "My Negro Problem-and Ours" Marquis. Basic. 304 pp. $25 (1963), James Baldwin's "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" Thirty years after its founding in 1965, the (1967), and Cynthia Ozick's "Literary debates over the National Endowment for the Blacks and Jews" (1972)-that give a star- Arts (NEA) have settled into a familiar pat- tling sense of how many steps it took to tern. Conservatives condemn NEA-funded reach the current state of perplexed re- projects as alternately too elitist or too com- sentment and hostility. Baldwin, for in- promised by popular culture. They object stance, concluded his essay conciliatorily: most strenuously when taxpayers' money is "If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my oppression did not ennoble me. . . ." This tone did not last. More de- pressing than their essays themselves are the 1993 afterwards appended by Podhoretz and Ozick, in which they come America's Biggest across as dramatically more one-sided Selection of and unforgiving than when they wrote the essays. Bargain In Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, Cornel West, a professor of African- American studies at Harvard University, Books Overstocks, Remainders, Imports and Reprints and Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, from all major publishers. Books recently priced at parlay their friendship into a dialogue $20, $30, $40 -now as low as $3.95, $4.95, $5.95. about prejudice, American culture, and Thousands of titles, from yesterday's best sellers to books you never knew existed. their perceptions of each other's histories. Over 40 subject areas: Biography, History, Fiction, They begin with personal experiences. Sports, Literature, Politics, Health, Nature and more. West grew up tough and unruly, beating Fast Shipment, normally within 48 hours, and a up white students for lunch money. moneyback------guarantee. Please send me your Free Catalog of Bargain Books. Lerner was just the kind of brainy white I kid who got beat up. At one point Lerner 1 I Name 1 entertains a paranoid fantasy about black I I anti-Semitism massively, brutally out of I Address I control. Ultimately, though, Lerner offers I city I a liberal, if peculiar, reason for why Jews I Zip I must shun antiblack sentiments. "If Jews ! HAMILTON Box 15-29, Falls Village CT 06031 , can turn their backs on the suffering of

BOOKS 93 used to support works they find offensive, such petition from commercial media with huge ad- as the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. vertising budgets and an eye to equally huge Meanwhile, the endowment's liberal defenders profits. The results will hardly appeal to moral- argue that, under the NEA, the arts have helped ists. MTV, for example, has certainly done more to reverse decades of urban decline and to bring to disseminate vulgar taste than the worst NEA self-esteem to the disadvantaged. To the left of projects. Rather than write yet another chronicle that left, many avant-garde artists simply view of its scandals, Marquis might have more prof- NEA funding as their due; denial of a fellowship, itably entered the debate about what stands in in their opinion, amounts to government censor- the way of a reformed NEA promoting a ship. With a new, conservative Congress threat- healthier cultural life in America. ening to put the NEA out of its misery, the time is ripe for a thoughtful analysis of the American experiment in public arts funding. IN THE BELGIAN CHATEAU: The Spirit Marquis, the biographer of the Museum of and Culture of a European Society in an Age Modern Art's Alfred Ban (1989), does not proof Change. By Renee C. Fox. Ivan R. Dee. vide it. Art Lessons is a relentlessly negative por- 339 pp. $28.50 trait of financial sloppiness, cronyism, personal scandal, and tolerance for mediocre art by ad- Fox, a sociologist at the University of Pennsyl- ministrators who love to proclaim the arts' so- vania, helped to create the disciplines of bio- cial value. In Marquis's telling, the NEA was ethics and the sociology of medicine in such born of a coalition of Rockefeller Republicans, path-breaking works as Experiments Perilous Kennedy liberals, and philanthropic business- (1974) and Spare Parts (1992). During the late men who saw themselves as missionaries bring- 1950s, when she visited Belgium to do research, ing a European-style culture to a benighted she discovered, beyond her professional inter- populace stupefied by sports, television, and ests, a culture that intrigued her. For the next 35 other mass media. Thirty years later, she claims, years, she kept returning in an attempt to fathom the NEA has become a hopelessly inefficient, what within that "conventionally 'bourgeois' so- corrupt bureaucracy, enslaved to a constituency ciety" corresponded to some "buried strange- its own funds have helped to create while indif- ness" within herself. ferent to the public at large. Despite its founders' History explains some of Belgium's mys- missionary zeal, the audience for "high art" re- tique. In 1831, following the revolt of the Catho- mains as limited as it was at the end of the lic provinces of the southern Netherlands, the Eisenhower era. The time has come, she con- great powers of Europe created a new country. cludes, to abolish the NEA. The united Kingdom of Belgium brought to- Marquis's critique may hold true for certain gether two distinct and potentially divisive lin- big cities-America's half-dozen "cultural capi- guistic and ethnic communities, the French- tals" located mainly on the two coasts. The arts speaking Walloons and the Flemish. What held in such places would be little different if the Belgians together, in addition to external NEA did not exist. But with her penchant for threats,were collective sentiments and symbols scandals, she ignores NEA-sponsored projects at (which they usually deny they have)-cornmon the local level-the repertory companies, exhi- associations not simply with church and mon- bitions, children's theaters, and art education archy but with mundane objects, from the red programs that have changed the face of the arts brick of their houses to the Congolese rubber in America's middle-sized cities and small plants within them, the latter hinting at former towns. Moreover, Marquis's unbounded attack colonial greatness. Indeed, it is the extraordi- gives little thought to the overall predicament of nary, almost numinous sense of the house, the art in a market society. Opera, the symphony, home-understandable in a country where se- and art museums will likely survive with pri- curity has been endangered in repeated inva- vate patronage, while all else, from folk artists sions-that strikes a deep chord within Fox. "It to avant-garde composers, will succumb to com- was inside the Belgium house," she writes, "that

94 WQ SPRING 1995 I found Belgium and both the professional and the personal meaning of my search." Ironically, Fox's quest for the essence of Bel- gian identity took place during years when profound internal changes threatened to dissolve the social and cultural glue that has held this "artificial state" intact. Belgium's international- ized postwar economy, the fading memory of its wartime experience, and the loss of its colonies are all working to erode a once-strong sense of national solidarity. In sensible, bourgeois Bel- gium, one now enters an Alice in Wonderland world where everything happens in double. Each town has separate shops for Flemish and Walloon customers; a street postbox has two slots, one for letters in French, the other for those in Flemish; and activists in Flanders are even pushing for a separate system of social security. The beloved country Fox examined threatened to disintegrate under her very microscope. His- tory kindly intervened, however, to provide her study with a happy endmg. The unexpected death of King Baudoin on July 31,1993, provoked an outpouring of mourning that transcended particu- laristic loyalties, suggesting that all Belgians were a national family once again. The question, though, hundreds of monkeys, some humans became in- remains: Apes Baudoin, Ie deluge? fected. Fortunately, life is not (or not always) a Stephen King movie, and this strain proved to be the single variety of Ebola that does not harm Science & Technology humans. The Hot Zone, written by New Yorker contributor Preston, has topped the best-seller THE HOT ZONE. By Richard Preston. lists and inspired the movie, Outbreak. Yet even Random House. 300 pp. $23 critics who dismiss it as simply a nonfiction THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging thriller acknowledge that it has drawn wide- Diseases in a World Out of Balance. By spread attention to the "newly emerging" vi- Laurie Garrett. Farrar, Straus. 750 pp. $25 ruses and bacteria that are changing our very understanding of the modem world. In 1993, Stephen King spooked American tele- Plagues and pandemics were, quite simply, vision audiences with The Stand-an eerie, not supposed to happen in the hygienic late 20th seemingly implausible story about a deadly vi- century. During the early 1960s, scientists pro- rus that quickly annihilates most of the human claimed that they had all but won the war species. A year later, King described the nonfic- against infectious diseases. Research biologists tional Hot Zone as "one of the most horrifying tended to focus on what was happening under things I've ever read." The central drama in The their microscopes and ignored what was chang- Hot Zone occurs in a "monkey house" in Reston, ing in their own human world. In The Coming Virginia (19 miles from Washington, D.C.), Plague, medical journalist Garrett connects Ebola where animals imported for scientific experi- and other diseases such as AIDS, Lassa fever, mentation are routinely quarantined. In 1989, and the "flesh-eating" streptococcus bacteria before scientists at the "monkey house" realized that killed Muppet creator Jim Henson to the that the extremely lethal Ebola virus was killing larger political, social, and ecological landscape

BOOKS 95 that promotes their spread. Late-20th-century enings (1983) and The Man WhoMistook His Wife humankind, she argues, lives in a habitat unlike for a Hat (1985), Sacks, not content with describ- that of any of our ancestors. Air travel allows vi- ing neurological illnesses, vividly evokes the ruses from Africa (such as HIV) to "jump" to personal experience of living within their effects. other continents in a matter of hours. In Third Sacks has described himself as a neuro-anthro- World cities, malnutrition combines with pologist but actually more resembles a physi- wretched sanitation to turn urban citizens into cian making house calls at the far border of hu- human petri dishes. And the destruction of ecosys- man experience. terns affects not only tropical rain forests but even Sacks calls his case studies or tales "paradoxi- Connecticut, where deforestation, by driving tick- cal" because the patients he describes have suc- bearing feral animals into the suburbs, has greatly ceeded not in spite but almost because of ex- increased the incidence of Lyme disease. traordinary dysfunctions.He describes an artist At rnidcentury, during the heyday of medi- who, having lost his color vision in a car acci- cal infallibility, one lone dissenter wrote, "Ev- dent, now paints striking works in black and erybody knows that pestilences have a way of white through a heightened sense of their con- recurring in the world." The dissenting voice trast. A surgeon with Tourette's syndrome- was Albert Camus's, in his novel The Plague characterized by oddly pitched vocal outbursts (1948). Almost 50 years later, many people now and arms flinging abruptly-manages, while wonder how close the world is to the "coining operating, to control all manifestations of the plagueu-say, an airborne version of HIV. No disease. An autistic zoologist finds that autism one, including Garrett, can say, but she presents permits her insight into animal behavior, but a frightening scenario of world health profes- around human actions she is perplexed enough sionals ill prepared to identify and control dis- to feel like "an anthropologist on Mars." Despite eases that nimbly spread, evolve, and become the neurological malfunctions that caused their resistant to drugs. Garrett reminds her readers conditions, Sacks writes, these people have how the early reluctance of governments to adapted into "alternate states of being, other grapple quickly with AIDS contributed to its forms of life, no less human for being different." rapid spread. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control The "anthropologist on Mars," though, has recently created a model "emerging infections more aptly applies to Sacks himself. Ever since program"; still, Garrett wonders whether what any Arthur Rimbaud attempted to "systematically one country does can enable it to "stave off or sur- disorder the senses," literature has endeav- vive the next plague." During the 1960s, people ored to resee the common world in new and such as Marshall McLuhan predicted that the strange ways. To this end, Franz Kafka often world would soon be one big village. For viruses, wrote in the guise of an animal-a mouse or at least, the prediction has come true. gorilla or dog; Francis Ponge (and numerous other writers) invented fictitious countries where familiar practices and psychology were AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS: turned inside-out. Sacks outdoes such fic- Seven Paradoxical Tales. By Oliver Sacks. tional contrivances, however, when he recre- Knopf. 315 pp. $24 ates the inner world of an idiot savant who sees ordinary objects as numbers or that of an Ask not what disease the person has, but rather alcoholic, suffering from a complete inability what person the disease has. By following this to remember, who lives in a hellish, endless maxim (learned from his parents), neurologist present. In Oliver Sacks, science seems to have Sacks has brought a degree of humanity to pa- fulfilled literature's old dream-to show that tients otherwise regarded as freaks and dis- life is not only stranger than we imagine but missed by his colleagues as hopeless. In Awak- even stranger than we can imagine.

96 WQ SPRING 1995 POETRY BEN JONSON

Selected and introduced by Anthony Hecht

hat maker and breaker of literary reputations, T. S. Eliot, began an essay on Ben Jonson (1572-1637) this way: "The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to beT damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries-this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval. . . . No critic has made him seem pleasurable or even interesting." After an opening like that, surely we expect to lean back and see justice belatedly done. But that's not quite what we get. Eliot, the restorer of life to John Donne, the literary assassin of Shelley, has nothing to say of Jonson as a poet but speaks of him only as a playwright (though he does pay complimen- tary attention to Jonson's dramatic verse). And Eliot goes on to point out that Jonson has been unfavorably compared not only with Shakespeare but with Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, Francis Beaumont, and John Hetcher. Eliot's essay did little if anything to alter public indifference to Jonson, either as playwright or poet, and his failure simply confirmed the supposed soundness of that indifference.Jonson continued to be regarded by those who bothered to read him as a man of highly specialized sensibilities: learned, haughty, condescending, impersonal, classical, envious, and aloof. In brief, forbidding and unpleasant. " 'Twas an ingenious remarque of my Lady Hoskins, that B. J. never writes of Love, or if he does, does it not naturally," reports the 17th-century writer John Aubrey. What poet can hope to engage readers when handicapped by deficiencies in so central a poetic subject? But Jonson deserves better of us. He is not as copious or versatile as Shakespeare, but at least one of his songs, "Queene and Huntresse," is as lovely as any song of Shakespeare's, and his musicianship (by which I mean his management of meter, rhyme, and stanza) is Shakespeare's equal. His 'Charme" ("The owle is abroad, the bat, and the toad") could fit seamlessly into an incantation of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, while some of his epi- grams are wonderfully funny. Teaching Jonson's poems to undergraduates over the years has shown me what it is in his work that keeps the general readership at bay. Students come to him knowing only "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and have been chilled by the artificial ingenuity, the remote formality, of that song. Renaissance English diction and spelling make the poems seem alien, stilted exercises devoid of humanity, so that when Jonson is being funny, as in "The

POETRY 97 Dreame," they completely miss the whole tone and tenor of the poem.

Or scorne, or pittie on me take, I must a true Relation make, I am undone to night; Love in a subtile Dreame disguis'd, Hath both my heart and me surpriz'd, Whom never yet he durst attempt t'awake; Nor will he tell me for whose sake He did me the Delight, Or spite But leaves me to inquire, In all my wild desire, Of sleepe againe, who was his Aid, And sleepe so guiltie and afraid, As since he dares not come within my sight.

Well, you can see what daunts those students, who are not enamored of allegorical figures. In this poem, both "Love" and "Sleep" are personi- fied. Obscurely those students sense that some sort of plot is going on, but though "surpriz'd and "guiltie and afraid are intriguing, it's hard to care much about events involving ghostly personifications. But when it is pointed out to a class that this poem is about being awakened by what parents used to call "a nocturnal emission," and what boys referred to as "a wet dream," the whole poem suddenly falls into place. It becomes personal, even confessional in a good-humored and unpretentious way. Jonson becomes more human.

nd yet his art is also always cunning. In his celebrated epitaph for the child actor Salathiel Pavy, the poem is set down upon the page so as visibly to alternate between long and short lines. The short lines are uniform in length, each closing with a femi- nineA ending; but the long ones, closing as they do with masculine endings, are not uniform. Their metrical deviation, however, is not random or ca- sual. They alternate between seven and eight syllables, the odd-numbered long lines containing seven syllables, the even-numbered ones, eight. The shorter of these long lines elide their opening syllables (the absent syllable is removed from the front, not the end, of the line), thereby providing a subtle and measured syncopation, all the while rhyming a b a b in quatrain form throughout. It might be argued that such syncopation reflects the asymmetrical imbalance belonging to the subject of a child who so successfully plays the roles of old men that the Fates themselves are deceived and summon him prematurely to his appointed end. To be sure, Jonson writes much stately and occasional verse. But he can be engaging in many moods-in his wrath as well as his humor, and the two are closely linked. In general, he is far more various than is commonly recognized. No small part of this variety lies in the fact that his poems are by no means all spoken (or sung) in propria persona. Quite apart from his plays, he is a lively inventor of characters of both sexes.

98 WQ SPRING 199 5 From Epigrammes From The Forrest

VI v To Alchymists Song. To Celia

If all you boast of your great art be true; Come my Celia, let us prove, Sure, willing povertie lives most in you. While we may, the sports of love; Time will not be ours, for ever: He, at length, our good will sever. Spend not then his guifts in vaine. Sunnes, that set, may rise againe: But if once we loose this light, XI11 'Tis, with us, perpetual1 night. To Doctor Empirick Why should we deferre our joyes? Fame, and rumor are but toyes. When men a dangerous disease did scape, Cannot we delude the eyes Of old, they gave a cock to Ksculape; Of a few poore houshold spyes? Let me give two: that doubly am got free, Or his easier eares beguile, From my diseases danger, and from thee. So removed by our wile? 'Tis no sinne, loves fruit to steale, But the sweet theft to reveale: To be taken, to be seene, These have crimes accounted beene. cxx Epitaph on S.P. [Salathiel Pavyl a child of Q. El. [Queen Elizabeth's] Chappel From The Under-Wood

Weepe with me all you that read I1 This little storie: A Celebration of Charis in And know, for whom a teare you shed, Ten Lyrick Peeces Death's selfe is sorry. 'Twas a child, that so did thrive 1.HIS EXCUSE FOR LOVING In grace, and feature, As Heaven and Nature seem'd to strive Let it not your wonder move, Which own'd the creature. Lesse your laughter: that I love. Yeeres he numbred scarse thirteene Though I now write fiftie yeares, When Fates turn'd cruell, I have had, and have my Peeres; Yet three fill'd Zodiackes had he beene Poets, though devine are men: The stages jewell; Some have lov'd as old agen. And did act (what now we mone) And it is not alwayes face, Old men so duely, Clothes, or Fortune gives the grace; As, sooth, the Parcae thought him one, Or the feature, or the youth: He plai'd so truely. But the Language, and the Truth, So, by error, to his fate With the Ardor, and the Passion, They all consented; Gives the Lover weight, and fashion. But viewing him since (alas, toa late) If you then will read the Storie, They have repented. First, prepare you to be sorie, And have sought (to give new birth) That you never knew till now, In bathes to steepe him; Either whom to love, or how: But, being so much too good for earth, But be glad, as soone with me, Heaven vowes to keepe him. When you know, that this is she,

POETRY 99 Of whose Beautie it was sung, XXIII She shall make the old man young, An Ode. To himselfe Keepe the middle age at stay, And let nothing high decay, Where do'st thou carelesse Lie Till she be the reason why, Buried in ease and sloth? All the world for love may die. Knowledge, that sleepes, doth die; And this Securitie, It is the common Moath, That eats on wits, and Arts, and oft destroyes them both. VII A Nymphs Passion Are all th'Aonian springs Dri'd up? lyes Thespia wast? I love, and he loves me againe, Doth Clarius Harp want strings, Yet dare I not tell who; That not a Nymph now sings! For if the Nymphs should know my Swaine, Or droop they as disgrac't, I feare they'd love him too; To see their Seats and Bowers by chattring Yet if it be not knowne, Pies defac't? The pleasure is as good as none, For that's a narrow joy is but our owne. If hence thy silence be, As 'tis too just a cause; I'le tell, that if they be not glad, Let this thought quicken thee, They yet may evnie me: Minds that are great and free, But then if I grow jealous madde, Should not on fortune pause, And of them pittied be, Tis crowne enough to vertue still, her owne It were a plague 'bove scorne, applause. And yet it cannot be forborne, Unlessemy heart would as my thought be torne. What though the greedie Frie He is if they can find him, faire, Be taken with false Baytes And fresh and fragrant too, Of worded Balladrie, As Summers sky, or purged Ayre, And thinke it Poesie? And lookes as Lillies doe, They die with their conceits, That are this morning blowne, And only pitious scorne, upon their folly Yet, yet I doubt he is not knowne, waites. And feare muchmore, that moreof him be showne. Then take in hand thy Lyre, But he hath eyes so round, and bright, Strike in thy proper straine, As make away my doubt, With Japhets lyne, aspire Where Love may all his Torches light, Sols Chariot for new fire, Though hate had put them out; To give the world againe: But then t'increase my feares, Who aided him, will thee, the issue of Joves What Nymph so e're his voyce but heares braine. Will be my Rivall, though she have but eares.

I'le tell no more and yet I love, And since our Daintie age And he loves me; yet no Cannot endure reproofe, One un-becomming thought doth move Make not thy selfe a Page, From either heart, I know; To that strumpet the Stage, But so exempt from blame, But sing high and aloofe, As it would be to each a fame: Safe from the wolves black jaw, and the dull If Love, or feare, would let me tell his name. Asses hoofe.

100 WQ SPRING 1995 LXXI Lay thy bow of pearle apart, To the Right Honourable, the Lord High And thy cristall-shining quiver; Treasurer of England. An Epistle Give unto the flying hart Mendicant. 1631 Space to breathe, how short soever: Thou that mak'st a day of night, MY LORD: Goddesse, excellently bright. Poore wretched states, prest by extremities, Are faine to seeke for succours, and supplies Of Princes aides, or good mens Charities. XXXII Disease, the Enemie, and his Ingineeres, Song Wants, with the rest of his conceal'd compeeres, Have cast a trench about mee, now five yeares. from The Gypsies Metamorphos'd

And made those strong approaches, by False The faery beame upon you, braies, The starres to glister on you: Reduicts, Halfe-moones, Home-workes, and such A Moone of light, close wayes, In the noone of night, The Muse not peepes out, one of hundred dayes; Till the Fire-drake hath o're gon you.

