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Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

THE LOST PROMISE OF THE AMERICANRAILROAD by Mark Reutter The revolutionary streamliner trains of the 1930s made America's passenger railroads the envy of the world. Now America envies others'. What went wrong?

THERISE OF EUROPE'S LITTLE NATIONS Alastair Reid William McPlierson David T.Gies G.M. Tamis One future of Europe's emerging little nations is being scripted in Serbia arid Bosnia; another, less savagely, in Scotland, Transylvania, and Catalonia.

38. Churchill the Writer by James W. Miiller 108. Lifestyle by Robert Eiwiii 116. The Critic as Novelist by Michael Levenson

DEPARTMENTS 4. Editor's Comment 125. Periodicals 8. At Issue 152. Research Reports 82. Current Books 154. Commentary 100. Poetry 160. From the Center Cover: Detail of a promotional poster for the Burlington Zephyr, from the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

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Landers Poetry Editor: Joseph Brodsky Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano Design Consultant: Tawney Harding e are often asked what the Wilson Quarterly is. It's a Contributiiig Editors: Linda Colley, good question. A "review of ideas and information" is Denis Donogl~ue,Max Holland, Walter w one answer we sometimes offer; "newsmagazine of the Reicli, Alan Ryan, Charles Townsliend, world of ideas," another. If both fail to satisfy, we pass on what Alan Wolfe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown others say. The (London) Times Literary Supplement recently came Researchers: Sarah R. Carlson, Jennifer up with "retro-humanist journal." Whether that was praise or a M. Restak, Benjamin M. Wattenmaker put-down, we'renot sure, but we find it anepithet worthy of some Librarian: Zdenek V. David small dilation. "Retro:" definitely. A conviction that knowledge Editorial Advisers: K. Anthony Appiali, can rise above the play of political or other interests marks us as Mary B. 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4 WQ WINTER 1994 PEACE FOR PALESTINE First Lost Opport unit y Elmer Berger Foreword by Don Peretz "A scrupulously documented account of the events Using primary, recently de-classified U.S., U.N., surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948. Rabbi and Israeli archival documents, Berger provides a Berger's book is a timely effort to peel away the timely account of the diplomatic efforts in 1948- thick self-serving layers of legend in which those 49 to end the first Arab-Israeli war. events have been encysted." "Provides valuable insight into the establishment -George W. Ball of the State of Israel and the efforts 3O2.p~.Cloth $3995. Order through full-service achieve a peaceful settlement in the region.'' book-stores or with VISA or MIC toll free: -Noam Chomsky, MIT 1-800-226-3822,

"A major work of reflection and analysis. . . . For UNIVERSITY PRESS OF , anyone who wants the definitive look at the question of Palestine, this is the book you have been waiting- for." FLORIDA -Edward w' said9 Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville

Russian Housing in the Modern Age Imperial Russian Foreign Policy Design and Social History Hugh Ragsdale, Editor William Craft Brum field Valerii Nikolaevich Ponornarev, and Blair A. Ruble, Editors Assistant Editor This book analyzes modernist projects for housing in Based on the latest research as well as previously the 1920s, workers' settlements for the Five-Year Plans, unavailable source materials, this book examines as well as Stalinist architecture. Later chapters examine the principal traditions, objectives, conditions, the origins of the bleary countryside and cityscape of and instruments of Russian foreign policy from the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras, concluding with a 1700 to 1917. The result is not onlv the first ioint view of contemporary developments. effort onthe subject by both ~ussianand western Contributors: William Craft Brumfield, Blair A. Ruble, James historians but also the first work to reoresent the H. Bater, Milka Bliznakflq John Bowlt, Robert Edelman, spirit of glasnost and a post-Cold ~armentalit~. Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Pupernyi, B. Vysokflvskii Contributors:E. V. Anisimov, Hans Bagger, Hugh Ragsdale, Woodrow Wilson Center Press Series Robert E. Jones, David M. Goldfrank, V. N. Vinogradov, 43197-2 Hardcover $90.00 V. N.Ponomareq N.N. Bolkbovitinov, David MacKenzie, A. V. Ignat'ev, DavidMcDonuld, and AlfredJ. Rieber Burundi: Ethnocide as Discourse Woodrow Wilson Center Press Series and Practice 44229-X Hardcover $59.95 Rene LeMarchand Books in the Woodrow Wilson Center Series This work situates Burundi in the current global debate are available to Woodrow Wilson Associates on ethnicity by describing and analyzing the wholesale at a 20% discount. massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority. The author refutes the government's version of these events that places blame on the former colonial govern- ment and the church by offering documentation that identifies the source of these massacres as occurring across a socially constructed fault-line which pitted the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority. Woodrow Wilson Center Press Series Call toll-free 800-872-7423 45176-0 Hardcover about $54.95 MasterCardIVISA accepted. Prices subject to change A Civilizing Mission?

t's at least something to think about, the value-and often the superiority-of what now that the 20th century is behind us, a they encountered. Colonialism had another century that, by historian John Lukacs's equally doubt-inducing effect. Because it en- reckoning, began in 1914 and ended in couraged brutal forms of exploitation, includ- 1989. That most vertiginousof centuriesbeganwith ing slavery, it was not long before the civiliz- a resounding bang, one that dealt a near-mortal ing mission seemed to have no greater effect blow to all the big ideals and to all the gods. than that of barbarizing the civilizers. In fact, the only god that came through the The quest for empire was not the only thing horrors of Verdun and the Somme unscathed to bring out the contradictions of Western civi- was irony. Not merely unscathed, it rose lization. The West has had no shortage of in- within the pantheon. After World War I, as house critics to point out its failings. Karl Paul Fussell relates, irony became the only at- Marx was only the most influential of the titude that a thinking person could assume. modern age. And what he and others said But it was even more than an attitude. It was a about the pathologies of our civilization deeply rooted orientation toward the world, seemed to many to be borne out by the Great marked by doubt, skepticism, and uncertainty. War-a war that not only confirmed people's And on no ideal did it focus with more exquis- worst suspicions, but helped bring into being ite ferocity than on the ideal of civi- a would-be to pi an alternative, lization, by which was meant, of the Soviet Union. course, Western civilization. During the "century" that saw That ideal was a blend, perhaps the birth, life, and death of the So- unholy, of legacies as diverse as viet Union, a complicated argu- the Jewish and Christian religions, merit over the question of civiliza- Roman and Germanic law, Hel- tion took place. One could say that lenic rationalism, Renaissance individualism, this argument was the subtext of that century's Enlightenment progressivism, assorted demo- history. The question itself consisted of many cratic and parliamentary traditions, and, not subquestions: Was there really something least, scientific, technological, and industrial called civilization worth preserving, or was it know-how. Whatever can be said for or just one of the "big words" in the great game, against this amalgam, it proved so dynamic a another weapon of "power politics" (that won- force that it compelled Europeans to venture derful 20th-century redundancy)? Was it a beyond the boundaries of their continent to mixed legacy, whose bad could be separated the four corners of the earth, giving rise to vast from its good, or was the whole package rot- colonial and imperial projects. ten, an "old bitch gone in the teeth," as Ezra Irony of ironies, though, these projects, Pound put it? Was it fatally Eurocentric, or did which were carried out by the more powerful it contain universal, even eternal, truths? In- European nations under the name of what the deed, could civilization be defined as an ever French called la mission civilisatrice, may well more capacious ideal, one that slowly, pro- have planted the seeds of future doubts about gressively comprehends the best that is the meaning, direction, and value of civiliza- thought and felt in all the world's cultures? tion. For one, they exposed Europeans to other And, not least, was civilization, however de- civilizations, and though the usual response fined, worth fighting and dying for? At times, was to view the other forms as deficient, primi- many people-among them the most intelligent tive, and therefore deserving of condescension and well-meaning of people~thoughtnot. or eradication, some Europeans recognized When we look back upon the abysmal

6 WQ WINTER 1994 Organize & Protect Your THE NEWS Copies of Wilson Quarterly Network Cutbacks in the Nation's Capital

These custom made cases and binders are the perfect way to organize and protect This book fleshes out what has Iongbeen apparent to aficionados of network news- your valuable copies of the Wilson that Washington coverage has been Quarterly. Beautifully crafted from shrinkingperilously. Kimball'sscholarship reinforced board covered with durable is excellent. The best features of the book leather-like material in maroon with gold are its punchy anonymous quotes from logo, the cases are V-notched for easy networkreporters."-Ray Scherer,former access, and the binders havea special spring White House correspondent, NBC News mechanism to hold individual rods which Do1t~17sizingthe News is based on interviews easily snap in. Each binder or case holds 2 conducted with Washington TV news correspondents, editors, and producers. years (8 issues) of the Wilson Quarterly. They describe such problems as the severe Cases: 1- $7.95 3- $21.95 6- $39.95 reduction in resources devoted to covering Binders: 1- $9.95 3- $27.95 6- $52.95 Congress, the downgrading of the State ------Department and Supreme Court beats, The Wilson Quarterly conflicts with the Clinton White House, and Jesse Jones Industries, Dep. WQ 1 difficulties in obtaining information from 1 499 East Erie Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19134 1 government officials. Often expressing 1 Enclosed is $ for - cases, and - 1 frustration-and even hostility-toward the 1 binders. Add $1 per case/binder for postage & I New York-based executives who "manage" 1 handling. Outside USA add $2.50 per case/ I the evening news, Washington's broadcast binder (US funds only). PA residents add 6% journalists decry sinking standards, as their 1 sales tax. I ability to inform citizens is sacrificed to I I material calculated to preserve dwindling 1 PRINTNAME I audiences. I Woodrow Wilson Center Press I S 13.95 paperback I 1 CHARGE ORDERS ($15 mid: AMEX, VISA, 1 MC, DC accepted. Send card name, account The Johns Hophhs University Press number, and expiration date. I Hampden Station, Baltimore, MD 2 12 1 1 ' CALL TOLL FREE (7 days, 24 hours): I To order, call 1-800-537-5487. 1 1-800-825-6690 1 20% discount to Wilson Center Associates I SATISFACTION IS GUARANTEED 1 L ------I record of the 20th century, what emerges as ers that no easy solution to their problems was perhaps its most remarkable aspect is that, at hand. Given his achievement, it hardly mat- somehow, the defenders of an ideal of civili- ters that many of Reagan's beliefs were de- zation not only managed to keep the faith but rived from a highly sentimentalized popular- also to prevail. So much of the intellectual en- culture version of civilized values: They gave ergy of the 20th century was devoted to de- him the strength and vision to hold fast and bunking and unmasking, so much to exposing finally to triumph. the feet of clay, that relatively little serious at- tention was given to discerning what should ut the popular culture that Reagan be preserved. Morality was aestheticized, with derived sustenance and direction high culture embodying the Nietzschean prin- from is now largely dead. What we ciple that life was justifiable only as an aes- see in its stead, in the United States thetic experience. Character went the way of and tl~rougl~outthe West, is a frightening so many other ideals. According to intellectu- thing. Dominating films, TV shows, and mu- als, there were no heroes. Great men or sic is the old ironic mode of 20th-century high women mattered little in the tide of human culture, now cheapened into a feckless cyni- events; the "forces" of history made history. cism that comports extremely well with what Yet history showed otherwise. Individuals of has become popular culture's main function: the stature of Churchill and Walesa turned his- advertisement. Serving now primarily as an torical tides. And fortunately the common advertising medium to drive manic consump- people proved wiser, finally, than most intel- tion, popular culture projects an endless pro- lectuals. Even as high culture explored new cession of fashionable styles and attitudes reaches of relativism and pushed irony to its while suggesting the toys and accoutrements limits-and how Hitler loved the Weimar to go along with them. It does this, moreover, ironists for preparing the way for his ascent!- even while mocking itself and its own devious popular culture in the West preserved a core ploys. It invites everyone in on the lie of false of simpler sanity. The films of Humphrey happiness, creating a kind of fellowship of hip Bogart upheld a notion of character and virtue and cheerful nihilism. The priests of this cult that no Sartrean treatise on "bad faith" could will come and go; for the moment, though, we effectively, much less popularly, cancel. have the likes of David Letterman, Rush Lim- baugh, and two entirely charming fellows ut a civilization cannot fare well for named Beavis and Butt-head. long when its head is severed from its We have come to a peculiar pass. Civiliza- body. Popular culture ran on bor- tion, thought to be on its last legs, staggers rowed time and dwindling spiritual through the last round of a long and bloody and intellectual capital for most of the 20th fight and unexpectedly-mirabile dictu- century. That Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood KO's its biggest challenger. Stunned, punch- actor, slxould have been one of the stronger drunk, and lurching back to its corner, victo- supporters of the ideal of civilization in the rious civilization stares into the crowd of its . closing decade of the 20th century says a great screaming fans and recognizes. . . almost no deal about how precarious the situation had one. Shaking its head in disbelief, it is not even become (which is neither to forgive his ex- sure what it is any more, much less what the cesses nor to devalue his accomplisl~ments). stakes of the fight were or what the prize is. We must remember that Reagan was the prod- The fans don't seem to care, either. They're uct of an earlier popular culture, one that be- having fun, though it looks like a violent, sav- gan to die in the 1960s. The ethos of that ear- age sort of fun. lier culture helped shape his resolve to wage This, then, is where we stand: in the park- a determined struggle against a demoralized ing lot outside the arena where civilization but still powerful Soviet empire; that determi- scored its last-round stunner, uncertain where nation was essential in convincing Soviet lead- to go next.

8 WQ WINTER 1994 But history abhors a vacuum as much as na- whether or not the teaching of values should ture does. There are already those opportun- be returned to the center of education; it asks ists around the world who have taken decisive probing questions about both high culture and advantage of civilization's self-doubts-one popular culture, what shapes them and how might even say its identity crisis-to pursue they shape us. their own dubious ambitions. One such mis- creant, Saddam Hussein, was scolded back uch questions must be asked. The re- into line, though so far his people have suf- sponses they elicit may well become fered far more than he has. Others have carried the substance of the civilizing process out their misdeeds with complete impunity. in the 21st century. We will hear Is there reason to hope that civilization can many shrill answers, of course, and many snap out of its postvictory doldrums? There is. narrowly partisan or provincial views, That hope resides in what some people call the but even these will be preferable, as part culture wars. This argument among intellectu- of an argument (a truly multinational ar- als, mainly American so far but, increasingly, gument) over values and ideas, to the ni- others from around the world, is important hilism of the international popular-culture less for what it has yet accomplished than for machine, which preaches only the maxi- the questions it raises. First, it focuses attention mization of pleasure and selfishness un- on the crucial issue, on culture, provoking der the false dispensation that nothing else needed debate oil what the term itself means. matters. The argument is essential if civili- It presses us to consider such conflicts as the zation is to recover a backbone and a firm particular and the relative versus the univer- sense of itself. One could even say that it is the sal and eternal; it raises the question of essential condition of any true global security.

WQ WINTER 1994 9 BY MARK REUTTER

A whole neiu breed of train took to the American rails during the 1930s, emblazoning names like Hying Yankee in American mythology. Fashioned from sleekly proportioned metal and powered by high-tech diesel engines, the nezu streamliners slas/zed city-to-city running times and made American rail passenger service the envy of the world. Here Mark Ret~tterrecalls these days of promise~aswell as the blunders that put America far behind in the worldwide race of high-speed rail.

10 WQ WINTER 1994 early 60 years ago, on May 26,1934, a train un- like anything ever seen on rails pulled out of Denver's Union Station and raced east across the Colorado plains. Boasting a stylish curved prow and fluted silver sides, it had been dispatched on a mission to prove the value of radically rede- signed railroad passenger equipment. Its goal was to make the longest and swift- est land run in history. To reach Chicago by nightfall, the train would have to cover 1,015 miles~one-thirdof the continent-in under 15 hours. No locomo- tive in railroad history had ever traveled more than 401 miles nonstop, and the fastest passenger train on the Denver-Chicago route, a deluxe steam-powered "flyer," took 25 and three-quarters hours to make the run. A main-line passenger train in the 1930s was supposed to be big and blunt, powered by a steam locomotive with churning driving rods and massive wheels. The Zephyr, though, was low-slung and sleek, with an unconventional "cab for- ward" design that put the engineer's compartment right at the front of the train. It was not just the Zephyfs appearance that was different. The train, was the prod- uct of several advanced technologies of the day. Its shimmering silver skin was the result of a breakthrough in metalworking.Its cars were not coupled like those of a conventional train but joined in a light-weight, semicontinuous, "articulated tube. Most important, the train was powered not by steam but by a revolution- ary compact diesel engine. Not a few railroad executives scoffed at the Zephyr that bright May morning, and newsmen on board the train labeled its attempt at the world record "chancy" at best. On the first leg of the journey, the train was held to an unremarkable 50 MPH in order to break in a new armature bearing in the diesel motor. Diesel teclu~i- cian Ernie Kuehn lay face down on the floor of the engine room, alert for the tell- tale scent of burning metal. No damage was detected, and the train covered the 34 miles between Fort Morgan and Akron, Colorado, at 70 MPH. On a monotonous stretch of highland plains past Akron, engineer Ernest Webber pushed the brass throttle to the top notch. The 600-horsepower diesel engine responded by knock- ing off the next 129 miles in 86 minutes, covering the 12 miles between Otis and Yuma, Colorado, at 104 MPIH, and the four miles from Yuma to West Schramm at 109 MPI-I. Then the Zeplzyr raced across three miles in 96 seconds flat-a pace of 112 and one-half MPH. "You almost forget you're mov- - < ing until you look out at those fence posts going by and realize they're telegraph poles instead," wrote a Chi- c~ Herald reporter who was on board. "It's a trip to defy imagina- tion," agreed the Rocky Mountain News correspondent. There was much laughter when a motorist tried to race the Zeplzyr on a parallel road and fell behind in a cloud of dust. Twice the train out-paced a biplane. By the time it reached Lincoln, Ne-

AMERICAN RAILROADS 11 braska, 483 miles from Denver, the clock led the train's mascot, a Rocky Mountain showed an elapsed time of only six hours and burro named Zeph, out of the baggage com- seven minutes. A railroad official announced partment, and presented him to officials of the that the train had broken the nonstop distance fair. "It was a sweet ride," Budd exclaimed. record set by Britain's premier train, the Royal Scot, in 1928. he Zqlzyr was born out of the imagi- As word of the Zephyr's progress nations of four men who brought to spread-news bulletins were dropped off at creative focus a variety of economic, prearranged intervals, then telegraphed to technological, and political develop- ments.T In addition to Ralph Budd, they were radio stations and newsrooms-the train at- tracted bigger and bigger crowds. In town af- Edward G. Budd (no relation), inventor of the ter town across rural Iowa and Illinois, fire si- all-steel automobile body; Harold L. rens shrieked and church bells pealed to sig- Hamilton, founder of a company that built nal its approach. Outside of Galesburg, Illi- self-propelled gas-electric "doodlebug" rail- nois, farm trucks and Model Ts packed the cars; and Charles F. Kettering, head of General right of way for eight miles solid. As the train Motors Research Laboratories. Wit11 the De- dashed toward C11icago~"acynosure of na- pression hanging over the country, these in- tional interest rivaling airplane flights for new dustrialists gambled that an ultramodern train records," said the Chicago Daily Nezus-its of unprecedented speed would recapture lost progress was monitored by President Franklin passenger traffic, create a market for new rail- D. Roosevelt's staff in Washington on an NBC way products, and invigorate a far-flung in- radio hookup. dustry threatened wit11 slowly advancing pa- When it finally touched down, snapping ralysis. the Western Union timing tape stretched The passenger train always had been across the tracks in Chicago, the Zephyr had more to America than a means of transporta- traveled 1,015 miles in two seconds under 13 tion. It was a historical force that opened up hours and five minutes, beating its own target and then bound together a nation of scattered by two hours. It had averaged an unheard-of territories and states. The first trains of the 77.6 MPH and established world records in 1830s were primitive affairs, little more than nearly every category of long-distance speed enclosed wagons that bounced roughly along and performance. Of particular satisfaction to on iron rails, but they sped up travel enor- many Americans was the fact that it had beat mously. Three days of hard travel across the the record of Germany's der Fliegende Ham- Appalacluans by stagecoach were reduced to burger, previously considered the fastest rail 24 hours when the Baltimore & Oluo Railroad vehicle on Earth. lived up to its name by reaching the Oluo River From Halsted Street Station, the train pro- at Wheeling, in what is now West Virginia, in ceeded slowly to the Century of Progress 1853. As track was laid deeper into the conti- world's fair on the shores of Lake Michigan, nent, stagecoaches and canals were eclipsed. just opening for its second year. When the After the Civil War the railroads began an- Zq11yr was rolled out on a stage that evening other great surge, paced by the industry's as the grand finale to a pageant on the history embrace of many tecl~nologicaladvances of of American transportation, the crowd surged the time: George Westingl~ouse'sair brakes, forward to touch the "silver streak." After Samuel Morse's telegraph, Henry Bessemer's order was restored, Ralph Budd, president of steel, and the first really powerful steam loco- the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, motive, the American-made Mogul. By the

Mark Reutter, a former Wilson Center Fellozv, is the author of Sparrows Point: Making Steel (1988). He is working on a book about the impact of diesels on railroads and railroaders. Copyright 01994 by Mark Reutter.

12 WQ WINTER 1994 turn of the century, passenger trains con- Norris and Matthew Josephson. Budd loved nected every major community in the United nothing better than to put in a 16-hour day at States and names such as the Phoebe Snow, a remote outpost of the railroad quizzing em- Wabash Cannon Ball, Black Diamond, Fast Flying ployees and poring over maps. Like many Virginian, Sunset Limited, Royal Blue, and Em- farm and small-town boys of the 19th century, pire State Express were celebrated in songs and he had gone into railroading because it was stories. the nation's prenuer industry. Starting as a $1- At first, the "horseless carriage," invented a-day surveyor for the Clucago Great Western in the 1890s, posed little threat to railroads. after graduating from a Des Moines, Iowa, Between 1896 and 1916, railway passenger trade school, he was only 27 when he was traffic tripled, while journeys on added-fare picked in 1906 to build the railroad needed for Pullman sleepers increased fivefold. The lug11- the Panama Canal project, and he was 40 when water mark was reached in 1920, when 1.2 billion pas- sengers boarded 9,000 daily intercity trains and rode a total of 47 billion passen- ger-miles. But soon the automo- bile began to take its toll. Henry Ford, who had in- troduced the Model T in 1908, began slashing prices after he opened his High- land Park, Michigan, as- sembly line in 1913. Be- tween 1920 and 1930, the number of registered cars on American roads in- creased from eight million to 23 million. While intercity express trains president hlphBudd is at left; carmaker Edward G.Budd stands beside him. more than held their own (the New York Central routinely dispatched he was named president of the Great North- five sections of the crack 20th Century Limited ern Railway. The appointment made 16x1 the in 1928),the auto began to make significant in- youngest chief executive of a major railroad. roads into the short-haul passenger business. When he took command of the Burlington in The biggest impact was felt on railroad branch 1931, the 11,000-mile railroad was staggering lines. Automobiles and buses were slowly under the impact of the Depression and the destroying the feeder system that brought weight of heavy passenger obligations. The passengers and profits to main-line trains. fact that the Burlington had lost a fifth of its passengers between 1926 and 1929-and then alph Budd watched this trend lost half of what was left between 1929 and with growing alarm. Tall, lean, 1931-was sufficiently shocking to call for and clean-shaven, wearing wire- radical treatment. rimmed glasses, he was the antith- Budd knew that he had some things esisR of the cigar-chomping, million-buck rail- working in his favor. Railroads benefited from road mogul immortalized by writers Frank the natural efficiency of steel wheel on steel

AMERICAN RAILROADS 13 rail: minimal rolling friction. (It takes only a lighter and less expensive trains that would fourth as much power to propel a passenger attract more passengers. railway car as to propel a highway vehicle moving 011 rubber tires.) He was also aware of udd later said that he was encour- the importance of passenger revenues in rail- aged to experiment by the political road economics. Freight brought in the lion's environment of the time. Revival of share of revenues, but as long as passenger the rail industry had been one of trains earned more than their out-of-pocket Franklin Roosevelt's campaign planks in 1932. costs, they could help defray the enormous Roosevelt's emissary to the industry, Joseph B. expense of track and other fixed capital. Many Eastman, said Washington might be willing to secondary passenger trains were not even relax antitrust regulations so that railroaders meeting their costs, however, the chief reason and suppliers could experiment wit11 new being the high cost of operating steam locomo- materials, new methods, and especially new tives. Having grown to 60-70 feet in length kinds of locomotives. "It is in tecl~nicalim- and weighing 200 tons apiece, steam locoino- provement that the salvation of the railroad tives inflicted a severe pounding on track and passenger business lies," Eastinan declared. on tl~emselves.The wear and tear showed up In September 1932, Ralph Budd paid a in costly roadbed repairs and unproductive visit to the Pluladelplua factory of another man time spent in ro~lndl~o~lses.The solution: named Budd. Edward Gowen Budd had got

Diesel engines are installed 111 Rock Island Rocket locol~~otivesat General Motors's Electro-Motive plant in Grange, lllinois, circa 1938. Tlie famous "E" locomotives toere capable of ail impressive 117 Mm.

14 WQ WINTER 1994 his start as a machinist apprentice in 1887, the lead in developing what would become when Philadelphia was still America's forge. one of the most prized "miracle metals" from He had helped build the first steel passenger under the nose of the Germans. car for the Pennsylvania Railroad before start- Ralph Budd wasted no time cornrnission- ing the Budd Company in 1912 to make ing the Philadelphia metalmaker to build the pressed-steel frames for the auto industry. Zephyr, giving him carte blanche to design it Possessing a showman's flair, he once perched "without any restrictions except those which an elephant on top of one of his steel auto bod- are inherent to railway equipment, namely the ies-and dared wooden-body makers to do gauge of the track and the clearances within the same. The crash of 1929 badly hurt his which the outside dimensions must be kept." auto-body business, but it gave the entrepre- The Zephyr began to take shape on the Budd neur a chance to explore new markets for steel. company's drafting boards in 1933. Its uncon- 'A Depression is a period in which you have ventional prow was designed not solely with time to think," he declared. In 1931 he came beauty in mind, but to reduce air resistance. out of a spell of thinking with the idea for a Windtunnel tests at the Massachusetts Insti- lightweight alloy to use in the building of tute of Technology had established that the trains. The alloy was one in the stainless steel tram's resistance to motion at speeds of 95 MPH group that metallurgists called 18 and 8. It and above would be less than half that of a consisted of low-carbon steel with 18 percent train of regular coaches. The three-car train chrome and 8 percent nickel. First produced had a tubular shape in which both the roof in Germany by Krupp, it outclassed ordinary and side frames carried loads formerly as- carbon steel on several counts. Strong and sumed by the subfloor structure. This allowed light, it was also so malleable that it could be Budd to do away with the heavy center sills drawn into fine wire or easily formed into and concrete-laid subfloors of conventional deep-drawn, graceful shapes. The term stain- equipment without sacrificing safety or stabil- less described another of its virtues: It did not ity. Because the train had a lower center of rust. The metal kept its silver sheen even when gravity, it would be able to negotiate curves at exposed to organic acids, and wind and rain lug11 speeds. only brightened its natural glasslike finish. Despite its attractive properties, stainless n Philadelphia, Edward Budd stuffed steel had found few uses-mostly for hypo- the latest technology into the train, using dermic needles, false teeth, and decorative the products of 104 U.S. manufacturers, novelties-because no satisfactory way had including Freon air conditioning from been devised to fabricate it. After much re- DuPont, radio reception by Stromberg-Carl- search, Budd's company came up with its son, and new battery-retardation brakes by patented "shotweld" method. The inspiration Westinghouse. The interior design of the for the invention came from lightning, Budd Zephyr was also daring. Gone were the arch said, in particular lightning's ability to melt a roofs, wooden-paddle fans, heavy curtains, piece of metal so quickly that the adjacent and other Victorian holdovers of standard woodwork is not discolored. Where two railcar design. Gone, too, were the violently pieces of stainless were to be joined, a macl-line (and justifiably) damned red-plush coach passed a strong electric current through the chairs that "on a hot summer day made you metal, forming a rigid bond that was hidden break out with prickly heat even before you sat because it cooled beforeit extended to the sur- down upon them," as one Midwest traveler face. Budd called it "stitching steel with recalled. Paul Cret, head of the architecture threads of lightning." With shotwelding and school at the University of Pennsylvania, in- a related innovation, Budd inaugurated the stalled soft-cushioned seats upholstered in modern age of metal fabrication and snatched pastel shades, recessed fluorescent lighting,

AMERICAN RAILROADS 15 wide double-paned windows, and other com- roader, figured out how to build a reliable self- forts and conveniences-all wrapped in a train propelled gas railcar, or "doodlebug," to be that was 196 feet long but weighed only 97 used on lightly traveled railroad lines. In 1930, tons, or little more than a single conventional Hamilton's Electro-Motive Company and an railway car. allied concern, Winton Engines, were pur- chased by General Motors at the urging of he only thing needed to bring the Charles Kettering, GM's chief of research. Zephyr to life was a suitably modern Kettering had been working for several years engine. That came in the form of on a diesel engine design and he needed T General Motors' brand-new model Hamilton's organization for its knowledge of 201A diesel engine. While not strictly the first electric drives, fuel-injection systems, and diesel to appear in railroad service, the other engineering esoterica. streamliner's power plant was the first diesel After 1931, there was something of an in- to be used for high-speed passenger service. ternational race to "sweat down" the diesel, or Ever since Rudolf Diesel built a crude 20- increase horsepower per pound of motor horsepower prototype in 1897, engineers had weight, in order to build a high-speed engine. dreamed of adapting the diesel to railroads. "Some topside men in General Motors kept Using as much as 37 percent of the potential advocating that the corporation get into the thermal energy in each gallon of fuel oil, the diesel engine business not by the development diesel was four times more efficient than a route that Kettering was pursuing but by pur- steam engine and had double the thermal ef- chasing rights and know-how from one of the ficiency of a gas engine (which relied on a old-established European companies making spark plug rather than compressed air for diesel engines," notes T. A. Boyd in his biog- combustion). The catch was that a diesel was raphy, Professional Amateur (1957),but Ketter- highly efficient only when operating at a slow ing refused to budge. He found an important and steady speed. That explained why the ally in the U.S. Navy. Interested in developing engine found its first widespread application an improved diesel for submarines, the navy in World War I submarines and ships that agreed to cosponsor the research and, in effect, traveled at constant speeds for days on end. insulated Kettering from GM's bean-counting Moreover, a diesel took up a lot of space, not "topside." only for the engine, but for the maze of pipes By early 1933, the Kettering-Hamilton needed for the intake, compression, and ex- team had tapped the potential of lightweight haustion of air. diesel with their breakthrough 201A model. The GM diesel grew out of the vision and Hamilton took the news to Ralph Budd. tenacity of two engineers, Harold Lee "Immediately I was set afire because I knew Hamilton and Charles Kettering. Hamilton, a that that was something completely revolu- former professional baseball player and rail- tionary and better-so much better-than

r'7'-'i-7FUEL FILLER

16 WQ WINTER 1994 anything we had ever had," Budd later re- technically as advanced as the Zephyr, the train called. He paid a visit to the GM research proved so popular that the UP'S young Wall labs in Detroit, where he talked to Kettering Street banker-chairman, W. Averell Harriman, about putting the diesel in his forthcoming sent it around the country on an exhibition Zeplzyr. "We wouldn't dare sell you this trip. The first stop was Washington, D.C., thing," Kettering told him. "We don't even where President Roosevelt was given a per- know if it will run." But Budd placed his or- sonal tour of the train by Harriman and his der in June 1933, giving the GM engineers 10 wife, Marie. Huge crowds were on hand as the months to deliver. As Budd explained, "I train embarked on its first coast-to-coast tour, knew that if General Motors was willing to heading west on the Pennsylvania Railroad. put the engine in a train, the national spot- The train's high-speed exploits filled the pages light would be on the corporation. They'd of metropolitan papers and the screens of simply have to stay with it until it was sat- movie houses. "They really don't run this isfactory. I knew they'd make good." Union Pacific train," people joked, "they just aim and fire it." fter barnstorming the West on a In Washington, Joe Eastman was taking 12-state exhibition tour, the steps to ensure that the fledgling revolution Zephyr went into regular service did not die from a lack of money or from bu- between Kansas City, Missouri, reaucratic timidity. A crusty, charismatic New and Lincoln, Nebraska, at the end of 1934. De- Englander long known as the "most liberal spite double-digit unemployment in the farm mind in the public utility field, Eastrnan had belt, the train attracted so many riders that been named coordinator of transportation by customers had to be turned away. To meet the FDR in 1933. After the Burlington and UP demand a fourth car was added, and the com- streamliners were built with private capital, pany made plans to buy five more Zephyrs Eastman approached Harold L. Ickes about from the Budd Company for other Midwest the possibility of advancing Public Works routes. By the end of 1935, revenues were twice Administration (PWA) funds to railroads what they had been when steam trains ran on seeking to build the next round of streamlin- the line, while operating costs had been re- ers. Ickes agreed, and $3 million was lent to duced from 65 to 35 cents per mile. Although three railroads for diesel streamliners and the initial $250,000 cost of the Zeplzyr was ap- switch engines. proximately double that of a steam train, the Eastman then faced the task of encourag- lower operating costs more than compen- ing General Motors to build the world's first sated. The bottom line showed $95,000 in prof- diesel-locomotive plant. GM officialdom was its in the Zep1zy~'s first year of service. still divided over the wisdom of investing in The Union Pacific Railroad was also in an railroad motive power. Hamilton and another experimental mood in 1934. From the draw- executive went to Washington to ask Eastrnan ing boards of the Pullman for his advice. If GM was company and the test convinced that its loco- labs of the University of motive could effect major Michigan came "Tomor- operating economies for row's Train Today," a the railroads, Eastman three-car aluminum-clad told them, it could surely train featuring such novel PIONEER win a lucrative share of touches as a bubble-top ZEPHYR the locomotive business cab for the engineer and a and smooth the cyclical waterfall splashed ups and downs of auto- across its prow. While not making. Eastman sug-

AMERICAN RAILROADS 17 gested that the corporation finance diesel sales out of the factory in April 1935. Built for the on an installment plan similar to the one of- New Haven Railroad by Goodyear-Zeppelin fered to auto buyers. Electro-Motive company Corporation, the blue-and-silver Comet bolted historian Franklin Reck says that this novel back and forth between Boston and Provi- idea helped sway GM headquarters. dence, Rhode Island, achieving speeds of 109 hef first PWA-funded streamliner rolled MFH. It was closely followed by the Baltimore

With its spirit of elegailt modernity, the streamline sti/le spread far beyond trains. A greeting card captured t1ie spirit, as did the sophisticated ladies who posed for a publicity still in a Union Pacific lounge. & Ohio's Royal Blue and Abraham Lincoln, both Zephyr itself "starred" in a Hollywood action- built by American Car & Foundry of St. romance hit, Silver Streak (1934), rushing a Charles, Missouri. The Abraham Lincoln was polio-stricken child to the safety of an iron pulled by the world's first standard-sized, lung. Movies of the era often showed charac- 1,800-horsepower diesel locomotive. Built by ters boarding the glistening new trains, and GM, the locomotive was tested repeatedly many a Tinsel Town starlet served as mistress over the next two years against the best steam of ceremonies at streamliner christenings. power on the railroad. Its impressive perfor- ''We are trying to revive the interest and mance-"she's the pullingest animal on rails," the romance that people used to see in the iron exclaimed George Emerson, the B & 0's chief horse," Frederick Williamson, president of the of motive power-resulted in a raft of orders New York Central, said. The streamliner did for GM locomotives and heralded the even- that and more: It promoted advances in con- tual dieselization of American railroads. struction that swept across the fields of trans- portation, architecture, and consumer goods. cross the country railroads found Automobiles, for example, became less angu- the new streamliners had only lar and boxy. The Ford Motor Company's new one flaw: They did not have sedan, the Lincoln Zephyr, had more than a enough cars to accommodate all name in common with the glamorous theA people who wanted to ride them. By 1938, Burlington train. As one car historian wrote, nearly every important railroad had bought- it "represented an entirely new idea in auto- or if it could not afford to buy, had rebuilt from motive design." Railroad streamline art influ- standard equipment-a streamliner of its enced advertising, architecture (notably, Radio own. In all, about 90 trains were placed in ser- City Music Hall in New York), and the design vice. Streamliners now blasted west out of of ordinary consumer products, Robert Reed Altoona, Pennsylvania, around famous Horse- writes in The Streamline Era (1975). House- shoe Curve on the Pennsylvania Railroad's wives were pictured in ads scrubbing their Broadivay Limited. They skimmed along the "convenient, up-to-date" aluminum pots as a desert sands of New Mexico on the Santa Fe's miniature streamliner rushed around the El Capitan and Silver Chief. They cut through kitchen sink. Streamlined furniture, stream- the piney woods of Mississippi on the Gulf, lined corsets, even streamlined coffins were Mobile & Northern's Rebel. They wound up sold to a receptive public. and over the Sierra Nevada at Dormer Pass on the Union Pacific's City of Sail Francisco, sped hat quickened the public pulse through the wheatland oceans of Kansas on as much as the glamor of the the Rock Island's Rocky Mountain Rocket, and streamliner was its tremen- threw their horsepower against the head dous speed. The Zephyr's winds of coastal Maine on the Boston & dawn-to-dusk dash to Chicago was a pre- Maine's Flying Yankee. amble to the "greatest speed-up of rail service In breathless magazine accounts such as the world had yet seen," in the words of in- 'The NEW ERA of Railroading," the public dustry journalist Donald Steffee. On routes was informed that railroad presidents were where trains had loped along at an average of consorting with "artists and designers" to give 35-40 MPIH since World War I, the new stream- expression to new creations. In 1937, the New liners quickened the overall pace to 55 MPH or York Central hired artist Henry Dreyfuss to higher, shrinking the running times between completely overhaul the 20th Ce11t11ryLimited, most terminals by about one-tlurd. The quan- at a cost of $800,000 per trainset, and the new tum leap in train speed is made vividly evi- Limited became one the era's leading symbols dent by industry reports. In 1928 there were of everything that was fast and modern. The only two trains scheduled at 60 MPH or more;

WQ WINTER 1994 19 by 1936 there were 644. The new trains cov- Ralph Budd first took on the competition- ered a distance of 40,205 miles, of wluch 29,301 Greyhound, Northwest Airlines, and the fam- were scheduled daily. By 1939, total mile-a- ily car-by announcing a six-and-one-half- minute mileage jumped to more than 65,000- hour run between Chicago and the Twin Cit- and the 10 fastest trains in the world were all ies. Diesels would make the trip in three and U.S. streamliners. one-half hours less than steam-driven trains (and 115 minutes faster than Amtrak does to- he acceleration was accomplished day). Thus were born the Twin City Zephyrs, by eliminating dead time and by with Budd-built cars and GM-powered en- reducing stops and slowdowns. The gines. Believing their corporate honor was at diesel locomotive was crucial in stake, both the Chicago & North Western and makingT these increased efficiencies possible. the Milwaukee Road responded by introduc- The diesel gained top speed much more rap- ing their own streamliners, matching the idly and smoothly than a steam locomotive, Burlington's scorclung pace and its comfort- owing to the steady rotating power delivered able seats, air-conditioning, elegant dining to the driving wheels. A diesel could round cars, and reduced round-trip fares. "If trans- curves at elevated speeds and did not have to portation competition ever justified itself, it stop for coal and water. The success of the did here," Fortune said. The new service re- diesel gave rise to an improved generation of sulted not in the waste of facilities but in their steam locomotives, which posted some re- highly profitable use. The Milwaukee's markable speed records on individual runs in Hiawatlza immediately started to gross well the late 1930s. Ultimately, though, the speed over $3.50 a mile, or three times its operating game was ruled by the diesel. expenses. The Twin Zephyrs carried an aver- The increase in speed occurred in all parts age of 316 people a day (up from 26 through of the country. In the East, where schedules passengers on average under the old steam were already tight, 40 minutes were cut from regime), and the C & NW's 400's performed the running time of the Co~zgressionalbetween equally well. Greyhound offered discount New York and Washington after the Pennsyl- fares and even attached trim to the sides of its vania Railroad completed electrification of the buses in an effort to imitate the streamliners, line in 1935. (At three hours, 35 minutes, the but to no avail. Additional fast trains were Congressional was about 50 minutes slower scheduled. Overall, the railroads carried more than today's express Metroliner.) The leisurely than four million passengers between Chicago eight-hour schedule between Chicago and St. and the Twin Cities between 1935 and 1939. Louis of 1925 was reduced to four hours, 55 minutes by the Green Diamond. Houston was nother travel market that was ex- brought two hours closer to Dallas by the panded by the mating of speed Southern Pacific's Sunbeam. Service between and comfort was the New York Kansas City and Oklahoma City was chopped to Florida trade. The Silver Me- from 12 hours to seven by the Frisco's Firefly. teor, put into service by the Seaboard Railway streamliners commonly ran 100 MPH to meet in 1939, trimmed eight hours off what had their schedules; one Midwest train was sclied- been a 33-hour run between New York and uled at 108 MPI-I between stops in Kansas. Miami. By 1941, six more fast and luxurious The testing ground for the economics of trains were in operation between New York high-speed service was the corridor between and Florida. Coach travel had increased 1,200 Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Between percent, and Florida had become "a play- these cities "there was probably more trans- ground for people who never had been farther portation competition than anywhere in the south than Asbury Park, New Jersey," one ob- world," noted Fortune magazine. In 1935, server said. In short, reawakened passenger

20 WQ WINTER 1994 departments discovered what John B. Jervis, he suggested, work through existing organi- an officer of the Mohawk & Hudson, had zations, notably the ICC, the Association of noticed a century before. "The expectations American Railroads, and the Shippers' Advi- of the public have been so much excited in sory Boards, to make the necessary arrange- reference to rapid traveling," Jervis wrote to ments? Budd's idea won over the White his board of directors in 1831, "that they will House, and on May 28, 1940, President not be satisfied with moderate speed, say 10 Roosevelt named him federal transportation or 12 miles per hour; they must have 15 as a commissioner, a post he held until America regular business." entered the war 18 months later. Just as Budd had predicted, railroads hen Ralph Budd met with proved to be one of America's more important President Roosevelt and Joe wartime assets. At the height of the war, they Eastman at the White House carried four times the passengers and twice in September 1939, he could the freight they had handled in 1939, without report that the rail-passenger business had the kind of congestion that had brought rail turned a corner. Railroad patronage, mea- traffic to a near standstill during World War sured in passenger-miles, had increased 23 I. "It was inconceivable that we could have percent over 1935 levels nationwide and 38 waged a two-front war without railroads percent over those of 1933. A pattern of decline which hauled 90 percent of all Army and that had begun in 1920 had been reversed. Navy equipment and supplies and more than Budd pointed out that the industry had taken 97 percent of all troops," one authority noted. tremendous strides in improving the business The secret to this achievement lay prima- of moving people. Under private ownership rily in the technological innovation that had and n~ostlywith private capital (the PWA occurred between the two world wars. The loans for streamlined trains had ceased in advent of the diesel locomotive was a break- 1936), railroads were offering better transpor- through, along with the introduction of cen- tation to the public than ever before. And this tralized traffic control, improvements in rights improvement had not been achieved at the of way, and the use of heavyweight rails. On expense of safety. Statistics collected by the many roads, diesel locomotives provided the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), extra horsepower to muscle war-swollen which was now chaired by Eastman, showed freight and passenger trains over the line. Die- only three fatalities resulting from accidents in sels hauled troop trains mile after mile, week five years of running speedy streamliners, a in and week out. Although the low operating tribute both to safe railroad practices and to cost of the diesel was important, the feature the engineering excellence of the railway that made it nearly indispensable was its equipment and locomotives. Nor did the im- around-the-clock dependability. On that score proved service add to the price of rail transpor- alone, it took only half as many diesel units as tation; ill fact, coach fares had dropped from 3.6 steam units to handle a given tonnage over the cents a mile to 2 cents a mile after 1936. same distance in the same time. This in turn Roosevelt and Eastman listened intently. represented an enormous saving in fuel and Hitler's invasion of Poland earlier that month labor. had forced an immediate rethinking of the Another spillover of diesel-streamliner government's plans for military readiness. technology was the development of dynamic Transportation loomed as one of the more brakes in freight locomotives. Without the pressing concerns. A number of experts were prior development of high-speed passenger urging Washington to nationalize the rail- service, this revolutionary application would roads, citing the precedent of World War I. probably have been delayed for another dec- Budd argued against federal seizure. Why not, ade. By simply operating a lever, a freight train

AMERICAN RAILROADS 21 engineer could change the electric traction roads' physical plant, equipment, and road- motors into generators, thereby reversing their bed suffer heavy wear, but in the crush of function from drivers to retarders. When dy- people and materiel, trains were delayed, namic brakes went into use on mountain connections were missed, and many a be- grades, the problem of smoking wheels dimin- nighted traveler spent at least one trip sitting ished and time-consuming stops for wheel on his suitcase in an "old rattler." Moreover, cooling were largely eliminated. for millions of young soldiers who rode the After Pearl Harbor, the pioneers of the troop trains to Oakland Pier or Norfolk, the diesel streamlinerwere deeply involved in the railroads took them away from loved ones war effort. Hal Hamilton's organization kept and toward a hazardous future. No doubt producing locomotives and was also pressed unpleasant associations with railroads were into service to develop diesel engines for the seared into the minds of many Americans. navy's LSTs (landing ship, tank). The "567" But under Joe Eastman before his untimely diesel gained worldwide renown for its reli- death in 1944, the Office of Transportation ability. During the week after D-Day, more cooperated with railroad personnel to en- than 300 LSTs shuttled tanks and heavy artil- sure that hundreds of thousands of cars and lery between the allied fleet and the locomotives moved night and day. The Normandy beaches. The Budd Company con- trains got through. verted its railcar factory to the emergency Had Hitler shown like judgment and not manufacture of war goods, turning out the sacrificed Germany's fine rail network to his famous bazooka projectile and earning the autobahns, RnilqAm magazine pointed out army-navy "E" award for outstanding war in November 1943, the state of the world production. In 1944, an ailing Edward Budd might have been different: "Germany is suffer- received the American Society of Mechanical ing now from the plan of her 'master-minds' Engineers' highest award, a medal for "out- to subordinate railway to highway develop- standing engineering achievements." The fa- ment and her ultimate defeat may be attrib- ther of the stainless-steel streamliner died two uted to the failure of her railways-assisted in years later at his Philadelphia home at age 76. such failure by our own Hying Fortresses-to The surge in wartime traffic was not an stand up under the job of supplying transpor- unmitigated blessing. Not only did the rail- tation during a long war."

A spirit of optimism prevailed in the lounges, that will leave New York and Chi- railroad industry at the end of World War 11. cago in the morning and arrive in Chicago "Railroad men never have been so full of or New York after dinner, and charge as ideas for developing passenger business," little as $10 or $12 for the trip." Carriers Fortune reported. "There is, for example, talk were making surveys of passenger prefer- of streamliners, complete with bars and ences, and railcar builders were preparing

22 WQ WINTER 1994 for the biggest boom in history. Paced by the permit these wheels to slow down." In aca- New York Central's order for 300 light- demic circles this phenomenon was known as weight coaches, the Budd Company an- the "railroad downfall theory," and it worked nounced plans to quadruple its car-building by analogy:Just as horse-drawn stagecoaches capacity. Budd and other builders believed were overtaken by railroads during the 19th that at least 13,000 of the industry's 28,000 century, so railroads in the second half of the passenger railcars would be replaced over 20th century would be buried by automobiles the next five years. They expected to build and airlines. more than 3,000 cars a year. Another body of opinion was built around the view that railroaders, preoccupied with hile it was widely believed hauling freight, had willfully abandoned their that airlines would eventually human cargo, practically slapping passengers dominate long-distance trips in the face with high fares and chronic bad of 600 miles or more and that service. "I am the Unwanted Passenger," E. B. carsw and buses would eat into the short-haul White lamented in the New Yorker. "I am all business, nobody gazing into a crystal ball in that stands between the Maine railroads and 1946 could have predicted what happened a bright future of hauling fast freight at a next. Railroads then handled two-thirds of the profit." Freight, in fact, did appear to remain nation's commercial passenger traffic, and the a solid revenue base until the 1957-58 reces- New York Central alone carried more people sion, when the curtain parted to reveal the than the entire US. airline industry. Who extent to which truckers had skimmed off the could have imagined that railroad passenger lucrative end of the business. Battered further volume would plunge from 790 million riders after 1959 by the opening of the St. Lawrence in 1946 to 298 million by 1965; that such leg- Seaway, which shifted vast amounts of bulk endary streamliners as the Liberty Limited, freight from rails to barges and cargo ships, Royal Blue, 4001s,and Orange Blossom Special even railroads that carried few passengers- would be discontinued or turned into locals, the Lehigh Valley, Ann Arbor, and Western shorn of dining and sleeping cars; or that the Maryland, to name threebegan a tortuous U.S. government itself, in the form of a 1958 descent into wholesale route abandonrnents or report by the ICC, would complacently assert receivership. that the passenger train was rolling down the track to oblivion and would in all probability n retrospect, the passenger train did not "take its place in the transportation museum succumb because the jet turbine was along with the stagecoach, the sidewheeler, more efficient than the diesel engine, or and the steam locomotive"? because Americans owned 60 million There were several standard explanations cars, or because railroad managers imple- for the collapse of the world's best rail-passen- mented fewer and fewer new ideas after 1950. ger service. Many observers, watching the di- Behind these effects lay a more profound version of traffic from railroads to cars and cause: a change in the very ground rules of planes, declared that the day of the train was transportation. After World War 11, govern- past, its work done. GI Joe had voted with his ment became the railroads' biggest competi- feet, it was said, preferring the go-anywhere, tor, as first Congress and then the White go-anytime convenience of his car and the House jumped into the transportation busi- speed of the plane. "We are a nation on ness. Released from the stringencies of the wheels," declared Lucius D. Clay, the retired Depression and the discipline of war, federal army general who headed the 1954 govern- expenditures for airports and highways rock- ment committee that would help launch the eted to dizzying heights, driven by the politics interstate highway system, "and we cannot of the Cold War and the pork barrel.