But lyes block'd up, and straighwed, narrow'd in, The wheele of fortune guide you, Fix'd to the bed, and boords, unlike to win The Boy with the bow beside you Health, or scarce breath, as she had never bin. Runne aye in the way, Till the bird of day, Unlesse some saving-Honour of the Crowne, And the luckier lot betide you. Dare thinke it, to relieve, no lesse renowne, A Bed-rid Wit, then a besieged Towne.

XVII Charme Miscellaneous from The Masque of Queenes The owle is abroad, the bat, and the toad, IV And so is the cat-a-mountayne, Hymn to Diana The ant, and the mole sit both in a hole, from Cynthias Revells And frog peepes out o'the fountayne; The dogs, they doe bay, and the timbrels play, Queene, and Huntresse, chaste, and faire, The spindle is now a turning; Now the Sunne is laid to sleepe, The moone it is red, and the starres are fled, Seated, in thy silver chaire, But all the skie is a burning: State in wonted manner keepe: The ditch is made, and our nayles the spade, Hesperus intreats thy light, With pictures full, of waxe, and of wooll; Goddesse, excellently bright. Their livers I sticke, with needles quicke; There lacks but the bloud, to make up the floud. Earth, let not thy envious shade Quickly, Dame, then, bring your part in, Dare it selfe to interpose; Spurre, spurre, upon little Martin, Cynthias shining orbe was made Merrily, merrily, make him saile, Heaven to cleere, when day did close: A worme in his mouth, and a thorne in's taile, Blesse us then with wished sight, Fire above, and fire below, Goddesse, excellently bright. With a whip i'your hand, to make him goe.

POETRY 101 Music AGAINSTGRAVITY

INe all derive different, private meanings from the music that delights us, but the recurrence of certain musical patterns in the works of great composers hints at meanings of a more universal character.

BY ALAN NEIDLE AND MARGARET FREEMAN 'Madame X installed a piano in the Alps."-~imbaud, 1886

n old man not far from death lies in his bed in a nursing home in New England. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas enters the room with a tape recorder. He places earphones on the gaunt head and turns the machine on. "Great! DAMN FINE WORK!" the old man declares, comingA alive as he sings along with the music. He is Carl Ruggles, American composer (1876-1971), in the last of his 95 years. He is hearing his own composition, Sun-Treader, whose title was inspired by the epithet that Robert Browning bestowed upon Percy Bysshe Shelley. The work begins with jagged leaps across large dissonant intervals. In about 30 seconds, led by the brass, the music surges, to the accom- paniment of pounding timpani, upward across nearly four octaves. Truly a giant is bestriding the planets. Ruggles, bedridden, is taking a journey across vast spaces. Thomas recalls what Ruggles said at the end of the visit: "I'm composing, you know, right now. But my body. . . it is totally diseased. But I'm composing. Every day. First there are horns . . . here flutes! And strings-molto rubato, rubato! . . . Now don't go feeling sorry. I don't hang around this place, you know. Hell, each day I go out and make the universe anew-all over!" Each piece of music is a journey. The idea is not simply a metaphor. The essence of music is motion. As a piece begins, you are in one place. As it comes to an end, some time later, you are in another. You have been somewhere and you have had an experience along the way, perhaps illuminating or even glorious, like Sun-Treader bestriding the heavens, or perhaps routine and tedious-but an experience, nonetheless. A journey. Sun-Treader is a journey of liberation, a surmounting of forces that pull human beings down. Our ability to respond to such forces is of absorbing interest to us from infancy to old age. The first unaided steps of a child from one loving set of arms to another is an event of unrea- soning exhilaration. We are inspired by those who haul themselves up by rope to a pinnacle-and even more by those who remain upright when tyranny beats down. The dream of staying aloft despite everything that would pull us down remains with us until no more dreams are possible. Composers over the centuries have repeatedly written music evok- ing the great theme of mankind's struggle against gravity. They have done so in a variety of ways, but perhaps no more strikingly than in their de- ployment of four distinctive patterns: climbing, descending, rise-to-fall, and floating. Of course, there are many possible ways of using rhythm and meter to move a composition forward, but these patterns illustrate most dramatically how music suggests possible responses to the forces of gravity. Looking at these four patterns, as employed by some of the greater Western composers, may help us draw closer to an understanding of how music communicates meaning.

MUSIC 103 limbing. In the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) there are themes that explode with volcanic energy. In the first movement of one of his early works, the Piano Sonata in D Major, op. 10, no. 3, a version of the main theme, after taking four stepsc down, surges rapidly upward in 16 steps across nearly three octaves. The steps are syncopated octaves until the last three, which are unison double- octave blows, fortissimo. That this sort of eruption is not solely the product of youthful exuberance is evident when we look at much later music, such as the opening of the "Ghost" Trio, op. 70, where piano, violin, and cello as- cend rapidly and violently in a very similar fashion. Nor is the phenomenon of Beethoven's themes straining upward limited to rapid and furious movements. The slow opening of the familiar Piano Sonata, op. 13, ("Path6tiquer') begins with a brief motif, six notes that rise in an insistent dotted rhythm. After a pause the motif is repeated, but higher. Then twice more, each time higher. The "Path6tique1' epitomizes Beethoven's propensity for struggling upward. After each declamation of the opening motif there is a choicewhere to go--and each time Beethoven hoists the music higher. Examples of this could be multiplied almost ad infiniturn. Of the 30 mature sonatas, the opening lines of 21 have motifs that are immediately repeated. In 18 of these 21, the repeated motif is hauled upward. If we extend the tabulation to second and third themes, as well as development passages where upward steps are especially prevalent, and do the same with second, third, and fourth movements, we will find that in the piano sonatas alone Beethoven propels us upward hundreds of times. Adding in 16 quartets, 11 piano trios, five cello sonatas, 10 violin sonatas, five piano concertos, and nine symphonies, it is safe to say that the prodigious Beethoven can take us through literally thousands of experiences of pressing, unstoppably, upward. Beethoven pushed beyond even the limits imposed by the normal pitch of instruments. An insight of the late German conductor Hermann Scherchen reveals how the composer, in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, raised the piccolo's highest note by accompanying it with the pitchless ring- ing and shimmering of triangle and cymbals. He also "climbed downward by deepening bassoon notes with the beat of the bass drum. Beethoven's feats of climbing are not confined to small, though sym- bolically large, gestures such as expanding the range of the piccolo. He created entire mountains of his own to climb. An example is the late Quartet in A Minor, op. 132. Its first eight bars even resemble the shape of a mountain. They consist mostly of half notes piled on top of each other in an arch, but held to pianissimo-the white outline of a mountain in the distance. The overall architecture of five movements is like a massif. The central, or third, movement is itself a huge structure of contrasting blocks

Alan Neidle, a former State Department official and an amateur pianist, is the author of Fables for the Nuclear Age (1989) and is currently completing a modern Gulliver's Travels.Margaret Freeman, a professor emerita of music at the College of William & Mary, specializes in the two English musical renaissances and the relationships between literature and music. She is now working on a study of the musical life of Samuel Butler, and is collaborating with Neidle on a book about musical journeys. Copyright 01995 by Alan Neidle and Margaret Freeman.

104 WQ SPRING 1995 of sound. It consists of a "Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Deity," heard in varied form three times, which alternates with vigorous interludes called "Feeling New Strength." This immense movement constitutes the core and dome of the mountain.

great mountain brings together violent contrasts-fragile crys- tals of snow and blocks of granite, blinding light and impen- etrable mystery. Those who attempt to conquer it often experience pain and struggle amid exaltation, life a step from death. Beethoven'sA ascent into this world in the quartet begins in the first movement.

MUSIC 105 It encompasses, in its 10-minute duration, some 17 thematic elements and about 60 more-or-less abrupt shifts between contrasting blocks of music. This abundance of contrasts includes a solemn introductory passage, rushing arpeggios, sinuous and lyrical melodies, and pounding dotted rhythms. The energy these contrasts generate will lift listeners upward through the large, scherzolike second movement, which begins with ascending steps, and on to the third, the dome of the mountain, where contrasts are greatest-solemn hymns remindful of the nearness of death, and vigorous interludes vibrant with life. In the glare of the mountain's summit this most fundamental of all contrastsÃ‘deat next to life-is confronted and reconciled. Conquered.

ow? What takes place on Beethoven's summit to bring this about? Surprisingly, it is the opposite of what one expects. Beethoven does not reconcile opposing elements by blending them, by sanding the edges. Instead, he makes them as extreme asH possible. The opening hymn of thanksgiving consists solely of passages of quarter notes and half notes, which progress at one of the slowest possible paces in music, molto adagio, and which are mostly piano. The contrasting section, "Feeling New Strength," includes a dazzling spray of notes, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, trills, and even grace notes attached to thirty-seconds, which move at a sprightly andante, leap up and down across octaves, and frequently and abruptly shift from loud to soft. The contrasting sections, all five of them, are presented in the way most calculated to assert and irn- pose their different character-as large blocks of music, each four or five minutes long. Why do we call this a reconciliation rather than a complete fracturing? Because it is a coming to terms with the harshest dichotomy of our existence, death alongside life. How? By exposing it fully, by not shrinking from any aspect of it, by exploring all of its ramifications. When this has been accomplished through Beethoven's massive and teeming contrasts, we come down from the mountain more in awe than in terror. Having once stared unflinch- ingly into mankind's profoundest dilemma, we know that we can do so again. Is this not a reconciliation? Beethoven did not create and climb his mountain for the sake of evasion. The phenomenon that we know of as "Beethoven" is the product of two large ingredients-a composer possessing gigantic creative powers and the intersection of his efforts with a special moment in history. He created his works at the turbulent confluence of two great cultural forces-the waning of Enlightenment thinking and the emergence of Romantic feeling. In this era of revolution and reaction, liberation and repression, of Napoleon, total warfare, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, there was much to challenge, huge intellectual and emotional mountains to scale. He began in the orbit of the Classical style, a student of Haydn, but his talents and his energies could not be contained by one movement or "school." Later he reached back to Bach and even Palestrina, while at the same time casting an enormous shadow forward. Unquestionably it is the Promethean character of his achievement, its boldness, its vast reach, its unlimited energy, its ceaseless exploration, that made Beethoven's music both an inspiration and a defining force for the Romantic

106 WQ SPRING 1995 era that would dominate the cultural life of the 19th century. Beethoven ham- mered bolts in the sky and climbed up. His successors have been climbing up after him ever since.

escending. At the end of the 16th century, the English lutanist and songwriter John Dowland (1563?-1626) set down a melody which by all accounts became the most popular tune in England and a good part of the Continent. Dowland him- Dself wrote three versions of the piece-the first for solo lute, the second for voice and lute, the third for consort of viols. So well known did the piece become that it was referred to, as if familiar to everyone, in a dozen or so popular plays written, variously, by Ben Jonson, Tho- mas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, and others. More impressively, its opening four-note theme was quoted at the beginning of dozens of com- positions by such composers as William Byrd, Thomas Morley, Or- lando Gibbons, and Jan Sweelinck. What type of theme could have such extraordinary impact-at a time of Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Galileo, of continental and oceanic warfare, of recurrent plagues, of religious dissension, of loyalty and betrayals? The opening is simple-just four notes, four adjacent descending notes. The name of the piece, "Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan," or "Pavan of the Ancient Tears," was commonly referred to simply as "Lachrimae." The words which Dowland fitted to the lute piece begin, "Flow my teares, fall from your springs. . ." The imagery could not be stronger-tears flowing downward, falling, accompanied by a musical motif that pulls toward the ground. May we not assume that in an age of high poetic utterance Powland's theme could become a metaphor for misfortunes that must be endured, for human limitations that will in the end bring everyone down? What is this somber four-note motif that resonated with such intensity with so many? The first note, G, holds level, steady, prolonged-the descent from F to E-flat and down to D is controlled, relatively swift, easy-and the landing, on D, is a genuine coming to rest. Why should this generate such power? Dowland himself has given us a clue. When in 1604 he published the consort version of "Lachrimae," along with six additional pieces about tears, all beginning with the same descending four-note motif, he included the following words in his dedication to Queen Anne: "yet no doubt pleasant are the teares that Musicke weeps." Is this perhaps a suggestion that art (Musicke) can bring solace to humans in the face of irreversible sadnesses? What we know from its wide popularity is that ordinary people, the nobility, musicians, all threatened with misfortunes, must have derived comfort and pleasure from this phrase. In its own way it is as memorable, as emblematic, as the famous first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony-three short, one long-which have meant so much to so many. In the early decades of the 20th century, 300 years after Dow- land's "Lachrimae," the work for solo piano most in demand was

MUSIC 107 the Prelude in C-sharp Minor by composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). After hundreds of his recitals audiences chanted "Prelude! Prelude!" The piece begins with a magnificent descent-three resounding octaves, A, G-sharp, and down to C- sharp. This theme is repeated some 18 times. Almost all surround- ing passage work and a central interlude emphasize downward motion. Is it a coincidence that Rachmaninoff's Prelude and Dow- land's "Lachrimae," both appealing to unusually wide audiences, were composed at times of enlarged human horizons, with attendant anxieties, and that both are about falling with control and dignity?

ise-to-fall. Instinctively we look to works of panoramic scale for profundity-the Sistine ceiling, Beethoven'sMissa Solemnis, War and Peace. But large insights can also come to us through art of intimate scale. A piano work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) in D Major, K. 355 (594a), composed about a year before his death, consists of 44 bars and takes less than two minutes to play. It is simply called "Minuetu-and is a life journey in music. The work is based in its details and in its overall structure on what we call "rise-to-fall" patterns. Unlike "climbing" or "descending" patterns, "rise-to-fall" patterns are integrated shapes in which an ascent and a descent form a single arching unit. Mozart's Minuet opens with a short five- note theme that arches up and down with disarming simplicity. This motif is slightly expanded and intensified. The journey suddenly becomes sus- penseful and even a bit foreboding with a chromatic rising in the bass completed by a sinewy descent in the treble. This idea is repeated twice more, rising higher. The first part of the Minuet ends with graceful steps that turn downward, a temporary respite in the mounting drama. Abrupt dissonances and slashing figurations open the second part of the Minuet. These brief moments of intense friction generate the energy to propel the music upward. Now swirling contrapuntal passages take repeated steps higher and higher to the apogee of an arch-and then there is a long descent. A sense of precipitous falling and inevitability is created by the rush of rapid sixteenth notes. As the great descent approaches its lowest point, the scale shifts from major to minor, thereby painting the plunge earthwards in a darkening color. The Minuet returns to the rise- to-fall themes of the opening. Elegant Mozartean lines of notes glide lightly downward in the last measures, as if there has been a reconciliation, a calm acceptance of the final descent. And so in a span of 44 bars we have taken a journey beginning with a simple, almost childlike theme, rising gradually upward through chromatic tensions, lifting higher and higher, achiev- ing the pinnacle of a great arc, tumbling downward, recovering in a world of calm, and ending in a last, peaceful descent. Rise-to-fall patterns occur throughout Mozart's music in a wide variety of shapes. The opening theme from the familiar Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, with three pulses on either side of a sweeping ascent, is sym- metrical but vibrant with energy. Some rise-to-fall themes are asymmetri-

108 WQ SPRING 1995 cal, such as the opening of the E-flat String Quartet, K. 428, which boldly lifts up one octave at the very start and then twists down sinuously. Some- times, as in the "Romanze" of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the melody will be an arch constructed of pulses, rests, slurs, and syncopations, combined to make the kind of elegant but nonetheless poignant creation which the world has come to recognize as uniquely "Mozartean." Mozart was, of course, a protean creator. Amid his stupendous out- put there is much that has no direct connection with rise-to-fall. But there is much that does, a strikingly large amount, and in ways that reveal how fundamental this conception is in his music. Mozart left us almost no commentary on the aesthetic significance or meaning of his works, so we have no direct evidence whether or not specific experiences, such as the death of his mother in the summer of 1778, entered in any concrete way into the composition at that time of such a somber and passionate work as the A Mi- nor Piano Sonata, K. 310, which contains many rise-to-fall elements. But in a letter to his father, in December 1777, Mozart gives us an intriguing clue about the way a specific emotional experience could affect his music. Then 21, Moz- art was giving piano lessons to a young lady, Rosa Cannabich, 13, The Bavarian Don Giovanni, by Paul Klee (1919) whom he described as "very pretty and charming . . . intelligent and steady for her age. She is serious, does not say much, but when she does speak, she is pleasant and amiable." She gave him "indescribable pleasure" when playing his Sonata in C, K. 309. The Andante of the Sonata "she plays with the utmost expression." Mozart reported that when he was asked "how I thought of composing the Andante. . . . I said I would make it fit closely the character of Mile. Rosa. . . . She is exactly like the Andante." The main theme of the Andante is a lilting, perky, and slightly earnest rise-to-fall theme. This, of course, is indirect and fragmentary evidence that cannot be

MUSIC 109 carried too far. But it does tell us a few relevant things. A sonata such as K. 309 was not for Mozart an abstract construction of sounds. For him the Andante, based on a rise-to-fall theme, stood for a person, a specific individual, whose qualities and experience~were much on his mind. Al- though we cannot be certain whether rise-to-fall patterns were consciously metaphors in his mind for life experiences, we do not have to be. The important thing is the music itself-the notes. Mozart's rise-to-fall shapes, small and large, correspond to familiar patterns in human lives. Viewed in a broader perspective, Mozart's creation of rise-to-fall patterns adds depth to our perception of him as one of the supreme ex- emplars of the classical style. These patterns are generally elegant and subtle and are, by definition, balanced, reflecting a poised acceptance that descents are inevitable-indeed, as inevitable and natural as ascents. But along the way there are some surprises, dark and unsettling passages, un- certainties and dislocations, flashes of the fantastic and incomprehensible. Mozart's music was "Classical"-but much, much more.

loating. Music that takes us aloft, surmounting the pull of gravity, and carries us on a journey, ascending, floating, is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is humankind expanding its capabilities, its intellectual and spiritual horizons, through Fart. We have been experiencing this for more than a millennium. In the Middle Ages the unison lines of plainchants-stretching, shifting up and down without rhythmic stress or harmonic direction-carried wor- shipers into the vaulted heights of cathedrals and beyond to the sky and God. In the 20th century, starting in 1939 when he went into exile in France and continuing for three decades, the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) concluded concerts with the ancient Catalan folk song "El Cant del Ocells" ("The Song of the Birds"). The haunt- ing melody, played alone on the cello, spirals round and round. Un- named thousands, during those years of occupations and oppressions, journeyed into the sky and over the horizon to freedom with Casals, his cello, and the melody of the gliding bird. One of the great creators of music that floats, many would say the greatest, was Fredkric-Franqois Chopin (1810-49). While still a teenager he began a long series of enduring works with original and enthralling passages that float. The Adagio of his F Minor Piano Concerto, composed when he was 19, contains filigrees of notes high in the piano register which like tendrils in the air drift up and down with exquis- ite weightlessness. Chopin wrote to his closest friend that the music was inspired by thoughts of a young soprano, someone he had dreamed about for six months but to whom he had never communicated his feelings. In Chopin's late bardic work, the Fourth Ballade in F Minor (1842), a profusion of passages float from bar 1 to bar 239, some 12 minutes later. The main theme is a quintessentially Chopinesque floating melody. It twists around itself, lingers on several notes to create tension, lifts up gracefully, hovers at a high point, and finally winds down-

110 WQ SPRING 1995 ward. After the music has journeyed into the strange and distant world of A major, Chopin weaves strands of this theme contrapuntally so that they twist their way back to the home key of F minor. Further on, the theme is transformed into arabesques that truly soar. In one passage, long lines of notes flow up from the depths of the keyboard at the same time that chords float down from above. Elsewhere figurations, after coiling tightly, rocket toward the top of the keyboard and then drift downward like pyrotechnic displays. And at several points the music, as if unable to contain itself, breaks into waves of sound of oceanic grandeur. Like Chopin, other composers who have made music float-Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Faur6, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel-have not confined themselves to shaping melodies of a floating character. They have fashioned the environment, the entire musical world over which or through which the melody floats. In his Requiem of 1887, Gabriel Faur6 (1845-1924) brought into existence a remarkable world of floating. In the Sanctus ("Holy, holy, holy"), he weaves together many strands to lift the music and the listener. The principal melody is carried by unison lines of sopranos and tenors slowly gliding upward and downward. Harp arpeggios, undu- lating figures in the violas, and sustaining tones in the organ and low strings provide a cushion for the voices. Riding above the voices, an accompanying violin melody curls sensually. Toward the end of the movement a striding rhythm takes hold, trumpets and horns ring out, and the music rises to its climax with the stirring words "Hosanna in the highest." The music subsides and the unison voices return together

MUSIC 111 with the curving violin obbligato and the gently rocking accompani- ment. In Faur6's Sanctus the soprano and tenor melody, and the listener, are surrounded from above and below, enveloped, and lifted above the woes of earth. Of the four gravity-related patterns, floating has by far been the most frequently employed. Its use spans at least a millennium-from plainchants of the Middle Ages to music in our century. Its scope extends across a broad range of poetic sentiments and deeply held beliefs, from the profane to the sacred, from the passionate utterances of Chopin to the spiritual aspirations of plainchant and Faur6. The metaphors of floating transcend traditional musical classifications such as "Baroque," "Classical," and "Romantic." They impress upon us the enduring and unifying elements in music.

mergingpatterns. What of the future? Music that has in the past so often probed humankind's anxieties and aspirations can surely be expected to continue to do so. But we must also expect, with the vastness of contemporary cultural change and theE inexhaustibility of human creativity, that composers will find new ways to evoke gravity-related themes. The 1970 Cello Concerto of Witold Lutoslawski (1913-94), Poland's profound and humane inno- vator, takes us on a deeply moving journey into the realities of 20th- century political experience. The cello, carrying on an amiable and harmless dialogue with the society of the orchestra, is repeatedly in- terrupted by discordant and irascible trumpet salvos. The cello struggles to stay upright and then collapses, beaten down by ever more raucous, overbearing, and thuggish assaults. In the end the cello tri- umphs, doggedly ascending and repeating a single note. Throughout we hear patterns from the cello that only slightly resemble those we have encountered in earlier music. Instead, after being assaulted, the cello scurries in all directions, whimpers and sobs as if collapsing. The forces attempting to bring down the cello, the blaring trumpets, execute their mission with completely new musical metaphors-passages in which they rapidly perform their notes independently of each other, thereby making a uniquely modern and thrilling cacophonous din. In their vividness and intensity, these transformed gravity metaphors reflect a degree of anguish about political conditions that composers of earlier times seldom, if ever, attempted to portray through music. The dedicatee and first performer was Mstislav Rostropovich, who knew much about the brutality of the state in crushing individuals and also about the human spirit in resisting conformity. Just before the concerto's premiere in 1970, the cellist reportedly told Lutoslawski that he wept when he played the passage where the cello seems to be beaten down. We find in the work of the avant-garde Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) even more radical departures from traditional patterns. In her "Du cristal . . . & la fum6e1' ("From crystal. . . into smoke") for large orchestra, including electronically amplified instruments, the

112 WQ SPRING 1995 musical ingredients are soundscapes crackling with gongs and percus- sion, threads that stretch into microtones, massive clusters that shat- ter and disintegrate, timbres that alter imperceptibly and hypnotically, and electrifying eruptions of timpani. The listener experiences a sensation of floating, free from any pull of gravity. Yet there are no melodies at all, much less ones that float like Chopin's or Schubert's. Saariaho has created a mysterious and enthralling world for the 21st century. She communicates to us, through musical metaphors that do not yet have labels, the excitement of living in a world of cosmic grandeur and vast adventure.

hat do we add to our understanding of music when we think of it in terms of various gravity-defying journeys? First, the reader should note, this approach in no way de- nies that individual listeners derive their own personal meaningsw from various works of music; it does, however, supplement and enrich individual interpretations by suggesting how, through history, certain patterns of sound have been taken repeatedly by composers and listeners to correspond to widely shared, perhaps even universal, human experiences. Everyone can tell when music rises. Everyone can feel the distinctly different sensations of lifting upward and sinking downward. Everyone who listens will know when a weighty and precipitous descent is taking place, as in the opening of the Rachmaninoff Prelude. There is nothing ar- cane or esoteric about the exhilaration we experience when Faur6 takes us soaring aloft. For some, the experience of surmounting gravity in a musical journey may have a religious character. Being taken beyond the pull of gravity to a vision of the eternal will deepen the spiritual dimension of their lives. For many, the journey can be a celebration of being alive and a renewal of buoyancy, zest, and good cheer. All of us, composers and listeners, may at one time or another harbor anxieties about our limitations, our infirmities, the terrors real or imaginary that occasionally grip everyone, the fear that we will not be able to remain upright if misfortune comes. When we take a journey with a composer in which we experience through the metaphors of sound the victory of spirit over frailty, we cannot help but be strength- ened. If destructive forces loom in our own lives, we can come to feel that we also are capable of prevailing over them. And so we may enjoy new confidence, new determination, new reason for carrying on. If that is what a journey with Bach or Beethoven, with Ruggles or Lutoslawski, accomplishes for us, it is no small thing. Indeed, are we not justified in saying that one of the fundamental features of great musical journeys is that they are life sustaining?

MUSIC 113 The Night

Long before cetaceans became objects of popular affection and scientific scrutiny, the author had his first and most memorable encounter with the killer whale.

BY WILLIAM W. WARNER

ne January night almost 50 years ago I found myself looking straight into the eye of a large black whale. It had just finished swimming on its back,0 exposing a gleaming white under- belly, through a dense bed of kelp. The whale's swimming motion was slow, sinuous, and obviously sensual, as though it were enjoying a deeply satisfying back rub. Now it had righted itself and was swimming closer into the kelp bed, the inner edge of which was not more than 10 the small cove of Harberton on Tierra del yards from the rocky beach where I stood. Fuego's Beagle Channel. And had I not There it stopped for what seemed like a read how killer whales had lunged onto very long time. ice floes to snatch the sleeping sled dogs Soon I became acutely aware that the of Antarctic explorers? There was reason whale's small, beady eye was fixed on me enough to give these creatures a wide in what looked like a malevolent glare. berth. It is true of course that in recent Yielding to a small-boy impulse, I threw years the orca, as the killer whale is also a rock at the whale. The rock hit the whale now popularly known, has been petted, squarely on its shiny wet-black back, just caressed, and cheered by crowds as it per- behind its high dorsal fin. Instantly the forms all manner of acrobatics at various whale raised its tail flukes, brought them aquaria; it has also starred in a recent fea- down hard on the water, and drenched ture film. There are now even orca dolls me in spray. I scrambled up the rocky for sale. They are a very popular item, I'm beach, quite scared. told, at San Diego's Sea World. But all of I knew the whale was a killer. "Bad this, or Oreinus area's kindly disposition feesh," said Don Clemente, my Yaghan In- toward humans, was quite unknown back dian host, when the whales first came into in the 1940s when I was in Harberton.

114 WQ SPRING 1995 What was known then was that given cer- "Their large dorsal fins, cutting through tain conditions killer whales might sav- the water like tall black sails . . ." agely attack penguins, seals, larger whales, and many other convenient forms What took me to Harberton in the first of prey. They still do. place was an irrational urge to explore la Even less known then was the concept tierra mas austral del mundo-the most of play among animals. Ethology, or the southern land in the world-as Chileans scientific study of animal behavior, was and Argentines like to describe the Cape still in its infancy, concentrating mainly on Horn region. Fresh out of the Navy and mating rituals and territoriality. The idea World War 11, I had decided to make the that anyone other than ourselves might trip using only public transport wherever enjoy play for play's sake was not yet get- such existed. Along the way I had the ting much serious attention. Certainly not good fortune to meet the Bridges family of in relation to cetaceans, at least, as the Viamonte on the Atlantic coast of Tierra order that includes all whales and dol- del Fuego, descendants of the first English phins is known. But that is precisely what missionary to have dwelled successfully I was privileged to observe on a January among the Yaghan. The Bridgeses kindly night almost 50 years ago. arranged for me to travel south across the

WHALES 115 Darwin Range, guided by two of their over the surface of the water by furiously ranch hands, to the family's original mis- beating their small wings and churning sion station at Harberton at the eastern their webbed feet, "mak[ingl such a noise end of the Beagle Channel. There, I was and splashing," as Charles Darwin once told, various small craft might stop en noted, "that the effect is most curious." route d-own the channel to Ushuaia, a The fur seals, much hunted in an earlier small town with a large prison then age, generally kept their distance or were known as "the Devil's Island of Argen- quick to slither down into the protective tina." Once in Ushuaia, I could take my masses of kelp. Sometimes, too, I scaled chances for transport to Cape Horn. rocky headlands to view the countryside. The journey across the Darwin Range, To the north were the peaks of the Darwin ordinarily one long day's ride, proved Range, dusted with summer snows. To more difficult than usual. There were fast- the south across the Beagle Channel was flowing mountain streams to ford and the Chilean island of Navarino, domi- bogs carpeted with brilliant yellow nated by a long, low massif desig-

day after day of the new year and its two neighbors lay only passed with not so much as a rowboat in the great southern seas and Antarctica. sight. It was about nine o'clock of a sunny I passed the time exploring evening during my second week, as I re- Harberton's rocky shores, occasionally member it, that the whales came to spotting a wary fur seal or flushing nest- Harberton. They first announced their ing pairs of Magellanic flightless steamer presence by a dull booming sound not ducks. The latter are large birds, about the unlike a distant or muffled cannon shot. I size of geese, known in Spanish as patos ran out of the kitchen where the camp vapores. They never succeed in becoming crew was having a late supper to see three airborne but move about quite rapidly killer whales at the exact center of William W. Warner, a former assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is the author of Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (1976),which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction;DistantWater: The Fate ofthe North Atlantic Fisherman (1983): and At Peace with All Their ~ei~hbors:Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860 (1994).Copyright @ 1995 by William W. Warner.

116 WQ SPRING 1995 Harberton's small harbor. One after an- two-thirds of their body length and then other the whales raised their tails, formed let themselves fall back in whatever pos- the flukes into cuplike shapes, and then ture gravity dictated. All joined in, adults slammed them down hard on the water and juveniles alike, in what I imagined surface. The result was a deep-toned and could only be a joyous celebration of their satisfying thud, loud enough to reverber- chance discovery of a sheltered and se- ate around Harberton's hills. (Humans cluded playground. can at least approximate the effect in a While this activity continued, one of bathtub by cupping both hands and bring- the adults came into the kelp, rolled over, ing them down sharply to make little and began the slow and sensual swim I depth-charge splashes.) My first thought have previously described. This gave me was that the whales were trying to stun a close view of one of nature's most star- schools of small fish. I therefore ran to get tling black-and-white designs-the jet my binoculars for a closer look. But all I black of the whale's topsides, that is, could see was mirror-smooth water, against the gleaming white of its under- untracked by any fleeing fish. Gradually parts. Whale-identification guidebooks and almost inevitably, the thought that generally describe the killer as having the whales were simply having a good "back, sides, tail, fin and flippers black; time crossed my mind. There could beno chin, throat, chest and abdomen white." other explanation. But the reader may gain a clearer picture Since the small inner harbor had a nar- of the contrast by imagining the white row inlet at its mouth not more than half underside as flowing outward in grace- a mile from where I stood, I set out half- running and half-stumbling over the rocky terrain to reach it before the whales might choose to leave. Along the way I all but tripped over a pair of the patos vapores, which immediately took to the water and sputtered off, squawking loudly in protest. But well before reaching the inlet, I was stopped in my tracks by a spectacu- lar explosion. A large whale shot up out of the water, rolled over in midair, and came down with a resounding splash less than 20 yards from the shore. Killer whales are not large as whales go, but a healthy male adult will measure more than 25 feet in length and weigh as much as six tons. To see a creature of these dimensions erupt in quiet and confined waters-in a pond, in effect-is a nerve- shattering and awesome experience. What is more, the one leaping whale was quickly joined by about four or five others, including two juveniles. Some whales cleared the water entirely, landing as loudly as possible on their backs, sides, or bellies. Others shot up for only half or

WHALES 117 tance, since there are slight variations in the whales had suddenly tired of their the shape of the patches, not to mention game and thus allowed the poor duck one the overall design. last chance to reach the safety of the shore- In time, or after getting sprayed as a line. But such a scenario, all things consid- result of my rock throw, I happened to ered, seems unlikely. look back from the higher ground at the All play must come to an end, of small group of whales that had first ap- course, giving way in the animal world to peared at the center of the harbor. Three the more serious business of the hunt. In whales were still there, but one of the the case of the whales who came into steamer ducks was missing. Then came Harberton, the moment came very one of those rare events that leave us with abruptly. It was as if a leader in the group a large measure of disbelief-disbelief, as had given a sharp command to leave, the popular expression has it, in what is since all the whales swam through the happening right before our eyes. harbor mouth within a very short time. At first the whales took turns coming Their large dorsal fins, cutting through the up under the remaining duck like surfac- water like tall black sails, passed by me in ing submarines, thus causing the poor what seemed a continuous review. I creature to slide down their broad backs watched them for a long time in the wan- in various ungainly postures. Then one ing sunlight of the summer evening as whale tired of this activity and swam they headed out to sea toward Picton Is- close alongside the duck, curving its body land and the great southern seas sur- to look backward as it passed. It then rounding Antarctica. So, too, did a ner- raised its tail and brought it down vous fur seal hugging the shore quite close sharply. The steamer duck, now quite ex- to me. hausted from repeated attempts to flee the whales' attentions, made a desperate week later, a small schooner lunge to escape the blow. But the whale's took me down the Beagle Chan- tail flukes did not strike the duck-indeed nel to Ushuaia. There I found I do not think such was the whale's inten- that the prison, the notorious tion-but rather came down just close Argentine Devil's Island, was no longer enough to create a great lateral thrust of the town's principal reason for being. water which sent the bird skidding across Rather, an airfield, some oil-storage tanks, the surface directly to another whale. and various improved port facilities were Much to my amazement, the second whale rapidly being built to be used as a base for promptly raised its tail and in the same Argentina's Antarctic pretensions. In fact, manner sent the duck skidding to the Ushuaia had been declared a recinto third. The third passed it back to the first. militar, or a restricted area under military So it went. Each time the weary pato vapor governance. What is more, as luck would made one more feeble attempt to escape, have it, the first Argentine Antarctic expe- and each time the whales sent it skidding ditionary ship was expected later in the in what resembled nothing so much as an same day of my arrival. These circum- ice hockey game featuring deadly accu- stances caused me yet another enforced rate slap shots. But very soon something stay. Not to explore ways of getting to distracted my attention-a particularly Cape Horn, that is, but rather to get out of loud splash, I think it was-from one of Ushuaia, where I was immediately the whales nearest me. When I looked thought to be a spy. But that is another back at the hockey players, the steamer story. More important to this narrative is duck was gone. I like to think that perhaps the fact that a month later I was in New

118 WQ SPRING 1995 York and eager to pass on my observa- All this has changed. Whale behavior is tions of killer whale behavior to any inter- now eagerly studied by scientists and le- ested authorities. gions of dedicated whale watchers. Al- though there remains very much to learn of y first stop (and only one, whale life cycles, we now know more about for reasons that will soon both the play and the communication sig- become clear) was the nals of a number of species, Orcinus orca American Museum of Natu- among them. The slamming of cupped tail ral History, an institution that had been flukes on the surface of the water which I one of my favorite boyhood refuges. Af- first saw at Harberton is now known as "tail ter various inquiries and calls from one of- lobbing" and recognized as a playful activ- fice to another, I was eventually received ity shared by a number of other species. The by a scientist-I remember neither his same can be said of "breaching," or jump- name nor his position-whom I supposed ing clear of the water. This, too, is recog- to be a whale expert. Patiently I read my nized as a form of play in which killer field notes to him, pausing briefly for whales and humpbacks are the absolute questions or exclamations of wonder- aerial champions. Jumping for joy, I prefer ment. But none ever came from my lis- to call it, since there seems to be no other tener, whose face remained fixed in a pa- satisfactory explanation for their spectacu- tronizing smile. As clearly as any words, lar leaps, although some scientists prefer to his silence told me he was not about to think of them as "an emphatic form of au- believe the unlikely observations of the dio-visual communication." After observ- young man sitting in front of him. Fin- ing killers in other places, notably British ished, I asked if he would like a copy of Columbia, and watching humpbacks in the my field notes. No, thank you, he replied, waters of Newfoundland and southeast there was really no need, since he could Alaska, I have come to the conclusion that scarcely forget my vivid account of such leaping most often occurs close to shore in extraordinary doings. relatively sheltered waters with plentiful It was as we say today the ultimate supplies of small food fish or other prey. A put-down. I left the museum feeling both quiet spot for leisurely dining in other humiliated and angry, certain that I words, which is reason enough for rejoicing. would make no further attempts to reach the scientific community. Looking back, I or should anyone be surprised now know that it was futile to have made to see killer whales lolling in the attempt in the first place. At that time, kelp beds, as they did at the late 1940s, the Smithsonian Institution Harberton. As far as we know, alone had a true whale expert, which is to nearly all whales seem to welcome a sense say a full-time curator of whales and other of touch. This is especially true of the kill- marine mammals, in the person of the late ers and their closest relatives, the dolphins. Dr. Remington Kellog. What is more, the (Taxonomically speaking, killer whales are study of whales there and later at the dolphins, or members of the family American Museum and other kindred in- Delphinidae.) Given the opportunity, they stitutions was for many years confined are likely to investigate even a single piece largely to systematics, as biologists now of flotsam-a stray log, for example, adrift like to call taxonomy-that is, the patient at sea-and rub up against it. Imagine, business of identifying all living things then, the attraction of coastal waters offer- and putting them in properly classified ing rocks, fine sand or pebbles, and wavy order. forests of kelp. Killer whales have been

WHALES 119 Above: an orca practices beaching. Above, right: closing in on a herd of sea lions. Right: an orca flips its prey before devouring it. observed using all three, the rocks to scratch itchy or sore spots, the bottom sand or gravel for back rubbing, and, finally, the kelp as a lubricious balm, the ointment, so to speak, after a good mas- sage. To prolong such tactile pleasures, in fact, the killers will often lift a mass of kelp and drape it over their heads and backs. Neither is there any mystery about killer whales responding to command, as they appeared to do when I watched them leaving Harberton. To be sure, they lack the eerie and sometimes melodious "songs" of the humpback, recently the subject of so much study. But killer

120 WQ SPRING 1995 whales do have a cacophonous variety of but one small example of what killers may sounds-whistles, clicks, squeaks, do with larger prey species. Dr. Roger grunts-which carry long distances and Payne and his associates, who have long are more than enough for a repertoire of studied right whales in Patagonia, and Dr. basic communications. That they do com- Claudio Campagna of the New York Zoo- municate, much like other dolphins, is logical Society, who studies sea lions in now an established fact. Their working the same general area, have seen small vocabulary, however, remains to be trans- pods of killers play catch with both adult lated. and young southern sea lions, a large spe- But there is one form of play, if indeed cies weighing up to 600 pounds. The kill- it can be called that, which the killer ap- ers literally throw the sea lions around, parently shares with no other whale or flaying them to death with vigorous head dolphin. It is the deadly cat-and-mouse shakes. (Some scientists believe the flay- game, or the torment they inflict on their ing action helps remove the sea lions' fur prey prior to consuming it. The steamer pelts, which the whales normally regurgi- duck episode I witnessed in Harberton is tate.) Other observers in both North and

WHALES 121 South America have seen similar cat-and- true in subsequent encounters with the mouse tactics used on penguins and seals. next few whales bound for other aquaria. But more interesting and certainly ore often than not, however, more significant explanations for the killer play is foregone in favor of a whales' dichotomy of behavior are com- swift attack and kill. In a staring from those who have studied the tling photograph that ap- whales in the wild most intensively. The pearedM in National Geographic, one of Dr. late Dr. Michael Bigg of the Canadian Payne's assistants captured the moment a Fisheries Research Board, Kenneth C. killer whale used its tail to hurl a large sea Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research lion some 30 feet into the air. Jen Bartlett, at Friday Harbor in northern Puget the photographer, has so described the Sound, Alexandra Morton of Raincoast event, after patiently watching a patrol- Research at Simoon Sound near the north ling pod of approximately six killers: end of Vancouver Island, and other ob- "Moments later the ocean erupted and the servers now conclude that there are two sea lion came hurtling out of the water. basic populations of Orcinus orca with dif- The other whales moved in, and it was all ferent social and behavioral patterns. In over in a matter of minutes, with nothing the first are what might be called resident left but scraps of meat on the surface for communities. They are large in number- kelp gulls to scavenge." 96 whales in the case of the Puget Sound Given such attacks, we are left to con- community-and are made up of two- front the one great apparent contradiction and three-generation families that bond in killer whale behavior. How is it, we for life. Remaining in one general area the may ask, that such seemingly savage car- year around, these community whales nivores appear to enjoy friendly associa- feed on salmon and other fish that are in tions with humans and take readily to relatively abundant supply on North training in captivity? But here, too, an- America's northwest coast. They have not swers are beginning to emerge. In the first been seen to eat seals or other larger forms place, we must bear in mind that killer of prey. whales have absolutely no fear of anything that swims in the seas-they are, he second grouping is composed after all, top-of-the-line predators-and of pods of whales, much smaller are inclined to show a nonhostile curios- in number, that are best deity toward boats, human beings, and al- scribed as transients. Constantly most anything else that is not part of their onT the move in pods of two to 10 individu- natural environment. (This curiosity no- als, they subsist mainly on penguins, ticeably increases, moreover, wherever seals, larger whales, and other warm- the whales are no longer hunted or other- blooded animals. Stomach autopsies of wise molested; conversely, it disappears these transients washed up on the shores quickly whenever they find themselves of British Columbia have shown that they threatened or the objects of too much at- have also consumed such assorted fare as tention.) When in 1965 an entrepreneur waterfowl, deer, and even the remains of from the Seattle Aquarium found it nec- a pig. But no fish. essary to dive into a temporary net enclo- In addition to opportunistic hunting, sure holding the first two killer whales the transient whales also gather at certain ever taken for captivity, the whales, al- specific locations at certain times of year though obviously stressed, did not attack to take advantage of large concentrations or harm him in any way. The same proved of their favored prey. A good example of