AMERICAN RAILROADS 23 one realizing that it would be the start of a postwar pattern in other industries, America let the tecl~nologicaladvan- tage built by the two Budds, Hal Hamilton, and Charles Kettering slowly slip away. Speed, cost, and efficiency were the three elements that had made the streamliner such a luminous success in the 1930s. Remarkably, all three were undercut or penalized by government policies in the postwar period. For example, Railway Age reported in 1944 that the industry was thinking Making a more apt symbol of the age than the Gateway Arch looming of fielding daytime expresses behind it, an interstate cuts across the "throat" of St. Louis Union Station. that would run between New The public promotion of roads and run- York and Clucago in 14 hours, a two-hour irn- ways, wit11 government construction, gov- provement over the fastest overnight sched- ernment maintenance, government policing, ules. Cars on these trains would connect with and government signaling, made it easy for the fleet of West Coast trains at Clucago, mak- truckers and airlines and bus companies- ing the coast run in about 36 hours, so that a not to speak of motorists-to compete wit11 passenger leaving New York on a Saturday railroads that built and maintained their morning would arrive at Los Angeles Monday own rights of way. At the same time, the pas- morning. But the ICC effectively killed this senger train was hobbled by an unusual ar- idea before a single train left the station. In ray of shortsighted government regulations, 1947, the agency imposed a 79-MPHlimit on all tax policies, and labor laws that drained vi- passenger trains not equipped with special sig- tal capital and squashed the enterprising naling devices in their locomotive cabs. The spirit of the 1930s. In the words of an exas- rule, which went into effect in 1950, further re- perated Ralph Budd, who retired from the stricted trains running on lines without other Burlington in 1949, the industry was denied trackside signals to 60 MPH. "the equality of opportunity" to compete for postwar passengers. he problem with the regulation was As the world of tires and wings over- not just the estimated $80 million it took the railroads, the great Gothic city ter- would cost the carriers (the equiva- minals that once echoed wit11 the bustle of lent of roughly $400 million today), travelers and the clatter of baggage carts but the minimal improvement it would make began to resemble the relics of a fallen em- in passenger safety. Because some of the fast- pire. "Year by year the railroads have sim- est stretches of track were used by so few pas- ply been drifting out of the public conscious- senger trains a day and under such safe con- ness," David P. Morgan, editor of Trains ditions, several railroads argued that special magazine, wrote in 1958. "Nobody hangs signaling was not warranted. The railroads' around the depot to see the 5:15, assuming line of reasoning irked ICC commissioner WU- it's still there, and a generation of Americans liam Patterson, who complained in a hearing, has never been inside a train." Without any- 'When you get to the final analysis here, it is

24 WQ WINTER 1994 a question of whether you [the railroads] Cut Bank, population 3,721 in 1950, had should determine how these funds should be an airport covering 1,703 acres which cost used or whether the government should. . . . $4.3 million, mostly provided by the fed- And hasn't Congress given the commission eral government, perhaps for military that responsibility?" reasons. Through the city and county air- port levies, the Great Northern in 1956 contributed $2,241 for the support of the nother obstacle placed in the path airport, and the ad valorem tax of West- of the streamliner was the 15 per- ern Airlines, which serves the airport, cent federal excise tax on com- was $22.92. There were 587 air passenger mon-carrier tickets. Originally loadings at the Cut Bank airport in 1957, establishedA as a wartime measure to dis- so that the cost to the Great Northern was courage civilian travel, the tax was contin- $3.82 for each of those passengers, com- ued after the end of the war, and unhappily pared with a tax cost to Western Airlines it succeeded all too well in its original pur- of 4 cents per passenger. pose. "The additional 15 percent added to the cost of rail transportation has often been Passenger trains were further burdened the deciding factor in the choice of the pri- by full-crew laws passed by many state legis- vate automobile over the rail service," regu- latures at the behest of organized labor. These latory commissioners said in a 1954 report. laws required a .fireman aboard every diesel Between 1945 and 1953, the tax added $1.4 passenger train, even though there was noth- billion to the federal treasury, while boost- ing for the fireman to fire. Both the fireman and ing the price of a one-way first-class ticket the engineer were paid under "basicday" rates between New York and Chicago from $35 to unchanged since 1919. One hundred miles con- $40.25. (The tax was lowered to 10 percent by stituted a basic day for the crew. As a conse- Congress in 1954 and rescinded at the request quence, crews were changed a total of eight of the Kennedy administration in 1962.) times on a passenger train running the 1,000 Local property taxes also hurt the pas- miles between Chicago and Denver in 16 and senger train. Unlike cars, trucks, and buses, one-half hours, and the crews shared a total of which travel on public roads, passenger 10 days' pay. Restrictive union work rules had trains used stations and rights of way that been a matter of controversy in railroading for were taxed as private property. As the cost years. But the issue of "featherbedding" took of local government rose after 1945, munici- on added urgency in a period of inflationary pal tax collectors found passenger-railway wages. During the 1930s, when the stream- properties too tempting to overlook. By liner movement got under way, the average 1955, the railroads in Chicago were paying pay of a railroader was 70 cents an hour. With more than $12 million in Cook County taxes. railroad wages climbing to $1.94 an hour in The New York Central became the single 1954, the costs of the old practices soared. biggest taxpayer in New York City. In 1956, This type of labor agreement has loaded it paid $6.6 million in taxes on Grand Cen- wage costs so heavily on the passenger train tral Terminal alone. that these costs alone have often been the de- Taking their cue from the cities, a number cisive factor necessitating the discontinuance of small towns and counties placed special of the operation of trains," an expert declared taxes on property owners for the support of to Congress in 1954. airports. This put the railroads in the madden- High operating costs were a greater prob- ing position of being able to calculate exactly how lem than loss of patronage: Through 1955, the much they were being required to contribute to number of passengers carried on an average the welfare of their competitors. A 1958 govem- intercity train was only slightly less than the ment report found this example in Montana: average carried in 1939. But the inflationary

AMERICAN RAILROADS 25 spiral had a deadly outcome. Capital that sociologist W. Fred Cottrell quipped, "ex- should have gone for improved equipment ceeded the French Code in size." Established and faster service was dissipated in wages and at a time when railroads ruled the transporta- taxes. tion world, the overlapping laws and agencies compelled carriers to provide passenger ser- he effect on American railcar-build- vice on money-losing branches and otherwise ers was profound. Orders for pas- denied management the right to make crucial senger-train cars sank to 109 units in economic decisions. Obtrusive regulations, T 1949 from a 1945 peak of 2,993. "We such as the signaling requirement, deprived carbuilders have literally knocked ourselves railroads of their flexibility to respond to out designing and building new types of changing conditions or to experiment with equipment," Edward Budd, Jr., son of the new technology, and bred a negative, antago- founder, told the Association of Passenger nistic approach to passenger-train problems. Traffic Officers in 1957. The carbuilder found Congress also suffered its own failure to that it was selling more rail equipment abroad modernize. Its thinking on railroads remained than at home: The title of a company adver- stuck in the 19th century, when railroad rob- tisement announcing delivery of a new ber barons seemed poised to take over the streamliner in 1955 made the bittersweet entire American econoniy. In 1943, for ex- boast, "None But the Best for Canada." ample, the New Haven and Pennsylvania rail- To be sure, rail executives deserved part roads sought permission to invest in commer- of the blame for the declining state of the pas- cial airlines. Presented with a golden opportu- senger train. Many companies were too prone nity to encourage the integration of air and rail to compete foolishly among themselves rather service in the New York area, Congress instead than against buses and planes, dispatching let the authorizing legislation die in the belief trains out of the same cities at the same times that railroads were seeking to monopolize instead of spacing departures througl1out the aviation. day on a cooperative basis. As often as not, A different regulatory environment was passenger trains stopped only in the down- established for air carriers. In 1938, aviation town stations of cities and rolled past the ex- enthusiasts pushed tl~rougl~Congress the panding suburbs that were home to many Civil Aeronautics Act, whic11 promoted as well potential riders. And it is fair to say that some as regulated air transport. The Civil Aeronau- companies became defeatist and used train tics Board (CAB) provided direct operating losses to try to convince state railroad conunis- subsidies to most airline companies and indi- sions that passenger service was 110 longer rect subsidies to all carriers by fixing lug11 rates necessary or desirable. On the Southern Pacific for air mail. But such public underwriting of and New York Central, management com- private enterprise paled next to the 1946 Air- bined trains and downgraded food and sleep- port Development Act. The law called for con- ing car service.The emphasis was 011 retrench- struction of more than 2,000 new airports and merit~onkeeping people off trains. authorized $500 million to help cities and Frequently, the government's own regu- states build them. The aid was justified on the latory apparatus served to accelerate the slide. grounds of national defense and the argument There were a number of reasons for this. Rail- that Washington had always offered financial roads, America's first big industry, were also help to promising new forms of transporta- its most highly regulated. Federal oversight tion, including railroads in the 19th century. began with the Interstate Commerce Act in But amid all the rhetoric there was plenty of 1887. The industry was also bound by state old-fashioned logrolling. "Every town had its laws, city ordinances, and 48 state public-ser- congressman, ready to proclaim the . . . abso- vice commissions whose cumulative decrees, lute necessity for airline service," wrote former

26 WQ WINTER 1994 CAB official Charles Kelly, Jr.,in his book, The critics labeled such roads "extravagant speed- Sky's the Limit (1963). Subsidies would be ways, designed to serve the luxurious few." needed "just to get the feeder lines on their Washington's involvement grew with the pas- feet. . . . At least that was the theory." Wash- sage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1944, ington also began to spend huge sums on con- which authorized $500 million a year for post- trol towers, approach-light lanes, weatl~er-re- war highway building. Yet it was not enough. porting systems, and a cadre of federal air traf- With cars pouring out of Detroit in record fic controllers. By 1960 the federal government numbers, highway supporters argued that had spent more than $2 billion on such "air- congested and obsolete roads would throttle way aids." the economy. With Washington's help, the airlines ex- perienced a tremendous boom. "Civilian avia- n July 12, 1954, Vice President tion is now a giant grown fat by government Richard M. Nixon waved the subsidies," a 1959 congressional report noted. promise of a $50-billion road- Between 1946 and 1959, the airlines' share of 0building project before state gov- commercial intercity travel leaped from a neg- ernors assembled at Lake George in upstate ligible six percent to a commanding 39 per- New York. At a time when the federal budget cent. The increase came almost entirely at the totaled $71 billion, this was very big money- expense of the passenger train. Airlines drew roughly equivalent to $1 trillion worth of con- comparatively few patrons away from high- struction work today, transportation historian ways, but gained an overwhelming share of Tom Heppenheimer notes. "America is in an the "business class" travelers who had previ- era when defensive and productive strength ously traveled in overnight Pullman sleepers require the absolute best that we can have," or daytime parlor cars. Nixon declared. Using notes prepared by By 1959, the railroads' market share (ex- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who could cluding commuters) was down to 29 per- not attend the conference, Nixon spoke of "a cent-only two percentage points above grand plan" of expressways that would solve intercity bus volume. Even the most progres- "the problems of speedy, safe transcontinen- sive railroads had trouble stabilizing passen- tal travel" and help "metropolitan area con- ger service. Despite vigorous sales campaigns gestion, bottlenecks, and parking." to spur travel on its flagship Afternoon In his diary, James C. Hagerty, Eisen- Hiawatlm linking Chicago and the Twin Cities, hower's press secretary, reported that Nixon the Milwaukee Road saw yearly revenues told a cabinet meeting that highway building from the line drop to $1.7 million in 1960 from "would be a good thing for the Republican a peak of $2.2 million in 1948. Party to get behind," and pointed out that "in California [Governor] Earl Warren got the fundamental shift in federal reputation of being a great liberal because he spending priorities helped pave built scl~oolsand roads. We are now ready to the way for America's postwar build roads and it is very popular." Eisen- car culture. Highways, historian hower, who had been greatly impressed by Bruce Seely points out in Building the American the German autobahns when he was supreme Highway System (1987), once were considered allied commander in Europe, agreed. the responsibility of local and state govern- Eisenhower picked as his key adviser on ment. During the Depression, Congress highways a man who was accustomed to agreed to underwrite new programs to build thinking in sweeping terms-retired general roads and bridges in order to create jobs for Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin airlift. From the unemployed, but rejected an $8-billion the outset, the Clay Committee couched the plan for a national system of highways after road-building project in Cold War terms. The

AMERICAN RAILROADS 27 threat of atomic attack demanded a national century before, but in the public's eyes, rail- superhighway system to speed the mass roads were run by whiners or plunderers. evacuation of cities, General Clay said. In one Eleven years after V-J Day, the train was no survey it was estimated that expressways longer considered essential to the nation's could save 225,000 additional lives in Milwau- transportation needs or even to its defense. kee alone (though it was estimated that The fact that Washington's encroachment 210,000 would still perish). Dubbing super- on the transportation business not only vio- highways "roads for survival," Clay and his lated the principles of free enterprise preached colleagues wrote in their report to President by the Republican Party but contributed to the Eisenhower, "It was determined as a matter of downfall of an important taxpaying industry federal policy that at least 70 million people only added to the sense of frustration and be- would have to be evacuated from target areas trayal among railroad officials. "When the in case of threatened or actual enemy attack. president signed the bill, I told him he had just No urban area in the country today has high- signed the death warrant of American passen- way facilities equal to this task. The rapid im- ger service," Howard E. Simpson, president of provement of the complete 40,000-mile inter- the B & 0 Railroad, recalled in an interview. state system, including the necessary urban An apparently indifferent Eisenhower replied, connections thereto, is therefore vital as a civil- 'We'll see." defense measure." Simpson was right. The impact of Out of a series of financial schemes that interstates would be little short of shattering. satisfied Eisenhower and the Democrats in Between 1956 and 1969, a total of 28,800 miles Congress came the National System of Inter- of interstate highways were opened to traffic. state and Defense Highways Act of 1956, de- In the same period, 59,400 miles of railroad scribed by Secretary of Commerce Sinclair were taken out of passenger service. General Weeks as "the greatest public-works program Motors, like many other manufacturers, bailed in the history of the world." A principal fea- out of the passenger-train business in the ture of the act was the establishment of a 1950s, although it continued to make diesel Highway Trust Fund that would collect freight locomotives at its plant in La Grange, money for highway construction from in- Illinois.* America's rail-passenger service creased taxes on gasoline, tires, and commer- dwindled from 2,500 intercity (noncomrnuter) cial road vehicles. In effect, urban drivers trains operated in 1954 to fewer than 500 in would subsidize rural drivers and the 1969. By that time it was impossible to ride a crowded Northeast would support road- train between Houston and Dallas or Pitts- building in the sparsely populated West. burgh and Cleveland. Gone was the South's South Dakota and Utah could not underwrite first streamliner, the Rebel. Other trains that interstates on their own, but with a national figured prominently in the great speed-up of fund that pooled money from all car and truck the 1930s-the Chicago & North Western's travel, superhighways could be built across the 400fs, the B & 0's Royal Blue, the Milwaukee country. Road's Hiazuathas, the Union Pacific's City of Portland, the New Haven's Comet-were ex- he unprecedented legislative and fi- cised from the timetable or combined with nancial support marshaled on be- half of interstate highways com- 'Before his retirement in 1956, Hal Hamilton, president of the Electro-Motive Division, wanted to experiment with new forms pleted the transformation of the rail- of railroad motive power, including electric and turbine genera- roads from a proven national resource to a tion, according to his son, Kent Hamilton. But his ideas were turned aside by GM chairman Harlow Curtice. "Curtice pulled rusty relic. Ralph Budd and other executives my father into his office and said: 'Hamilton, you're not selling had seen the industry make more significant enough parts. You're building your engines so they last too long. Now you've got to cheapen up those engines so that they won't changes in a decade than in the whole half- last as long so we sell more parts.' "

28 WQ WINTER 1994 other trains. Cars built for the world-famous trains in Japan and Europe have been a com- 20th Century Limited were sold to the Mexican mercial success, earning revenues substan- National Railways, which ran them out of tially over costs. Guadalajara and Mexico City. It is difficult today to appreciate how On lines where passenger trains still ran, primitive Japan's railways were in the years service was often threadbare. Only a masochist following World War 11: Those were the days would want to ride the Erie-Lackawanna from when Japan's industrial reputation rested on Buffalo, New York, to Hoboken, New Jersey, the manufacture of little trinkets found in just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The American cereal boxes. Built in narrow gauge railroad offered one train a day, a local with and served by archaic steam locomotives, nothing but coaches, that left Buffalo at 5:15 Japan's rail system was an antique assemblage P.M. and arrived at Hoboken at 3:35 A.M. Save of short lines whose construction had been fi- for the popular Metroliner trains that began nanced by British traders in the 19th century. operating in the New York-Washington corri- The first step in the rejuvenation of the Japa- dor in 1969, the once-blazing torch of Ameri- nese National Railways (JNR) was political can intercity passenger service had dimmed to rather than technological. In 1949, the railroad a faint dot on the horizon when the National was reorganized by the U.S. military govem- Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) ment into a quasi-public operation, its man- took over virtually all intercity service in 1971. agement separated from the Ministry of Transport. The second step was the selection of Slunhi Sogo as JNR president in 1954. Ap- pointed after the capsizing of a JNR ferry re- sulted in Japan's worst-ever peacetime sea disaster, Sogo recognized that his first task was to improve safety. Once he got the railway functioning as a national system, he intro- duced the first intercity streamliners to Japan. But Sogo knew that his organization had to address the technological gap that existed between his country and America. Following JLCITY OF SAN FRANCISCO a tour of the United States, he expanded the Railway Technical Research Institute in Tokyo and launched programs in applied research During the same years that American rail- and systems engineering. In 1956, the same roads fell into decrepitude, officials in Japan year that President Eisenhower signed the in- and Western Europe took the bright ideas of terstate highway bill, Japan's minister of trans- Edward Budd, Hal Hamilton, and other port, at Sogo's urging, formed a commission American inventors and figured out how to to study the costs and traffic demands of the use them to propel passenger trains to a new Tokyo-Osaka corridor. The group called on threshold of speed, safety, and energy effi- the government to consider new railways an ciency. Their achievements have revived integral part of national transportation, paral- worldwide interest in steel-wheel transporta- lel with highway construction and new air- tion. Trains in France currently top 175 MPH. ports. Three years later, the ceremonial first Trains in Japan and Germany use between spade of dirt for construction of a new high- one-sixth and one-eighth as much energy as a speed super-railroad was turned. The Shin- jet plane carrying an equal passenger load. The kansen, or Bullet Line, debuted in October safety record of such trains is nearly flawless. 1964, and soon the railway was dispatching And like U.S. streamliners of yore, high-speed blue-and-ivory trains that ran between Osaka

AMERICAN RAILROADS 29 Has Amtrak Missed the Train?

mtrak started operations inauspi- For a time, the railroads that had dumped ciously on May 1,1971, a year after the their passenger service continued to operate the A bankruptcy of the Penn Central rail- trains under contract to Amtrak. Even though road forced a reluctant federal government to Aintrak now operates its ow11 trains, the freight enter the passenger rail business. After only two railroads still own most of the track. This di- months of operations, Amtrak's modest federal vided responsibility leads to buck-passing be- start-up grant of $40 million was nearly ex- tween the two. One result is that long-distance hausted. And when its first president, Roger train service is slower today than it was when Lewis, asked for authority to buy new passen- Aintrak took over in 1971-and measurably ger equipment, President Richard M. Nixon's slower than it was during the streamliner era White House turned hiin down, forcing of five decades ago. The schedule of the New Amtrak to rely on a ragtag fleet of old cars and York-Chicago Broadway Limited has gone up locomotives. from 16 hours in 1940 to 20 and one-half hours Since those chaotic early days, the National today; the Southwest Limited requires 50 hours Railroad Passenger Corporation, or Amtrak, between Chicago and Los Angeles on the same has compiled a mixed record. On the positive route that took 39 and three-quarters hours side, it has replaced much of its antiquated roll- under the Santa Fe Railway. ing stock with Superliner and Amfleet cars. Its In recent years, Amtrak supporters have operating deficit has been sliced from 44 per- blamed the railroad's plight 011 President Ro- cent of total costs in 1984 to 21 percent last year. nald Reagan, who took an extreme laissez-faire (Aintrak received $351 million in federal oper- position on Amtrak's subsidies and repeatedly ating subsidies last year.) A number of dilapi- rejected plans that would have improved ser- dated depots, notably Washington, D.C.'s vice. But some of Amtrak's "friends" share the Union Station, have been restored, and ticket- blame for its current state. They include nostal- ing and reservation services have improved gia buffs who seem satisfied to have Amtrak greatly. operate trains like those they knew as children Yet against these accon~plisl~mentsmust be and local political interests that want to use the weighed the poor perforn~ance of many railroad for a variety of purposes, such as serv- Amtrak trains, whose slow scl~edulesand in- ing out-of-the-way towns or providing jobs for the frequent service conspire to make trains a mar- homeless. These friends seem unable to conceive ginal presence outside the Northeast Corridor. of passenger rail as a business and a teclu~ology, Today, Amtrak accounts for less than four percent not as a social agency or a trip down memory lane. of common carrier travel nationwide, wlule buses claim 10 percent and planes 86 percent. nother perennial problem is high la- Amtrak's problems partly stem from the bor costs. When it passed the legisia- politics surrounding its birth. It was overseen A tion creating Amtrak in 1970, Con- during its early years by Nixon administration gress did not demand any relaxation of restric- officials whose commitment to passenger trains tive work rules from railroad labor. Despite was less than wholehearted. Secretary of Trans- some improvement in union work rules, about portation John Volpe slashed 49,500 miles of 60 percent of revenues today are consumed by railroad passenger service to 23,000 miles and wages. cut the number of intercity trains from 450 to The Northeast Corridor is the happy ex- fewer than 250. A private railroad that wanted ception to Amtrak's woes. In 1976, Paul to be relieved of its intercity passenger routes Reistrup, Amtrak's second president, pur- was required only to pay Amtrak an amount chased the Washington-Boston mainline of the equal to its 1969 passenger-service losses. Before bankrupt Penn Central, giving Amtrak total long, Amtrak was the underfinanced master of control of passenger operations. Reistrup's bold all the nation's intercity passenger trains. move, together with fresh capital committed by

30 WQ WINTER 1994 Washington ($1.6 billion for track rehabilitation tract the public would be to use the proven tech- and $150 million for station improvements), re- nology of steel wheel on steel rail. "Maglev" trains sulted in a New York-to-Washington speedway that float above a magnetic guideway may prove that allows travel at up to 130 M.P.H.,wluch begins workable in the future but are not practical today. to approach the kind of rail system in place in Ja- The trains would need to use tracks barred to pan and under rapid development in Europe. freight trains and free of grade crossings so that The public has responded to fast, frequent total safety and high speed could be achieved. A trains by making Amtrak the largest single similar sort of "dedicated" passenger service was common carrier in the New York-Washington suggested by federal TransportationCoordinator market. Its share of the air-rail passenger busi- Joseph Eastman back in 1936. ness is 43 percent and growing. Amtrak is try- One way to overcome the financial ob- ing to duplicate this success by rebuilding its stacles to high-speed rail would be to tie the line from New York to Boston. But it has dis- service to hub airports, then encourage airlines played little enthusiasm for starting other high- to invest in rail as an alternative to unprofitable speed corridors.The reason may be traced to its "short-hop" air routes. Passengers from, say, history: To protect its annual subsidy in Con- eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland could gress, Amtrak must curry favor with organized check their baggage at rail stations and ride labor and other constituencies, and they are directly to Virginia's Dulles Airport for long- quite content with the status quo. distance and international flights. Integrated Amtrak's structural inadequacies have rail-air ticketing could be provided, and airlines convinced many transportation specialists that could be awarded coveted airport gates as an in- if high-speed rail is ever to take centive to invest in modem ground holdin the United states it will transportation. have to be developed outside the Another idea would be to split Amtrak system. Several groups high-speed corridors into two dis- have come forward with plans for crete parts. A private company the construction of high-speed would buy the equipment, run the intercity rail. A consortiumled by Morrison- trains, and price tickets &thou; public subsidies, Knudsen Corporation and GEC Alsthom, a wlde the federal government- would maintain the French-British venture, is seeking permission to rights of way, much as it supports highways and build a 620-mile route that would link Dallas- airport terminals. Such a venture would parallel Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio developments in Japan and Europe, where gov- using 200-M.P.H.French-built trains. The project ernment railroadshave been broken up into has created a Texas-size political dust-up. An smaller, quasi-private companies in order to lower earlier attempt by other businessmen to build costs and to encourage private investment. a Shinkansen-like railroad between San Diego High-speed rail advocates face a formidable and Los Angeles was defeated after citizen opponent in the highway lobby, which has domi- groups objected loudly to high-speed trains nated American t1Illiking about transportation near their homes. since World War 11. Yet there are signs of change. Despite such opposition, the basic concept Some market-oriented conservatives now pro- of high-speed rail is sound and could be applied pose to put highways in the hands of private in- on a number of routes where travel is heavy, vestors, who would charge tolls reflecting the true such as Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Jacksonville, cost of the facilities. %'idea has aroused inter- Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit, Philadelphia- est in the Clinton administration. Secretary of Harrisburg-Pittsburgh, Kansas City-St. Transportation Frederico Peiia has argued that Louis, and perhaps San Francisco-Los Ange- such pricing of car travel, coupled with the intro- les. Marketing studies indicate that if rail travel duction of fast intercity trains, could save the between two cities is reduced to three hours or less, country huge sums that otherwise would be many businesspeople will choose rail over air. spent on highways. The best option for introducing trains that at- -Mark Reutter

AMERICAN RAILROADS 31 By 1976, the line had grossed $7.5 billion, equal to six times its $1.2-billion cost. Expanded to connect nine of Japan's 10 largest cities, the Shinkansen con- tinues to be profitable fol- lowing JNR's breakup into six regional passenger car- riers in 1987. High-speed rail has played an impressive part in reducing transportation costs in Japan and limiting the nation's oil imports. The International Institute for Applied Systems Seizing the future: A Japanese bullet train, part of a fleet that relied heavily on borrowed American technology, speeds through Kyoto in 1966. Analysis found the Shin- kansen to be nearly three times more productive and Tokyo at 115 to 125 MPH, setting world than aircraft serving the same route in terms speed records. of labor efficiency, five times more productive The bullet trains represented the coming in terms of capital charges on equipment, and of age of Japanese industry in many respects. eight times more productive in terms of energy To build the railroad, Sogo tapped into virtu- consumed. And Japan's bullet trains have carded ally every field of Japanese civil engineering nearly four billion passengers since 1964 with- and manufacturing. In all, 4,000 experts were out a single reported fatality. mobilized from the ranks of the nation's automakers, steel companies, electric-maclun- urope, too, appreciated the value of ery makers, and other industries. In many ar- the American passenger train, as eas, the Shinkansen applied teclu~ologyfound well as the diesel engine used by in America. It incorporated the lightweight U.S. forces during World War 11. cars and two-axle trucks of the Budd Com- The first "American-style" lightweight cars pany and included dyiianuc brakes pioneered made their debut on the Continent in 1949 on by Electro-Motive. Propulsion for the Japanese France's Paris-Strasbourg line. In Germany, a trains was provided by overhead wires using pair of lightweight diesel trains that borrowed alternating current (AC)developed by George heavily from the original Zephyr design, began Westinghouse and first installed successfully muting between Hamburg and Frankfurt in by the Pennsylvania Railroad on its New 1953. American Car Foundry reported a similar York-Washington main line. (Under Sogo, the pattern of overseas enthusiasm for its railroad JNR also dieselized many of its rail lines, thus equipment. In 1950, the railcar builder intro- gaining efficiencies from yet another American duced the low-slung Talgo train, only to find it innovation.) unsalable among hard-pressed American rail- Imported or not, the Shinkansen was that roads. The Talgos, however, became a great rarest of phenomena, a large-scale construc- success for the Spanish National Railways. By tion project that earned a profit from the start. virtue of a tilting mechanism that enabled the Ridership on the Tokyo-Osaka line climbed trains to round curves at high speed, the 300 percent in the first five years of operation. Talgos reduced the travel time between

32 WQ WINTER 1994 Mahler, S mphony No 5 3er1in ~011bb~d~.Live! (DG) 73795 t iershwin Rha sody In Blue chicago -%o!~evine ~lavs& conducts. fDGl64384 lohn Mauceri: American Classics . (Philios). . 83824 t Yuri ~emirkanov:Rimsky- Korsakov, Scheherazade RCA) 00653 Barber Adagio For Strings 41so ~ymhony No 1 3a1timore ~6/Zinian,.. Arm) 00864 1 ialway At The Movies . Atlantic in the form of Sweden's X-2000 passenger train. istratioi1advocates, the technical ~nOW-l~OWof When Anitrak tested it last spring between New York and Washington, its tilt system for curves was hailed in the news lugli-~peedrailroading now belongs to France/ media as "revolutionary." Germany, Japan, Spain, and Sweden. This

34 WQ WINTER 1994 places America in the ironic position of hav- speed, comfort, and reliability. ing to repurchase the fruits of its own engi- "Now after carrying more than one mil- neering from foreign manufacturers. lion passengers, the train has earned an hon- orable retirement," Murphy said. "At this '11 take the right side and you sit in the great museum, those who knew the Zephyr in fireman's seat, and we'll see if we can get the past, rode on it, or just watched it go by, the old girl started." The date was May can renew their acquaintance and relive their 26,1960, when a group of railroad offi- memories of it, while children who are too cialsI and suppliers gathered on the grounds of young to have known the train during its pe- the Museum of Science and Industry in Chi- riod of service can go through its cars and cago to pay their last respects to the train that learn from the pictorial displays inside about had opened a new era in land transportation. the important role it played in revolutionizing Exactly 26 years after it had hurtled across the transportation." prairies on its history-making run, the world's It was a bittersweet moment, for the first dieselized, stainless steel train had Zephyr renewed but ultimately failed to save reached the end of the line. America's private-sector passenger train. By Harry Murphy, president of the the time of the streamliner's retirement, the Burlington Route, made informal remarks to industry had declined so precipitously that the audience. He recalled how Ills predecessor, no technology, no matter how efficient, the visionary Ralph Budd, had decided upon could rescue it. The business was beyond the the train's name. He had been rereading therapy of traction power. After Murphy Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the god spoke, he handed the brass throttle to Lenox of the west wind, Zephyrus, promised re- Lohr, president of the museum. The diesel newal. Budd thought the name perfect for engine was started one last time and the wail a fast train that would run across the Mid- of its horn flooded the museum grounds as west. And for over a quarter of a century Lohr yanked on the whistle cord four times. the Zephyr had breezed past farms and small Then the diesel was turned off and a small towns on various Burlington routes, des- group of admirers climbed a platform that tined to run off 3.2 million miles in its daily flanked the cars and filed slowly past the duty of hauling passengers and mail with still-gleaming silver streak.