122 WQ SPRING 1995 this phenomenon, recently the subject of gives it a yellowish cast. These "yellow a number of nature films, may be found at whales," as the Russians like to call them, Punta Norte on the Vald6s Peninsula of live in large communities of 150 to 200 Patagonia. Here transient pods congre- individuals and subsist almost entirely on gate every March and April, when the fish, which were found to make up 98.5 pups of the southern sea lion are born. percent of their stomach contents. As their Not content with what they may kill in the name suggests, the "yellows" stay close to water, the whales crash through the surf, the edge of the circumpolar pack ice the effectively stranding themselves, to year around. In social organization and snatch the pups on the beach. No other feeding habits, therefore, they would whales have the ability to save themselves seem to correspond most closely to the from a stranding, but the killers are so resident communities of the Pacific North- strong and athletic that they have little west. Nearby, but more often roaming in trouble squirming back into the water. So open water, the Russian scientists found important is this seasonal feast, in fact, much smaller groups easily identified as that parent whales patiently teach the the standard Orcinus orca. Because these stranding technique to their young on whales had no trace of yellowish coloring, empty practice beaches. the Russian scientists took to calling them "whites." Much like North America's fter almost 20 years of inten- northwest coast transients, the whites sive study and observation, traveled in small pods averaging 10 to 15 Kenneth Balcomb and his individuals, were never seen to mix with associates believe the two the yellows/ and subsisted mainly on groups,A the community residents and the other warm-blooded mammals, the re- transients, do not interbreed and have mains of which constituted 89.7 percent of probably been genetically isolated for a their stomach contents. The other warm- very long time. More recently, Dr. A. Rus blooded mammals in this case were prin- Hoelzel of the National Institutes of cipally other whales, especially the minke, Health has managed to carry out DNA smallest of the so-called great whales. But fingerprinting of the two groups. They are as Soviet and other commercial whalers indeed genetically distinct, Hoelzel has from the bad old days of Antarctic whal- found, so much so that "you might think ing will readily attest, the Antarctic kill- they came from different oceans," as he ers will attack any of their kin regardless likes to put it. of size. This the whalers know not only Although much more study is neces- from actual sightings but because they of- sary, similarly separate groups or "races" ten found characteristic killer-whale teeth appear to exist elsewhere. In 1979-80 the marks on the skins of all the various spe- giant factory whaling ship Sovietskaya cies they once took. Even on blue whales, Rossiya purposely took 906 killer whales in fact, largest of all living things. from Antarctic waters for scientific exami- Historically, the first killer whales nation. As a result, Russian scientists now captured for aquaria from 1965 to 1976 propose not different groups or races but came from the two best-known resident two separate species. The first, provision- communities in the United States and ally named Orcinus glacialis, is noticeably Canada, the Puget Sound-Straits of Geor- smaller in all dimensions than the famil- gia community of almost 100 individuals iar Orcinus orca. It also has a slightly dif- and the north Vancouver Island- ferent cranial structure and a film of di- Johnstone Strait community of 190. Since atomaceous algae covering its skin that then, owing to mounting public reaction

WHALES 123 enally. The obliging killers shoot up from the water like Polaris missiles, jump through hoops, allow trainers to ride their backs, strand themselves on tank aprons, and apparently enjoy audience participation, letting spectators pet them or even brush their teeth. The whales learn simple commands in a manner of weeks and attain what trainers like to call a performance repertoire in approximately six months. Accidents and fatalities in the training process have been remarkably few-one person dead by drowning and one serious injury as a result of a performance accident. Caution, however, remains the watchword. Some whales in captivity exhibit unfriendly if not downright hostile reactions to both humans and other whales and dolphins newly introduced into their environment. These reactions may take the form of bunting or ramming the new whale or habitually drenching a poolside attendant who has somehow against further captures in both the provoked their displeasure. A quiet ap- United States and Canada, all killer proach, or time enough to get acquainted, whales taken for captivity have come seems the rule to follow. from Iceland. Little wonder, therefore, that killer What might happen if a mature whale whales have become the star attraction of from one of the small transient pods-one the aquarium world. (One recent of the offshore whales, as they are some- aquarium survey has shown that atten- times called-were suddenly introduced dance drops off 50 percent without the into an established aquarium community whales.) Vancouver, Vallejo, San Diego, remains a matter of speculation. Mean- San Antonio, Niagara Falls, Cleveland, while, the popularity of Orcinus orca as a Orlando, Miami-all these cities and more public attraction has grown phenom- have their performing whales. They may

124 WQ SPRING 1995 also be seen in Japan, Argentina, Hong The record, however, is everywhere Kong, and France's Cote d'Azur. And improving. There are now significant Keiko, the star of the motion picture Free numbers of whales that have spent 12 or Willy, has been kept in a relatively small more years in aquaria, which means they tank in Mexico City for 10 years. (As of this have attained sexual maturity, and a few writing, however, a private foundation has that have passed 20, which means that raised $4 million of an estimated $9 million they have reached the hypothetical age for needed to buy Keiko, rehabilitate him for grandparenting. Then, too, as aquarium life in the wild in a large new tank in Or- directors are quick to point out, the num- egon, and then try to find his family in Ice- ber of baby killer whales born in captivity landic waters prior to releasing him.) appears to be rising. Sea World, which operates four aquaria in the United States, ith the killer whales' in- has successfully raised nine calves since creasing popularity has 1985. Five more have been born in other come mounting criticism of aquaria and marine parks during the same their retention in aquaria. period. And the Vancouver Aquarium, a Asw the largest mammals held in captivity model of its kind, is pointing the way with and one of the fastest swimming of all sea a firm policy against taking any more creatures, they cannot of course be kept in killer whales from the wild, relying in- enclosures that begin to approximate their stead on births and breeding loans from natural habitat, as is now the practice with other institutions. some zoo animals. Thus it happens that when the thrilled gasps and the cheers of n response to the criticism of Green- a performance have died down, the peace and kindred organizations, whales may be seen endlessly circling aquarium directors maintain that per- their confinement pools. Eventually they forming killer whales have done more may grow listless, some critics claim, and thanI any other single aquarium species to die of disheartening boredom. More accu- raise public consciousness of whales and rately they may grow listless and die from the need for their protection. It is thus no viral diseases-pneumonia is the most coincidence, although something of a common-against which they have no paradox, that the first places to show natural defense. The life span of Orcinus killer whales, notably Seattle and orca has been estimated at anywhere from Vancouver, were also the first to see 40 to 80 years, with females usually out- strong public reaction against their fur- living males. But in captivity, their life ex- ther capture. To put it another way, the pectancy appears to be much shorter. performing whales-"the Teddy Bears Most specimens taken for capture are and giant pandas of the marine world" as young-very young, on average four-and- some call them-seem to have the power a-half years old according to the Depart- to evoke both instant enthusiasm and ment of Commerce's National Marine sympathy from their audiences the world Fisheries Service, which is charged with over. keeping track of all marine mammal Science, too, has benefited from the populations. Records from the same retention of killer whales in aquaria and source show that the life span for the first marine parks. The latter have offered 30 aquarium whales that have died of what in effect are the first living laborato- known diseases since the early 1970s av- ries for marine mammal research. In the eraged seven-and-a-half years following predawn era of cetacean research, which capture. is to say the preaquaria era, even such a

WHALES 125 basic datum as the gestation period for Vancouver Island and Puget Sound com- killer whales and other dolphins was un- munities. known. (It is 17 months for Orcinus orca Still, it is hard not to sympathize with and 11 months for Tursiops truncatus, the the position of each camp. For myself it bottlenose dolphin of performance fame.) has been a rewarding experience to renew Today, thanks to these living laboratories, acquaintance with Orcinus orca through studies in cetacean behavior, acoustics, ge- the convenience of public showings. Even netics, hematology, general physiology, and as I might wish these noble animals could veterinary science have all made great ad- forever roam free, I find myself thrilled by vances. There are very few cetacean special- watching them display their grace and ists, in fact, who have not profited from the athleticism in the intimacy of an aquarium visiting fellowships and general study facili- setting, to the point of joining the cheers ties offered by the better aquaria. of the crowd, I must confess, or sharing Killer whales in confinement, it would the sense of wonderment and joy of the therefore appear, are here to stay. To be youngest spectators. sure, there are now more opportunities to observe the whales in their natural habi- et, these are not the occasions tat through whale-watching cruises and that remain indelibly in my day trips. For this reason, it is the view of mind. What persists, rather, is some conservationists and humane-soci- Y the memory of the night the ety critics that the wild should be the only whales came to Harberton almost 50 years place to see whales. But if only a very ago. Every incident of what was in effect small fraction of the millions of interested a private showing in that wild and lonely viewers who now flock to aquaria to see amphitheater remains remarkably clear. killer whales perform-more than 15 mil- The tail lobbing, the explosive breaches, lion annually visit the four Sea Worlds in the rolling in the kelp, the steamer duck the United States alone-were interested hockey game-all these are like so many in taking boats to the best-known killer- freeze-frame images that can be brought whale concentration areas of the Seattle- instantly and brilliantly to mind. But the Vancouver region, the result might well image I like best, the one I think of most be disastrous. The very size of the flotilla often, is of the whales' departure. It is the necessary to take the public to these areas image of the tall black sails of their dor- and the resulting commotion of marine sal fins passing in review, heading out the traffic in such confined waters as the Beagle Channel to the great southern seas Johnstone and Georgia straits might very and Antarctica in the waning light of a well cause the disappearance of the north summer evening.

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

Citizens of the World, Unite? A Survey of Recent Articles

atriotism is the last refuge of a scoun- capacity, our first allegiance and respect." drel," Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said, Nussbaum is responding, in part, to an op- and 20th-century American liberals have ed essay in theNew York Times (Feb. 13,1994) by been quick to agree. Indeed, liberals of a more philosopher Richard Rorty of the University of utopian cast at times have gone one huge step Virginia. Most Americans, he notes, "take pride further: they have tried to shed all patriotism in being citizens of a self-invented, self-reform- and to embrace, in one guise or another, all ing, enduring constitutional democracy. We humankind. Not many Americans have joined think of the United States as having glorious- them in this, but the dream dies hard. In a spe- if tarnished-national traditions." But the cial issue of Boston Review (0ct.-Nov. 19941, American Left, found mainly in academia, "is Martha Nussbaum, a noted professor of phi- unpatriotic," he asserts. "In the name of 'the losophy, classics, and comparative literature politics of difference,' it refuses to rejoice in the at Brown University, makes a case for world country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a citizenship-and 29 other thinkers kick her ar- national identity, and the emotion of national gument around. pride." It favors "multiculturalism," instead of "[An]emphasis on patriotic pride is both mor- traditional American pluralism. ally dangerous and, ultimately, subversiveof some Rorty believes that, for all its faults, the Left is of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve doing "a great deal of good for people who have for example, the goal of national unity in devotion gotten a raw deal in our society." Nevertheless, he to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality," says, it is painting itself into a comer. "An unpatri- Nussbaum proclaims. In place of patriotism, she otic Left has never achieved anything. A Left that proposes to put "cosmopolitanism," which would refuses to take pride in its country will have no ask Americans to pledge primary allegiance to all impact on that country's politics, and will eventu- of humanity. Students in this country should be ally become an object of contempt." taught that while they "happen to be situated in Nussbaum is unpersuaded. Patriotism, she the United States, "they are above all citizens of a world of human beings." Citing the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes (who declared himself "a citizen of the world"), Nussbaum says that he knew "that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good. The accident of where one is bornis just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral

PERIODICALS 127 says, "is very close to jingoism, and I'm afraid I greater closeness of bonds to one's country and don't see in Rorty's argument any proposal for countrymen need not mean denigration and dis- coping with this very obvious danger." respect for others." Of course, Americans should Commenting in the same issue of Boston Review, learn more about other countries and do have Harvey C. Mansfield, a political scientist at moral obligations to the rest of humanity. "But," Harvard University, says that despiteNussbaum's Glazer adds, "there is a meaning to boundaries, eminence as a professor of philosophy, "when it in personal life and in political life, as well as a comes to politics, she's a girl scout. Indeed, she has practical utility." less useful acquaintance with American politics 'I am not a citizen of the world, as than a schoolchild of either sex who has recently [Nussbaum] would like me to be," declares po- been exposed to the Declaration of Independence litical philosopher Michael Walzer, author of and the Constitution-unless, thanks to the foolish Spheres of Justice (1984). "I am not even aware cosmopolitanism she encourages, these items are that there is a world such that one could be a no longer in the curriculum." citizen of it." While Nussbaum is quick to per- Mansfield agrees with Nussbaum that Rorty's ceive "the chauvinist possibilities" of Rorty's "groundless patriotism" could be perverted into patriotism, Walzer observes, she seems blind to jingoism, but asks why she excludes the possibil- cosmopolitanism's "obvious dangers." ity of a "reasonable" patriotism: 'Why does she "The crimes of the 20th century have been ignore the liberalism and the constitutionalism of committed alternately, as it were, by perverted the country in which she lives?" patriots and perverted cosmopolitans," he writes. "If fascism represents the first of these ome other Boston Review thinkers have perversions, communism, in its Leninist and kind words for Nussbaum's idealism and Maoist versions, represents the second. Isn't this eloquence, but-in what could be taken as a repressive communism a child of universalizing signs of widespread realism among liberal intellec- enlightenment? Doesn't it teach an anti-nation- tuals today-very few accept her main argument. alist ethic, identifying our primary allegiance Leo Marx, an emeritus professor of American (the class limitation, 'workers of the world,' was cultural history at the Massachusetts Institute of thought to be temporary and instrumental) Technology, observes that Nussbaum "seems to much as Nussbaum does?" regard American nationhood as indistinguish- Precisely because powerful economic and able from other routine embodiments of nation- technological forces are moving the planet closer alism. But the originating concept of the Ameri- to cosmopolitanism, the noted historian Arthur can republic was exceptional in at least two re- Schlesinger, Jr., points out, the appeal of patrio- spects." The United States, he says, "was tism is growing stronger, as people "seek refuge founded on precisely defined political prin- from threatening global currents beyond their ciples." And these were selected "for their pu- control and understanding." tatively universal moral and rational validity. Extreme patriotism is evil-but patriotism Whatever the record of actual American practices need not be extreme, notes Stephen Nathanson, since 1776, the fact is that this nation initially was^ a professor of philosophy at Northeastern Uni- and in principle remains-dedicated to an Enlight- versity and one of 15 additional commentators enment brand of cosmopolitanism." Hence, he who respond to Nussbaum in Boston Review points out, Nussbaum, as an American citizen, can (Feb.-March 1995). It is possible to love one's be both patriotic and cosmopolitan. country, he says, "without hating other coun- Yet how far can the bonds of obligation and tries, being an enthusiast about war, limiting loyalty be stretched? asks Harvard sociologist one's concerns to one's own country, or believ- Nathan Glazer. In some ways, he notes, "they ing in mindless obedience and support." can encompass all men and women. Do we not "In an ideal world," Arthur Schlesinger ob- sense, though, whatever the inadequacy of our serves, "Martha Nussbaum's generous and en- principled ethical arguments, that we owe more lightened appeal would be exactly right. But we to our family members than to others? The must deal with the world we have."

128 WQ SPRING 1995 POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

Can Government them responsive, we expose them to access by Be Reinvented? endless reporters, lawyers, committees, and &- vestigators. The result, inevitably, is a culture of "Reinventing Public Administration" by James Q. risk aversion that cannot readily be altered." Wilson, in PS: Political Science &Politics (Dec. 1994), American Political Science Association, 1527 New To truly empower government workers, they Hampshire Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. would have to be allowed-by interest groups, the news media, and congressional watch- "Reinventing" the executive branch of the fed- dogs-to make honest mistakes that get some era1 government so that it "works better and people upset. 'When a culture of forbearance costs less," as Vice President A1 Gore's National and forgiveness descends on Washington," Wil- Performance Review is supposed to do, is a very son says, "please alert the FBI at once, for it will laudable goal, says political scientist Wilson, of be evidence that somebody has kidnapped or anesthetized the entire legislative and judicial branches of government." The prospects for putting "customers" first seem equally dim. "A 19-year- old high school dropout working at McDonald's will be prompt and cour- teous if the alternative is being fired," Wilson notes. The franchise manager will labor to see that employees measure up, if that means more money in his or her pockets. "But those conditions do not exist in the Postal Service or the IRS or the Social SecurityAdrnin- A skeptic's view of the Gore initiative to reorganize government. istration. As aresult~gains in customer satisfaction will have to be achieved the University of California, Los Angeles. Imprac- largely by means of exhortation." They are not tical, too, without getting rid of big government. likely to be large. The Gore report, issued in 1993, would not do "When we and our elected representatives au- that. Although the vice president and his review thorize the government to perform a task that once staff regard the government's reliance on "large, was performed in the private sector or not at all," top-down, centralized bureaucracies" as its Wilson says, "we are declaring, in effect, that we "root problem," their solution is to make gov- value some goal more highly than customer satis- ernment more' "entrepreneurial." They would faction or employee empowerment." The only way retain almost all government programs and to really "reinvent" big government, he suspects, agencies, but "empower" government workers would be to dismantle it. and "put customers first." That is much easier said than done, Wilson observes. "The kind of sweeping cultural changes that are possible in some corporations Toward a Passionate House are not possible in government agencies, pre- "A Madisonian Compromise" by James R. Stoner, Jr., cisely because they are government agencies. in Policy Review (Winter 1995), The Heritage They are agencies invested with awesome pow- Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E., Washing- ers of compulsion-to tax, regulate, inspect, ar- ton, D.C. 20002-4999. rest-and attractive powers of reward-to sub- sidize, purchase, and protect." And they are Conservatives seem to be of two minds about typically immune from competition. "To make term limits, especially now that the Republicans them accountable, we enshroud them in a maze have taken command of Congress. Enthusiasts of laws, regulations, and court rulings; to keep argue that limiting lawmakers' terms would end

PERIODICALS 129 prevent the public from keeping good legislators indefinitely in office. Stoner, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, proposes a compromise: term limits for the House of Represen- tatives but not the Senate. This, he argues, would be in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution. The House, whose members face the voters every two years, was supposed to be the site of democratic fer- ment. In The Federalist, James Madison wrote that the House "should have an immediate de- pendence on, and an intimate sympathy with the people," since "it is essential to liberty that the government in general, should have a common interest with the people." That, Stoner says, is precisely the sentiment that has made term limits so popular today. The Senate, he points out, was intended to be "a deposi- tory of experience and stability." Madison wrote that "such an institution may be sometimes necessary, as a defence to the people against their own temporary errors and delu- sions." For example, Stoner asks: Would the long U.S. commitment to the containment of communism have been main- tained during "the heady days of detente in the 1970s, [if] the Senate had been purged by term limits of the Cold War- riors who remembered Stalin's and Khrushchev's threats?" The original difference in the character of the two chambers was blurred by the 17th Amendment (1913). Senators political careerism and free citizen-legislators to act thereafter we ;re elected directly by the people in the public interest; skeptics note that term limits instead of by state legislatures. Imposing term were rejected by the Founding Fathers and would limits on the House but not the Senate, Stoner

130 WQ SPRING 1995 argues, would restore "something of the origi- World War II hero, got 20 percent. Peddy was a nal distinction" between the two bodies. conservative and it was thought that his supporters would flock to fellow conservative Stevenson rather than to the more liberal Johnson. LBJ moved right, but, according to an analysis of the voting re- The Making of LBJ turns by Baum and Hailey, got little more than one- "Lyndon Johnson's Victory in the 1948 Texas Senate fifth of the Peddy voters. Nor did he make any sig- Race: A Reappraisal" by Dale Baum and James L. nificant inroads among Stevenson's original voters. Hailey, in Political Science Quarterly (Fall 19941, LBJ did do extremely well at attracting new voters Academy of Political Science, 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115-1274. and those who had supported minor candidates. But that was not enough to offset the advantage "Landslide Lyndon" they called Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson had with Peddy voters. after he won a 1948 run-off Democratic primary for How then did Johnson win? The answer, ac- the U.S. Senate by only 87 votes out of 988,295. In cording to the authors: he did an extraordinary job explaining LBJ's razor-thin victory (tantamount to of getting almost all of his July supporters to turn election since Texas was then a virtual one-party out and vote for him again in August, while state), Robert A. Caro, author of The Years of Lyndon Stevenson abysmally failed to do likewise. An es- Johnson: Means of Ascent (1990), and other histori- timated 113,523 Texans who cast ballots for ans have focused on this remarkable occurrence in Stevenson in July stayed home in August, whereas one precinct in the South Texas town of Alice: 202 only 4,054 LBJ voters did not return to the polls. In Mexican-American voters, some of them dead or two West Texas counties-Hansford and out of the county that election day, lined up in al- Kinney-Stevenson's local supporters, believing phabetical order at the very last minute to cast their their votes would not add significantlyto his state- ballots overwhelmingly for Johnson.Caro and oth- wide margin of victory, complacently decided not ers see that as part of a pattern of deceit that runs even to hold run-off elections. By Baum and through LBJ's long political career. The Alice vote Hailey's calculations, their votes alone could have was indeed a mite suspicious, note Baum and made all the difference for Stevenson. Hailey, a historian and graduate student, respec- Despite the "many thousands" of votes that tively, at Texas A&M University. Nevertheless, Robert Caro believes were stolen for Johnson (and, they contend, fraud was not the chief reason for the it should be noted, numerous votes may also have future president's narrow victory. been stolen for Stevenson), the authors say that if In the July primary that preceded the runoff, "Calculatm' Coke" had gotten just eight out of ev- former governor Coke Stevenson, a West Texas ery 10 of his July supporters to cast ballots for him rancher, got 40 percent of the vote to Johnson's 34 again in August, Lyndon Johnson would have had percent, while George E. B. Peddy, a decorated a very different political career.

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

Ethnic Eauations in Somalia. . . . Since the Cold War ended, I there seems to have been a veritable explosion 'Peoples Against States: Ethnopolitical Conflict and the Changing World System" by Ted Robert Gurr, in ethnic the International Studies Quarterly (Sept. 1994), Dept. of But appearances deceive, says Gurr, a politi- Political Science, Ohio State Univ., 154 North Oval cal scientist at the university of ~~~~l~~d. Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210. "Ethnopolitical conflicts were relatively Civil wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Azerbaijan; common, and increased steadily, throughout genocidal massacres in Burundi; clan fighting the Cold War," he reports. The greatest in-

PERIODICALS 131 crease took place during the 1970s, when 55 Bosnia: A Short History (1994), Western states- ethnic groups were involved in serious men have failed to understand what the war clashes, up from 39 during the preceding de- there is about. cade. During the 1980s, the total was 62; in "Although commentators and analysts had 1993-94, it was only eight higher. been accurately charting the political strategy Of the 50 "serious" ethnic conflicts in the of the Serbian communist leader, Slobodan world today, more than half began before Milosevic, since 1988-the takeover of the po- 1987. These Cold War-vintage conflicts are litical machinery in Montenegro and the also the more deadly ones, resulting, on av- Vojvodina, the illegal suppression of local erage, in 111,000 deaths and 408,000 refu- government in Kosovo in 1989, the mobiliza- gees. The 23 conflicts begun since 1987, in tion of nationalist feeling in Serbian public contrast, have produced many fewer deaths opinion, the slow-moving constitutional coup (43,000 on average) but many more refugees against the federal presidency, the Serbian (684,000). economic blockade against Croatia and The end of the Cold War did intensify a Slovenia in late 1990, the theft by Serbia that few rivalries, notably in Afghanistan and year of billions of dinars from the federal bud- Angola, where the superpowers' disengage- get. . . and the incitement and arming of Serb ment gave impetus to existing tensions or minorities in Croatia and Bosnia during 1990 allowed old ones to resurface. But most and 1991-it was as if the Western govern- other Third World ethnic conflicts are in ments could see no pattern in these events "the weak and economically stagnant states whatsoever," Malcolm writes. "When Croatia of Africa south of the Sahara." and Slovenia, losing patience with Milosevic's Twenty new states have come into being attempts to manipulate the federal Yugoslav since the Cold War ended, and others have system, voted for independence, the West re- been experimenting with democratic institu- acted with incomprehension." tions. "Much of the upsurge in communal After the breakup of the Yugoslav Fed- conflict," Gurr says, "has occurred precisely eration, Western policymakers comforted in these states, and as a direct consequence themselves with the thought that it had been of the fact that institutional change has inevitable, either because of the collapse of opened up opportunities by which commu- Soviet communism or because of "ancient nal groups can more openly pursue their ethnic hatreds" in Yugoslav history. The objectives." Six of the recent conflicts first theory was implausible, Malcolm says, erupted in the Soviet and Yugoslav succes- as Yugoslavia since 1948 had been less un- sor states. der Moscow's control than any other coun- Indeed, the sense of alarm about the sup- try in Eastern Europe. The second theory posed explosion of "tribal" conflict in recent was simply wrong. The few examples of years, Gurr believes, is partly a result of "the wars and massacres that were offered in its fact that some of the new conflicts have support, he says, "were from the 20th cen- erupted on Western Europe's doorstep." tury, or at most the late 19th, [and] arose mainly from the most untypical episodes in Balkan history, conflicts introduced or exac- erbated by forces (such as the Axis invasion) Head in the Sand? from outside Yugoslavia itself. For most of the rest of the history of those lands, there "Bosnia and the West: A Study in Failure" by Noel Malcolm, in The National Interest (Spring 1995), 1112 are no records of Croats killing Serbs be- 16th St. N.W., Ste. 540, Washington, D.C. 20036. cause they were Serbs, or vice versa." The theory of "ancient ethnic hatreds" For all of the West's diplomatic efforts to halt nevertheless became popular, Malcolm the destruction of Bosnia, argues Malcolm, a says. It was convenient to Western political London political columnist and author of leaders, for it made all sides to the conflict

132 WQ SPRING 1995 in this small-arms factory in Sarajevo. But the ~osnianshave held off the better-equipped Serb forces. equal. "At a stroke, attacker and defender aged to hold the front lines static for more were reduced to the same status. The fact that than two yearsu-evidence of their higher the defender in this war was not just an eth- motivation and morale. nic group but a democratically-elected gov- Only military force will bring the Bosnian ernment, containing Muslims, Croats, and war to an end, Malcolm says. 'With a minimal Serbs, was an unfortunate detail which most Western military action in October 1991, at the Western policymakers tended to elide." time of the bombardment of Dubrovnik, it might Instead of viewing the Bosnian war as an have been possible to check the Serbs' ambitions enterprise undertaken "by a set of people and make them seriously reconsider their plans with political aims," Western leaders saw it for Bosnia. Again, with a proper guarantee to as "an outbreak of an undifferentiated thing protect the Bosnian state in April 1992, backed called 'violence,' which had just sprung up, up with an immediate response from the air, it as a symptom of Bosnia's general malaise. . might have been possible to stop the war in . . Lacking a political understanding of the Bosnia within its first week." Since then, West- origins and nature of the war, the West re- ern leaders have erred in assuming that stop- sponded to it not with politics but with ping the Serbs would require massive NATO therapy." Seeking to reduce the violence, the forces. The Bosnian government never even West imposed an arms embargo-denying asked for Western soldiers. Those who are there the Bosnian government the weapons it should be withdrawn, and the arms embargo needed to defend itself. Despite the Serbs' should be lifted, Malcolm argues. It is in the military superiority, Malcolm points out, West's long-term interest "to see that the Greater "the Bosnian government forces have man- Serbian experiment fails."

PERIODICALS 133 ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

Merger Mania Revisited A Survey of Recent Articles

f you were looking for fighting words dur- The real problem, Baldwin and Clark believe, ing the 1980s, "mergers and ac- is more prosaic: the capital-budgeting and finan- Iquisitions" would do nicely. This phrase cial-planning techniques that big business in- could make the hair on a corporate titan's head creasingly adopted after World War 11. These stand on end and touch off ideological brawls methods gave managers a way to estimate re- among people worried about the future of the turns from investments in tangible items but U.S. economy. Some said the decade's extraor- made it difficult to evaluate spending on what dinary number of corporate mergers, takeovers, the authors call "organizational capabilities": and leveraged buyouts was destroying the U.S. things such as skills, procedures, and informa- economy. Others insisted that these activities tion systems that improve the speed or quality were a healthy development. of production. Adhering strictly to conventional In the cool light of history, it appears that the methods, for example, it would be hard to jus- optimists may have been "more right" than the tify costly investments in gathering customer pessimists. In a special issue of Business Histo y feedback, reorganizing management, and rede- Review (Spring 19941, Harvard's Alfred D. Chan- signing products to improve quality. Quality is dler, Jr., the dean of American business histori- hard to quantify. ans, puts the decade's events in longer-term A backlash against those methods was al- perspective. Their roots go back to the 1960s, ready beginning in corporate circles as the when U.S. corporations facing rising competi- merger-and-acquisitions movement gathered tion from domestic and overseas rivals began speed in the early 1980s. Both the backlash and diversifying into other, frequently unrelated the movement were propelled by ever-increas- areas of business. There were some 6,000 merg- ing competition, not only from foreign firms but ers and acquisitions in 1969 alone. The trend within U.S. industry. toward conglomeration produced corporate in- Chandler finds that financial restructuring digestion, as headquarters personnel lost touch varied a great deal during the period, depend- with their varied and far-flung operations. The ing upon the type of industry. In what he calls financial restructuring that reached its crescendo the "low-tech industries (e.g., food, drink, and in the 1980s actually got under way during the tobacco), there were a lot of mergers and take- 1970s, as big businesses began to shed divisions overs, and many were highly publicized. Well- they had unwisely acquired. known companies such as General Foods, But the problems of American business were Nabisco, and Beatrice Foods were absorbed into bigger than a few unwise acquisitions and by the other corporations. Most of these changes, Chan- 1970s they were becoming painfully apparent. dler suggests, were needed responses to the In another article in the Spring 1994 issue, Carliss overdiversification of the recent past; in the end, Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, both of Harvard's the competitive strength of the low-tech sector Graduate School of Business Administration, was little affected. argue that the usual explanations for declining competiveness-the high cost of capital and the n America's "high-tech" industries, such short time horizons of U.S. business execu- as chemicals, electronics, and aerospace, tives-are too simplistic. They report that in a there were a number of high-profile merg- 1993 study of 432 large companies, economist ers and acquisitions, but "managers, not finan- Michael Jensen found that about one-quarter of cial intermediaries, proposed the moves and car- them overinvested during the 1980s. General ried them out." Unlike the controversial "trans- Motors spent $67 billion on new plant and action oriented deals masterminded by invest- equipment but saw its market share drop from ment bankers and corporate raiders gunning for 45 percent to 35 percent. quick profits, these deals were normally made

134 WQ SPRING 1995 by managers taking the long view. They bought heated markets of the 1980s, investment bank- and sold companies chiefly in the interest of re- ing houses and other financial intermediaries shaping "product portfolios." Consider chemi- collected huge fees, costing industries hundreds cals (including pharmaceuticals), a $210 billion of millions of dollars and forcing reductions in industry in 1987, as compared with the $127 bil- R&D and capital investment. lion auto industry. Reshaped by mergers and ac- In a third Business History Review article, Ber- quisitions and reinvigorated by heavy research- keley economist Bronwyn H. Hall reaches sirni- and-development (R&D) outlays, the U.S. lar conclusions with regard to firms that went chemical industry held its own against foreign through leveraged buyouts (in which so-called competitors.Between 1987 and '91, exports rose junk bonds or other forms of debt were used to from $25 billion to $44 billion. take a company private) or big increases in debt "Stable-tech" industries, ranging from fabri- loads. The action, she says, was focused in the cated metals (e.g., cans) to farm equipment, suf- stable-tech sector. Overall, she suggests, such a fered the most during the decade. The high-tech freewheeling "market for corporate control" has industries were able to respond to rising com- a salutary effect on business. petition by boosting R&D spending to develop new products and markets. Stable-tech compa- n all three sectors, Chandler concludes, the nies that were able to find similar opportunities past few decades have taught business the generally managed to fend off unwanted suitors: dangers of unplanned growth. The stable- oil companies moved into petrochemicals; com- tech industries learned the hardest way. But "the panies such as 3M and Corning Glass moved United States is not going the way of the United into fields such as fiber optics. But other indus- Kingdom in terms of long-term competitive tries, such as steel, aluminum, and nonelectrical strength," he writes. Late-19th-century Britain machinery, were battered by the merger-and- failed "to make the long-term investments in takeover wave. Corporate raiders such as Asher production, distribution, and above all in man- Edelman and Samuel Heyman contributed to agement essential to compete globally. . . . To- the chaos, says Chandler, but corporate manag- day American companies remain powerful ers pursuing long-term goals were again the competitors in the most dynamic and transform- chief players. The problem was that in the super- ing industries of the late 20th century."

The Ugly Truth Canada in 1981),interviewers not only obtained the usual labor-market and demographic infor- About 'Lookism' mation but also rated their respondents' physi- "Beauty and the Labor Market" by Daniel S. cal appearance, from homely to drop-dead Hamermesh and Jeff E. Biddle, in The American good-looking. Economic Review (Dec. 1994), American Economic Assoc., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Term. Hamermesh and Biddle's analysis shows 37203. that, other things (such as education, health, and marital status) being equal, the five per- Now there is proof: women do face discrirnina- cent of women judged homely or quite plain tion in the workplace on the basis of their looks. earn about five percent less than those with Economists Hamermesh and Biddle, of the Uni- ''average" looks. The unlovely male, however, versify of Texas, Austin, and Michigan State pays a penalty of about nine percent. At the University, respectively, have the evidence to other end of the scale, good-looking or beau- prove it. But there is a surprise: men face even tiful women earn about four percent more greater discrimination. than ordinary-looking ones. Men who are In three extensive surveys (two done in the "10s" (or thereabouts) get an earnings bonus United States in 1971 and 1977, and one in of five percent.

PERIODICALS 135 SOCIETY

The Mailing to see shopping malls." Yet the malls, very much like their Ameri- Of Europe can counterparts, are there. In one outside "Eurosprawl" by Alex Marshall, inMetropolis (Jan.- Lyon, France's second-largest city, Marshall Feb. 1995), 177 E. 87th St., New York, N.Y. 10128. encountered Jacques Martin, a balding man in To Americans who loathe suburban sprawl his fifties, nursing a cup of coffee and reading and shopping malls, Europe has always the morning paper at L'Absinthe, a mall ver- seemed the promised urban land. Writing sion of a sidewalk cafe. "I come here about about the woes of U.S. cities, architects and once a week to shop and relax," Martin told city planners frequently dot their texts with the journalist. Although born and reared in cosmopolitan asides about how much more old Lyon, Martin said he seldom ventured Europeans still care about community, about downtown anymore. "The traffic is too bad," public spaces, about cities. "Well, they don't. he explained. Of the Lyon metropolitan area's At least not as much as we think,"writes 2.5 million people, less than 10 percent live in Marshall, a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot of the city's core. Norfolk, Virginia, who explored Western Eu- Eurosprawl is not quite the same as U.S. rope for 10 weeks last summer on a fellowship. suburban sprawl, Marshall acknowledges. Outside Lyon, outside Copenhagen, out- The European suburb "remains tied to the side Brussels, outside Cologne, he found a center by some form of mass transit. At least surprisingly familiar sight: "Just as in the a bus line, and often train, subway, and bike United States, Europe's middle class has lanes as well." One can travel from the ba- moved to the suburbs-where they shop in roque city hall in Lyon to open farm fields in malls, live in secluded subdivisions, and drive under 15 minutes. "Europeans pay a price for on traffic-clogged freeways." Most Ameri- this," he says. "In exchange for tighter, more cans, Marshall notes, "don't see it and don't cohesive cities, they generally live in smaller, know about it because they don't go to Europe meaner spaces than Americans do." They also

The sight is familiar to Americans, but not the site: just outside Lyon, France's second largest city.

136 WQ SPRING 1995 must pay more for items such as washing in choral societies. Many other observers have machines "because there is less space for a stressed the importance of a healthy civil so- Wal-Mart to muscle its way in beside the near- ciety to the new democracies in Eastern Eu- est freeway." rope and elsewhere. But the similarities outweigh the differ- Putnam's evidence of civic decay in the ences. "The classic European city no longer United States goes beyond organized bowling represents the real Europe," Marshall writes, (and the oft-deplored decline in voter turnout any more than New York's Greenwich Village in national elections): represents America. "The perfect European The number of people reporting that city we see on postcards and brochures is Eu- they attended a public meeting on town or rope in a box, kept there to remind the natives school affairs in the previous year fell from 22 of their heritage, to look pretty, to reap tour- percent in 1973 to 13 percent 20 years later. ism dollars. Meanwhile, the real day-to-day Participation in religious services and in action goes on in the suburbs." Mon Dieu! church-related groups has declined by per- What would Henry James think? haps one-sixth since the 1960s. Participation in parent-teacher associations fell drastically-from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely five million in 1982 be- Bowling and fore recovering somewhat (to seven million Civic Rot today). The number of people who volunteer for "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" mainline civic organizations is down. Volun- by Robert D. Putnam, in Journal of Democracy (Jan. 1995),1101 15th St. N.W., Ste. 802, Washington, D.C. teering for the Boy Scouts is off 26 percent 20005. since 1970; for the Red Cross, 61 percent. Membership in traditional women's More Americans go bowling today than ever groups has steadily declined since the mid- before, but too many of them are bowling 1960s. In the national Federation of Women's alone. Nearly 80 million went at least once Clubs, membership is down 59 percent since during 1993, a 10 percent increase over 1980. 1964; in the League of Women Voters, it is off Nevertheless, bowling in organized leagues has 42 percent since 1969. plummeted 40 percent. This development Membership in fraternal organizations, may seem unimportant in the larger scheme of such as the Lions, Elks, and Masons dropped things but Putnam, director of Harvard's Cen- substantially during the 1980s and continues ter for International Affairs, insists that, on the to fall. contrary, it isvery significant: one more sign, It is true that newer organizations, such as whimsical though it may be, of the decay of the Sierra Club and the American Association America's "civil society." of Retired Persons, have greatly expanded Americans' inveterate inclination to form their memberships, says Putnam, but most civic associations greatly impressed Alexis de members of such groups never even meet; Tocqueville when he visited the United States they just pay their dues and perhaps read the during the 1830s. He considered, as do many organization's newsletter. latter-day Tocquevilles, that such civic en- What has caused the erosion of America's gagement is vital to making democracy work. "social capital"? A big factor, obviously, has Putnam agrees. His own 20-year study of been the movement of women into the work Italy, published as Making Democracy Work: force. The loosening of ties within the family Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), showed may be another. TV and VCRs, by turning citi- that the quality of governance in different re- zens into couch potatoes, may also have gions varied with the level of civic engage- played a role. Whatever the causes of the rot, ment, as reflected in such things as voter turn- Putnam concludes, America's civil society out, newspaper readership, and membership urgently needs repair.

PERIODICALS 137 Disabled or the federal government's mushrooming welfare for the disabled, a category that now in- Dysfunctional? cludes drug addicts, alcoholics, and even chil- "Welfare's Next Vietnam" by Heather Mac Donald, dren with behavioral problems. in City Journal (Winter 1995),Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for the nonworking, disabled poor is In the debate about welfare reform, the "wel- "the nation's fastest-growing welfare pro- fare" under scrutiny is the Aid to Families gram, about to surpass both AFDC and food with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, stamps as the main form of support for the which assists single mothers and their off- non-working poor," Mac Donald points out. spring. Reformers need to expand their hori- Begun in 1974, SSI in 1993 dispensed $20 bil- zons, argues Mac Donald, a contributing edi- lion in benefits to 4.5 million recipients. Mean- tor of City Journal. They should take a look at while, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), launched in 1956 as a modest program to aid workers over 50 with severe disabilities, in 1993 provided 3.7 rnil- lion "disabled workers (of all ages) with $35 billion in payments. The eruption of SSDI outlays is bankrupting the So- cial Security disability trust fund, which will have to be bailed out this year with money from the Social Security retirement fund. Behind the explosive growth in these two programs, Mac Donald says, is a radical expansion of the concept of disability. Behavior that might simply be considered antiso- cial or even criminal is now taken as evidence of disabling "mental disor- ders." Thirty percent of all SSI recipients-and nearly 45 percent of male SSI recipients in their thir- ties and forties-are classified as mentally im- paired; the situation is much the same with SSDI recipients. Increasingly, Mac Donald says, the disability programs are sup-

138 WQ SPRING 1995 porting people who "may indeed be unemploy- have at last awakened to the enormity of the able, but their unemployabdity reflects rampant plot against them, but because the conditions drug use, a chaotic upbringing, and a lack of of human life have changed." And this has education and work ethic rather than any physi- allowed growing numbers of women to enter cal impediment." Today, at least 250,000 diag- the labor force and to compete with men on an nosed drug addicts and alcoholics are on the dis- equal basis. ability rolls, up from fewer than 100,000 five Although radical feminists just don't seem years ago. They are receiving about $1.4 billion to get it, the conditions of life in the premod- a year in benefits. ern era simply did not permit such things, In the early 1980s, the Reagan administra- Ellis argues. The absence of modern birth con- tion sought to rein in the disability programs. trol methods is one important difference, but But instead of closely examining individual not the only one. The absence of Social Secu- cases, it took "a meat-ax approach," review- rity meant that children were a virtual eco- ing 1.2 million cases and terminating the ben- nomic necessity: they were "social security" efits of nearly a half-million recipients. The for people in old age. The high rate of infant courts revolted. "The legacy of the 1980-84 mortality meant that in order to have two chil- review crisis,"Mac Donald writes, "is enor- dren who would live to adulthood, a woman mous, for in the legal counterattack the re- would have to bear perhaps six or seven. The views ignited, advocates challenged and en- shorter life expectancy during the 19th century larged the. . . eligibility standards. Ultimately, meant that a woman had a much shorter span Congress codified virtually all of these victo- of years during which to give birth seven ries" in the Social Security Disability Reform times. The absence of refrigeration meant that Act of 1984. It is time, she concludes, to reverse most women had to breast-feed their children. course and adopt a more sensible definition of The absence of motor vehicles and telephones disability. made it hard for women with young children to work even five miles away from home. "There are countless other features of modern life that affect the way women are now The Sins able to live their lives," Ellis observes, "and Of the Fathers they go well beyond the obvious labor-saving devices that enable both men and women to "Feminist Theory's Wrong Turn" by John M. Ellis, in devote a larger share of their time to doing Academic Questions (Fall 19941,575 Ewing St., Princeton, N.J. 08540. what they like to do." Thanks to electricity, for example, "very few jobs are left in which the Is the past a history of women's mistreatment greater upper-body strength of men still mat- by men, of "patriarchy" and sexist oppres- ters." Profound advances in science and tech- sion? It is often presented that way by radical nology, medicine, communications, travel, feminists. This is a profound misreading of the and social legislation now, for the first time, past, warns Ellis, a professor of German litera- are equalizing the opportunities available to ture at the University of California, Santa women and men. Cruz. It threatens to turn the feminist move- "If misrule by an oppressive 'patriarchy' ment, once associated with goals that enjoyed were a correct interpretation of the past, the broad support, into an ever more isolated logical remedy" would be hiring goals and fringe group. timetables for reaching parity in all profes- If women in the past were oppressed by a sions and occupations, Ellis points out. But if patriarchal conspiracy, he asks, why did they women instead "see their situation of today as not rise up against it? To be consistent, femi- one that has coalesced gradually over the last nists must take "a dim view of their sisters of century and could never have existed earlier, yesterday." In reality, he contends, change is they will simply move to take advantage of coming today for women, "not because they their new opportunities." And they will make

PERIODICALS 139 their own choices. If the collective result of feminists at war with the patriarchy-but to their choices is less than mathematical parity everyone else, female as well as male, it will with men, that may be intolerable to radical be just fine.