AMERICAN RAILROADS 35 BACKGROUND BOOKS

uc11 has been written about the first tury U.S. economy as is generally believed. His 100 or so years of railroading in view remains highly controversial. The more America, when the industry roared conventional interpretation is advanced in forward in tandem with the U.S. economy. Sel- George Rogers Taylor's Transportation Revolu- dom discussed, like some embarrassing relative tion, 1815-1860 (1951);The American Railroad who went to pot, are the years since 1940. Network, 1861-1890 (1956),by Taylor and Irene For the most part, railroad literature consists D. Neu; and Edward Chase Kirkland's Men, of individual histories of the dozens of railways Cities and Transportation: A Study in New that sprouted during the industry's heyday. England History, 1820-1900, 2 vols. (1948). Many of these books-and there are literally Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the dean of American hundreds of them-are more anecdotal than lus- business historians and editor of The Railroads: torical, and, as often as not, emphasize pictures The Nation's First Big Business (1965; Arno, at the expense of text. In recent years, however, 19811, emphasizes that the railroads did much a number of company histories that transcend more than build up steel and other industries. the genre have been published. Among the best "The swift and widespread adoption of the rail- are James D. Dilts's Great Road: The Building road, together with the telegraph and ocean-go- of the Baltimore & Ohio, the Nation's First ing steamship. . . . helped to lay the foundations Railroad, 1828-1853 (Stanford, 1993); Maury of the modern American economy and to trans- Klein's Union Pacific, 2 vols. (Doubleday, 1987, form the nation into the world's greatest industrial 1989); and Allen W. Trelease's North Carolina power. The large corporation, the craft union, the Railroad, 1849-1971, and the Modernization of investment bai^]

36 WQ WINTER 1994 that was to sweep away many of the old railroad dry, supplement on the shifting nature of federal ways. Notable examples include The Railroader transportation policies. Other sources include (1940), by W. Fred Cottrell, Railroad Avenue the special issue of Trains magazine (April 1959), (19451, by Freeman Hubbard, and A Treasury of "Who Shot the Passenger Train?," and John Railroad Folklore (1948; Bonanza, 19891, edited Walker Barriger's Super-Railroads (1956), a for- by B.A. Botkin and Alvin F. Harlow. Even in ward-looking work suggesting ways in which 1940, Cottrell, a Miami University sociologist, rail service could be improved through public had to remind readers of the railroads' "glorious and private investment. past." He recalled that in small-town America every "air jammer," "baby lifter" and "club he development of Amtrak has revived winder"~occupationsdefined in Cottrell's 21- interest in passenger trains, though most page glossary-earned enough to be considered T observers pay more attention to trans- a man of substance, and was entitled as well to portation politics than to improvements in ser- a certain amount of swagger by dint of his role vice and technology. Amtrak (American Enter- in such a daring enterprise. prise Inst., 1980) is a strongly argued critique of The neglect of the years after railways existing passenger service by economist George stopped expanding extends to the field of tech- W. Hilton, cited by the Reagan administration in nology. Studies of the effects of post-1930s die- its attempt to cut off Amtrak's public subsidies. sel propulsion, central traffic control, and other In Off the Track (Greenwood, 19851, Donald M. innovations are scant and superficial. Two ex- Itzkoff, a congressional staff member, also criti- ceptions are Railroads in the Age of Regulation, cizes Amtrak's performance, but places much of 1900-1980 (19881, edited by University of Akron the blame on Republicans in the White House. business historian Keith L. Bryant, Jr., which Amtrak also comes under unflattering scrutiny contains profiles of railroad executives and com- in Supertrains (St. Martin's, 1991), by Joseph panies through the 1970s, and The Life and Vranich, president of the High Speed Rail/ Decline of the American Railroad (Oxford, Maglev Association. 1970), by John F. Stover, a Purdue University One of the more valuable books of recent historian. years on American railroads is Albro Martin's As the sickest part of the business, the passen- Railroads Triumphant (Oxford, 1992).The pro- ger train has suffered from similar neglect. No fessor emeritus of history at Bradley University one has bothered to write a comprehensive his- begins by asking why "an innovation as clearly tory of railroad passenger travel. By far the best revolutionary" as railroads came to be "despised documentation of the private-sector passenger and rejected" by the public. In no uncertain train's problems comes from government re- terms, he blames government overregulation for ports and from the pages of railway and business the plight of the railroads, and breathes a sigh of magazines. Highly useful are the Reports of the relief that the "stinking corpse" of this sort of Special Committee on the Railroad Passenger regulation was buried with the Staggers Rail Act Deficit Problem, issued by the National Asso- of 1980. The law reduced federal regulation of ciation of Railroad and Utilities Commissioners freight rates and otherwise freed the industry to (1952,1953,1955,1957). They document how compete with truckers and other rivals. The re- federal airline subsidies undermined the eco- vival of the rail-freight business in recent years nomic viability of intercity rail service, and how owes much to this measure. Martin thinks that ill-designed labor contracts exacerbated the even passenger rail will stage a comeback, and problem. James C. Nelson's Railroad Transpor- he writes serenely that we are at the dawn of "a tation and Public Policy (1959) is a helpful, if new railroad age."

AMERICAN RAILROADS 37 Winston Churchill's political accomplishments alone inspire awe, yet he was also a prolific author, writing history as he made it, with a sweeping view and bold jzidpzents. He capped his literary career with a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Because Churchill thought through so many political problems in his book, James W.Muller zurites here, they provide a window into the mind of this extraordinary statesman.

BY JAMES W. MULLER

38 WQ WINTER 1994 he years have been kind to the 1940, he paid the first of his annual visits to memory of Winston Churchill. Harrow, his old school, where students Half a century has passed since his ended the Michaelmas term by gathering to rousing rule of Britain during World sing the songs he had once praised as "the War 11, and while he still has his critics, and greatest treasure that Harrow possesses." against them his defenders, the controversies He joined in the singing with an uncanny that attended his career are muted or stilled memory for the words he had learned half now. Since the war, the empire he cherished a century before. When the program ended, has dissolved into a host of sovereign nations, he asked the students to sing two more of and John Bull himself has had to swallow hard the school songs. One of them, written by and learn to be a good European. Seen against Edward E. Bowen in the year of Churchill's such changes, Churchill's Britain looks all the birth, was called "Giants": more resplendent. When we survey his nation's story, nothing has happened since lus There were wonderful giants of old, time to gainsay his hope that the Battle of Brit- you know, ain might prove its "finest hour," as he urged There were wonderful giants of old; his countrymen to make it in one of his war- They grew more mightily, all of a row, time speeches. Than ever was heard or told; All of them stood their six feet four, The recollection of those speeches, once a And they threw to a hundred yards common bond among citizens in the English- or more, speaking countries, has now become the privi- And never were lame, or stiff, or sore; lege of the old. In a new age of spin doctors, And we, compared to the days of yore, ghostwriters, and media experts who adroitly Are cast in a pigmy mould, trump up mediocrities into national figures, For all of we, Churchill's invocation of our common liberty Whoever we be, and lus mastery of the English tongue have an Come short of the giants of old, you see. aura of antique virtue about them. We hardly expect our politicians to equal his style of poli- The song goes on to describe "splendid tics, but in. case they surprise us we call them cricketeers" and "scholars of marvellous ChurclulLian. force" among those giants, whose feats gym- Yet in coming to grips with Churchill's nastic and academic are daunting and achievement,we cannot avail ourselves of the unmatchable. Yet the final verse of the song expedient by which modern men, as long ago offers the boys an entirely different message: as Montesquieu and Rousseau, excused them- selves from imitating the valor of the ancients: But I think all this is a lie, you know, supposing that the ancients were more than I think all this is a lie; men. For Cl~urcl~illlived in our century, died For the hero-race may come and go, in 1965, and fought our wars or those of our But it doesn't exactly die! For the match we lose and win it again, parents or grandparents. Some among us re- And a Balliol comes to us now and then, member him still, while for the rest he springs And if we are dwarfing in bat and pen, to life in the lifeless memory of modern elec- Down to the last of the Harrow men, tronics, which is notoriously unreceptive to We will know the reason why! the divine. There appears to be no doubt that For all of we, he was a man like us. Whoever we be, As prime minister during World War 11, Come up to the giants of old, you see. Cl~urclullwanted the new generation to pon- der afresh the possibilities of greatness. A The prime minister and old Harrovian then week before Christmas in the stern days of remarked that the boys had been singing of

CHURCHILL 39 the "wonderful giants of old," but he asked two biographies, while not uncritical, are both them if anyone could "doubt that this genera- admiring. tion is as good and as noble as any the nation has ever produced, and that its men and he reader who scrutinizes what women can stand against all tests." There ap- Churchill used to call "the reverse of peared to him no room and no excuse for the medal" will find no dearth of de- shrinking. bunkers, including most recently On the other side of the ocean, accept- John Charmley's Churchill: The End of Gloy- ing an honorary degree from Harvard Uni- A Political Biography (1993). The critics raise versity in September 1943, Churchill questions about Churchill's long career that sounded a similar theme, bidding the stu- must be tackled by defenders not content to dents "remember that we are on the stage of rest with the sort of picture that Parson Weems history, and that whatever our station may long ago drew of George Washington. Yet the be, and whatever part we have to play, great parson's school of biography, despite its short- or small, our conduct is liable to be scruti- comings, satisfies the curiosity of ordinary nized not only by history but by our own readers better than do the biographies that fol- descendants." low current academic fashion and whittle great men and women down to modest pro- t is probably some longing for contact portions. The discovery that the Father of His with what Lincoln called "the better an- Country sported false teeth, however gratify- gels of our nature," in both our states- ing to a leveling spirit that resents his high men and ourselves, that encourages reputation, adds little or nothing to an under- readers to embark upon long books about standing of his achievements. Churchill. Longest of all-indeed the longest Accordingly, most readers have little use biography ever written, and indispensable for for the debunking kind of history, except if studying Churchill-is the eight-volume offi- somebody deserves to be debunked; but then cial life begun by Churchill's son, Randolph, they may be less interested in reading about and recently completed by Martin Gilbert.* the person. In Churchill's case they have a The distinguished Oxford University historian settled view that he was equal to his reputa- tells the story so carefully, and obtrudes so tion. That he or members of his family had little, that he allows the reader almost to recon- ordinary human failings, as some recent books struct Churchill's life day by day in its richness have charged, misses the main point. Readers and unexpected texture. Those who prefer a are drawn to him not because he was an ordi- less austere narrator may turn to the three- nary mortal but because they sense that he volume life by William Manchester, The Last was somehow larger than life-as the young Lion (1983- ), which would seem a very long Andre Maurois saw when he was posted to work if not for the contrast with the official bi- his battalion during the Great War and came ography. Legtons of readers have devoured its to think of Alcibiades as 'Winston Churchill, first two volumes and eagerly await the third. without the hats." People read about Churchill Different as they are in their approaches, the with the same fascination that Maurois felt as he observed him in person: in hopes of peer- 'Randolph S. Churchill wrote the first two volumes of Winston S. ing round the curtain that separates a mid- Churchill (1966-88)and Martin Gilbert wrote the remaining six. There are also 14 companion volumes of documents, with an- dling life from one that is grand, or of profit- other nine volumes planned. ing from Churchill's example, or at least of - James W.Muller is professor of political science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is studyi~zgChurchill's writings under a Fellozuslzip for College Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This essay is drawn froiiz his forthcoming book, The Education of Winston Churchill. Copyright 01994 by James W.Muller.

40 WQ WINTER 1994 being warmed and heartened by it. His very But the young parliamentarian soon em- faults and foibles, wluch have come in for their barked on a more thoroughgoing effort to own share of attention, command interest as appropriate the family inheritance. His chief the peculiarities of a magnanimous man. Not work during his first few years in the House that one can achieve Churcl-lillian stature sim- of Commons was writing the official biogra- ply by smoking his trademark cigars or sip- phy of Lord Randolph, a project that he ad- ping Pol Roger champagne. But the advice dressed with a single-mindedness startling once offered by the British embassy in Wash- to his gentlemanly circle. Published in 1906, ington to a solicitous host is as instructive now the book was emphatically a political biog- as it was then: "Mr. Churchill's tastes are very raphy, eschewing his father's private life to simple," since "he is easily pleased wit11 the examine his public career, and particularly best of everything." his brief ascendancy in the mid-1880s. The To hold up Churchill's life as exemplary climax of the book is Lord Randolph's res- and worthy of ignation from Lord Salisbury's Tory govern- study is to bor- ment in 1886, when, his son wrote, he had row a leaf from "rated his own power and conse- his own book. quent responsibility too high." Winston him- Nonetheless, Winston Churchill self sought in- concluded from his father's ex- struction in the ample that a statesman must career of another sometimes diverge from Churchill, his father, his party, even at the Lord Randolph (1849- risk of sacrificing his 95), who was described by his friend Lord Rose- As the (Lon- bery as "the shooting star don) Times Liter- of politics." Winston Chur- ary Supplement chill tells us in his autobiogra- advised its read- p11y that "for years" he read "ev- ers in its review ery word" his father spoke "and what the of Lord Ran- newspapers said about him." Lord Ran- dolph, who by his mid-thirties was chancel- (1906), "No lor of the exchequer and leader of the House one who cares of Commons, seemed to his son "to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having." He died when Winston was 20 and just out of Sandhurst, several years once in his hands. before he was elected to Parliament, but the People who do not care for younger Churchill concluded his maiden politics had better not touch speech in the House of Commons by ac- it." Lord Rosebery, noting that knowledging "a certain splendid memory the author had managed to which many l~on[orable]members still pre- overcome what might have serve." Winston Cl~urchillbegan his politi- been the "insuperable" ob- cal career aiming to vindicate that memory, stacle of not having "known his taking exception to the military budget pro- father, politically speaking, at posed by his own party's minister, just as Lord all," pronounced it "a fascinating Randolph had done in the crisis that abruptly ended his own career as a minister in 1886. Winston in Vanity Fair, 1911.

CHURCHILL 41 book, one to be marked among the first dozen, and admits that he "never expected him to perhaps the first half-dozen, biographies in our "develop so far and so fully." He wonders language." why Winston "didn't go into politics," telling him, 'You might have done a lot to help. You he biography was reprinted in might even have made a name for yourself." 1952, with a new preface describ- Thereupon he vanishes, and the story ends. ing Lord Randolph's Tory Democ- After putting this "private article" in a drawer T racy as a harbinger of the demo- for a decade, Winston Churchill made some cratic revolution of the 20th century. Winston final revisions in the late 1950s and then willed Churchill's fascination with his father was as it to his wife. It was published posthumously durable as the book. From the time he was at in 1966 as "The Dream." Harrow he followed Lord Randolph's speeches, which he used to learn by heart from et Lord Randolph was not the the newspapers: The father's astonishing only Churcl~illwho served as a memory was replicated in the son. Winston model for Winston. His meteoric Churchill learned from his father's power as Y success in the late 19th century had an orator, from his insistence that the Tories burnished the gleam on a name that had been embrace the new democratic electorate, and pre-eminent in England for generations. from his difficulty cleaving to a party line. He Looming far above Lord Randolph in the fam- used to visit Lord Rosebery in the old ily story was the first Winston Cl~urcl~ill'sson statesman's latter years because he loved to John, mastermind of the Grand Alliance hear him talk about Lord Randolph. It made against King Louis XIV at the beginnu~gof the up in some measure for the conversations he 18th century. Serving his sovereign as both had never had with his father. Afterward, minister and captain-general, he bested the when he wrote his autobiography in the 1930s, French in four great battles during the War of he revised his explanation, of his father's fall the Spanish Succession. For his service to the from power, attributing it to the nation's wish nation he was made the first Duke of Marlbor- for "quiet times" and "political repose." He ough by a grateful Queen Anne, who arranged might later have written the same about his to build the palace near Oxford that took its own fall from power in 1945. name from his victory at Blenheim. In that After World War 11, at the urging of his monument to the glory of his ancestor Win- son and daughters, Churchill set down on ston Churchill was born in 1874, and there he paper what he called a "private article" that made his proposal of marriage to Clementine had begun as a reverie at the dinner table. In Hozier in 1908. From childhood he read every- it, he imagines that Lord Randolph reappears thing he "came across" about Marlborough, on a November afternoon in his son's studio and even before he was elected to Parliament, at his Chartwell estate. Asking what has be- his evident literary talent attracted a come of the world in 1947, Lord Randolph is publisher's proposal that he should write the astonished to hear of Britain's experience of so- duke's biography. But the idea was put off by cialist governments, women's suffrage, and the Boer War-Churchill dashed off, hand- especially the world wars. He also asks about somely paid, to cover it for the Morning Post- lus son, who explains that he supports himself and afterward by a more durable obstacle. and his family by writing "books and articles Churcl~ill'sreading had shown him the for the Press." With delicious irony, Winston greatness of Marlborough, yet he had also read Churchill forbears to mention his own politi- of the duke's coming of age in a dissolute cal career. Lord Randolph, who in life was court, of his treachery to several sovereigns, doubtful of his son's prospects, is nonetheless and of his notorious avarice. With the rest of impressed with lus evident political acumen his generation, Churchill had learned modem

42 WQ WINTER 1994 history from the great Whig histo- rian Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England from the Accession of James II (1849-61) de- picted Churcl~ill'sancestor as an exemplary villain. Despite his un- doubted talents and abilities, Macaulay's Marlborough was a man who carried selfishness, bad faith, and mendacity to the highest pitch. Churchill had an even closer bond with the Victorian writer than most of his contemporaries: His earliest triumph at school had been his faultless recitation of Ma- caulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1846), and his reading of Macaulay when he was a young officer in India during the late 1890s had helped form his prose style. With a pang Churchill had discov- ered the historian's judgment of his ancestor, and for years it put him off writing the life of Marl- borough. At length he learned to A FAMILY VISIT see the story differently. Over ITWAS A GREAT WORK, AND 1 WISH YOU COULD NOW ADD ANOTHER lunch with Lord Rosebery, the last CHAPTER TO YOUR OWN CAREER." obstacle was removed. His father's A Punch cartoon, 1938. friend told him of a little known, out-of-print book by John Paget that vindi- trials of his wartime prime ministry. Keeping cated Marlboro~ighagainst the charge of be- his distance from the murky irresolution of traying his countrymen's descent on the Tory governments during his "wilderness French coast in 1694. Churchill was so pleased years" between 1929 and 1939, Churclull im- with Paget's refutation of Macaulay that he mersed himself in the political history of the wrote a new preface and arranged for Paget's 18th century. Enjoying ready access to the first book to be republished in 1934. Paget helped duke's papers at Blenheim Palace, visiting his 161n to the conclusion that Macaulay's asper- battlefields on the Continent, and testing ideas sions on Marlborough's conduct and charac- in conversation with research assistants from ter were unjustified, thus clearing the way for Oxford, he grew more deeply appreciative of the great biography of his ancestor to which Marlborough's clairvoyance as strategist, Churchill devoted so much energy in the diplomat, statesman, and servant of the 1930s. crown. If writing the life of lus father was the cor- In his biography, Churchill traced his nerstone of his political education, marking ancestor's service to five sovereigns, from the era when he readied himself to hold inin- Charles I1 to George I. He studied Marlbor- isterial office, then writing the life of ough's deft abandonment of James I1 in the Marlborough was the capstone, marking the Glorious Revolution of 1688, his victories on era when he readied himself for the supreme behalf of William 111, and, above all, his lead-

CHURCHILL 43 ership of the allied coalition against the French Churchill), he wrote a political novel, eyewit- in the age of Anne. As captain-general, ness accounts of three Victorian wars, an east- Marlborough never fought a battle he did not African travelogue, multivolume histories of win, and Churcldl pondered his military ge- the two world wars, the two great biograplues nius. As prime minister in all but name and many shorter sketches, political and pldo- through most of Anne's reign, Marlborough soplucal essays, and his four-volume Histo y balanced the different interests of domestic of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58). Al- parties and foreign allies, breaking the power most all of his books were best-sellers. Some of Louis XIV before his own enemies at court have never gone out of print, and many have secured the duke's fall at the end of 1711. recently been reprinted both in Britain and in Marlboroug11's successes and travails in. form- the United States. In 1974, to mark the cente- ing a national government and an international nary of his birth, his books were collected into alliance to defeat a Continental tyrant would a 34-volume set, and a selection of lus essays later prove instructive to lus descendant in the filled four volumes more. struggle against Hitler. Churchill's Marlbor- ough, His Life and Times (1933-38) is generally ow Churchill's manner of writing acknowledged to be his literary masterpiece. diverges from contemporary his- Its four volumes have been called "the great- toriography may be gathered est historical work written in our century," from the two biographies. Where which opens for its reader, as it did for its au- the contemporary historian modestly aims to thor, "an inexhaustible mine of political wis- make a contribution to his field, Churchill dom and understanding." frankly aspires to write books that will hold their own against all comers for several gen- hus, to understand what Churcldl erations, or longer. Where the current histo- was, one must read not only the rian shrinks from making judgments on ques- books about lhbut also the books tions of politics and morals, sidestepping con- by him. This brief account of the two troversy to fetch up on the barren country of biograplues that Churclull wrote, to which one mere fact, ChurdTill the writer pronounces and might add several dozen brief lives he limned argues in the same manner as a practical man of in Great Contemporaries (a book of essays pub- state. Where the contemporary historian neglects lished in 1935), may suffice to introduce his politics and war to uncover the underlying shelfful of books. Everyone knows that causes of human affairs in sociology, econom- Churchill saved Britain in the war against ics, or psycl~ology,Cl~urcl~ill cleaves to politi- Hitler; yet his leadership in the Battle of Brit- cal and military lustory, arguing that politics ain was only what the Greeks might have and war are most important. Where the con- called the aristeia, or crowning deed, in a long temporary historian cautiously circumscribes and varied life. Aside from lus political career, a subject, writing a specialist monograph to Churcldl was also a precocious, talented, and illumine a little corner of the field, Cl~urcldl voluminous writer. Beginnu~gwith five books boldly broadens his subject to take in the he wrote before entering Parliament at 25, his whole human experience. Finally, where the writing career spanned six decades, culminat- current historian is content to write for a small ing wit11 the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. circle of fellow specialists, Churchill offers his Sorted for display in a bookstore, his works work to a large audience of lay readers. would greet the reader on many different Perhaps Churcl~ill's approach and shelves because of the variety of his subjects. method strike academic specialists as off-hand III addition to lus autobiography and collected or old-fashioned; perhaps the grandeur of his speeches (standard works for a politician, prose diverts us from the perspicuity of his honed to an uncommon standard by thought; perhaps we are simply loath to grant

44 WQ WINTER 1994 Reading Churchill

The best start for reading Churchill is his au- Churcl~illwrote. His mature philosopl~ical tobiograp11yMy Early Life: A Roving Commis- musings are in Thoughts and Adventures (1932, sion (1930, reprinted 19871, which rivals Mark reprinted 1991), originally published in the Twain for adventure and good humor. United States as Amid These Storms. Of the works that Churclull wrote before The 20th-century events that Cl~urcl~ill he was elected to Parliament, most impres- observed and superintended are retold wit11 sive is The River War: An Historical Account of gripping immediacy in The World Crisis, 5 the Reconqnest of the Soudan (1899). Unfortu- vols. (1923-31, abridged ed. 1992) and The nately, only this rare two-volume first edition Second World War, 6 vols. (1948-54, reprinted published by Longmans, Green, and Com- 1986). Cl~urchill'sgreat biographies are Lord pany has the complete text and the full flavor Randolph Clz~irchill,2 vols. (1906) and Marl- of his exuberant narration. borough: His Life and Times, 4 vols. (1933-38), Though Cl~~~rcl~ill'searly novel has its neither of which is currently in print. Marl- flaws (he tells us in My Early Life that he "con- borough, which shows Churchill's grasp of sistently urged his friends to abstain from politics and his narrative power at their best, reading it"), the reader who seeks an appre- also exists in an abridged edition. The reader ciation of his prescience and detachment whose time is cut into small pieces might opt should ignore his advice and read Savrola: A instead for Churcl~ill'sbrief lives in Great Con- Tale of the Revolution in Laz~rania(1900, re- temporaries (1935), reprinted as recently as printed 1976).After all, Churclull himself ar- 1991 but once again out of print. ranged in the 1950s for the book to be repub- The reader with no time at all might lished. Prowlers in used bookstores should scour books of quotations, which Churchill beware lest they pick up novels by the Ameri- himself commended in My Early Life: "The can Winston Churchill (1871-19471, a popu- quotations when engraved upon the memory lar novelist and sometime politician who was give you good thoughts. They also make you no relation to the English statesman, though anxious to read the authors and look for the two once met for dinner in Boston: Savrola more." In most such books Cl~urcl~ill'sown was the only novel that the English Winston good thoughts cover page after page. that a practical politician could also excel as a debate as no more than a cover for a contest scholar and historian. Whatever the reasons, of force, it is hard to grant that there might be Churchill's books, though always popular more to Churchill's defense in The World Cri- wit11 the general reader, have been neglected sis (1923-31) of the Dardanelles campaign- by scholars. Those who do consult them ap- wluch cost him lus post as first lord of the Ad- proach them warily, fearing lest they be en- miralty in 1915Ñtha simply an attempt to res- snared by special pleading, as in the bio- cue his own falling political star. graphical vindications of lus ancestors, or by Certainly his books were written with an personal apology, as in his memoirs of the eye to a particular political situation. Cl~urchill world wars. To a historian trained in impar- himself disclaims his works as impartial his- tiality, it is startling to realize that Churchill toriography, putting the reader properly on recounts Marlborough's early experience as a guard. Yet scholars have too quickly dis- courtier in order to teach a lesson in political missed lus unfamiliar approach as illegitimate, morality: not only how, but also when and and the ground of their complaint may more why, one may rightly desert one's king. To a properly be turned against them. Of Chur- political scientist trained to consider political chdl's books it might be said, as it was of t11e