PRESS & MEDIA Stranger than Fiction A Survey of Recent Articles

uring the Cold War, some U.S. jour- how the paper would respond if, as more infor- nalists worked themselves into a mation about the KGB's penetration of the West- Dlather over the fact that patriotic col- ern press comes to light, it was discovered that leagues had given assistance of various sorts to one of its own correspondents had been enlisted the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In a in the service of the Soviet Union." lengthy article in Rolling Stone (Oct. 20,1977), Richard Gotfs work for the KGB was brought reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame to light by London's conservative Spectator (Dec. 10, claimed that over the preceding quarter-century, 19941, in an article by Alasdair Palmer. He notes that more than 400 American journalists had "se- the 56-year-old Gott-who had been an editorial cretly carried out assignments" for the CIA- writer, foreign correspondent, features editor, and, and journalists, he seemed to take for granted, finally, literary editor of the GuardianÃ‘ha made should not in any way be helping an intelligence no secret of his communist sympathies. Indeed, agency, even their own government's. Com- Palmer writes, Gott had spent his long career "ful- menting in the Washington Post (Sept. 18,1977), minating against the evils of international capital- columnist George Will saw nothing wrong with ism and attempting to airbrush out the faults of So- much of the cooperation that had taken place viet communism." between journalists and the CIA, but agreed that But Gotthad made a secret of his employment no reporter should be a paid agent. by the Soviet espionage organization. The Spec- Three years later, when foreign correspondents tator says he was recruited by the KGB in the late Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss's The Spike 1970s. "Richard Gott committed no legal offense appeared, a novel about Soviet efforts to influence in meeting and talking with the KGB," Palmer the Western media, it was dismissed by many jour- writes. But in taking money from that organiza- nahsts as a far-fetched tale, an outgrowth of conser- tion, he adds, Gott betrayed his readers' trust "in vative, anticommunist paranoia. the most fundamental way possible." Now, with the Cold War over, comes the reluctant admission by an eminent journahst at the he Spectator's expos6 prompted Gott to Guardian, London's highly regarded left-of-center resign from the Guardian (Dec. 9,1994), newspaper, that he had taken money from the So- Twith a lighthearted admission of having viet KGB-and, incredibly, the scandal is shrugged taken-in an "essentially harmless sagau-what off in many journalistic quarters. "Holdover Snip he calls "red gold from the KGB to pay for trips ing From Cold War Claims a Victim" is the head- to Vienna, Athens, and Nicosia "to meet their line over the New York Times (Jan. 8, 1995) story man." His letter of resignation appears under about the affair, with the poor "victim" being the the jaunty headline: "I was a mellow traveler." Guardian journalist himself, Richard Gott. The Guardian's editor, Peter Preston, accepted "Given the Times' remarkably incurious re- the resignation in the same spirit, lauding Gott sponse to this journalistic scandal," the New as "a free spirit and a brilliant journalist who has Criterion's Hilton Kramer comments in the New served the Guardian long and well," and joking York Post (Jan. 17,1995), "one naturally wonders that "if the Russians thought of recruiting

140 WQ SPRING 1995 you . . . no wonder they lost the Cold War." leagues, his readers, and, above all, those mil- William Shawcross, the liberal author of Side- lions of defenseless people around the world show: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cam- whose interests he purported to defend. Gott bodia (19791, is not amused. Writing in the Times took money from a regime which has murdered of London (Dec. 16,19941, he declares: "Gott's more millions of people than any other in his- taking what he calls 'red gold' was not a joke, but tory. Whatever his particular sense of humor, treachery-against his profession, his col- that is hardly a joke."

PERIODICALS 141 From Watchdogs getting close to the powerful in government- which made the journalists more "respon- To Attack Dogs sible." That is not as true now. In the past 20 'Read All About It" by Adam Gopnik, in The New years, Gopnik writes, the press has been trans- Yorker (Dec. 12,1994),20 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. formed "from an access culture to an aggres- 10036. . sion culture: the tradition, developed after the Civil War, in which a journalist's advance- "Edge" and "attitude" are very highly prized ment depended on his intimacy with power, attributes in journalism today. In a front-page has mutated into one in which his success can story about President Bill Clinton's trip to also depend on a willingness to stage visible, Oxford University last June, the once-somber ritualized displays of aggression." New York Times reported that he "returned Post-Watergate journalism may have today for a sentimental journey to the univer- looked like the hallowed "muckraking" tradi- sity where he didn't inhale, didn't get drafted, tions of yesteryear, but Gopnik points out that and didn't get a degree." The president is only there was a profound difference: "The new ''the most visible object of this malicious man- crusaders had no causes, or were not allowed ner," and the Times only its most prestigious to admit to them." The commercial press still practitioner, notes Gopnik, a New Yorker staff held aloft its traditional ideal of "objectivity," writer. and the crusading reporters had to pay defer- Many analysts look upon the new ap- ence to it (or at least give the appearance of proach as the triumph of the "tabloid style doing so) in their stories. The end result of this over "serious" journalism. Watergate reporter bind, over the years, Gopnik contends, is the Carl Bernstein has argued that the "idiot cul- sort of "knowing" yet mindless journalism in ture" of scandal and sensation must be coun- fashion today. tered with a reassertion of the investigative "The media," he writes, "now relish ag- tradition that he champions. Gopnik, how- gression while still being prevented, by their ever, argues that "the new attitudes in the own self-enforced codes, from letting that ag- press" are the long-run consequence of "a pe- gression have any relation to serious political culiar twist in the logic of skeptical journalism argument, let alone to grown-up ideas about that Bernstein helped to reinvigorate." conduct and morality." It is, he laments, "the Once reporters got stories and status by Sam Donaldson era."

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

The Transformation freedom and freedom of conscience. Yet not so very long ago, the church was indignantly de- Of Catholicism nouncing these same rights and condemning the separation of church and state. This turnabout, 'Christianity and Democracy" by Pierre Manent contends Manent, director of studies at l'~cole (translated by Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton), in Crisis (Jan. 1995 and Feb. 1995), 1511 K St. N.W., Ste. des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, 525, Washington, D.C. 20005. reflects a profound change in the relationship between the church and democracy. Pope John Paul I1 invites Christians to dis- "If the church initially, and for so long, cover in their religion the true source of the declared herself against democracy," he notes, rights of man, and the Catholic Church now "it is because she had. . . the conviction that celebrates the sacred character of religious the modern democratic movement was di-

142 WQ SPRING 1995 rected fundamentally against her, that is, in a political situation contrary to the good of against the true religion and thus against the souls." Instead, the church has become "sim- true God." And indeed, Enlightenment think- ply the collective 'beautiful soul,' presenting ers of the 18th century did aim to establish the herself to men as 'the bearer of ideals and val- secular, liberal state, based on the collective ues.'" The realization of ideals or values can- will, and without regard for "the law of God." not be commanded, he observes, but must be The excesses of the French Revolution chas- left up to the free will of individuals. "The tened many liberals. Even as the Revolution's church repeats, in a more emphatic way, what aggressively antireligious actions prompted democracy says about itself." the church to refine and harden its opposition Although such a church cannot serve as to modernism, many true liberals became Tocqueville's brake on democracy, Manent willing "to join with, if not always the church, thinks that the "political submission . . . to deat least Christianity, or with 'religion' in gen- mocracy" is a good thing. "Democracy no eral," in order to place a check upon the hu- longer, in good faith, has any essential re- man will. proach to make against the church. From now To 19th-century liberals such as Alexis de on it can hear the question the church poses, Tocqueville, the hostility toward Christianity the question which it alone poses, the question exhibited in the previous century was not Quid sit homo-What is man?" In an ironic re- "natural." Religious faith, not unbelief, was versal of their Enlightenment relationship, "the permanent state of mankind." And since Manent concludes, the church, having ceded religion was anchored in nature, Tocqueville political sovereignty to democracy, has gained reasoned, it could do without the state's sup- the advantage in the moral dialectic between port. Indeed, he noted, religion in the United church and state. States, invigorated by its independence from the state, was a useful restraint on men's minds, limiting the dangers of political liberty. In the end, says Manent, Tocqueville effectively reduced the justification of religion to social utility-"natural" religion was completely overshadowed. Regarding itself as entrusted with the one true faith, the Catholic Church, however, was not content to have belief judged according to its usefulness to society. The church's 'thought or doctrine contains commands, which is its nature, indeed its duty to want to have respected," Manent observes. Conse- quently, the separation of church and state placed it in a difficult position, one it long re- sisted. As late as the early 20th century, Pope (now Saint) Pius X denounced such separation as a "supreme injustice" done to God. More recently, however, the church has taken a much different course. To escape the bind in which separation puts it, Manent says, the church has substantially transformed the character of its message. Since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, the church has ceased to present itself as "the most necessary and most salutary government, doing her best

PERIODICALS 143 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

Environmental Racism? waste facilities are slightly more likely to be in industrial neighborhoods with a lower per- "Environmental Injustice" by Christopher Boerner and centage of minorities and a higher percentage Thomas Lambert, in The Public Interest (Winter 1995), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036. of white working-class families." Moreover, the authors contend, advocates Are poor blacks and other minorities-to add to of "environmental justice" ignore the eco- all their other woes-made to bear more than nomic benefits such facilities can bring. In their fair share of the burden of pollution? A Sumter County, Alabama, the all-black county disproportionate number of industrial and commission has opposed state proposals to waste facilities are placed in their backyards, reduce the amount of waste accepted by a activists against "environmental racism" assert, landfill that provides more than 400 jobs, a $10 and regulators often give owners carte blanche million payroll, and a guaranteed $4.2 million to pollute. In Washington, some liberal lawrnak- in annual tax revenue. ers have proposed banning construction of The chief injustice involved in siting pollut- waste facilities in "environmentally disadvan- ing facilities, the authors maintain, has noth- taged communities. Environmental Protection ing to do with race or income. The injustice is Agency Administrator Carol Browner has that while the public at large benefits from the promised "[to] weave environmental justice facilities, only a relative few individuals bear concerns throughout all aspects of EPA policy the costs of playing host to them. The authors and decision making." propose a new kind of "green" remedy for this All of this corrective action is more than a bit injustice: compensation in hard cash (or other premature, contend Boerner and Lambert, Fel- benefits) for all those affected. lows at the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis. They find various methodological flaws The Science of Taste in the major studies cited by those who see "Accounting For Taste" by Thomas Levenson, in The "environmental racism." The most fre- Sciences (Jan.-Feb. 19951, New York Academy of quently cited piece of research, published in Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021. 1987 by the United Church of Christ's Com- mission for Racial Justice, found that zip Everyone knows that some people savor their codes with one hazardous waste plant had food while others seem indifferent to what they about twice the concentration of nonwhite eat. What accounts for this difference in taste? residents as those with none. But because Answer: the number of taste buds on one's zip code areas are often large, Boerner and tongue, reports Levenson, the author of Measure Lambert point out, what statisticians call for Measure: A Musical History of Science (1994). "aggregation errors" can affect the data. To measure differences in the ability to taste, Very different results were obtained in "the Linda Bartoshuk, a professor in the Yale School most comprehensive analysis . . . to date," a of Medicine's Department of Surgery, asked vol- study by the Social and Demographic Re- unteers to compare the strength of precisely search Institute at the University of Massa- graded "taste" solutions to sounds. Years of test- chusetts, Amherst. ing on hundreds of volunteers revealed wide The Massachusetts researchers looked at variations: "A taste that seems as strong as a si- census tracts (which are smaller geographic ren to a supertaster," she said, "will seem weak units than zip code areas) and found no as a whisper to a nontaster." greater concentrations of minorities in neigh- Bartoshuk also counted the volunteers' taste borhoods with commercial waste facilities buds, which, Levenson notes, are "the chemical than in areas with none. "Indeed," Boerner receptors that detect the four basic tastes: sweet, and Lambert say, "in the 25 largest metropoli- salty, bitter, and sour." (Contrary to what most tan areas studied, commercial hazardous- people learn in school, "all four tastes are de-

144 WQ SPRING 1995 taste pore I Bad Bonzo "To Catch a Colobus" by Craig B. Stanford, in Natural History (Jan. 1995), American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th St., New York, epithelium N.Y. 10024. From Tarzan's Cheetah and Ronald Reagan's co-star in Bedtime supporting cell for Bonzo (1951) to the more recent simian thespian Willie, who stole connective tissue scenes from Matthew Broderick in the 1987 movie Project X, chimpanzees have long been looked upon

\ cranial nerve fiber as lovable, if mischievous, creatures. Even in the wild, they sel- This (taste) bud's for you: Inside one of the body's sentinels. dom were seen hunting other animals and, in fact, until the 1960s, were thought to be strict vegetar- tected all over the tongue . . . ;only the intensity ians. Alas, it turns out that the chimpchave varies.") She found a direct correlation between a secret life, one that may tarnish their Hol- intensity of taste and the number of taste buds. lywood image. About 20 percent of the volunteers had an un- "We now know," writes Berkeley anthro- usually high number of taste buds and were ex- pologist Stanford, "that a small but regular tremely sensitive to sweet and sour tastes; an- portion of the diet of wild chimps consists other 20 percent had few taste buds and a dull of the meat of such mammals as bush pigs, sense of taste. small antelopes, and a variety of monkey "The taste buds," writes Levenson, "can be species." In Tanzania's Gombe National understood as sentinels that stand at the body's Park (where anthropologist Jane Goodall gate, heralding helpful visitors and sounding first saw chimps eating meat) and its Mahale alarms at signs of dangerous intruders. They Mountains, and in the Ta'i Mountains of the frisk foods for signs of their basic intentions, Ivory Coast, chimpanzees "all regularly then pass them along to the nose for further in- hunt red colobus monkeys." troductions. The flavors we find in chocolate, "Gombe chimps use meat not only for nu- steak, or fine wine are largely olfactory labels. trition," Stanford observes. "They also share They are only fully sensed when specific chemi- it with their allies and withhold it from their cals flow through the retronasal passage at the rivals. Meat is.. . a social, political, and back of the throat to the smell receptors in the even reproductive tool." Males often kill nose. The taste buds themselves don't have time prey to offer to female chimps who are in for long, complicated encounters, so they detect heat. only [the] four basic flavors." Because Stanford has studied both hunt- Bartoshuk found that women have a much ers and hunted, his research can at times be sharper sense of taste than men do, Levenson 'a bit heart wrenching," he notes. In Octo- says. More women are "supertasters," and the ber 1992, for example, a party of 33 chimps most sensitive of them are far more aware of encountered his main study group of red sweet and bitter tastes than even highly sensitive colobus. "The result was devastating from men. Why should natural selection have made the monkeys' viewpoint. During the hour- that so? Pregnant or nursing mothers, because long hunt, seven were killed; three were they are eating for two, Bartoshuk pointed out, caught and torn apart in front of me. Nearly need an acute sense of taste to be able both to four hours later, the hunters were still shar- identify sources of calories and to avoid poisons. ing and eating the meat they had caught,

PERIODICALS 145 while I sat staring in disbelief at the remains son-year compared with $1,924. However, only of many of my study subjects." about five percent of the deceased appear (from the fact that their Medicare payments amounted to $40,000 or more) to have received aggressive, high- tech medical services, such as being put on a res- The Costly War pirator or placed in intensive care. Against Death Elderly patients who are given such care, it is important to note, do not all die soon after. Of those ' 'The High Cost of Dying' Revisited" by Anne A. who had Medicare payments of $40,000 or more in Scitovsky, in The Milbank Quarterly (No. 4,19941, Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main St., Cambridge, Mass. 1988,73,000 died that year-but 70,000 survived. 02142. "It is easy enough in retrospect to regard those who died as terminal or dying patients," Scitovsky Health-care specialists have been worrying for writes. "It is a different matter, however, to do so years about the high cost of medical care given to prospectively. Despite the enormous advances in dying patients. A 1984 study revealed that the six medical technology (or possibly because of them), percent of Medicare enrollees who died in 1978 medical prognosis in most serious illnesses is still accounted for 28 percent of all Medicare expendi- highly uncertain." tures. A powerful force behind the nation's soaring In the long run, Scitovsky believes, bringing expenditures on health care ($752 billion in 19911, health-care spending under control as the popula- concluded many analysts, was the expensive high- tion ages is going to demand somethingeven more tech care being lavished on the critically ill in their difficult ethically than cutting back on high-tech final months. If s not so simple, warns Scitovsky, care for theen'tically ill elderly in their final months. an emeritus senior staff scientist at the Research It will require deciding when to stop giving suste- Institute of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. nance and ordinary care, such as antibiotics to fight The costs of medical care in the last year of life infection, to chronically ill elderly patients in nurs- are indeed great, she notes. Medicare payments in ing homes. That, she says, will demand "a change 1988 were about seven times higher for those who in our expectations of what medical care can do for died than for those who survived: $13,316 per per- us, especially our attitude toward death."

ARTS & LETTERS

Broadway's Final wearing an ordinary suit, performs in front of the barest of sets. Yet absurdly high as ticket Curtain prices have risen, observes Allen, who has "Who Killed Broadway?" by Brooke Allen, in City written for stage and TV, the costs of produc- Journal (Winter 1995), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. tion keep going up faster. The result, she argues, is the apparent end of Broadway as a Despite competition from movies, home place for original dramas, or even original video, and cable TV, there is still an audience comedies and musicals. for live theater. But many theatergoers now go Just to stage a modest one-set, two-actor to Broadway only once or twice a year. They playÃ‘1'th kind of show that, 30 or so years are put off by the outrageous ticket prices: at ago, used to open by the dozen every Broad- least $55 to $65 for a lavish production such way seasonv-now takes an initial investment as Les Miskrables, and nearly $50 even for Po- of some $800,000, Allen says. "Weekly run- litically Incorrect, in which a lone comedian, ning costs amount to at least $135,000, which

146 WQ SPRING 1995 covers salaries for actors, stagehands, design- Crucible, would never be produced on Broad- ers, and stage managers, rental [of] sound and way today-too expensive." The ultimate light equipment, theater rental and fees, man- comment may be that Broadway productions agers' salaries, advertising costs, and many of Shakespeare are now all but impossible. other smaller items. No wonder Broadway 'With any luck," Alien writes, "noncommer- tickets are never cheap." cial theatrical ventures as well as the popular, But why are the production costs so high? mainstream pieces that no longer thrive on The unions, those of stagehands and of musi- Broadway will continue to find a homealbeit cians in particular, get a lot of the blame. The a smaller and less glamorous oneoff-Broad- stagehands' union requires each of the 36 way." But off-Broadway can never be the major Broadway theaters to have a permanent cultural force that Broadway was in its heyday "house" carpenter, electrician, and property 40 years ago. That Broadway, she laments, is manager. They help set up scenery and con- now gone, apparently forever. duct rehearsals, and then, when the show is running, appear only on payday-to collect a weekly salary of $800-$900. The musicians' union, meanwhile, insists that from nine to 22 The Revenge of the musicians be assigned to each theater used for Eminent Victorians musicals, and that they all be employed even if the show needs only four. [The union in 1993 "Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought" by Richard D. Altick, in The American Scholar agreed to relax this rule in "special situa- (Winter 1995), Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1811 Q St. N.W., tions." The producers of Smokey Joe's Cafe, a Washington, D.C. 20009. musical which opened in March, have been allowed to pay only the seven musicians who With Eminent Victorians (1918), biographer actually play.] and critic Lytton Strachey did what no one Broadway producers typically must also else, before or since, has done, writes Altick, pay theater owners five to six percent of the an emeritus professor of English at Ohio State weekly gross, plus about $40,000 a week for University. With a single 350-page book, Stra- ushers, concession workers, janitors, and box chey "turned an entire past society into a office staff, plus a separate flat fee of as much laughingstock in the estimation of a new one." as $20,000 a week. "These sums have gone up Not quite eight decades later, however, it ap- enormously in recent decades," Allen says, pears that the last laugh is on Strachey. "largely because ballooning real estate values Eminent Victorians cruelly profiled four Vic- have driven owners' taxes up." torian worthies: Roman Catholic Cardinal All of this has consequences on stage. Pro- Henry Manning; Florence Nightingale, an ducers now try to cut costs by reducing the idolized humanitarian; Thomas Arnold of cast, simplifying the scenery, or cutting a Rugby, an education reformer, and General three-act play to two acts. "Their other way of Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a national hero for staying afloat," Allen writes, "is to minimize his exploits in China and his ill-fated defense risk: hence the push for reliable blockbusters of Khartoum. In the developing climate of and revivals." cynicism after World War I, Strachey treated Last season, at Christmas, only one Broad- his subjects with indiscriminate ridicule, Al- way production was not a musical: An Inspec- tick notes. He portrayed "Manning as an ob- tor Calls, a revival of a 1924 English play. And sessive ecclesiastical opportunist, the redoubt- of the 17 musicals playing, seven were reviv- able Nightingale as a workaholic driven by als, one was a reworking of old material, and ruthless devotion to duty, Arnold as a zealous, seven had come to Broadway only after suc- pompous public-school headmaster who cessful runs in London. "The economic prob- tended to confuse himself with God, and Gor- lem has become an aesthetic one as well," says don as a religious fanatic and dipsomaniac, al- playwright Arthur Miller. "My early play, The ternating between Bible and brandy bottle."