CHURCHILL 45 proach to history more akin to A Sampler those of Gibbon and Macaulay, whom he took and It is no doubt true that he rated his own power and consequent re- studied as models, than to the sponsibility too high. Like many a successful man before him4 emerging fasluon in historical some since-he thought the forces he had directed in the pasf were writing. In Hegel's terms, he resident in himself, whereas they were to some extent outside him- self and independent. resuscitated original lustory- -Lord Randolph Churchill (1906) history as written by its partici- pants-even though it was I have made or implied no criticism of any decision or action taken supposed to be dead and bur- or neglected by others, unless I can prove that I had expressed the ied. Churchill brings to life the same opinion in writing before the event. . . . [Tllze whole stony is choices faced by political lead- recorded as if happened, by the actual counsels offered and orders ers, which gives his books the given in the fierce tunizoil of each day. . . . Nothing of any consequence same immediacy and interest was done by me by word of mouth. that animate Thucydides' lus- -The World Crisis (1923) tory. The Englishman might have borrowed his purpose lalzuays loved cartoons. At my private school at Brighton there were from the Athenian, who three or four volumes of cartoons from Punch, andon Suizdays we were allowed to study them. This wsa very good way of learning meant his book to be "a pos- history, or at any rate of learning something. session for all time." -Thoughts and Adventures (1932) Every biographer has drawn upon Churchill's Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion books, which offer a source as resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions unavoidable as it is attractive. of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But Yet in a way the writings have great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create been slighted even by the Chur- new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and cld scholars. Biographers are in nations, to which all must conform. drawn to Churchill's accom- -Marlborough: His Life and Times (1937) plishments in politics and Wzatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as war. They fit his books into well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly fo~iizda- their account of his deeds, treat- tioizs. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable ing them mostly as projects that than the fighting of elections. Here you come into contact with all occupied time and energy, and sorts of persons and every current of national life. You feel the Con- earned money, but slighting stitution at zuork in its prinzary processes. Dignity may suffer, the his absorption in them and superfine gloss is soon worn azuay; nice particularisms and special their importance as a window private policies are scraped off;much has to be accepted with a shrug, on lus soul. a sigh or a smile; but at any rate in the end one knows a good deal Several theories have been about what happens and why. advanced to explain Chur- GreatContemporaries (1935) chill's motive for writing. There is some truth to the claim that his books owed man himself, that you see all their faults at first their being to his wish to live like a lord with- blush and spend your life discovering their out inherited wealth, a desire that forced him hidden virtues. In forsaking the inhibitions to live from pen to mouth. Indeed, Churchill that make much 20th-century historiography took pride in his ability to support lus family sterile and lifeless, Churchill did not simply by his writings; even in his youth he com- play to the crowd. He also adopted an ap- manded record-breaking royalties. After the

46 WQ WINTER 1994 Great War he declared at a party that it was considered an attempt to vindicate his conduct "very exhilarating to feel that one was writing of the Admiralty against his critics. Churchill for half a crown a word!" His chief motive for himself wrote to his wife that the book was "a the ephemeral newspaper pieces he frankly g[rea]t chance to put my whole case in an called "pot boilers" may have been pecuniary, agreeable form to an attentive audience." In but the money motive hardly suffices to ac- 1946, the year after the fall of lus government, count for his grander and more enduring Churcliill explained in a letter to his successor, works. Most biographers have only a super- Clement Attlee, that he was writing his mem- ficial understanding of Churchill's writings oirs as an explanation and defense of his "con- because they fail to see past this obvious but duct of affairs" during World War 11. Critical inadequate explanation. acc'ounts of his prime ministry published im- mediately after the war whetted lus appetite here is more evidence for the claim to set the record straight, and, as his literary that Churchill wrote to put his assistant Wilham Deakin later told Martin Gil- name before the public. In the bert, Churchill thought of the memoirs "as his summer of 1897, as a green subal- monument." ternT in the Fourth Hussars, he wrote to his mother from the Indian frontier that he had hat remark suggests that Churcldl's ridden lus "grey pony all along the skirmish writings had a purpose beyond the line where everyone else was lying down in assistance they might give his politi- cover. Foolish perhaps but I play for high cal career, that he sought through stakes and given an audience there is no act hisT books to attain not just fame or the good too daring or too noble." But he was playing opinion of his contemporaries but a kind of to an audience larger than merely his brother immortality. Even as a young man he was officers. He was disappointed that autumn acutely conscious of the shortness of a mortal when his war dispatches were published un- life, an awareness perhaps heightened by his signed, since it had been his design (in his 23rd father's death in his 46th year and his own pre- year) to bring his "personality before the elec- monition-fortunately not borne out-that he torate." The publication of the dispatches as too would die young. He was fully aware that his first book soon thereafter allowed him to a statesman's fame depends only at first on his put his name forward. (He had not yet at- reputation among his contemporaries and tained the ironic reticence that charms the later on the judgment of historians. He ad- reader of "The Dream.") That so many of his mired the serenity of Marlborough, who never published works are autobiographical-from wrote an account of his achievements but re- his early novel Savrola (1900) to lus histories of lied on his victories, and the noble monument the two world wars, the first of which Arthur of Blenheim Palace, to preserve lus name. Yet Balfour called Churchill's "autobiography dis- he knew that his ancestor's glory had been tar- guised as a history of the universeu-lends nished by the historians until his descendant credence to the view that he wrote to raise his came along to defend lum. To write history own banner. himself, or to make at least a contribution to Or perhaps also to defend it. In Churchill's history, was therefore for Winston Churchill description of his father's estrangement from a way of seeking a more lasting vindication. the Tory leadership, many discerned an at- But the novel that he wrote as a young sol- tempt to justify his own departure from the dier in India-the first book he undertook, party in 1904. (He joined the Liberals, but though not the first work he published-casts gradually returned to the Tories during the doubt on the sufficiency of that explanation as 1920s.) His epic history of World War I, with well. Its hero is the young statesman Savrola, its pivot on the Dardanelles campaign, may be who leads a popular revolution against the

CHURCHILL 47 military dictator in the imaginary nation of reading: a yearning to answer the great ques- Laurania, whose shores are lapped by the tions of politics and pldosopl~yfor himself. Mediterranean. Savrola is an honorable man To live wit11 the dozens of books that wit11 a splendid gift for oratory, but behind Churchill wrote is to be reminded forcefully him is a rude and unruly democratic party that the man who fascinates historians was often stirred by less savory leaders. Uneasily more than a politician. His friends were sur- coexisting wit11 Savrola's ambition is a con- prised by ChurclTill's ability to turn away from tempt for what Cl~urcl~illlater called the the urgent affairs of state to his writing. His ca- "rough and slatternly foundations" of democ- pacify for detachment from the world of hu- racy. Like Churcld, he is a reflective man-a man affairs was also attested by his love affair reader of lustory and pldosopl~y.His study is wit11 painting, ably and lovingly described by strewn with many of the books that Churclull his daughter Mary Soames in Winston Chur- read wlde his brother officers slept away the chill: His Life As a Painter (1990).As Churchill long Indian afternoons: works by Schopen- tells us himself in his essay "Painting as a Pas- hauer, Kant, Hegel, St. Simon, Johnson, Zola, time" (1921-22), "One is quite astonished to Gibbon, Boccaccio, Darwin, Plato, Thackeray, find how many tlungs there are in the land- Lecky, and Macaulay, as well as the Bible. scape, and in every object in it, one never no- ticed before. And this is a tremendous new ven if lus purpose had been strictly pleasure and interest which invests every walk practical, to plumb these books for or drive wit11 an added object. . . . I think this their political intelligence, Churchill heightened sense of observation of Nature is would have assembled here a re- one of the cluef delights that have come to me markably meaty, if idiosyncratic collection. through tryu1g to paint." But in lus novel he So all-embracing was his ambition that he gives us another unmistakable sign of this was unwilling to leave such serious books to detachment. At the height of the revolution, the "Senior Wranglers" at the universities. In Savrola breaks away from politics to climb the fact, he might have gone to Oxford himself stairs to his roof, where in a small observatory when he returned from India in 1899, except he trains his telescope upon the stars. that he "could not contemplate toiling at Greek irregular verbs after having com- lis contemplative side to Churchill's manded British regular troops." Even with- hero, wluc11 springs from a sense of out formal training, however, Cl~urcl~ill the insufficiency of human tlungs gave himself a remarkable education. Not and a yearning for tlungs above us every aspiring parliamentarian would have that are more enduring, belongs as well to devoured volume after volume of the An- Churchill. He tells us in My Early Life that "a nual Register, making notes on debates that man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of took place decades ago and deciding what Thought or Action." As a man who held al- his own position would have been, before most every important cabinet post in the Brit- taking his seat in the House of Commons in ish government in the course of his long po- 1901. His study of history and philosophy, litical career, Churclull certainly chose the ac- culminating in his reading of Plato's Repub- tion of a political life. Yet lus writings show lic, was still more unusual. Churchill's writ- that 1us choice was not so simple, for in them ing was rooted in the same desire as his we see how reflective a political man may be.

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The formation of the European Community and the end of the Cold War had one common and quite unintended result: Both gave encouragement to the nationalist urges of numerous regions zuithin Europe's established nation-states. What these stirrings zuill finally produce in places such as the fanner Yugoslavia, Scotland, or Lombardy is impossible to predict. But three of our contributors-- Alastair Reid, William McPJierson, and David Gies-look at three different cases to show what has already come to pass. Our fourth author, G. M. Tamis, explores the ideological foundations of this unsettling ethnic nationalism.

ome years ago, I came across a few remains, however, a linguistic abstraction. references to the Fourth World, a geo- Unlike the countries we group together as the political coinage that was meant to Tlurd World, which do have realities in com- embrace all those ex-nation-states, mon, those entities that make up the so-called ethnic and religious minorities, and other sov- Fourth World are unlikely to pool their griev- ereignties lost through the twists of history, ances or make common cause, for their situa- small races swallowed up at some point by tions are utterly separate and unique, some of larger, latter-day states. The Fourth World them very ancient indeed, as in the case of the

50 WQ WINTER 1994 LITTLE NATIONS

stand from the outside the arguments, legal and lustorical-the entire rationale behind the surges of nationalism-it is impossible to ap- prehend the nature and intensity of the feel- ings involved.

am aware of those feelings, though in a milder form, through my growing up in Scotland, and although I liave often enough explained Scotland's case to friendsI from elsewhere, I know how impos- sible it is to make them feel how it feels, for it is something close to the bone and fiber of being. The kind of nationalism I am talking about arises from situations hi wluch a smaller country is taken over by a larger power, wluch imposes on it a new official identity, a culture, and often a new language, suppressing the na- tive identity and driving it inward to become a secret, private se1.f. In conditions of such subju- gation, a people is forced to become both bilin- gual and bicultural. That duality lies at the heart of suppressed nationalism. While many such takeovers liave had successful conclusions in human history, some decidedly have not; it is from these tliat nationalist feelings arise, from situations of deep discontent, from a resent- ment of a ruling authority coupled with a deep fear of losing the particular ways and myths of being and believing tliat have always told a once-independent people who they were. For a very long time, whenever I went BY ALASTAIR REID back to Scotland, I put out an extra-wary an- tenna to pick up any trace of what we used to call the "Scottish Condition." The Scottish Basques of Spain. The demands of such en- Condition can show itself fleetingly in tlie claves may very well occupy an international smallest of gestures, a sniff or a sigh, or it can small-claims court for the next century. At take a voluble spoken form, but it has lurked present, we are made only too brutally aware for a long time in the undercurrents of Scottish of the ruthlessness and mindlessness of their life. It wells from ancestral gloom, from the impatience. In talking about thwarted nation- shadows of a severe Calvinism, and from a alism, however, one fundamental point has to gritty mixture of disappointment and indigna- be made: While it is quite possible to under- tion, and it mantles tlie Scottish spirit like an

NATIONALISM 51 ancient moss. "It's no' right," that cry that ech- own educational system; and it was granted oed through my childhood, is one wrenched representation in the Parliament in West&- from tl-ie Scottish soul, implying a deep unfair- ster. At present, tl-iereare 72 Scottisl-imembers ness at tl-ie heart of things. I grew up under a of Parliament out of 650, a proportion that is low cloud of girn and grumble, never quite a constant reminder of tl-ieir minority status. understanding what the injustice was, for it Wlde the Act of Union was always seen was never identified. It was just something in as a Scottish sellout, there could have been no the air, a kind of national weather, a damp mist way of knowing how much it was to become of dissatisfaction. an English takeover. Whatever expectations may l-iavebeen, no "union," in any deep sense cotland would qualify as a senior of tl-ie word, took place, no national self-image member of the Fourth World. In es- was replaced by another, no "British" meta- sence, the Scottisl-i Condition stems character evolved. Citizens of the United kg- from the fact tl-iat, since 1707, Scot- dom rarely refer to themselves as Britisl-i, ex- land has been an ex-nation, a destiny that its cept when traveling abroad, for "Great Brit- people have never quite accepted or even un- am" exists more in a diplomatic and legislative derstood, but one tl-iat they have so far been sense than in a human one. Union suddenly unable to alter. The year 1707 is a date as dire handed the Scots a dual nationality: Officially, as doomsday to Scottisl-iears. In 1707, the par- tl-iey were Britisl-i,but in their own minds, tl-ieir liaments of the sovereign countries of England own mirrors, they were Scots. No such dual- and Scotland signed an Act of Union, yielding ity afflicted the English. For them, "Britain" up their separate sovereignties and parlia- and "England were synonyms from the be- ments to form the United Kingdom of Great ginning, an assumption that has always infu- Britain, ruled over by a British parliament. But riated the Scots. In the eyes of tl-ie English, the omens were not exactly favorable to union: Scotland had gone from being a troublesome The two countries l-iad fought each other on neighbor to becoming a remote northern re- more than 300 occasions, according to Sir gion, a market, an occasional playground, a Walter Scott, and were accustomed to regard- gl-iost of its former fierce self. From tl-ie begin- ing each other as enemies. Altl-iougl-ithe ma- ning, English culture dominated, but it took jority of Scots were opposed to union, Scot- some time for it to dawn on the Scots that by land was in an impoverished condition, its tl-ie terms of union, England appeared to l-iave coffers emptied out by the failure, in 1699, of made considerable gains, while they, on tl-ie its ill-planned colonial enterprise in Dari6n (in contrary, l-iad acquired an ambiguous identity. present-day Panama), on which it had banked At first, tl-iere was a degree of confidence for survival. It badly needed access to the rich among tl-ie Scots tl-iat tl-iey would remain trading markets of England and its colonies, stoutly themselves, and would hold together and the fact that union brought immediate in a cultural sense. But tl-ie Scottisl-i self, with economic relief to Scotland swept aside the passing of time, became an increasingly deeper considerations and ignored the wishes resentful one, as Scottisl-i affairs were given of the majority. By tl-ie terms of the act, Scot- short slvift in the proceedings at Westminster. land retained certain autonomies-it kept its To be left with a culture, a history, and a na- own legal code, the body of Scots law; it kept tional character, and yet to l-iaveno longer any the Presbyterian Church of Scotland; it kept its political control over the terms of national ex-

Alastair Reid, a former Wilson Center Felloiv, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and traveler. He has translated the work of many Latin American autliors, notably Jorge Lids Borges and Pablo Neruda. His last two books are Weathering: Poems and Translations (1978) and Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner (1987). Copyright 01994 by Alastair Reid.

52 WQ WINTER 1994 istence, amounts to a disastrous emasculation. That lies at the heart of the Scottish Condi- tion. The distinctness of Scottish nationality had little to sustain it but memory, and so, for almost 300 years, the Scots have wallowed in an aggrieved nostal- gia, uncertain of what it means now to be Scot- tish, and gnawing perpetu- ally at the problem. In reac- tion, they have taken three courses: some have left Scotland be- Queen Anne receiving the Act of Union in 1707 hind, to find fortune in some other country; some have taken the Union at face value and gone south to England; some have stayed at half of the 18th century, the Highlands twice home, to see what Scotland would become, to rose in armed rebellion. The ruthlessness witli see what would become of it. which an English army put down Prince Charles's rebellion in 1746, and the brutal sub- had a geography teacher in Edinburgh duing of the Highlands that followed, left no who used to tell us gleefully (he was doubt as to where the power lay. Yet in the English), "The Scots are like dung, only latter part of the 18th century, Edinburgh en- good when spread." History may very joyed such a flowering, intellectually and ar- wellI bear him out. I am always astonished by chitecturally, and housed such a concentration the ubiquity of Scottish emigrants. What they of distinguished thinkers, that it could justifi- took with them was an austere self-sufficiency ably claim to be an influential European capi- and a sturdy independence, determined to tal. The "Scottish Enhghtenment," as it came make the most of what they found. Since what to be called, gained for the Scots such renown they found was generally more than what they that Voltaire wrote, "It is from Scotland that had left behind, they prospered, the homeland we receive rules of taste in all the arts, from a flinty, waning memory. I am aware that my epic painting to gardening." Around 1750, a Scottish beginnings, frugal and somewhat se- visionary lord provost of Edinburgh, George vere, splendidly prepared me for a peripatetic Drummond, set in motion tlie plan to build a life, since I have always felt my needs to be New Town to the north of Edinburgh's few, and portable. Of the Scots who remained, craggy, overcrowded center. The New Town however, a fair proportion of them accepted, took 50 years to complete, but the grace of its and still accept, the Union, moving to England broad avenues, its ample squares and curved to enjoy a life in which their Scottishness lies terraces, all witli a unifying Georgian facade, all but buried, or is kept as a kind of fancy make it even today as elegant a piece of city as dress. While the case for union can be argued you could ever find. By some curious architec- coherently, it is contradicted by the grumble tural alchemy, the New Town seemed to sum- of discontent that underlies Scottish realities, mon into being, as though to fill its graceful a grumble that has never gone away. mold, the extraordinary men of tlie tirne-law That the Union was engineered by a mi- lords, men of science, social thinkers, pluloso- nority of Scots became clear when, in the first pliers, many of them holding university chairs.

NATIONALISM 53 David Hume and his friend Adam Smith re- were always the enemy; occasional English main the most illustrious names from that children at school were regarded as Martians, period, but their peers were many, and with beings beyond us. That past is monumentalized Scotland in a relatively settled state, it seemed all over Scotland, and it is thickly and meticu- for a time that the Union might allow it to lously documented in the National Library in maintain a purely cultural identity, relieved of Edinburgh, studied, pored over, and fed on. having to govern itself. Scotland was sometlung that had been lost; it was The Past, and the past in. consequence was hat was the fervent belief of the held in some reverence, throwing a long Enlightenment's favorite son, Sir shadow on the present. The other shadow was Walter Scott. No one could have cast by a long-engrained Calvinism, severe, been a more dedicated Scot than he, judgmental, unforgiving. In Scotland, I once yetT he saw union as a forward step, relieving remarked to a passing neighbor on the beauty Scotland of its ancient rages and bringing it a of the day, to hear her mutter in reply, 'We'll relative prosperity. Bewitched by Scotland's pay for it." vivid and violent past, Scott proceeded to A Scottish identity, which the Scots had mummify it in all his many writings, lighting once worn easily and naturally, had by the it with the candle glow of nostalgia. That pre- 19th century become for them a kind of secret vailing view locked Scotland into the fixed self, wluch could only emerge on certain occa- attitude of looking backward, the present and sions, such as sporting confrontations, but the future being out of its hands. As my lus- which otherwise hung about like a rueful tory master in Edinburgh was fond of saying, shadow. Scottishness became a kind of free- Scotland was from 1707 on a country wit11 its floating nationality, something like a dress future belund it. Yet Scott has to be credited suit, to be worn on unspecified occasions, a with a certain prescience: In one of lus letters, pointlessness. None of the compensatory he wrote, "If you unscotcl~us, you will find us forms that nationalism could take, in the arts, damned miscluevous Englishmen." in sporting competition, provided more than Improbably enough, Queen Victoria con- a brief venting of steam. The country lived, it tributed to the mummification of Scotland's seemed, in a state of mourning for itself. I re- image. On the death of Prince Albert in 1861, call feeling this secretiveness about things she virtually took refuge in Scotland, where Scottish as a child. I remember being puzzled she encouraged the cultivation of a historical by it, as I was by the habit Scots have of look- identity for the Scots by reviving the ancient ing warily at the sky, as though something fabric of clans and tartans and helping to cre- darkly unforeseen might fall from it. ate the image of Scotland that still shows up in the whisky advertisements.That image per- t seems that at the heart of nationalist sists, and the Scots are certainly not innocent discontents lies always a dilemma of lan- of exploiting it. Scotland's summers, which guage. As often as not, when smaller can be glorious, are tluck wit11 tourists, and the states or cultures are overrun by larger degree of tartan hype makes it not too difficult powers, they are overrun at the same time by to imagine a quite different future for Scot- a dominant outside language, so that the na- land, in which it turns into a living museum, tive language becomes secondary, separate, a heritage park for global travelers. secret even. To speak it is a subversive act. A As I grew up, I felt the Scottish past in- language imposed from the outside forces a truding thickly into the present, in the form of people to become bilingual in order to survive, ruins and lustory lessons and a litany of heroes and saddles them wit11 a dual nature. That du- and battles, the past of pugnacious nation- ality is experienced over and over again sim- hood. In our playground games, the English ply in the act of speaking. When the public use

54 WQ WINTER 1994 of Catalan, was officially banned in Franco's somehow inferior. David Hume, although the Spain, the language became for the Catalans a stauncl~estof Scots, would nevertheless send secret weapon, a readily available expression his manuscripts to English friends for them to of defiance and complicity, a bond felt in the weed out his Scotticisms, which he did not tongue. Now that Catalonia has its own lan- consider appropriate to serious discourse. Yet guage restored to it, Catalans use it aggres- I treasure the Scots I still have, for its down- sively and ubiquitously. rightness and for its blunt vocabulary, for It is Scotland's curious linguistic situation words as wonderfully apt as the verb to that feeds its cultural ambiguity, that under- szuither, which means to be of two minds about lines its discontents and keeps them palpable. something, like an undecided voter. I also feel, While Scotland and England were still inde- as is often the case in bilingual situations, that pendent countries, the language used by the I write English wit11 especial care, feeling it Scots had much the same relation to the En- somehow a foreign language, and having to glish of England that, say, Dutch has to Ger- dominate it as a form of self-defense. man today.*The two languages, Scots and En- glish, had, after all, a common source, and t is no longer accurate to say that Scots were mutually intelligible, at least in their today is a separate language, as once it written form, to English and Scots alike. But was; rather, it is a linguistic mode, a English was certainly the more dominant of manner of using English, yet wit11 a rich the two, particularly since, from the 16th cen- extra vocabulary of Scots words. In speech, the tury on, the Scots had used an English version Scots reject the mannerisms of "English En- of the Bible, and tlu-oug11 it were well familiar glish" for a blunt directness, a spare and wary wit11 written English, although they pro- address; ingrained in the Scottish spirit is a nounced it in their own manner. After union, downright egalitarianism that insists on tak- however, it became clear that English culture, ing others as they present themselves, what- and the English language in particular, had no ever they may represent, a natural democracy intention of moving over to accommodate the of feeling. The way the Scots speak among Scots in any mode or manner. Scotland themselves, in their own words, has remained needed the Union more than England did, and domestic and intimate. But although all Scots as their merchants went south to better them- are well schooled in English, even the remain- selves, they were obliged to conduct their busi- ing Gaelic speakers in parts of the Highlands, ness in the English language, a tacit condition it still has the feel for them of a foreign lan- they had no choice but to accept. It was En- guage, something that, although they live glish that was taught in Scottish schools-En- comfortably enough in it, does not quite fit glish was the official, public language, and was them. Among themselves, they modify it so synonymous with "correctness." I remember that it does, but to outsiders they speak En- well, at school in the Scottish Border Country, glish. As Robert Lewis Stevenson put it, "Even that we would speak in our own local fashion though his tongue acquired the southern in the playground, but as we entered the class- knack, he will still have a stray Scot's accent of room, we crossed a linguistic threshold and the mind." spoke English. A Scots word used in class Every time I hear a Scot speaking wit11 an made us laugh aloud: It was an irregularity. Englishman, I am acutely aware of how differ- Speaking English was, to us, speaking ent are the two modes, the manners of speak- "proper," wliic11 rendered our own local ing the language. The "official" English accent, speech improper by implication, secondary, called variously "Oxford," or, "BBC English," or "Nobspeak," is a curious phenomenon. It is 'Gaelic, at least since the 14th century, has been largely confined left over from the Empire, an accent that is to the northwest Highlands, where its use has steadily declined. clearly designed to command, that implies a

NATIONALISM 55 whole morality and a view of history, and car- been conquered, while Scotland had merely ries a certain condescension, a superiority, a made a questionable deal. Ireland, besides, distancing. It is not a regional accent, though had a history, a religion, a language, a clear it became the language of a ruling class. It can identity, something to fight for, to die for. be acquired, and is, by Scots as well as English, Scotland had no such incendiary cause, only through the agency of institutions such as the a slow fire that often seems to have gone out, English public schools. It is in utter contrast to only to flare unexpectedly at times. "The En- the manner in which the Scots use English- glish yoke" had meaning in Ireland, but in direct, vigorous, unadorned, even blunt. The Scotland only irony, for Scotland had not been different speech modes embody all the differ- oppressed, only slighted. Instead, English culture ences of history, of nature, of human manner, and language became so dominant as to saddle and although on an everyday level they co-exist the Scots with enough of a duality of being to easily, they still speak across a distance of being. make their conflict an inward one. The Irish had I grew up with the labyrinthine arguments a tangible enemy, England; in Scotland, the ar- of Scottish nationalism ringing early in my gument really took place between separate ears. Every Scottish community seemed to parts of the self, a circumstance as paralyzing have at least one blunt and vociferous nation- to the Scots as it was to Hamlet. Scotland has alist, an agent provocateur who hectored been less a subdued country than a self-sub- those who came to listen about the string of duing one. Scottish nationalism does not turn injustices they were supposed to be suffering. violent, except possibly on sporting occasions, I used to go to meetings of the Scottish Na- and its notion of civil disobedience amounts tional Party (SNP) occasionally, as schoolboy to no more than sticking stamps with the and student, and what I recall most of all is the queen's head on them upside-down on their petulance, the air of injury that hung over envelopes, all of wluch might suggest that the those gatherings: Their speakers were dar- Scots have become so accustomed to their ag- ing-even provoking-their audiences to ad- grieved state that it feels like home to them. mit to buried feelings of having been wronged, exhorting them to turn their secret sense of uring the last 50 years, national injury into a banner and, in election years, to feelings have seethed in Scotland vote accordingly. But there were Scots, patri- at irregular intervals. In the 1970s, ots enough in their own eyes, who rejected the as the vast oil fields of the North badgering of the SNP, hoping for a different, Sea were being discovered, there was a lot of though yet undreamed, expression for their muttering in Scotland, muttering that brought nationalism. Indeed, the nationalist movement the SNP into the fray with the slogan, "It's has always been beset by ardent factionalism. Scotland's Oil." The campaign brought the The plain reason is that nationalist feelings, SNP a lot of votes; in the two elections of 1974, although present in every Scot, vary in degree it found itself with first seven and then 11 Scot- from white-hot to infinitesimal, and take on so tish Nationalist members of Parliament, many different forms that the only common enough to force the Labour Party, then in ground of agreement among Scots is the sense power, to commit itself to devolving some of having been wronged. It is to be hoped, power to Scotland and Wales. In 1977, after however, that the day of "grievance" nation- weary years of commissions of inquiry and alism is waning, for it has led not so much to parliamentary committees, separate acts for clear thinking about Scotland's situation as to Scotland and Wales were put on the something verging on a gloomy expectation of Westminster agenda, to be preceded by a na- disappointment. tional referendum. On Marc11 1,1979, the Scot- Where Iris11 nationalism burned, Scottish tish electorate was given the opportunity to nationalism barely smoldered. But Ireland had vote yes (for a form of Scottish self-govern-