PERIODICALS 147 Strachey (1880-1932) insisted that he only itself has not worn well. "As a literary work," sought to tell the truth about his subjects and Altick says, "it is almost unreadable, except as claimed to have done a great deal of research. a curiosity. One is struck not by Strachey's In reality, Altick says, he relied heavily on the once admired urbanity and elegance" but bv "standard" biographies, his pose as a middle-aged enfant terrible, his and used them "with obsession with meretricious effects, and his as- great license, selecting tonishing predilection for cliches." and tampering with the More important, Altick writes, the stereo- data to conform to his type that Strachey so firmly attached to the fixed idea of his subject Victorians-that they were "stupid . . . par- and going so far as to sup- ochial, philistine, complacent, prudish" press contrary evidence people-has been largely overturned by and falsify quotations." scholars (although traces of it still persist, Nevertheless, Strach- even among them). The very fact that a de- ey's "boldly innovative cade ago, former British prime minister book made a big splash, Margaret Thatcher could invoke "Victorian Altick says. It ushered in values" as a remedy for current woes ' 'the jazz age biography,' showed "how radically the image of the Vic- fizzing with colorful per- torians has been altered." Today, Altick con- sonal details, imagined cludes, it is Eminent Victorians, not Victorian scenes, purported psy- civilization, that stands discredited. chological insights derived from letters or thin air, and illusive intimacy, as when one biographer of Getting Real in Matthew Arnold called Children's Literature that exponent of high seri- ousness 'Matt' from cradle 'Reading for Profit and Pleasure: Little Women and The Story of a Bad Boy" by Ellen Butler Donovan, in to grave." Eminent Victori- The Lion and the Unicorn (Dec. 1994), Johns Hopkins ans and the hundreds of Univ. Press, Journals Division, 2715 N. Charles St., imitations that followed Baltimore, Md. 21218-4319. touched off a debate about biography that continues Generations of young people have enjoyed the to this day. It is a debate adventures of the March sisters in Louisa May over what balance must be Alcott's Little Women (1868-69). But readers struck between what the today may not realize how much of a radical biographer owes to the departure in children's literature this classic- memory of the subject and along with its lesser-known contemporary, the subject's survivors and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad his duty to his readers, Boy-represented. The two books, contends over the balance between Donovan, of Middle Tennessee State Univer- the recital of fact and artis- sity, were the first for children to offer more- tic effect. realistic characters and a world not tightly Yet Eminent Victorians controlled by adults. BeforeLittle Women and Bad Boy (first published in serial form in 1869), children's fiction When Max Beerbohm aimed mainly to teach moral or religious les- did this 1929 caricature of Lytton Strachey, he sons, Donovan says. The child characters called him "The Prince served as examples of either good or bad be- of Prose- Writers." havior, and adult paragons (3f virtue were in-

148 WQ SPRING 1995 variably on hand to guide or correct the one-dimensional children. Drawing on their own experiences, Alcott and Aldrich created more-natural characters. Each of the March girls has her own individual traits: Jo is short-tempered, Meg longs to be fashionable, Amy is vain, and Beth is bashful. In Bad Boy, Aldrich went even further, Donovan notes. Tom Bailey, the title character, "manages to involve himself in all sorts of scrapes," and even spends time in jail. Both authors gave adults only minimal roles in the novels, and these elders were not automatically invested with absolute moral authority. Un- like the ideal parent portrayed in the typical children's literature of the day, the March mother, Marmee, is not "all wise, all knowing, and all good." Instead, she makes mistakes, admits them to her daughters, and at one point even apologizes to Meg for making a "very unwise" decision. Marmee is "just an older, more experienced version of the girls," Donovan points out. In Aldrich's Bad Boy, the adult Sailor Ben even serves as Tom Bailey's accomplice. Although Little Women and The Story of a Bad Boy marked a fundamental literary change, both novels were immediately snapped up by the book-buying public and remained popular throughout the 1870s. has inspired three film adaptations (the lat- These groundbreaking works had appeal in est last year). Aldrich's novel and its young a time when adolescence was increasingly protagonist, Tom Bailey, however, long being recognized as a stage between child- since have faded into obscurity. Perhaps hood and adulthood. Little Women has re- young readers found Tom Sawyer and Huck tained its popularity to the present day, and Finn more to their liking.

PERIODICALS 149 OTHER NATIONS

Good Earth far more remote today than in the past. "Prepublication censorship," says Polum- For Fiction baum, "is [now] actually a rarity in China: "New Chinese Literature" by Judy Polumbaum, in certain topics ostensibly must be cleared by Poets & Writers Magazine (Jan.-Feb. 1995), 72 Spring St., New York, N.Y. 10012. authorities ahead of publication, but this may or may not occur, and the list of literary taboos Most observers of cultural developments in is constantly in flux." Outright bans "often China assumed that the 1989 Tiananmen backfire," Polumbaum notes, "by fueling de- Square protest and massacre would have an mand and creating a black market." extremely chilling effect, particularly on Chi- Even controversial writers find a range of nese literature. But the cultural frost was not publishing options. An author whose book is as severe as expected. Indeed, literature in rejected as too subversive by one publisher can China seems to be flourishing today, reports now turn to another of the "more than 500 pub- Polumbaum, a journalism professor at the lishing houses and more than 4,000 printing es- University of Iowa. In the past year alone, tablishments, along with legions of unlicensed, about 10,000 short stories, 1,000 novellas, and often fly-by-night operations," or strike a deal 100 novels were published, and they include with one of the 500 literary journals or thou- many "innovative and experimental" works. sands of popular magazines and newspapers. From the founding of the People's Republic Zhang's GoodMomingFriends, for instance, first in 1949 through the Cultural Revolution of the appeared in a provincial literary journal. late 1960s, writing was "a politically foolhardy Some authors have even managed to turn the occupation," Polumbaum points out. As a re- appearance of government censorship to their sult, novels and stories from that period were advantage. Jia Pingwa published his racy 1993 populated with "heroic workers and peasants. novel, The Abandoned Capital, with blanks in The characters were stereotyped, the plots banal, place of words supposedly excised by the cen- the language uninspired." But with Mao sors, and the book became a runaway best seller. Zedong's death in 1976, new voices began to Although the novel eventually was officially emerge and the range of acceptable characters banned (with little effect on sales), it now seems was expanded. These new writers started to ex- that the blanks may have been merely a promo- press "a backlog of grievances" dating from the tional gimmick. late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of 1966- 69. Their writing was "a prelude to more daring and sophisticated work." Today, Chinese fiction regularly features Church and Stasi such topics as "abuse of power, romantic love The 'Stasi' and the Churches: Between Coercion and and family life, the complexities of traditional Compromise in East German Protestantism, 1949- 89" by John S. Conway, inJournal of Church and State culture, and the contradictions of contempo- (Autumn 1994), P.O. Box 97308, Waco, Texas 76798- rary life." Many of the new works-such as 7308. Wang Anyi's Brocade Valley (English translation, 1992), whose female protagonist has an 'Kircke, wir danken dir!" ("Church, we thank extramarital affair, and Zhang Xianliang's you!") proclaimed a large banner paraded Good Morning Friends (1987), about the erotic through the streets of Leipzig in late 1989. The experiences of secondary school students- Evangelical (Protestant) churches of the also include the kind of sexual explicitness former East Germany had been instrumental that in decades past might have landed the in bringing down East German communism. author in a re-education camp. "These days," But after the files of East Germany's hated se- writes Polumbaum, "demotion or loss of one's cret police, the Stasi, were opened, the job are more realistic dangers." While the risk churches suddenly were cast in a much less of imprisonment for "the vaguest of offenses" flattering light, notes Conway, a historian at reappeared after'the Tiananmen tragedy, it is the University of British Columbia. Not only

150 WQ SPRING 1995 PERIODICALS 151 had the clergy been infiltrated, but church and secretly subsidizing organizations such as leaders for many years had held secret talks the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference. with the Stasi. During the 1980s, things started to get out of Theological conservatives, mainly from control, as church leaders and the basis West Germany, charged that the East German groups of peace activists began "to criticize all churches had been wholly misguided in recent militarism, including that of the Soviet decades in seeking an accommodation with Union." Church-organized peace meetings in socialism and the Marxist state; they had ne- 1981 drew large crowds, especially of young glected the church's prophetic duty to resist people; soon, new groups of human-rights tyranny and injustice, and by meeting with the and other activists sprang into existence. Communists, and even the Stasi, had "sold Stasi officials met secretly with church out" the church. Radicals from the church-re- leaders and demanded that they bring the ba- lated "basis groups," who had helped topple sis groups to heel. Whatever the inclinations the regime, also demanded that the churches of the churchmen may have been, they knew face their failures. The East German bishops, they would lose all credibility with their sup- however, took a "cautious and hesitant porters if they tried. In 1989, Conway reports, stance" toward any "Declaration of Guilt." "the wave of protests and demonstrations The critics have lost perspective, Conway sharply increased. In church halls and base- contends. The bishops, pastors, and other eccle- ments, where there had been scores, hundreds siastical leaders had to operate in the same now took part in public discussions calling for "murky world of corruption, espionage, and reform. In Leipzig, where the Monday prayer intimidation which marked the daily experience meetings for peace had attracted hundreds, of the East German people." The revelations that thousands now turned up and the crowds perhaps 113 pastors worked for the Stasi were spilled out into the streets." The eventual re- shocking, Conway says, but those spies repre- sult was completely unambiguous, the col- sented only a small fraction of the roughly 4,000 lapse of communism, and for helping to bring pastors in the former East Germany. it about, Conway insists, the churches still That Manfred Stolpe, the former chief ad- deserve much credit. ministrative officer of the East German Church Federation, and other church leaders had secret contacts with Stasi and other officials was much more disturbing, Conway On Being Nordic notes. Stolpe claimed that in more than 1,000 "Between Baits and Brussels: The Nordic Countries meetings with the Stasi, he-with the backing after the Cold War" by Ole Wsever, in Current History of his ecclesiastical superiors-had sought (Nov. 1994), 4225 Main St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19127. only to protect church interests, to keep suspected individuals out of the Stasi's clutches, During the Cold War, the five Nordic coun- and to prevent worse repression. But the fact tries took a lofty stance toward the East-West that the secret talks were held meant that the struggle, calling for peace, disarmament, and churches could not claim to have been alternatives to confrontation. With the end of "merely the innocent victims of Stasi machi- the Cold War, they suddenly got their wish- nations," Conway notes. How far their "col- and were none too happy about it, writes laboration" went, or what the consequences Wasver, a lecturer in international relations at were, is not clear. the University of Copenhagen. The churches' very involvement in the anti- For the Nordic nations, the Cold War was ideal, government opposition had ambiguous ori- he says. "Their rhetoric-their nationalimage-de- gins. During the 1970s, the Stasi began to en- pended on being against and maintaining a dis- courage so-called "progressive elements" tance from the Cold War, but that was pleasant. within the churches, letting compliant church- They had lower tensions, no nuclear weapons, no men travel to ecumenical meetings abroad foreign troops." Norway and Denmark played

152 WQ SPRING 1995 minimal roles in the North Atlantic Treaty Orga- destabilization." Somalia, Liberia, and nization, as did Iceland, which has no army. Swe- Angola are approaching anarchy, while the den was neutral, and Finland, bordering the Soviet "pure destruction" of genocide appeared in Union, wanted to be. Rwanda last year. The post-Cold War Shunning "confrontation, ideological movement toward democracy is foundering, clarion calls, and militarization," the Nordic with fewer than one-third of sub-Saharan countries "could consider themselves keepers nations having anything resembling multi- of the promise of the more humane society to party politics. "Africans acknowledge the come when others freed themselves from the immensity of their crisis and the need to con- grip of East-West antagonism." Sweden espe- sider hitherto unacceptable remedies," writes cially imagined that it offered other nations a Pfaff, author of The Wrath of Nations (1993).His social-democratic "middle way" between proposal: "a disinterested neocolonialism" by communism and capitalism. When the Soviet Europe's former colonial powers. bloc fell apart, however, the new democracies The project, which might take as long as of Eastern Europe did not rush to adopt the a century, he says, would not only benefit '"Scandinavian model." Indeed, in Sweden it- Africa but would be "a deeply constructive self, the Social Democrats fell from power and accomplishment for Europe." Africa's their vaunted model fell from grace. plight, after all, is partly the West's fault. Defining Nordic identity anew, Waever says, The European powers that, from a mixture has turned into a contest between "European of motives, colonized Africa destroyed the Union-appendix" and "Festung ('Fortress') social and political institutions they found, Norden"-that is, between drawing closer and Pfaff says, but did not stay "long enough to adapting to an integrated Europe on the one put anything solid and lasting in their hand, and defending Nordic independence place." After the "great wave" of against spreading "Europeanness" on the other. decolonization in the late 1950s and early It is a false dichotomy, Waever believes. 60s, "a shameful series of self-interested He proposes a new middle way (though he foreign interventions and ruthless exploita- does not call it that): a Scandinavia that looks tion of indigenous African conflicts by the not only to Brussels but to the new states of Es- Soviet Union, its proxy, Cuba, and the tonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the eastern United States" made matters worse. shore of the Baltic Sea. Being Nordic, Waever Kenya's Ali A. Mazrui, an editor of the asserts, "is to be involved both in Brussels af- UNESCO General History of Africa, last year fairs and in the development of the new Bal- proposed a United Nations trusteeship sys- tic states. . . . Nordics are those of us who tem, with African and Asian nations among travel as more than tourists to Tbrshavn, St. those appointed to govern certain countries, Petersburg, and Brussels." under the guidance of a council of major Af- rican states. It is not going to happen. Pfaff believes that a new form of European over- sight stands a slightly better chance of be- A Radical Cure coming a reality. For Africa The ex-colonial powers have an urgent interest in easing Africa's problems and stem- "A New Colonialism? Europe Must Go Back into Africa" by William Pfaff, in Foreign Affairs (Jan.-Feb. ming the tide of immigration to Europe. They 1995), 58 East 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. also have the means to help, Pfaff observes. 'As its former colonial ruler, the Italians know Hopes for Africa's future, soaring only a few Somalia, just as the French know West and years ago, are crashing down today. "From Central Africa, the British, East Africa, and the now on," says Congolese writer Ange Severin Portuguese, Angola and Mozambique. . . . If Malanda, "the danger in several parts of the anybody is competent to deal sympathetically continent is of pure destruction or generalized with these countries, the Europeans are."

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

"Casualties, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Intervention: Implications for U.S. Regional Deterrence Strategies." RAND Corp., 1700 Main St., P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, Calif. 90407-2138.27 pp. $7.50 Author: Benjamin C. Schwarz

he American public's ap- 62 percent in July 1965, when In August 1968, only nine per- parent reluctance to take U.S. ground troops were com- cent of Americans favored T in stride the casualties mitted, to only 32 percent in withdrawal from Vietnam-a that result from military ac- August 1968, when casualties percentage virtually un- tion is often regarded as the had risen to 200,000. changed since July 1965. And, nation's Achilles' heel. Yet the That retrospective assess- although little noted at the common perception that ment was politically impor- time, those New Hampshire Americans will choose to cut tant for President Lyndon B. voters who cast ballots for and run once the body bags Johnson. His popularity suf- McCarthy favored, by a three- start coming home is very fered, as the surprisingly to-two margin, fighting harder much in error, contends strong showing by dovish in Vietnam, not withdrawing Schwarz, a RAND researcher. senator Eugene J. McCarthy in from it. Indeed, as disapproval During the Vietnam and the March 1968 New Hamp- of the original commitment Korean wars, as the toll of dead shire primary showed. But grew, so did the public's de- and wounded mounted, polls Schwarz points out that ask- sire to escalate the conflict to reflected the public's increas- ing the public about the initial achieve victory. ing unhappiness. Public ap- decision to intervene was not During the Korean War, the proval of the initial decision to at all the same as asking it polls told a similar story: in- intervene in Vietnam fell from about the best future course. creasing disapproval of the ini-

-- Cumulative casualties - Percent approving intervention 70 ...Percent favoring withdrawal 200,000 - - Percent favoring escalation /

.S 50- Â£ 3 ^ Q

- / cn 0 .-0) * / -+ 5 30- - u 0/ 80,000 a 0 Public Opinion and the - Q 0 8 - 0) 20 0 War in Vietnam > 0 .-+ 0 40,000 0 ,...... - lo7, ...... - 6 --^ 0 4 0 0 July 1966 1967 1968 August 1965

.%urce: Benjamin C. Schwarz, Casualties, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Intervention (Harris, Roper, NORC, and New York Times polls)

154 WQ SPRING 1995 tial decision to intervene-but serves. During the months pre- flag." Just before the air offen- steady opposition by the over- ceding the 1991 Persian Gulf sive against Iraqin January 1991, whelming majority to with- War, Saddam Hussein repeat- 79 percent were in favor of go- drawal. "In both wars," edly asserted that America did ing to war. And the public sub- Schwarz writes, "far more not "have the stomach for a sequently showed little sign of Americans preferred to fight prolonged and costly conflict. wanting to withdraw from the (harder) than to quit." The public was much more di- conflict. "In fact," Schwarz says, The mistaken perception that vided over the wisdom of inter- "believing firmly that war with mounting casualties will vention than it had been before Iraq would be a horrible experi- prompt America to cut and run the Korean or Vietnam wars, ence for America, most Ameri- can undermine the deterrent Schwarz says. Yet once the na- cans nevertheless wanted to effect of U.S. military threats tional commitment was made, continue making war against and lead to miscalculations by he notes, most Americans Iraq even after Saddam's forces potential enemies, Schwarz ob- "quickly rallied around the were ejected from Kuwait."

"Human Capital and Economic Development." W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 300 S. Westnedge Ave., Kalamazoo, Mich. 49007-4686.163 pp. $23 (cloth); $13 (paper) Editors: Sisay Asefa and Wei-Chiao Huang

ill the U.S. economy that the burden imposed on Between 1950 and 1980, he be hurt by the the working population by notes, population in the de- country's slow pop- rising old-age dependency is veloping countries increased wulation growth? In his 1987 likely to be offset by the de- rapidly, by two percent a year book, The Birth Dearth, Ben clining cost of supporting or more. Yet the widely pre- Wattenberg of the American infants and children as birth- dicted disaster never occurred. Enterprise Institute argued rates drop. In fact, per capita gross do- that it will: markets and pro- In any event, Easterlin is mestic product in these coun- ductivity will grow more not surethat population fore- tries increased faster, by 2.6 slowly, while an increased eld- casters have a good picture of percent annually. erly population will consume the future. They did not fore- Whether population a growing share of national see the post-World War I1 baby growth is slow or fast, wealth. boom, and also were caught Easterlin and Johnson indicate, Economist Richard A. by surprise when fertility it is a minor factor in deter- Easterlin of the University of started to plunge in the 1960s. mining the value of "human Southern California, one of They may be wrong again. The capital" or a nation's economic six contributors to this col- U.S. total fertility rate (esti- well-being. "Government poli- lection, says the historical mated number of lifetime cies are of far greater impor- experience of the United births per woman) was 2.09 in tance," Johnson says. States and other advanced 1990-slightly less than "re- In the United States, other countries does not bear out placement level" fertility contributors to this volume Wattenberg's thesis: "While (2.11), but up from the 1986 argue, making the most of population growth has "baby bust" rate of 1.77. A new human capital requires im- trended downward in most "fertility upswing" may be in proving the education and of these countries over the the making, Easterlin says. training of the working last century, real per capita Economist D. Gale Johnson populace rather than trying income growth has trended of the University of Chicago to influence such largely un- upward." Moreover, Easter- throws cold water on another governable forces as popula- lin says, doomsayers forget bit of conventional wisdom. tion size or growth rate.

RESEARCH REPORTS 155 We welcome timely 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. Letters may be mailed to our editorial address or sent via facsimile, at (202)287-3772, or E-mail, at [email protected]. The writer's telephone number and address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

service to their alrna maters. But practically speaking Games People Play theRubicon was crossed long ago, whenathletes were first awarded scholarships ("&ants-in-aid," as they I read Wilfrid Sheed's essay "Why Sports Matter" are euphemistically called) irrespective of financial ["The Future of Sports," WQ,Winter '951 with excite- need. ment. As with many good essays, I discovered that I Among ail participants in extracurricular activi- already knew most of whattheessayistwaswriting but ties, only athletes are provided this largesse straight did not know that I knew it until I read the essay. up; only athletes were long ago set aside as a class Sheed mentionsRobert Maynard Hutchins doing apart. There areno grants-in-aidfor student singers or away with football at the University of Chicago to student cheerleaders or student actors or, even, stu- preserve theacademicintegrityof theuniversity.When dent journalists. Therefore it is neither a philosophical I was a student at Chicago,I was told that Hutchins had nor emotionalleap to pay them in the coin of the realm; actually said that the university had a choice. It could student-athletes are already a little bit pregnant. either give up football or else buy the Chicago Bears Two other developments have occurred which and call them the University of Chicago footballteam. justify cashon thebarrelhead. Onceupona time-and It is interesting to speculate about what might not so long ago, either-all sides were kind of in it have happened had the university, with its long and together. ~venthe best coaches made modest salaries. noble football record, bought the Bears and hired John Wooden never earned more than $40,000 while George Halasas thefootballcoach.Surely other schools winning 10 championships in 12 years at UCLA, and would have followed suit. the lads would go over and toast marshmallows with George R. Wren Mrs. Coach in the off-season. Now Mr. Coach takes St. Louis, Mo. home 500 grand from Nike and another 250 from his summer camp on university property, the athletic department makes millions from NBC and the sale of Among the valuable background provided by your personalized sweatshirts,and thereis no off-seasonfor excellent articles on sports, Edward Tenner tells how the players, because they are expected to spend hours the rise of professional coaches for college teams sup- daily in the weight room year-round. planted amateur advisers such as Woodrow Wilson. Nostalgia and best-of-all-worlds aside, the fair Few people would think of Wilson as a football coach. response is to pay the athletes who bring in the money Yet in his Wesleyan days (1888-90) when he was (mostly football and basketball players) and award professor of history and political economy, he also scholarships to all other athletes on a need basis only, served as football coach. In 1889 he wrote in his diary, the way other students are treated. 'It is one of my duties to train the football eleven, and Frank Deford when we win, I just call attention to the fact that I have Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair a share in the victory." In addition to serving as coach, New York, N.Y. he was also director of the "Foot Ball Association." David B. Potts, in Wesleyan University 1831-1910, quotes a Wesleyan alumnus who remembered Wilson Just as the culture of Chaucer's "verray parfit gentil as "a tall thin man running up and down these very knight" vanished with the invention of gunpowder, sidelinesduring the afternoon's football practice, wav- the sporting ideal, according to John Hoberman and ing his closed umbrella in the air and cheering encour- EdwardTenner, has been killedby technology. Tenner agement at the top of his lungs to the team on almost eloquentlyargues that technology, a categoryinwhich every play." he includes not only equipment but organized logical Edmund T. Delaney thought, has undermined the amateur spirit. Charac- Chester, Conn. ter, intelligence,and honor no longer count for muchin athletic competition. Arduous and exacting practice, Like Wilfrid Sheed, I regret the pass we have come to professional coaching, and high-tech equipment are where so many of us believe that some college athletes often the difference between winning and losing. should be paid wages for their valuable box office Hoberman laments that doping compromises what is

156 WQ SPRING 1995 unique about sport: its ability to serve as a measure of sourceof energyinthe field. When they analyzesports human potential. and the media in terms of ideology and iconography While both writers show how a socieys accep- (e.g., Wenner's article on beer commercials during tance of new technologies can undermine its own sports telecasts) they leave the amateurs far behind. values, they leave oneimportant questionunanswered: I applaud WQ's attempt to enlist authors who did technology initiate the decline of the sporting ideal write in clear, coherent prose. Unfortunately, you se- or did it only sustain an existing trend? lected three writers still on leisurelv cross-countrv The first step in answering this question is to jaunts compared to the new breed of researchers with explore what the aithors mean bithe "s

For Hoberman, the ideal involves testingu the limits of writers on sports who can explain their research to human potential; the "biochemically engineered general readers, or journalists who can do it for them. superperson" is the antithesis of the pure athlete. Murray Sperber Tenner's ideal is somewhat different. Technology in Indiana University his view undermined what he calls the amateur ideal. Bloomington, Ind. This is strange, because Tenner recognizes that the amateur ideal never existed historically, but he apparently wants to believe in the world of the early 20th Guns or Butter? century fictional character, Dinkstover, in which spirit and charactertriumph over rationalized efficiency. He I agree with every word of A. J. Bacevich's "Use of proposes that "the decline of the heroic ideal is re- Force" [ WQ, Winter195].I havealwaysbeendepressed flectedin thehistory of protective technology," and the by what one might call the 'Weinberger-Powell im- use of technology and scientific training has distin- perative" of Americanstrategy:only toget involvedin guished the professional athletefrom the amateur. Yet, wars that you know you can win. The combination of we wonder when this amateur athlete existed. Even an army p;epared to deal only withmajor wars against Greek athletes in 600 B.c., Tenner notes, "resorted to other regular armed forcesand a populationunwilling special diets, coaching, and other aids in attempts to to accept casualties even in a &or confrontation is a improve performance." The Greeks, we would add, recipe for miIitary impotence of which both the en- even used specially constructed "halteres" (weights emies and, I am afraid, the allies of the United States used in long jumping). They did not even have a word will be taking very careful note. for amateur. Britain was brought to disaster before 1939 Technology may not have caused the decline of very largely by the relictance of her army and her the sporting ideal, but clearly it has affected the nature people even to contemplate continental war. The and meaning of sport. Before technology is introduced Unitedstates couldbe placedin equaldifficultiesby into any endeavor, be it ballet, business, or basketball, an army reluctant to contemplate anything else. But its potential impact should be carefully studied. We in both cases the fault lies, not so much with the can and must make active, educated choices so as to armed forces themselves, as in the first place with a avoid accidentally killing the not so perfect "verray political leadership unwilling to lay down firm po- parfit gentle knight." litical guidelines and ensure that the military follow Nadine Gelberg and Ronald A. Smith them: and in the second, with an electorate that is at Pennsylvania State University best indifferent to such questions and, at worst, University Park, Penn. unwilling to accept even minimal losses in a minor campaign. Nations, I am afraid, tend to get the armies they deserve. If readers of your sports cluster begin with Allen Sir Michael Howard Guttmann's selectivebibliography on the subject, they Berkshire, England will discover books-many of them decades old-that contain most of the "insights" in the articles by Sheed, Tenner, and Hoberman. To current students of the "The Use of Force" is an excellent overview of the subject, the pieces by your authors also lack-to quote problems we face today concerningmilitaryinterven- anugly butaccuratephras+"methodologicalrigor." tionalloverthe world. Asiscustomarywithsuchtypes Your writers seem unaware of the last two de- of analysis, however, it offers no program for over- cades of sports studies, dominated by such highly coming these problems. professional researchers as Michael Real, Lawrence I believe it is erroneous for Bachevich to conclude Wenner, and Garry Whannel. Unfortunately, these that our military is doomed to failure because of its authors and their colleagues converse in jargon-en- inflexible "orthodoxy." I participated in the occupa- crusted prose, extremely difficult for general readers tion of NorthChina in 1945 and 1946 to stabilizeNorth to comprehend. Nevertheless, their workis the current China and to repatriate the Japanese army. My doc-

COMMENTARY 157 trine in thosedays came fromseveralold China Hands which Brown refers to. At the end of the 1960s I who had served in China before World War 11. It was predicted to my astonished colleagues that this would a smooth occupation; it was a peace-keeping mission happen by the end of this century. and warfare was not on the agenda. We'll see. Our success was based on the fact that there was W. W.Rostow a clear mission and the State Department was actively Univ. of Texas, Austin engaged on location. Given the same kinds of direc- Special Asst. to President Johnson, 1966-69 tion, today's troops would be able to execute similar successfulmissionsabroad. They are hampered, however, by a lack of political leadership to guide the Frederick Brown has written a tour de force. Seldom military activities. has so muchbeen written so well in such limited space George N.Mayer about developments in Vietnam over the last two Washington, D.C. decades. But as an expatriate American who has lived a quarter-centuryin Australia, my perspectiveis somewhat different. Nowhere is this more evident than in A reading of A. J. Bacevich's article leads one to the editors' introduction to the essay, which asserts wonder if the author had thought before he penned. A that "now, with their Soviet patron gone and the U.S. rereading leads to an inescapable negative conclusion. trade embargo lifted, Vietnam's communist leaders The fact is that America's military has served us are lookingoutward. . . ." This is very much an Ameri- well throughout our history.It is especiallytrue thatwe can-cente&d perspective. vietnam began looking out- have been better served by the military mind than its wardat leastthree yearsbefore theembargo waslifted. civilian overseers. We can hope that civilianminds will America must come to realize that it is not the only catch up to the militarfs, but if the author is an player in Vietnam today. example, it is unlikely. If Vietnam taught us anything, I have two major quibbleswith Brown's analysis. it should be that having minds from academia in- Wehe correctly details the ideological and policy volvedinmilitary [and perhaps many other] mattersis failings of the Hanoi regime, he fails to factor in the a great mistake. The ivory tower is a poor perch from impact of the US. embargo. It would be important to which to view the real world. know, for example, whether or not unremitting US. Edmund E. Ackerson hostility played into the hands of Vietnam's commu- Belmont, Mass. nist conservatives. Americans, scholars and officials alike, havenever Ed. Note: Bacevick served as an army oficer for 23 years, quite understood the origins of the Vietnam War and including tours of duty in Vietnam and Europe. the fact that the Vietnam Communist Party was a national organization. It is true that there were North- South differences and that these differences mani- Vietnam's Prospects fested themselveswithinthe party. But Brown's analysis fails to highlight those elements of cohesion within FrederickBrownrssurvey of the policies and moods of the ranks of Vietnam's communist movement. How Vietnam [''VieQam Since the War, 1975-1995," WQ, elsecan weexplainthat approximatelyone-third of the

Winter '951 is, I believe, an accurate account of the past present ruling- -politburo are southerners? two decades. The only fact of importance dealt with Carlyle A Tkayer incompletelyis that the election of 1956 was provided Australian Defense Force Academy for in the protocol of the 1954 Geneva agreement, Canberra,Australia which neither we nor the South Vietnamese signed. There is an interesting paradox that emerges at the end of the essay. In a dynamic situation where the TheVietnameseCommunists won the war, and it was underlying economic and social forces are making for a far longer war than most of their adversaries en- the diffusion of power and democratic rule, can cen- dured. But it can only be said that they subsequently tralized Communist Party power persist? Or, can the lost the peace. Their retributionagainst their erstwhile transition already underway be carried to its logical nationalist foes drove into exile many potential con- conclusion without a Tienanmen Square or the blood- tributors to the rebuilding of the country. Their appli- shed of civil war? (The same question hangs over cation of communist economics at almost the same contemporary China.) time it was being found wanting in most of the rest of Logically, Vietnam belongs with the medium the world, plus the isolation of the country from its powers, most bordering the South China Sea, that Asian neighbors, caused Vietnam to miss the huge make up ASEAN. It is in that company that it will find burst of growth the rest of Asia experienced. its prosperity as wellas the independence and freedom Mr. Browncorrectly recounts therecentmovesby

158 WQ SPRING 1995 thevietnameseauthoritiesto rejoin the world, opening Plaudits for Poetry their borders to theviet kieu from overseasand moving" toward an acceptance of the free market and foreign To include a poetry section among the treasures to be investment. TGShas indeed given new life to &e found in the Wilson Quarterly was one of your best country, spurring its agricultural production and fill- ideas. It's almost an introductory course. I had never ing its streets with foreign consumer goods. heard of L. E. Sissman, whose poems Anthony Hecht But volitical freedoms are harder to vermit, as included in the winter edition. they caniutindoubt theauthorityof theca&eswhose Everything Mr. Hecht says of these poems is harsh discipline directed the victorious battles of the there: they are charming, witty, alive with youthful past. So while entrepreneurs and even foreigners are gaiety. Now I must start a search for the volumes encouraged to engage freely in economic growth, the mentioned. modem "Mandarins" of the Party insist that they alone Eugene L. Swan, Jr. administer the nation politically. Athens, Me. Butanarticlesimilar toMr. Brown's 10 or20 years hence will show that this effort will erode as surely as communist economics has. Fellow Asian nations Ko- Correction rea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, allauthoritarian politically 10 and 20 years ago, have moved decisively In FrederickZ. Brown's "VietnamSincethe War (1975- toward democratic rule. Economic success in those 1995)" (WQ, Winter 19951, Ho Chi Minh's slogan, states created a middle class, and it in turn pressed for Khong co gi 9uy hon doc lap tu do-meaning, There is recognition of rights and for participation in the direc- nothing more precious than independence and free- tion of the nation. This will surely happen in Vietnam dom- as incorrectly given. A ''2was inadvertently and lead to a real reconciliation of the erstwhile foes added to the word hon. We regret the error. within that nation and its full membership among the Asian "tigers," the objective for which many Ameri- cans fought and died. William E. Colby CIA Director, 1973-76 Washington, D.C.

Credits: Cover, Defense Nuclear Agency photograph; pp. 8-9, Distress of Lot, by Joel Sheesley, 1991, oil paint, 50'' x 72"; p. 12 (top), Selfportrait with Apple, by Catherine Murphy, 1989, oil on canvas, 26-314" x 35-1/2''; (bottom), Persimmon, by Catherine Murphy, 1991, oil on canvas, 25-314' x 29-1/2, Private Collection, Photographs courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York; p. 13, Eric, by Catherine Murphy, 1990, oil on canvas, 37' x 29-1/2"; p. 16, Signal, by Joel Sheesley, l992,6Ut x 5Y'; p. 19, Diwan of Amir Hasan Diiavi Manuscript, 17th c., copied at Allahabad, India by Mir Aba-allah Katib, Mushkin Qalam, The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; p. 21, This photograph originally appeared in Vanity Fair magazine, @ChrisSteele-Perkins/Magnam; p. 22, AP/Wide World Photos; p. 24, The Bettmann Archive; p. 27, 0 S. Meiselas/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 33, Grizzly Giant, and p, 35, Untitled, by Carleton Watkins, Library of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; p. 37, In the Woods, by Asher Brown Durand, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; p. 40, Giant Redwood Trees of Califor~?ia,by Albert Bierstadt, Gift of Zenas Crane, The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.; p. 42,Kindred Spirits, by Asher Brown Durand, 1849, oil on canvas, collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; p. 45, Hooker and Company Joz~rnq- ing Through the Wildernessfiom Plymouth to Hartford, 1636, by Frederic Edwin Church, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; p. 46, National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, N.M.; pp. 5&51, Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation; p. 52, Courtesy of the Rand Corporation;p. 55, TASS/SOVFOTO/EASTFOTO; pp. 5657, Map created by Eason & Associates, Washington, D.C.; p. 59, COCO, China Times, Taipei, Taiwan, Cartoonists &Writers1Syndicate; p. 60, Reprinted by permission of The Progressive; p. 63, @ J. P. LaffontISYGMA;p. 6M9, Brown Brothers; p. 71, UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos; p. 74, by Frank Wolfe, from A Political Educa- tion: A Washington Memoir, by Harry McPherson; p. 78, by Mark Alan Stamaty, reprinted with permission; p. 80, Chicago His- torical Society; p. 81, @ Wayne Andrews/Esto. All rights reserved; p. 82, @ Ezra Stoller/Esto. All rights reserved; p. 86, from The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Reuolutionay France, by Robert Darnton; p. 88, by Jack Ohan, Reprinted by permission: Tribune Media Service; p. 91, from The Magus of the North, by Isaiah Berlin, originally appeared in Johann Georg Hamann, der Magus im Norden, by D. E. Kuhn (Gutersloh, 1908); p. 92, Kiss, @ 1994 by Art Spiegelman, reprinted with the permission of Wylie, Aitken &Stone, Inc.; p. 95, photograph by Thomas W. Geisbert, USAMBIID; p. 102, The Sun Treader (Portrait of Carl Ruggles), by Tho- mas Hart Benton, 1934, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. (Gift of the Friends of Art); p. 104, Traveller Gazing at fl Sea of Fog, @ Elke Walford, Fotowerkstatt Hamburg, Germany; p. 109, The Bavarian Don Giouanni, by Paul Klee, 1919.166, watercolor, 22.5x21.3cm, The Solomon R. Guggenhaim Museum, New York, Photograph by Robert E. Mates; p. 111 Ouer the Town, by Marc Chagall, 1917, GiradonIArt Resource, New York, LA 30.980, Moscou, Gal. Tretiakoff; p. 11&115, @ Kelley Balcomb-Bartok;pp. 116,126, Illustrations by Douglas Hand, from Gone Waling, @ 1994 by Douglas Hand; p. 117, Photo courtesy of the author; pp. 12CL121, @ D. Parer & E. Parer-Cook/AUSCAPE International; p. 124, @ Flip NickIinlMinden Pictures; p. 129,Jonathon Brown, Clipper Publications; p. 133, 0 SIPA Press/Francoise Demulder; p. 136, @AlexMarshall; p. 141, Used with the permission of Jack Ohman, The Oregonian,Portland; p. 148, From A Catalogueof the Caricaturesof Max Beerbohm, by Rupert Hart-Davis; p. 151, Kal, The Economist, London, England, Cartoonists & Writers' Syndicate.

COMMENTARY 159 here is, to borrow from Adam Smith, a since the Nixon years, of talk about a new feder- good deal of ruin in the nation, and for alism. Budget cutters are speaking up for the the moment the students of ruin aren't virtues and problem-solvingabilities of the states sure why. One popular theory holds and local governments. thatT the size of government itself serves as a kind Cynics are understandably skeptical about of crude index of the health of the polity-too this, but there may be something new in the much of the one marking too little of the other. devolution talk of today. The earlier new But how much is too much, and how do we federalisms were back-bLrner political pro- know? Clearly this is a matter of proportions, grams that never amounted to much. Cold but what is government proportionate to? To War concerns were on the front burner, and answer that we need politicsl the more knowl- the Cold War imvosed discivlines. It fostered edgeable the better. nationalism, and nationalism meant that Wash- Our politics might be more knowledgeable ington! the capital of the free world, would be if we paid more attention to the voice of the required to show that democracy on a national economist Herbert Stein, a credentialed conser- scale could deal with its toughest problems. vative who is also respected by liberals. In a Thus the modern civil rights revolution, the recent column on the budget! Stein challenged wars on poverty, illiteracy, drugs, and much the idea "that any objective observer, if you can else besides-all directed from Washington. imagine such a thing," having studied how the Military spending, always broadly de- public business is done elsewhere in the world, fined, shaped the federal role in the economy "would think that excessive size of government during a long period of extraordinary growth, is one of America's big problems." often in ways at one or more removes from What is it that leads so many to think strict militaiy necessity. Nonmilitary spend- otherwise? Economic miseries alone ing helped to stabilize a crisis- won't do as an answer. Stein notes prone system and showed that in- that while everyone would prefer tractable problems such as unem- boom times, the American economy ployment and dependency among is in pretty good condition. Rela- the elderly could be managed if tive to the gross domestic product, not resolved. Mass public higher total government expenditures in education got started with the GI the ~iitedStates are-lower than in Bill! and wis secured by the provi- other nations, where the misery seems no sions of the National Defense Education Act. greater. Though our federal expenditures, The very costly interstate highway system that driven hard by military needs and soaring took a generation to build was justified offi- entitlement costs, rose sharply after the mid- cially by its bearing on national security. NASA 1970s, the federal share of total outlays is still was intended to trump Sputnik, and so on smaller here than in countries that count for down much of the line. comparison. For decades now the level of It is a good question, then, how the prob- federal civilian employment has been essen- lem-solving spirit of nationalism will fare with- tially flat, at about 2.5 percent of total employ- out its external enemies, and how Washington ment, and while a work force of just under will fare as a symbol for the achievements of three million people is formidable by any stan- the national culture as it recedes. No one can dard, America is a big place and the number- say. But as Herbert Stein makes clear, even for now declining thanks to the Clinton admin- those who believe that the national govern- istration's reinventions-doesn't tell us much ment ought to be smaller, "there is no reason about how well or badly the duties of the to think that making it smaller would solve national government are being performed. any serious problem in the country." The prob- Despite the cogency of such level-headed lems that government in general must be pro- observations, the rhetoric of opposition to Wash- portionate to will remain. ington and all its ways intensifies. The situation is complicated beyond the usual by the re-emer- Michael J. Lacey, Director gence in Republican circles, for the third time Division of United States Studies

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