56 WQ WINTER 1994 the imagination be called emphatic. More important, the government had set a threshold for the referendum: 40 percent of the electorate must register a yes vote for devolution to proceed to the next stage. So the referendum failed to carry, and Scotland slumped back into a kind of stupefaction. What always infuriates the Scots is English indifference to their difference, and the Scottish MPs took their revenge by voting with the Tories to bring down the government, thus propelling into power Margaret Thatcher, who, during her 11 years in office, inadvertently did wonders for the cause of Scottish nation- alism by uniting the Scots in the loath- ing they felt for her. With her party holding only 12 Scottish seats out of 72, the Scots felt that she in no way repre- sented them. She in turn made it clear from the beginning that she had no inter- est whatsoever in any Scottish claims to a devolution of power, and that in her book the Union was not open to question. Thatcher was mightily indifferent The Scottish National Party calls for a politically to the Scottish situation, but, worse autonomous Scotland as a nation arnoizg nations zvitliii~the than that, she patronized the Scots. Cu- encompassing embrace of the European Community. riously enough, it was to her accent, which she had gone to great pains to ment) or no (opposing acquire, that she it). It seemed that owed much (though Scotland's moment certainly not all) of was arriving; but the her extreme unpopu- result only intensified larity in Scotland, an the national frustra- accent that grated on tion. With an electorate Scottish ears. Hackles then of 3.8 million, 32 rose at its presump- percent voted yes, 30 tions of rightness, its percent no, and 37 per- lofty self-assurance, cent did not vote. Of its dismissiveness- the votes cast, as the all Scots have en- SNP was quick to point dured similar English out, the yes votes had schoolteachers, simi- 51.6 percent as against lar public pomposi- 48.4 percent voting no. ties, to the muttering The results, however, point. I have heard could by no stretch of Thatcher's voice on

NATIONALISM 57 the evening news suddenly cut through the polls, however, were wrong, and the Tories clishrnaclaver of an Edinburgh pub, abruptly returned to power. I was in Scotland in the stilling the conversation, and causing a dark wake of that election, and I have never felt it flush to spread collectively up the necks of its so deflated, so dashed, so desolate, for John grim listeners. Such moments are at the inex- Major soon made it clear that his party would plicable core of nationalism; it is at such mo- not budge from its stance on the Union. The ments that it occurs to me all over again that SNP's fanciful plan for an independent Scot- the Union, from the beginning, was not really land in a European union seemed also sud- a very good idea. denly inconceivable, and Scotland has since remained dormant, lying in wait. en years after the referendum, a Among themselves, the Scots are nothing group of concerned Scots formed a if not contentious, obstinate in argument. Yet, Campaign for a Scottish Assembly as I write that, 1 remember being frequently T and, after a year of consultation, checked in my youth for making such broad published a Claim of Right for Scotland, a statements. "You can't generalize," my elders document that laid out, in a clear and dispas- would declare, shaking their heads, an ad- sionate manner, the case for Scotland's having monishment I resented bitterly, since they an elected assembly of its own to deal with themselves seemed to do so with alacrity. I see Scottish affairs. The document also stressed now, however, that when they said that, they the need for constitutional reform in the had Scotland in mind, for while most Scots United Kingdom, and made its case so sensi- partake of the national discontent to a greater bly that most intelligent Scots today view it as or lesser degree, they are very far from unani- something of a blueprint for an inevitable fu- mous about how to remedy it. Nor are they ture. The Scottish National Party, however, unanimous in their resentments, which run all clinging to its grievances, refused to associate the way from the small and sniffy to the itself with the Claim of Right, instead pressing voluble and impassioned.After Scotland was somewhat wishfully for full Scottish indepen- deprived of its public existence, it really dence under the somewhat wishful umbrella of turned into countless secret countries, private European union. The squabbles over indepen- Scotlands, from the sentimental to the politi- dence or devolution effectively splintered the cally committed. For that reason, Scottish self- main argument: that Scotland should govern it- government, while generally wished for, is self directly, in some form or other. infinitely disputed, causing some to voice the The cautious expectation at present is that, view that, were Scotland granted its own as- should the Conservatives lose the next elec- sembly, such a body might be the beginning tion, which seems increasingly likely, Scotland of its country's troubles, rather than an end to will eventually get a Scottish assembly sitting them. I doubt that. I think that the Scots have in Edinburgh, with control over Scottish af- shed in large part their ancestral gloom and fairs, and limited fiscal powers. All emotion their defeatism, if not their contentiousness, and aside, it makes sense. It almost came to pass will do very well at taking charge of their own in March 1992, when the Labour Party was affairs. In spite of nearly 300 years of ambiguous confidently projected by all the polls to win lustory, Scotland has persisted as a reality in power from the Conservatives, and had prom- its own mind, and it certainly has the energy ised a devolved assembly to the Scots. The and the imagination (and the humor) to be- whole country fizzed with expectation. The come one in a responsible, political sense.

58 WQ WINTER 1994 THE RISE OF EUROPE'S LITTLE NATIONS

riving through the rolling Transyl- doesn't matter what will occur, only that the vanian countryside from Cluj to- Hungarians don't come back," one very old ward Tirgu-Mures one wintry woman told me. "I have lived under the Rus- Sunday afternoon some six weeks sians. I have lived under the Germans. Any- after the fall of Ceausescu in December 1989, body but the Hungarians." Although Roma- I passed a group of about 100 peasants-vir- nians formed an absolute majority of the tually the entire village, it appeared-clus- population of Transylvania, and had for cen- tered with their priest around a cenotaph. turies, Hungarian nobles-a minority within Curious, I backed up the car and joined them. a minority-had been their overlords for most The cenotaph commemorated Romanian he- of the preceding 1,000 years. The woman who roes of former wars. It was being dedicated addressed me had, in fact, been born in the again that day to include, especially, the fallen dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, heroes of December. When I approached, the when Transylvania was under direct Hungar- peasants were angry, and suspicious.At first ian control and the Hungarian government they were afraid I was Hungarian. Their fear pursued a harsh policy of Magyarization was palpable and, I have no doubt, genuine. among all its subject peoples. She had lived Eventually the sto- through two world ries poured out. "It B Y W I L L I AM M c P H E R S 0 N wars and under two

NATIONALISM 59 monarchies, tlvough the unification with Roma- Helsinki Watch investigating mission found iua in 1918 and the annexation by Hungary from five. At least four of the dead were Hungar- 1940 to 1944, and finally through 45 years of ians. Two hundred sixty-nineperhaps communism. And today, or maybe yesterday, more-Romanians and Hungarians were Hungarian peasants had attacked Romanians wounded, some viciously. Andrgs Siit, the in their fields, in their villages, with pitchforks. best known writer in the Hungarian language They had burned their houses. in Romania, lost an eye. It was not, as so many "Which houses? Who was pitchforked? Romanians say of their revolution, a "movie," a Where?" I asked. "Here?" "scenario," though it seems likely to have been "No, not in our village." a manipulation. The difference between mov- "In what village, then?" Everyone now ies and life is that in life the scenario can kill. seemed to be talking at once. Figures vary as to the number arrested "Not the next village, a village beyond." I and convicted for crimes committed in those left in search of the village, but I never found days-42?47? (accurate figures are extraordi- it. It was always a village beyond the next vil- narily difficult to come by in Romania)-but lage. And the same was true in Hungarian it is clear that of those arrested only two were villages-stories of Romanians attacking, ma- Romanians; the great majority were Hungar- rauding, raping, pillaging, bunxing, but always ian-speaking Gypsies. Seven of the latter, un- in other villages. able to read their statements (which had been So I made my way to Tirgu-Mures. By the written by the police), were tried and con- time I got there, I was very familiar with atroc- victed under a Ceausescu-era decree of being ity stories. And by the time violence actually social parasites; five are still in prison. broke out in Tirgu-Mures, little more than a Two days after the disturbances a parlia- month later, the rumors had escalated to the mentary investigating commission was estab- point where "they were killing our children." lished. Its first report was never officially re- leased. A second report was written because do not know of a single Romanian or the first was deemed inaccurate, and finally Hungarian who had been pitchforked, was presented to Parliament in January 1991. or of a village that had been burned, or Neither report addressed the controversial of a child who had been murdered. I do not role the police and the army had played in the believe there were any. But there were many m- events, the worst ethnic violence in Romania mors, and soon the stories became all too real. in years, in which real people really died as For two days, on March 19 and 20,1990, they had during the events of December 1989. Romanians and Hungarians battled with clubs (The role of the secret police and the army in and pipes and bottles in the center of mgu- the final days of the Ceausescu regime has Mures, a once largely Hungarian city whose never been clarified either.) The final report population is now almost equally divided be- did point out that among the guilty were tween ethnic Romanians and Hungarians. "some agents of the former political police" Romanian peasants arrived on buses and in whose names it was not able to reveal because trucks from the nearby villages of Hodac and it did not have enough proof, largely because Ibanesti to join the fray. The first death toll was of the lack of an intelligence service at the time, six; the second figure announced was three; an arguable state of affairs that was in any local police and medical sources said eight; the event immediately rectified.

- - - William McPherson, a former Wilson Center Guest Scholar, is a writer and journalist. He is the author of two novels and has written extensively on Roii~aiziain the Washington Post and elsewhere. His book on the coziiztiy, where he has lived for most of the last four years, zuill be published by Simon and Sclzuster. Copyright @ 1994 by William McPherson.

60 WQ WINTER 1994 . ,W., ., ,?- .-..,, , Transylvania I! ...... ~ Partition, 1940 ! 100 Statute Miles 1 \-, I.-, 2. .. I 1, 100 Kilometers -- Â :, - -- . ',, ! .-- x - I

Hungarian share of total poulation

t YUGOSLAVIA l, V, 3-

A week after the events in Tirgu-Mures, Albanians, in this view, are at the bottom of hinting darkly at foreign "agents provocateurs," the explosive heap. "Kiss the hand you cannot the provisional government of that time recon- biteu-a common Romanian expression that stituted and rehabilitated the former secret po- describes a particular mode of survival-ap- lice, known as the S6curitateÑofficiall dis- plies not only to Romanians. In this part of the solved shortly after the fall of Ceausescu three world, the Balkans and Mitteleuropa, where months before but ill fact only reshuffled,under the borders of peoples correspond only the inoffensive name of the Romanian Intelli- roughly to the borders of political states, hand- gence Service (Servici~dRoman Informaii or SRI). kissing is the custom. But every inferiority "From humanity, through nationality, to complex implies a corresponding superiority bestiality," the 19th-century Austrian drama- complex, and the converse of the duplicity tist Franz Grillparzer wrote. It was once ex- suggested in the statement, "Kiss the hand you plained to me that all the seemingly irrational cannot bite," and implicit in it, is the straight- attitudes and behavior in Eastern and Central forward message, "Bite the hand you can." Europe can be construed as the result of a se- That seems to be the custom, too. ries of interlocking, more or less aggressive, In the terrible, tangled politics of Roma- inferioritycomplexes: The Austrians feel infe- nia, the past is always present, never forgot- rior to the Germans, the Hungarians to the ten and never forgiven-especially in Austrians, the Romanians to the Hungarians, Transylvania, the largest and richest and in the Slovaks to the Czechs and the Hungarians, many ways the most beautiful area of Roma- the Bulgarians to the Romanians, etc., etc. The nia. Enclosed within the great protecting arc

NATIONALISM 61 of the Carpathians, the Bihor Massif, and the part of the Hapsburg Empire; the middle tri- Tisa Plain, it is-or has been-rich in gold and angle of the Turkish pashalik of Buda, which silver, vital salt and copper, forests, rivers, and was increasingly absorbed into the Ottoman fertile earth. Its history is complex, with an Empire and now included a large Sepl~ardic early mysterious gap of some 1,000 years, and community; and Transylvania-Erd6ly as the inextricably entwined with the idea of the Hungarians call it-a semi-autonomous prin- Romanian nation struggling to be born-and cipality nominally loyal to the sultan and jeal- of the Hungarian nation fighting to establish ously coveted by all and which, until 1686, and then to preserve itself against the forces of remained largely independent. Encouraged by Constantinople and of Vienna, the Ottoman an influx of Hungarian nobles fleeing the invaders and the Hapsburg Empire. pashalik, the purest Hungarian culture was here preserved, free of extraneous influence of ierce Magyar horsemen crossed the Turk and Jew and German and Slav-and Carpathian passes from the north- presumably of the autochthonous Romanian ern Urals and the steppes of Central as well. Thus for some Magyars here and Asia at the beginning of the tenth abroad, the cradle of Hungarian civilization centuryF to terrorize the Christian West with indisputably lies within Romania today-in their arrows. Before being driven back to the that exact same Transylvania which a fact Carpathian Basin, they succeeded in dominat- sheet from the Romanian Ministry of Foreign ing whatever indigenous peoples were (Roma- Affairs describes as "the cradle of the Roma- nians, as the Romanians claim) or were not nian people and the inexhaustible source that (nobody, as the Hungarians claim) in Transyl- has kept alive and constantly strengthened the vania, as well as the Slavs and Germans in the Romanity, East and South of the Carpatluans." rest of the region. By the year 1000, Stephen As a people, the Romanians are presumed the Great had brought his warrior nobles to the to descend from the Dacian tribes who inhab- still-united Christian Church, for which Rome ited present-day Romania (including Transyl- later canonized him, and the Kingdom of vania) and Trajan's Roman legions who con- Hungary was established under the Crown of quered them in A.D. 106. Rome abandoned its Saint Stephen: a gift, it is said, of the pope. Al- province of Dacia 170 years later but left its though a part of Hungary, Transylvania was language with the people, who remain an iso- ruled for the next 300 years by its own Ortho- lated "island of Latinity in a sea of Slavs," as dox princes, who gradually became the somewhat inaccurate saying goes. It is in- Magyarized, especially after 1365, when Ca- accurate because the Magyars are not Slavs. tholicism became a qualification for holding Surrounded but certainly never enslaved by land and titles. The Romanians, after the Great the Slav-and German and Latin-people, the Schism of 1054, had remained loyal to the Magyars are equally if not more isolated by Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople. their language, which does not belong to the But how the mighty are laid low. Indo-European family but is related to Finn- Hungary's King John I, who waged war ish and more distantly to Turkish. against the powerful Hapsburgs, was forced As a country, however, Romania is to kiss the hand of Suleyman the Magnificent young, younger even than the United States. a year after the disastrous Battle of Mohacs in On the edge of three great and contending 1526, which is to the Hungarians what the empires, Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian, it Battle of Kosovo in 1389 is to the Serbs: the was formed by the union of the principalities burial ground of their greatness as a nation. of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, but it did After Moh6cs1 the Turks occupied Budapest, not gain real independence until 1878, when and Hungary was split into three parts: Royal it was at last released from some 400 years of Hungary to the west and north, which became Turkish suzerainty and-with the arrival from

62 WQ WINTER 1994 Germany of the Holienzollern-Sigmaringen President Truman, he organized tlie Roma- lineturned its face toward the West, toward nian anti-communist underground, joined by Europe. Three years later, Carol I, prince of the 314,000 peasants, many of tliem "his." After 15 Regat, or Old Kingdom, since 1866, was years in prison, and penniless, he was released crowned king of Romania. The dynasty lie and made his way-with four bottles of idea, founded held tlie throne until the communists four bottles of vodka, and a sandwich in liis forced King Michael to abdicate at tlie end of knapsack-to Switzerland, and to liis wife. 1947. The deposed king now lives in exile in "Luckily, she inherited." Switzerland but remains a source of consider- Below that loftiest aerie, for centuries able irritation to tlie present regime. there was the vast sea of peasants. Then came 1848, the year of revolution in Europe. The ntil tlie 19th century, it was not peasants-Hungarian as well as Romanian- possible to think in terms of na- had been subject since 1517 to "tlie lords of the tionalism or nationalistic move- land in absolute and eternal servitude,"as tlie ments in this part of the world. Werb6czi Code, or Tripartitum, put it. (Serf- Whatu united people, and what separated dom was abolished in Wallaclua in 1746, and tliem, was social class. At the top was the in Moldavia in 1749.*) Altliougli tliere had single political class: a tiny group of nobles, an been several violent rebellions, more violently often charming and well-spoken supranational quelled, it was only in 1848 that what in elite who, like the royal houses of Europe af- Transylvania had been primarily a social con- ter Queen Victoria, were mostly related or oth- flict-serf against virtually absolute lord- erwise connected to one another. In Transyl- became clearly, strongly national: Romanian vania, whatever Romanian aristocracy tliere peasant against Hungarian peasant. was having long since been Magyarized, these nobles were entirely Hungarian, although the he Romanian majority demanded circumstance of their being Hungarian was far status as a nation equal to the three less important than the astonishingly privi- long-recognized "nations" of the leged circumstances of their birth. land: the Hungarian nobles, and the Shortly before lus death in 1991, one of the T lesser, quasi-noble Germans and Sz6clders (a last survivors of this class, loan de Mocgony Hungarian subgroup). The Romanians de- Stircea, born an Austrian in Bukovina but manded equal recognition of their Orthodox bearing both Hungarian (Mocgony) and Ro- church, which had been merely "tolerated manian (Stircea)names, a "double baron" who alongside the four "privileged" religions: Catholi- could trace his ancestry to Cliarlemagne and cism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Unitarian- who once possessed the "the greatest fortune ism. They also wanted die right to their language in Romania after the king's," told me quite in scliools and in administration and legisla- unself-consciously, 'When I was arrested [by tion (rights, incidentally, which the Hungar- the communists], 43,000 of my peasants ians in Transylvania are claiming today). In ex- marched in protest in Timisoara. Our family change for social equality and the abolition of founded Moldavia in 1212." During World serfdom, tlie Hungarians demanded that War I1 lie saved 1,000 Jews from deportation Transylvania, still under the rule of Vienna, be from Bukovina. "We used to run our places incorporated into the Hungarian state. with tliem," he said. His places included a 200- By the end of 1848, serfdom had been re- year-old oak forest of 54,000 acres, and this instated and all tlie Romanian demands re- after the most thorough interwar land reform jected. In 1867, Hungary and Austria resolved in Europe. In another place in Transylvania, "we had all the stone." He had places in every ^Until the 19th century, the word romaii (Romanian man) in both region of the land-banks, too. Prompted by principalities was synonynlous with "serf."

NATIONALISM 63 its population in the process. Most of those three-fifths, however, were not Magyars but other nationalities. The Hungarian census of 1910 in- dicates that Magyars were a minority in their own country, making up only 48.1 percent of the 18.3million inhabitants. (The largest minority-14.1 percent, almost entirely in Transylvania-was Roma- nian.) Twenty years later, Magyars composed 89.5 per- cent of the 7.2 million inhabit- ants of post-Trianon Hungary, which had become in fact a "unitary" state. The popular response in Budapest to its radically di- minished status in Central Eu- rope after 1918 was "Nem, nem SO/I~."' (No, no, never!) After a their quarrels, and Transylvania was incorpo- brief interlude in 1919 as the Hungarian Social- rated into the Hungarian "unitary" state un- ist Republic under Bela Kun-enthusiastically der the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. An assisted in its fall by the invading Roma- intensive campaign of Magyarization began. The nians-a truncated but now etluucally homo- Romanian demands that had been rejected since geneous Hungary settled into the fascist re- they were first formulated in 1791 continued gime of Mikl6s Horthy, an admiral who no to be rejected until 1914. longer had a sea. Istvan Lazar, the Hungarian With the signing of the peace treaties at author of a lustory of his country that seems the end of World War I, Romania more than otherwise predictable in its national feeling, doubled its size and population, from about wrote that "the chief and, at times, the only 137,000 to 295,049 square kilometers, and from rallying cry heard during the quarter century 7,160,682 people in 1912 to 15,541,424 in 1920. of the Horthy period concerned the enlarge- For the first time in history, the vast majority ment of the country, rectification of its borders: of the Romanian-speaking people were united 'Dismembered Hungary is not a country, un- in one political state-excessively centralized divided Hungary is heaven.' . . . From the very after the French model, and now with sigmfi- first moment, Horthy and his White Army made cant minorities and cultural differences. Al- efforts to revise the borders." though Romania gained Bessarabia from the ruins of the Russian Empire, Bukovina from n 1940 Horthy succeeded. The Vienna Austria, and Southern Dobrudja from Bul- Diktat-the Second Vienna Award garia, Romania Mare, or Greater Romania, whose anniversary is still dolorously came into being largely at the expense of noted in the Romanian press every Au- Magna Hungaria, defeated in the war and gust 30-forced Romania to cede northern shrunk to one-tlurd of its former size by the Transylvania to Hungary, the so-called Treaty of Trianon in 1920, losing three-fifths of "Horthyist tongue," an area of 43,243 square

64 WQ WINTER 1994 kilometers-two-fifths of the territory that The Helsinki Final Act, to which both Hungary had lost to Romania under countries are signatories, prohibits the chang- Trianon-with a population of 2.6 million. ing of borders by forcebut not by peaceful According to not-always reliable Romanian means, a loophole left in order to allow for the statistics, 50.2 percent of them were ethnic eventual reunification of Germany. It is worth Romanians, 37.1 percent Hungarians and noting that the Vienna Diktat was technically Sz4clders. (Hungarian figures allot Romanians a peaceful arbitration, as both parties-cer- a less generous portion, 48.4 percent, and tainly Romania-are doubtless aware. How- Magyars an additional four percentage ever, Budapest has said unequivocally that it points.) Admiral Horthy rode triumphantly has no territorial claims on. Romania and con- into the Transylvanian capital of Cluj-Kol- siders the current borders permanent, "irre- ozsviir, now that it was Hungarian again~on spective of their being just or unjust," as a state- a white horse, as he had in Budapest in 1919. ment of the six Hungarian parliamentary parties Romania had had its revenge in 1918; now, in put it. The political parties that head the govern- the implacable dialectic of progress and vio- ing coalitions in both countries-the newly lence that followed 1848, it was Hungary's renamed Romanian Party of Social Democracy turn. The notion of heterogeneity within a in Romania (formerly the Democratic Na- single imposed political framework, which the tional Salvation Front) and the Hungarian Ottomans, the Austrians, the Russian tsars, and Democratic Forum-in an attempt to maintain finally their Soviet heirs tried to realize, was their tenuous holds on power, play to varying never deeply rooted in the Europe of the West, degrees the nationalist card, which has always much less in the East, and it had died with the and everywhere served as a useful distraction archduke at Sarajevo; the Soviet empire was from more immediate problems. simply an anachronism.Neither Hungary nor As to Admiral Horthy, Hitler's ally who Romania gave it much more than lip service. died in exile in Portugal 36 years ago, he was reburied in Hungary on September 4 of last lthough the Vienna Diktat was re- year, with much of the grandeur of a hero's versed after World War I1 when a funeral. The obsequies were covered live on defeated Hungary once again re- state television, and the mint issued gold and treated to the borders established silver coins in commemoration. Although by Trianon, it is in this "tongue" where Roma- Hungarian prime minister Jozsef Antall (who nian nationalist feeling is most intense today. died last December) chose not to attend the It is fueled in part by Hungary's refusal thus ceremony-his wife did-he praised Horthy far to sign a treaty with Romania, such as it as a patriot and anticommunist. So far, at least, signed with Ukraine and Germany signed the Romanians have not reburied with such with Poland, stating that neither country has honors their wartime leader, Marshal Ion An- any territorial claim on the other. Romania, for tonescu, who was also a staunch anticommunist its part, refuses to sign an agreement guaran- and Hitler ally and was executed for that in teeing minority rights, saying that its minor- 1946Ñthoug many would if they could. ity policy is exemplary and is in any event an This cursory sketch of a history that has internal matter. Both Hungary and Romania consumed untold thousands of pages and the rather disingenuously justify their refusal on productive lives of nationalist Hungarian and the grounds that the inviolability of borders Romanian historians alike may explain, if it and minority rights are already affirmed in does not excuse, Romania's current fear of various international agreements, including Hungarian irredentism, a fear that sometimes the Helsinki Final Act. Despite Helsinki, three seems to verge on the irrational, and East European states have broken up since Romania's attitude toward the restive Hun- 1990, two of them bordering Romania. garian minority within its borders.

NATIONALISM 65 As Ceausescu pursued his vigorous poli- The displaced workers in die great industrial cies of industrialization and liomogenization complexes, resentful of their lot and fearful of in the last two decades of his rule, tlie popu- tlieir future,by and large, fonn tlie popular base lations of tlie great Transylvanian citiesxluj, of tlie Romanian nationalist parties today, which Oradea, =gu-Mures-began to change cliar- repeat in one form or anotlier the old Ceausescu acter. Tlie factories needed workers. Large propaganda. These people elected tlie virulently numbers of Romanian peasants from tlie nationalistic mayor of Cluj, Gheorglie Funar, a countryside and especially from other regions, laugl~igstockto tlie outside world but a man to particularly Moldavia, moved in to tlie stark be reckoned with iii Romania. He ran for the new blocks on the edges of town wliich they presidency in 1992 and placed third, getting al- liad first been brought in to build. Tlie propor- most 11 percent of tlie vote. He lieads tlie larg- tion of Magyars diminished.The new arrivals est nationalist party in the Parliament, the Party had a different accent, different values-more of Romanian National Unity, a vital part of the Balkanic, tlie Transylvanians would say, less rulhig government coalition.The Party of Social civilized. They liad more children. Tlie popu- Democracy (formerly tlie Democratic National lation of Cluj is now 328,000. Salvation Front), which ranked first wit11 28 per- cent of tlie vote in the parliamentary elections, rban Transylvanians-Romanian also includes among its embarrassingbut neces- as well as Hungarian-are proud sary allies the extremist Romania Mare and So- of tlieir heritage, and scornful of cialist Labor parties. The former is headed by tlie Byzantine and slotliful ways Conieliu Vadim Tudor, whose notoriously anti- ofu Moldavia and Wallacliia, where Bucharest Semitic journal of the same name declares in a is located. Tlie newcomers, in turn, were en- banner lieadline each week: "The year 1993 Con- vious-and of course tlie Hungarian lan- tinues tlie Fight against Hungarian Fascism." guage, still heard daily on tlie streets, was im- Tlie president of tlie latter is Hie Verdet, penetrable to them. It was clear tliat these cit- Ceausescu's prime minister in the early 1980s; ies possessed a kind of provincial imperial its vice president is Adrian Paunescu, a favor- style, liowever faded-almost a grandeur ite of Ceausescu's, who tried to seek refuge in quite unlike anything in tlie places where tlie tlie American Embassy when tlie crowd spot- new residents liad come from or the cities they ted then attacked him in December 1989. liad seen. It was also clear, to Hungarians and Romanians alike, tliat living conditions were mild nostalgia for past glories-a steadily improving across the border, in Hun- common enough phenomenon in gary, while at home the reverse was true. To the world, especially in a dimin- divert attention from this disastrous economic ished present-does not necessar- condition, the already cliauvinistic Ceausescu ily entail a fanatical irredentism or a virulent became even more stridently natioidstic, and to nationalism; it is only nostalgia, neither the a paranoid degree. Hungarians became his scape- most constructive of human feelings nor tlie goat. The message sank in, especially among most malign, but familiar to all. Tlie empha- those who did not know any Hungarians. sis, liowever, is on mild. With all tliis, a few After the dictator fell, Hungarians remained things must be kept in mind. tlie scapegoats,blamed, with tlie Jews, for bring- First, Hungary would be destroyed if it ing communism to Romania because a dispro- suddenly returned to its 1914 borders. Tlie portionate number of die early communists were great majority of Hungarians know tliis full one or the other or both, the indigenous Cornrnu- well. Instead of 11 million not entirely satisfied nist Party iii Romania at tliat time numbering Hungarians,tlie state would contain an addi- only about 1,000, which made it the smallest such tional six million very unhappy Romanians, party in Europe. and anotlier million each of Slovaks and Serbs,

66 WQ WINTER 1994 not to mention Ukrainians, Croats, Slovenians, the Hungarian minister of defense, Lajos Fur, Ruthenians, and so on. The dream of a Greater said that the safeguarding of Hungarians ev- Hungary, which figures far more prominently erywhere was inseparable from the security of in the minds of Romanian extremists than in the Hungarian state. "This nut in Cluj is the di- actual Hungarian designs, would be a night- rect result of the Hungarian defense nunister's mare, not only for Hungary but for Europe. popping off," a high Western diplomatic Incipient Hitlers, of which there are several source told me. The Romanian government waiting in the wings (as has been amply dem- immediately accused the Hungarian govern- onstrated in the former Yugoslavia), would ment of being "irredentist and revisionist." In sprout like mushrooms after a rain. the autumn of 1993 the Hungarians lobbied Second, it is in no one's interest to escalate forcefully (but fruitlessly) against the admis- ethnic conflict to a point where it cannot be sion of Romania into the Council of Europe controlled. Open, armed conflict would ut- and the granting of most-favored-nation sta- terly destroy both countries. The horror now tus by the United States. Shortly afterward, being enacted in the former Yugoslavia has Romania's President Ion Iliescu accused the been salutary in this regard. Fortunately, nei- Hungarian government of using Hungarians ther the Romanian people nor the Hungarian from abroad as a "subversive fifth column" in people are toting Kalashnikovs, and the mili- neighboring states-an old charge: It was the tary leaders of both countries are generally reason, in fact, that Romania at first refused in- behaving responsibly. ternational observers for the 1992 national Third, fanning nationalist flames in order elections. The Hungarian government was to deflect attention from the real and difficult "shocked." And on and on. The polarizing problems at hand is in the narrow interest of effect of these actions makes radicals out of certain groups in Romania, and in Hungary as moderates. Bad money drives out good, as the well, who wish to maintain power, to augment economists say. it, or to achieve it-not by force of argument Fourth and finally, no rational person or superiority of political program but by could argue that the Magyars are a persecuted manipulating in the most cynical way (or the minority in Romania today, although without most stupid) the passions of those unhappy doubt some injustices have been inflicted upon people most grievously affected by the them, and innumerable smaller and larger changes in their countries, particularly the eco- harassments. Nonetheless, it is irresponsible nomic changes. These latter are not the old and a degradation of the language to speak, as communists who were in power before-they some have done in this regard, of "ethnic pu- have adapted all too well to the new situation rification." Magyars may be envied, even in both countries, which is one of the prob- feared, but they are not despised. That misfor- lems-but those who were miserable before tune falls on the Gypsies, disdained by Roma- and, bearing the brunt of economic changes nians and Hungarians alike. and a new and unfamiliar capitalism whose So what then do the Magyars in Romania laws are more akin to the laws of the jungle want? Essentially what Romanians in Transyl- than to the modern (and to varying degrees vania before Trianon wanted: to be citizens, mixed) market economies, are indeed more not subjects. In the local context, that means miserable now. first the right to public education,local govern- In this vein, Antall several times stated ment, and the administration of justice in their that he felt in his soul that he was prime min- mother tongue by their own people-all of ister of 15 million Hungarians. Only 11 million which were enunciated in the Declaration of of them live within the Hungarian border, a Alba Iulia on December 1,1918, the birthday fact not lost on any of Hungary's neighbors. and since 1990 the national day of today's Ro- Just before Funar was elected mayor of Cluj, mania. Although there are Hungarian schools

NATIONALISM 67 in Romania, most of the promises in the dec- signs hi areas where minorities make up a sig- laration, repeated in January 1990, have never nificant proportion of tlie population. Tliey been kept. In an attempt to aclueve tlieir goals, want a law on national minorities enacted, Hungarians formed tlie Democratic Union of and a ministry of minorities. Tliey want collec- Magyars in Romania, tlie first new political tive rights for tlieir community, an embryonic party in Romania after tlie fall of Ceausescu. concept tliat tlie Hungarian government is It is not a monolithic organization, however, promulgating in international forums. In his but a coalition of some 16 different parties and biography, With God,for the People, the Calvin- associations spanning the political spectrum ist pastor Laszlo Tokes, a hero to all Roma- and held together largely by tlieir self-identi- nians in December 1989 but today a hero to fication as Hungarians against the attacks of only a few, wrote: "The concept of 'tlie rights tlie extreme nationalists. of tlie individual' lias always sounded some- what strange to me. Individualism is a kind of pecifically, Hungarians want tlie 400- alienation, and in many parts of the world, year-old Hungarian Boylai University community has been lost as individuality has in Cluj re-established. It was incorpo- thrived." True enough. Tokes is honorary presi- rated into tlie Romanian Babes Uni- dent of tlie Democratic Union of Magyars in versity in 1959 and effectively terminated a Romania and leader of its radical wing. few years later under Ceausescu. In the early Hungarians also want a somewhat hazily autumn of 1993, however, the decision was defined cultural, not territorial, autonomy. The taken to begin by yearly stages the teaching of word is anathema to Romanians because they tlie entire curriculuni in Hungarian as well as consider autonomy tlie first step toward tlie hi Romanian. As of last October, out of almost dismemberment of Romania. Unfortunately, 3,500 first-year students, some 500 are in tlie Prime Minister Antall, seeking to bolster his Hungarian section. (Of course, some Magyars party's plummeting popularity at home by enroll in the Romanian section.)They can com- focusing tlie attention of tlie nation on Hun- pete for entrance in tlie Romanian section, too, garians abroad, recently vowed to support Mag- so if they fail at one they have a chance at tlie yar aspirations to autonomy witl~iRomania, other. Now tlie more radical Magyars want a wlucli lie characterized as "fundamental." completely separate university, with a sepa- rate administration. Andrei Marga, the Roma- utonomy is a difficult problem, nian rector of tlie combined university, called but one might think tliat bilingual Babes-Boylai, and an intelligent and rational street signs, common for years man, is worried. "This is a potential source of and still seen in many Transyl- serious conflict in Cluj," lie says. Tliere are so vanian cities, would be a simple and insig- many. Older Romanian physicians remember nificant concession. But in the increasingly 1940, when the Romanian medical faculty divided city of Cluj, the fanatical mayor has there was closed and they had to move it to changed tlie names of many streets to elimi- Sibiu, which was outside tlie "Hortliyist nate any that lionor Hungarians and lias tongue." Many of these doctors now vote for threatened to melt down tlie statue of a Hun- tlie nationalist parties, whose support is not garian king in the center of the city, although limited solely to tlie urban proletariat. Pliysi- the king, Mattliias tlie Just, was tlie son of a cians have considerable influence in Romania. Romanian noble and born in Cluj. Tliere, tlie They are not inclined to be sympathetic to de- most minor concession-any conciliatory mands such as the call for a separate university. gesture at all-is viewed as opening tlie Below tlie university level, Hungarians gates to tlie Hungarian invaders. It is no want history and geography taught in tlieir wonder tliat tlie Hungarians joke, "We are own language. Tliey want bilingual street a double minority. First, we are clever. . . ."

68 WQ WINTER 1994 In a normal country, in a normal time, Caritas collapses-as it must-the repercus- Funar would be laughed out of office-and sions will be staggering. investigated for corruption as well. Neither the Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dadaist country nor the times are normal, however. movement, was born in Romania. So was Last summer the headline in a local newspa- absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. Surely per loyal to the mayor proclaimed, "Hungary there is some connection. Planning Surprise Attack In Next Five ''This is the Balkans," the editor of Months." The distinguished elderly woman Romania's largest newspaper told me a while who showed it to me believed it. She also be- ago, making the connection. "We are at the lieved that Hillary Clinton had adopted an gates of the Orient. Everything is dangerous, extraterrestrial,and proceeded to describe the and nothing is serious." creature to me. His skin was a green crust, and he was an "absolute vegetarian." She had read hat is the Balkanic excuse, but the it in the newspaper. rest of us can only hope he is correct. Absurd as some of this may seem, it is The "power" needs scapegoats. just such absurdities that could be the cause When Caritas collapses, it will need of serious ethnic conflict, particularly in a T them desperately. In Romania, the most popu- country where rumor replaces information lar scapegoats are first Gypsies and then Hun- and the economy is headed over the brink of garians, followed at some distance by Jews. disaster. Another absurdity: The largest Hungarians and Romanians have lived to- money-making machine in Romania-and gether in Romania for hundreds of years, usu- the largest scam going in all of Europe-is ally with a reasonable degree of peace and a pyramid scheme called Caritas, which has within living memory too. If left to their own been running in Cluj for 18 months now and devices, there is no reason to believe that they has attracted the savings of virtually the cannot continue to work out existing problems entire adult population of the city plus some or others that may arise. There is reason to three million other Romanians-more than believe, however, that neither Romanians nor one-sixth of the adult population-with the Hungarians are left to their own devices. The promise of a sevenfold return on investment Romanian Intelligence Service is quite keen on in three months. As of October 1993, it was maintaining an undefined "national spirit," taking in the equivalent of almost five mil- which it appears to find under threat from lion dollars each day. Cluj now boasts sev- foreign influences both sacred and secular. If eral Caritas dollar millionaires-in a coun- the Hungarian government is up to a tenth of try where the average monthly income is what the Romanian government seems honestly less than $70 and annual inflation ap- to believe, then there is a very big problem. proaches 300 percent. Caritas-no connec- 'We don't have a functioning economy," tion with the international charity of the a Romanian told me recently, '"but we do have same name-is run by an obscure accoun- history." The springtime of hopes that began tant from Fagara and promoted by Funar, in the euphoria of December 1989 had pretty who has gotten rich off it. Right now, it is the much faded when the leaves were still in bud. single factor uniting Hungarians and Roma- Right now, except for the Caritas millionaires, nians in Cluj: They all want to be rich. The the mass of the population does not have only good thing this indicates is that if Ro- much else besides history. For this and other mania ever really gets its economy going, reasons, etluuc tensions are kept on the sim- ethnic problems will fade fast. But when mer but still below the boil.

NATIONALISM 69 THE RISE OF EUROPE'S LITTLE NATIONS

BY DAVID T. GIES

t their outset at least, the 1992 lieved an advertisement, designed and paid Summer Olympics in Barcelona for by the Generalitat, the governing body of appeared to be organized by Catalonia, that appeared in several interna- people who had nationalism, not tional magazines. This provocative piece of sports, foremost in mind. Consider the curious self-promotion located Barcelona in Catalonia, fact that the three official languages of the "a country in Spain," the copy read, "wit11 its games were English, French, and Catalan. own culture, language, and identity." In case Why Catalan and not Spanish? Because Olym- readers missed the point, the advertisement pic Committee rules allow for the use of Eng- depicted the "country" of Catalonia in sharply lish, French, and the language of the country colored relief on an otherwise borderless map hosting the games. More to the point, the or- of Europe. ganizers had no doubt that Catalan was the The advertisement was only part of a language of their country. campaign by the Catalan organizers of the But Catalonia a count;y? Yes, if one be- Olympic Games to inform the world of their

ICH COUNTRY WOULD YOU PLACE THIS POINT?

70 WQ WINTER 1994 independence from the Spanish state-the cartoonists. In the first block of the cartoon, the very state that had contributed nearly 70 per- question, "In which country would you place cent of the funding for the games. To be sure, this point," was reproduced as in the original. the Spanish language was heard throughout In the second block, the point, Barcelona, is the games, but the Catalan national anthem revealed to be a livid boil on the backside of played before the Spanish anthem as the Spain's president, Felipe Gonzhlez. Less imagi- games got under way each day. native responses simply wrote the ad off as an Even the timing of the advertisement was imbecilic mistake, a betrayal, the latest idiotic provocative, appearing as it did just two days effort by the Generalitat to fan the flames of an before King Juan Carlos's scheduled mid-July old and often bitter controversy. visit to the Olympic Village. Jordi Pujol, the president of the Generalitat, did little to t the center of the controversy is smooth matters when he proclaimed, "We are the autonomous region of Cata- a small country, but we are moving forward." lonia, which lies in the northeast And when tourists finally arrived in Barcelona corner of the Iberian Peninsula. for the games, they were greeted with signs Occupying some 32,000 square kilometers, it that read, "Catalonia: A Country in Europe." is roughly the size of Belgium, and consists of Madrid reacted with official indigna- the provinces of Barcelona, Tarragona, L6rida tion-and a smattering of unofficial humor. (Lleida in Catalan), and Gerona (Girona). It Cambia 16, Spain's leading newsweekly maga- looks, in writer Ian Gibson's words, somewhat zine, published a parody of the Generalitat like a fan opening upward toward France, advertisements by two well-known political with its base perched southward near

NATIONALISM 71 Valencia. Its six million inhabitants constitute tance itself from the central government about 16 percent of Spain's population, and should come as no surprise to those who many of them carry in their heads a rich and know the record of Madrid's past dealings complicated history of their region. with the region. Felipe V, the first Bourbon king in Spain (reigned 170046), was so in- nvaded by the Arabs in A.D. 717 and re- censed at Catalonia's support of the Haps- covered for Christianity in A.D. 801 with burgs during the War of the Spanish Succes- the help of Charlemagne, the area be- sion that he organized a campaign against the came first the County of Barcelona and ancient kingdom that included the elimination eventuallyI an independent kingdom. In the of the Generalitat, the suppression of the Cata- 11tl1 century, an expansionist Barcelona con- lan language, and the closing of the University quered territories south and west of the city. of Barcelona in 1714. But this and subsequent In the 12th century, allied through marriage to attacks over the centuries only stiffened the the daughter of the King of Aragon, the Count backbone of Catalonians and fed enthusiasm of Barcelona (Ramon Berenguer IV) became for separatism. Catalonia has always had in- the King of Aragon and Catalonia. Further dividuals eager to rally support for indepen- conquests in Valencia, Mallorca, Sardinia, and dence, the most articulate of these in the 20th Sicily strengthened the power of the kingdom century being E. Prat de la Riba, who pub- and extended the influence of the Catalan lan- lished his La Nacionalitat Catalana in 1917, re- guage. By the 13th century, the local powers energizing the debate over regional rights. The (mostly the aristocratic elite) had created a fall of the Bourbon monarchy in 1931 and the parliament whose main function was to dic- proclamation of the Second Republic, whose tate laws, defend local rights and privileges, Parliament approved the Statutes of Au- and check the powers of the king. This parlia- tonomy for the region in 1932, seemed to bring ment eventually gave way to what is now the full autonomy closer to reality. local government, called the Generalitat. When the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon fused ut Francisco Franco, for reasons shortly after the marriage of Ferdinand and similar to those acted upon by Felipe Isabella, in 1469, and later, when their daughter V (the Catalans sided with the Re- Juana married the son of the Holy Roman publicans in the Spanish Civil War), Emperor Maximilian, Catalonia came increas- squashed those hopes of autonomy in 1939. As ingly under the will of the Hapsburg rulers. Robert Hughes observes in his hugely enter- While the central government, soon to be perma- taining Barcelona, the civil war had been more nently located in Madrid, outwardly respected than a class struggle. Franco saw clearly that the area's local rights, it refused to grant it per- the Catalans were also animated by strong mission, for example, to trade with the New feelings of local nationalism and that these World. The cession of the French side of the were bound up with the preservation and use Catalan area in 1659 in the so-called Treaty of of their language. The repression was extreme, the Pyrenees and the loss of central-govern- if uneven. A Barcelona student in his early ment support following the War of the Span- thirties recently related to me an incident from ish Succession reduced Catalonia to the status the mid-1960s, one that had decisively marked of a mere province in the larger nation-state. his attitude toward the Francoist state. One That Catalonia today should wish to dis- day he and his grandfather were having a chat

David T. Gies, Co~~zi~zoiziuealthProfessor of Spanish and chairman of the Departinent of Spanish, Italian, and Portugueseat the Uiziuersityof Virginia,has written or edited six booksand numerousarticles on Spanish literature and c~~lt~~re.His latest book, The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain, iuill be published by Cambridge University Press this war. Copyiglzt @ 1994 by David T. Gies.

72 WQ WINTER 1994 on the street in downtown Barcelona. A po- axis of Barcelona's economic and cultural life liceman happened to overhear them and turns to Paris rather than to Madrid. "Well, promptly slapped the young man's grandfa- Barcelona is Europe," announces one of the ther with a stiff fine. The crime was "deviant characters in Manuel Vhzquez Montalbkn's activityu-speaking Catalan, a language that 1977 novel, The Manager's Solitude, and that Franco had banished from all public dis- statement reflects a broad-based popular sen- course, from the public schools, and from the timent. Many of Europe's major philosophical media for years following the Nationalist vic- and political movements entered the Iberian tory in the civil war. Everyone was supposed Peninsula via Barcelona in the late 19th and to speak in Christian, that is, in Spanish. Thou- early 20th centuries (republicanism, anar- sands of books were burned, and even the chism, federalism, communism). And Cata- Catalan national dance, the sardana, was for- lonians point with pride to their great artists, mally banned (although the fiercely indepen- including Antonio Gaudi, Salvador Dali, Joan dent Catalans danced it frequently and defi- Mir6, and Pau Casals. Of course, such pride antly in spite of the ban). Inconsistently, by the can sometimes get the better of a people. With mid-1960s, Catalan was tolerated in the uni- little real justice, many residents of Barcelona versities and in private secondary schools. claim to be culturally superior to their coun- However unevenly applied, though, repres- terparts in Madrid, whom they view as dis- sion inevitably backfires, and today the re- tant, slightly less sophisticated relatives. claiming of Catalan rights and privileges forms the background of a game of political uch feelings are not discouraged by cat-and-mouseplayed between the politicians Jordi Pujol, the undisputed leader of in Catalonia and those in Madrid. Catalan regionalism today. "Region- The idea that Spain is synonymous with alism is not something which is Castile is one that the Franco regime repeated anachronistic or romantic or pure folklore," he ad nauseam during the first decades of the declared to the press in January 1993. "It is a dictatorship, but it was never as deeply em- modern movement and a movement of bedded in Iberian history as Francoist histori- progress." ans would have had people believe. In fact, it Pujol has been the president of the Gener- was developed a mere century ago by a gen- alitat since 1980, and his popularity still runs eration of writers struggling to find an iden- high, even though his political organization, tity in a world that was changing more rapidly Convergencia i Uni6 (CiU), has faced compe- than they might have wished. The Spanish tition from other groups championing inde- Empire hi America finally crumbled by 1898, pendence. (Terra Lliure, a terrorist group ac- and intellectuals began to propagate the belief tive in the 1970s and '80s, disbanded in 1991, that the essence of Spain, its soul, was to be but Esquerra Republicana, the Partit Socialista found in the dour, self-negating, stoical Castil- Catalan, and the Partit Socialista Unificat de ian farmer. Even philosopher Jose Ortega y Catalunya still push hard for independence.) Gasset (1883-1955) thought that Castile had To underscore Catalonia's semi-autonomous made Spain what it was in his day. status, Pujol's Generalitat has set up quasi-dip- Residents of Catalonia, where nationalist lomatic offices in many large cities outside sentiment was on the rise, had a decidedly Spain, and Pujol himself often travels in the differentview. Their resistance to the idea that manner of a head of state, giving lavish din- Castile somehow meant Spain ran deep, and ners to which the Spanish ambassador in the it encouraged them to turn their eyes away host country is pointedly not invited. When from the center. Many residents of Barcelona Pujol speaks of the federal government, he considered themselves to be more European more frequently refers to it as the Spanish state than Spanish-and many still do. To them, the rather than as Spain to underscore his convic-

NATIONALISM 73 tion that Spain is merely an administrative a penny. Despite such frugality, per capita structure, a political entity, an invention. consumption is higher in Catalonia than in any other region of Spain. Some people contend, ut finally, these are minor provoca- not entirely unjustifiably, that the industrial tions, skirmishes in a war of words, area around Barcelona, which produces 25 because neither Pujol nor his party percent of the peninsula's total industrial em- really believes in Catalonia's full in- ployment (in textiles, electronics, plastics, au- dependence from Spain. Convergencia i Uni6 tomotive products, and chemicals), has more is a minority party that controls only the in common wit11 Germany's Rulv Valley than Generalitat, not the Barcelona n~ayor'soffice. it does with any other part of Spain. In fact, it does not even speak for the majority Spain's loose federal arrangement, estab- of Socialist-leaningresidents of Catalonia, who lished in the post-Franco Constitution of 1978, vote for Pujol on local matters but for the rep- gives Catalonia and other autonomous regions resentatives of the Spanish Socialist Workers' significant latitude in making laws and spend- Party in national elections. "Catalanism does ing funds for culture, infrastructure, and gov- not necessarily mean separatism," Jordi Sole- ernment services. The central government Tura, a Catalan law professor who rose to collects all tax monies and redistributes them become Spain's minister of culture in 1990, based not on who gave and how much, but wrote in 1970. Pujol agrees in principle but according to other formulas that are more geo- plays what writer David Rosenthal once called graphic than economic and more in keeping "a perpetual game of chicken wit11 Madrid." with the pl~ilosophyof the main national Money and language are the two keys to party, the Socialists. The result is that Catalan politics. Catalonia is the strongest eco- Catalonians feel that they receive less than nomic region on the Iberian Peninsula. While their fair share and that their region subsidizes it occupies just six percent of the landmass, it poorer areas (particularly Andalusia). Pujol's produces 19 percent of the gross national harping on this issue creates tension not only product and ships 23 percent of Spain's ex- between his Generalitat and the central gov- ports. Twenty-three percent of Spanish bank- ernment of Felipe Gonztilez but between the ing is controlled by Catalan interests, and Generalitat and the mayor's office of nearly one-quarter of foreign investments in Barcelona, which is held by a member of the Spain are made in Catalonia. Pujol himself Catalan Socialist Party, Pasqual Margall. rose to prominence by founding the Banca Catalana in the 1960s and enjoyed enormous anguage is at least as much an issue success wit11 it until the mid-1980s, when huge as the wallet, for Catalan, unlike losses and suggestions of financial misman- Basque, has a long and distin- agement forced it into restructuring. The guished literary history completely Banco de Sabadell, Catalonia's oldest bank separate from Castilian language and litera- (founded in 1891),is one of Spain's more prof- ture. In fact, nothing was more irritating to itable financial institutions, and La Caixa sav- Catalans than the Francoists' insistence that ings bank is the second largest in Europe. Per Catalan was a mere dialect of Castilian. The capita income in Catalonia is 20 percent lugher first book printed on the Iberian Peninsula, than the national average. Tirant lo Blanc, a chivalric romance by Joanot Catalans save more than their Spanish Martorell, was published in Catalan in counterparts (not a difficult achievement, Valencia in 1490, but well before that great given that most Spaniards save nothing at all), thinkers and writers from Catalonia had ex- which gives them a reputation as money-con- pressed themselves eloquently in their native scious and tight. According to one local joke, language. In the early 13th century, the kings wire was invented by two Catalans pulling on of Catalonia were ordering the production of

74 WQ WINTER 1994 chronicles in Catalan. Ramon Llull (1235- education and also because Spanish is where 1316),known as Doctor Illuminat throughout the market is. (Some 600 million people speak the medieval world, used Catalan brilliantly in Spanish throughout the world; six million his encyclopedic works of science, pldosophy, speak Catalan.) religion, and literature. His Bla~zqz~er~zahas been called one of the first modern European he language issue still provokes novels. Other writers, including the pre-Re- heated debate. Although the Law of naissance humanist Bernat Metge (1343-14131, Linguistic Normalization of 1983 and the poets Anselrn Turmeda (1352-1430), stipulates that Catalan is the domi- Jordi de Sant Jordi (1400-24), and Ausiis Marc11 nantT language of instruction in the region, it (1397-1459) created a tradition of contemplative also provides for Spanish to be used in the lyric in the Catalan language which, however, classroom. In the autumn of 1993, however, seemed to fall into disfavor as Castilian lan- the department of education of the Generalitat guage and politics grew to dominate the Ibe- decreed that Catalan would be used exclu- rian Peninsula. All were fully conscious of sively in all public scl~oolsfor children ages themselves as Catalans, not Spaniards. three through eight. This touched off howls of Not until the mid-19th century, during protest from a small group of parents who what has become known as the Renaixenqa of insisted on their right to have their children Catalan letters, did the use of Catalan, as a educated in Spanish. The parents' association means of literary expression come back into adopted the unfortunate tactic of comparing favor. Bonaventura Caries Aribau (1798-1862) Pujol's "repression" of Spanish to Franco's initiated a new wave of nationalist sentiment attempted extermination of Catalan. This com- with his tendentious but stirring poem "Oda parison in turn roused El Pais to denounce the a la Pitria" (1859), "To the Fatherland," and ultra-Right for ignoring the more than 10 years poet and essayist Jacint Verdaguer i Santal6 of civil peace and social consensus built up in (1845-1902) led the rebirth of Catalan litera- the country. ture, behind which pulsated the recognition of The Generalitat's move underscores the Catalonia as a separate state. Other poets, reality that Catalan has not yet reached equal philologists, dramatists, and novelists fol- status in Spain. The recently published Dictio- lowed the lead of Verdagneri i Santal6 and nary of Spanish and Spanish-American Literature created an important flowering of Catalan let- (1993) never mentions Catalan language or lit- ters that has lasted to this day. Among the erature, and last summer's opening of most widely read Catalan authors today are J. Madrid's first Catalan bookshop and cultural V. Foix (1893-1987), Joan Salvat-Papasseit center-called Blanquerna, after Llull's (1894-19241, Tomas Garces (1902- ), Merce novel-was cause for widespread comment in Rodoreda (1909-83), and Salvador Espriu the Spanish-languagenewspapers. The book- (1913-85). shop bills itself as a bridge of dialogue between However, wlde Catalonia dominates the the two cultures, underscoring just how differ- publishing industry in both Spanish and Cat- ent they are considered to be both by propo- alan, only 5,806 of the 51,000 titles edited on the nents of Castilian and by defenders of Catalan. peninsula last year were published in Catalan. (Anyoneinterested in seeing how these differ- Still, it must be recognized that many of the ences play out in fiction should read Juan peninsula's best-selling novelists (such as Mars's riotous recent novel, El amante bililzpd Eduardo Mendoza, Manuel Vfizquez Montal- In attendance at the ribbon-cutting ceremony ban, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marse, and Esther was a who's who of the cultural and political Tusquets), although born and raised in Cata- elite, including Pujol himself, Pere Gimferrer lonia, write in Spanish rather than in Catalan (who began his career in poetry writing in because the former was the language of their Spanish, but who now writes exclusively in

NATIONALISM 75 Catalan), the mayor of Madrid, the Catalan trists and separatists alike have bought into cultural attache, a representative of the Autono- the ideal of consensus and cooperation that mous Community of Madrid, and the president was outlined by the king in his very first post- of the Spanish Royal Academy, who pro- Franco speech in 1975 and subsequently writ- claimed that Blanquerna would "help us get ten into law by the Constitution of 1978. to know Catalan cultural reality better." Juan Tomas de Salas, editor of Cambia 16, Just why this creative tension between the probably reflected the entire country's mood center and the periphery seems to be working when he noted that at the Olympic Games in contemporary Spain is difficult to establish. "Catalan and Castilian fused together harmo- While Pujol's views on Catalonia as a separate niously as a symbol of the fact that both "country" are immensely popular in his re- peoples have lived together for over 500 years. gion, they are, when all is said and done, mere The great mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Mar- chin music. He does not want real indepen- gall, symbolized better than anyone the Cata- dence for Catalonia. Nor does he attempt to lan who is as Spanish as he is Catalan, or who maneuver the political structure toward that is Spanish precisely because he is Catalan." He goal. In fact, he has recently agreed to collabo- challenged his country's new generation to rate informally with Felipe Gonzalez's minor- ensure that such harmony continue and that ity government in Madrid, guaranteeing not Spain not fragment itself into what he called only stability in the central government but a "bicephalic, cuatrilh~gualMediterranean arid also the continuation of the Socialist lock on Atlantic" state. power. (GonzAlez and the Socialists have ruled Spain since 1982.) Because of his long pain seems to have learned how to and intelligent leadershipno Spanish politi- balance the obligations of a modern cian has ever served in elective office longer nation-state with the requirements than Pujol-Catalonia has settled into a re- of regional- rights.- The federal system laxed stand-off with the federal government. of autonomous regions is working nicely in It has been able to do so because many of post-Franco, post-Constitution Spain, al- its immediate objectives-the teaching of Cat- though each year brings new tensions to test alan language and history in the schools, the the resolve of frequently disparate interest use of the language in print, on TV, and in of- groups. But now at least those tensions can be ficial government business (the Generalitat expressed in Catalan as well as in Spanish. drafts its documents and makes requests in Amusingly, the Olympic Games as conceived Catalan, and the central government answers by Pujol-that is, as a glorification of Catalan in Spanish)-were achieved without the autonomy-became a worldwide celebration armed conflicts that have marked dealings of Spain, with Spain winning an. unexpected between Madrid and some extreme separat- number of gold medals. By the time the clos- ist movements within Spain, notably that of ing ceremony was broadcast to millions of the Basques. Observers credit this levelhead- viewers around the world, more Spanish flags edness to what the Catalans call seizy, that is, were in evidence than Catalan flags, and the a sense of balance, perspective, and common real hero turned out to be none other than wisdom which they claim has always ruled King Juan Carlos, king not of that country, their lives. For all intents and purposes, cen- Catalonia, but of all of Spain.

76 WQ WINTER 1994 ______I __ _ ~ I _C_II~ THE RISE OF EUROPE' S LITTLE NATIO NS

A LEGACYOF EMPIXE

BY G. M. TAMAS

n ideavery much afoot in Europe thissolution, while it workedin certainparts today-one that arousespolitical of Europefor a time,today proves to be a trou- A passions everywhere from Ab- bling inheritance.Not only is it ill-suitedto khazia to Scotland--is the notion nation-states (to those that have existed for ofcultural and territorial autonomy. The idea centuriesas well as to those that have emerged is,in fact,a compromisebetween the old prin- in thepostcommunist era); it is a threatto their cipleof state sovereigntyand the new one of integrityand stability. a separate ethnocultural identity of linguistic The,oreatViennese novelist Robert Musil or racial groups. It was born in the old oncenoted that there was only one nation in Austro-Hungarian Em- Austria-Hungary, the pire aroundthe turn of Austriannation, and it

this century, when ;· +. ? had no ethnic identity people preoccupied Q whatsoever. As an ethrlic with the decline of the " ~I~i~\ *a group, Austrians called supranational state (es- themselves Germans and peciallysocialists) tried longed,when in a nation- tosaveitbytakingac- ,_~~~ alistic mood, for the count of the emerging merger of LittleAustria ethnicidentities. These with GreaterGermany: new and fractious iden- Alzsclzltlss. Nationalist titles were arrayed movements are always against the old baroque ~_i-_~::~Z:~ :-:-::::.l:i:~.~ filled with love for the monarchy,whose legiti- mothercountry, but Ger- macy was upheld by the ::: man-tlustrian national- divine right of kings ism was filled as much and by a notion of sov- ~~ with hatred for it.Still, ereigntyheavily influ- the king-emperorFranz enced by natural law: $ ~ ·a~ 1 Josef I called himself eilz both theologicalconvic- "-, ·i 1 ,;~i ·i Ileutscl?el·Fiilst, a Gennan ~·/~$~~ tions that seemed in- 7i: prince, because for a long creasin,olyoutmoded in time he hoped to restore an age of secularismand nationalism, theHoly Roman Empire of the Germannation Thewish to presen~e a supranational state finishedoff by Napoleon half a centuryearlier. with no identifiable ethnic or class character, and at the same time the inclination to placate to my mind the greatest theawakening ethnic and regional conscious- authorityon the Austro-Hun- ness,resulted in the idea of atltorzol?~y,an idea garian monarchy,writes in his inherited by the yost-Hapsburg successor Musil,masterpiece, Tlze Mnr2 Witliout statesand, througl~ the influenceof socialist Qua2ities,that the Joint Empire was supported thoughtby otherEuropean areas as well. But by a strangealliance, a motleycrowd of

NATIONALISM 77 Galician-Polish aristocrats, Bohemian-German give the state a specific cultural and racial landowners, the German-speaking bourgeoi- 11ue.This emphasis on ethnic attributes was as sie in the east (and only in the east), the offi- alien to socialists as it had been to officials of cer corps, the Catholic Church, the Jews, and the Joint Empire. socialists. Socialists in Austria-Hungary and in the Russian Empire tried to identify the different hese elements had a vested interest demands of ethnic nationalists. They stipu- in the continuance of universalistic lated the right of each and every ethnic and imperial power because they were, regional group to preserve its language, cul- or felt themselves to be, surrounded tural tradition, historical identity, and racial by hostile aliens. Equal s~~bjecthoodobscured pride. Cultural autonomy, the brainchild of the the fact that Galician peasants spoke Ukrai- great Austrian socialist thinker Otto Bauer, nian, that the Bohemian indentured laborers was intended to provide every ethnocultural spoke Czech, that the German-speaking gen- group within a given polity the right to decide tile burghers hated the Jews, that the simple everything pertaining to its identity (educa- fellows who served as privates in the imperial tion, the arts, the cult of national past) while army had difficulty understanding German remaining loyal to the supranational state as commands, that the Protestant churcl~essided subjects or citizens, taxpayers, and soldiers. with destructive nationalist sedition, and that Laws were to be uniform everywhere within the workers' movement was fractured by eth- the future federal republic (or, failing that, in nic tensions. a federal monarchy), but taught and learned The socialists of Eastern and Central Eu- in various idioms. The struggle for the eman- rope were the first to realize that their cipation of the proletariat was and remained emancipatory ~topiahad a potent rival in eth- a universal goal, but it was to be synchronized nic nationalism. Fin-de-siscle socialists-the with the liberation of the subject nations from only heirs to the Enlightenment apart from the the dictates of cultural oppression, from the imperial court and the upper echelons of the forced imposition of alien ethnocultural iden- imperial bureaucracy-understood that if tities masquerading as abstract discourses of they wanted citizenship a la fmqaise to suc- justice, science, religion, and pl~ilosophy. ceed imperial-~~niversalisticsubjecthood, they Thus, in the view of the Austro-Marxists, had to deal somehow with the emerging con- liberation and emancipation meant also the sciousness of ethnicity. emergence of hitherto concealed cultures. Ethnic nationalists in countries that were These in turn would contribute, by means of ruled by a foreign aristocracy and dynasty and an open dialogue made possible by a a rationalist-universalist central bureaucracy noncoercive society, to the new and varie- set two goals for themselves: a restoration of gated texture of the mental life of the New ethnic or national identity, and the creation of Man. Political obligation, civic duty, and the an independent state led by a home-bred elite. like need not extend, held the Austro-Marx- Citizenship was to be defined not only by im- ists, to conformity with a culturally alien dis- personal law and abstract obedience to the course. sovereign but also by cultural tradition, lan- Both the imperial and the socialist solu- guage, and racial stock. "Our kind" was to be tions to the problem of ethnicity stem from the predominant within the state, and it was to late-Enlightenment teaching on citizenship.

G. M. Tamds, a former Wilson Center Guest Scholar, is director of the Institute of Pl~ilosopJn/of f11eH~li7garian Academy of Sciences, a11 opposition member of the Hungarian Parliament, and the author of L'Oeil et la Main (1985)and Les Idoles de la Tribu (1989), the American version of which, Tribal Concepts, zoill be published by Open Court in 1994. Copyright 1994 by G. M.Taiiiis.

78 WQ WINTER 1994 According to this teaching, citizenship is de- posed-for a long wlule, even etluuc Russians termined by an equality of rights, by sover- in Kazakhstan had to learn Kazakh. Etluuc tra- eignty residing in the people, and by a sym- dition was considered to be the outer garment metrical relationship to the state. Both the of socialist man, as indeed it was. The Com- universalistic monarchy and universalistic munist Party fostered the creation of local socialism fought the separateness of the estates elites, composed, for the first time in many and all forms of aristocratic, parochial, or re- cases, of people drawn from a region's ethnic gional privilege, which they viewed as poten- majority. The party thus provided a way of tial excuses for resistance to benevolent central preferment and advancement to people who, rule. By divorcing ethnicity from citizenslup, under the tsars, had been considered rebel- Austrian socialists hoped, ethnic nationalism lious and disloyal serfs. And precisely because would be removed from the sphere of politics the road to etl~noculturalself-assertion led and nationality kept separate from citizenslup. through the Communist Party and its auxilia- The body politic of the future was to be a loose ries, many etluuc demands being voiced today federation of "nations"-i.e. etl~nocultural in the old communist bloc hearken back-al- groups. (And without the socialist vision, one beit unconsciously-to the Stali~~istsystem of should note, contemporary East European eth- privileges granted to ethnic elites. This fact nic nationalism would never have become so alone poses a serious obstacle to those who are apolitical, so oddly noncivic and anti-authori- trying to promote the universalism of modem. tarian, as it is now.) liberal citizenship in the states of the former Although World War I blew the Austro- communist bloc. Hungarian Empire to pieces, the legacy of the universalistic empire, along wit11 the later hat we are witnessing today in Austro-Marxist emendations, was inherited Eastern and Central Europe is by the Soviet Union. It is easy to forget that a repoliticization of ethnicity what appears today as a fossil of a societal and based on criteria that were in- cultural monster was originally mapped out stituted by the Soviet system. After all, if pos- as a utopia designed to liberate mankind. The session of a distinct language, folkloric tradi- Soviet Union accomplisl~edwhat had been tion, and shared sense of identity is sufficient thought to be the utopia of Hapsburg social- reason for cultural and territorial autonomy, ism. It created a uniform political order and a then why not for independence? When the symmetric relationship of all subjects to cen- heady wine of socialist utopia evaporated tral power, and it successfully separated from the poisoned chalice of Soviet "federal- ethnicity and politics. In all Soviet republics, ism," what was to hold the tribes together? autonomous territories, and other localities, When the belief in the divine right of kings one could everywhere find the same political vanished under the impact of the bitter expe- discourse, the same system of symbols, the rience of trench warfare in 1914-18, the old same activist, mobilizing, futuristic ideol- continental empires were shattered beyond all ogy-translated into hundreds of languages. realistic hope of repair. (Hapsburg or Ethnic, even tribal, folklore was celebrated by Romanov nostalgia is a toy for the intelligent- myriads of choirs and dance troupes; naive sia only.) When-to quote the idiotic formula odes to the Supreme Helmsman and Little of Soviet "social realism"-the "socialist con- Father of All His Peoples were sung in 11un- tent" (communist-futuristutopia) disappeared dreds of languages; an official popular litera- from the "ethnic form," the guardians of this ture ("ethnic in form, socialist in content") was 'ethnic form," the political, ideological, cul- executed, under orders from above, by Artists tural ruling strata of the federal and autono- of the People. In each federal or autonomous mous republics, people such as Zviad Gamsa- republic, etl~noc~ilturaluniformity was im- khurdia in Georgia and the war criminal

NATIONALISM 79 Radovan Karadzic from Serb Bosnia (both tion of Europe. Even the European states poets, typically) wanted to fill that "form" themselves have postponed the granting of with national content, that is, national inde- cultural rights to their minorities on the pendence, ethnic or racial purity, and a poli- grounds that a future unified Europe will tics inspired by the great ethnic narrative make "all this" of no importance. culled from ancestral folk epics. It is interest- ing to note, however, that the new ethnic states he European Community is the cre- claim to deny their ethnic-autonomist origins ation of a special brand of French and to embrace an assirnilationist view of citi- socialism, not that of the streets or of zenslup. But the claim is a charade. The new eth- the factories but that lesser-known nic statelets, born from older Soviet-styleautono- varietyT that reigns supreme in the hushed cor- mous regions, are all trying to ai-inil-lilateevery- ridors of the Council of State or the old Min- thing alien within their borders, exactly as the istry of Planning, a kind that is taught at the successor states of the Hapsburg Empire did ~coleNationale dlAdministration and ill ev- with their minorities after World War I. ery gra1zde kcole in Paris to Gaullists and leftists The legacy of the former empires, cultural alike. It is basically the old Bourbon-Bonaparte autonomy combined with territorial au- idea of politics as administration,gestion. The tonomy, can also be found in countries that administrator, or g&rant, of public affairs is a were not part of the communist bloc. In Spain, member of the ruling, truly aristocratic crime for example, the regionalist-autonomist move- of high bureaucracy, a worshiper of Reason, ments, such as those of the Catalonians and state intervention, and planning-thus a fig- Basques, are movements of the Left that were ure reminiscent of the old, Spanish-Austrian reinvigorated by the Spanish Civil War and civil servant of the Hapsburgs, who typically the subsequent ferocious persecution by received his education at the feet of learned Franco. All, moreover, are indirect legatees of monks. Hapsburg socialism. The elevated, elusive, and secretive world of progressivist French civil servants retains hroughout Europe, we find yet an- the old imperial belief in the shape of the state other aspect of the emerging ethnic as a fortuitous product of expediency and national politics, and it too is of so- historical accident. The advantages of a larger cialist origin. I am speaking here of market and the possibility of rational gover- theT regionalist movements, such as the Scot- nance unencumbered by querulous parlia- tish Nationalist Party in Great Britain and the ments are of such importance to their subtle Northern League in Italy, that have been en- minds that they will, when necessary, make couraged directly or indirectly by the Euro- concessions to the irrational rump of obsolete, pean Community. The "federal" bureaucracy ancient statehood. With similar condescen- in Brussels and Strasbourg tries, quite natu- sion, they will also deign to protect national rally, to weaken the authority of national de- culture and tradition for the delectation of cision-making bodies, especially national par- connoisseurs and the feigned admiration of liaments and supreme courts, and it has found domesticated philistines. Socialist utopians a precious ally in the form of regionalist move- always wanted us to believe that, in a free so- ments. The Scottish Nationalist Party and the ciety, government will be administration, Northern (formerly Lombard) League both since the question of the good life and of a pretend that their scission from Great Britain good polity will be settled by a pl-lilosophy that or the Italian Republic will pose no problems understands human needs and can mold so- and may even pass unnoticed within a united ciety accordingly. The EC version of socialist Europe. Other ethnic and religious minorities centralization and planning regards the plural- pin. similar hopes on the improbable unifica- ity of cultures and ethnicities precisely as if

80 WQ WINTER 1994 they were part of what Hegel called "the time worked surprisingly well. But the aban- wrong infinite." There is no necessity, hence donment of the supranational socialist state no dignity, to cultural expression. The benign after the democratic upheavals of 1989 left ge'rant of human affairs will provide funds for only the possibility of the creation of new na- the upkeep of the etlu~ographiczoo, knowing tion-states. full well that cultural diversity, as an expres- sion of ethnicity, has nothing to do with seri- he odds that these new nations will ous politics, just as tradition has nothing to do successfully reform themselves with serious economic and social science. along the lines of the older nation- Socialism, by its very nature, is incapable states of Western Europe are not of delimiting or defining the body politic (for great.T The reason is almost paradoxical. For socialist liberation is deliverancefrom politics, while the old nation-states were much more and the end of all politics). So any peculiarity, closely tied to ethnicity, folk traditions, racial anything specific expressed by one or another pride, and other tribal affiliations than either technique of human imagination, will be seen the Hapsburg Empire or the Soviet Union as contingent. At least wlde socialism still had was, they were also committed to a liberal a utopia, that belief presupposed a link be- politics of rights, equality, tolerance, and uni- tween the community and something outside versalism. This commitment to liberal ideals, it (theGrand Project). The imperial faith linked while far from perfect and often little more the community to the divinely anointed mon- than a cover for domination by the majority arch. But the contemporary state of affairs- culture, did at least provide a limit to raw trib- which I shall call, for want of a better term, alism and a check against centrifugal tenden- postsocialist socialism-affirms only the ab- cies. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, stract, empty identity bordered by difference, ill the lands of the former empires, the absence difference bordered by identities, a human of such powerful, countervailingideals has al- condition shown to be nothing but contin- lowed, or at least encouraged, the disintegra- gency contiguous to other contingencies. Poli- tion of nation-states along strictly ethnocul- tics and polities based upon such identities tural lines. The fatal combination of the con- can multiply indefinitely and infinitely-and tradictory principles of nation-states and of will, until a new idea of the state is found or etlu~oculturalautonomy are quickly destroy- discovered. ing the state as such. Combined in Eastern and TOrecapitulate, then: The principle of cul- Central Europe with a generalized contempt tural and territorial autonomy-a limited self- for institutions of any kind, a profound dis- government in some areas of public life with- trust of the law, and the collapse of all spiri- out pretensions to statehood, independence, tual and secular authority-and inspired by a or full sovereignty-was invented for the sake well-founded suspicion of the intentions of of reforming the crumbling supranational ethnic majorities and nationalist gov- empires before and during World War I. The ernments-ethnocultural autonomy, which principle was implemented by means of revo- seemed to have a conservative aspect in its lutionary socialism in the Soviet Union and commitment to tradition and custom, is today the Yugoslav federation and for quite a long the mightiest weapon of nil-dlism.

NATIONALISM 81 CURRENTBOOKS

Consuming Visions

LAND OF DESIRE: Merchants, Money, and looked the nearly universal human tendency the Rise of a New American Culture. By to make meaning from material objects. Goods William Leach. Pantheon. 510 pp. $30 liave always served symbolic as well as utili- tarian purposes, and advertisers' efforts to lie American critique of consumer cul- associate silverware with status or cars with ture is embedded in an honorable but sex were a recent and well-organized example T narrow tradition. From Tliorstein Veb- of a widespread cultural practice. As Tlieodor len to John Kenneth Galbraitli, Vance Packard Adorno once observed, Veblen's celebrated to Christopher Lasch, critics have assailed tlie assault on "conspicuous consumption" in so- captains of commerce for fostering an obses- cial, domestic, and religious life was really an sion with material goods and distracting tlie "attack on culture," so much of wliicli de- populace from public duty. Altl~ouglithey ar- pended on apparently frivolous display. ticulated the critique in various secular idioms, Along with this antimaterialist bias, tlie all of these observers had inherited Protestant existing critical tradition revealed other limi- commitments to plain speech, plain living, and tations as well-a distrust of fantasy and play, the independence of tlie individual self. They a productivist ethic that implicitly devalued were haunted by the vision of tlie future leisure and aesthetic experience, a failure to evoked in Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand catch tlie affinity between consumer desires Inquisitor": a docile mass society, preoccupied and ancient religious longings. The by reckless extravagance and sedated by consumer's dream world, Adorno wrote, packaged fun. bears some resemblance to tlie "land flowing A little more than a decade ago, tliat criti- with milk and honey." Only if we acknowl- cal tradition began to go out of style, among edged that resemblance could we begin to both popular and scliolarly audiences. In the understand how the promise of modern ad- summer of 1979, cultural pessimism peaked. vertising could exert such broad appeal. Dur- Soon after summoning Lasch to Camp David, ing tlie 1980s, revisionist scholars took up tlie Jimmy Carter denounced wasteful consump- challenge, avowing tlie utopian dimensions of tion habits and called for ecologically consumer culture even as they sought to main- grounded sacrifice. Not much more than a tain a critical perspective on it. year later, Carter was out of office, his warn- On one point, though, nearly everyone ings drowned out by Ronald Reagan's strate- agreed: Consumer culture emerged during the gies of systematic denial. America was back, half-century between tlie Civil War and and weekly news magazines spoke of a "re- America's entry into World War I. Only a few turn to elegancen-which mostly meant historians of the colonial period claimed to stretch limousines and suspenders for stock- liave traced its origins to an earlier time. For brokers. In academic circles, scliolars re-exani- most scholars and critics, tlie period 1865- ined tlie older critique of consumer culture and 1917 marked tlie watershed between found it wanting. Some discovered die emanc- Victorianism and modernity; the rise of na- ipatory potential in acts of consumption and tlie tional corporations selling brand-name goods creative energies in commercial pageantry. and the transformation of department stores This was more than a shift in intellectual into palaces of consumption coincided with a fashion. There were serious conceptual ques- "revolution ill manners and morals" tliat over- tions raised by social scientists such as Mary turned the ethic of fixed character and re- Douglas and Michael Scliudson.The scolding placed it with a new emphasis on fluid person- Veblenesque attack on materialism over- ality. Rooted hi these changes, a "hedonistic"

82 WQ WINTER 1994 consumer culture flowered in baseball parks, to dramatize the appeal of transparent velvet, movie theaters, and dance halls-all sites of featuring assorted models in alluring poses). the new urban-based mass amusements. Vic- The book is a remarkable achievement, an ex- torian discipline dissolved. Some lamented its traordinary synthesis of business and cultural passing, others were jubilant. history that casts new light on broad areas of Among the more influential of the cel- American commercial life. Leach documents ebrants was the historian William Leach, who an efflorescence of theatricality and exoticism, insisted that consumer culture might well especially during the years before America's have been a liberation-especially for entry into World War I. He describes spec- women-from the pinched, patriarchal world tacles designed to promote retail commerce, of rural republican virtue, and that the secu- ranging from Jolm Wanamaker's lush tableau lar utopian faith was not entirely false. Leach vivaiite from The Garden of Allah, a steamy sen- was fascinated by the joie de vivre of the lavish timental novel of 1904, to the opening of the department-store spec- Coconut Grove tacles staged during the nightclub in 1917. All early 20th century, and the spectacular dis- entranced by the imagi- plays, all the color native new uses of color, and light and glass, glass, and light in store are here in abun- design. Like the old con- dance. fessor envisioning the But they are ac- amusement park lights companied by a de- in F. Scott Fitzgerald's tailed account of the "Absolution," Leach be- "circuits of power" came convinced that that lay behind and things had gone "a- energized the spec- glimmerin' " in the met- tacle-the network of ropolitan commercial moneyed men who landscape of the early set up the credit ap- 20th century. And like paratus for entrepre- the boy in the story, neurs as well as con- Leach came to believe sumers, who fi- that "there was some- nanced the expansion tiling ineffably gorgeous of retail chains, who that had nothing to do fixed things with the with God." each appeared poised to make a relevant government officials. ~avinguncov- major case for the emancipatory potential of ered this nest of investment bankers, real-es- consumer culture, based primarily on the car- tate brokers, and politicians, Leach is unable nivalesque qualities of the urban retail scene. to sustain lus enthusiasm for the emancipatory potential of consumer culture. On the con- ow, Leach's Land of Desire has ap- trary, lie asserts that "the culture of consumer peared. It is the fruit of a decade's capitalism may have been among the most worth of digging in archives, librar- nonconsens~~alpublic cultures ever created," ies, and private collections, of interviewing re- because it was produced by elites rather than tired department-store buyers such as Dor- the population as a whole, and because "it othy Shaver (who became president of Lord & raised to the fore only one vision of the good Taylor) and public relations counselors such life and pushed out all others." as Edward Bernays (who staged media events That vision pervaded religion, literature,

BOOKS 83 and tlie arts as well as commercial life. It corn- from tlie former. Thus he scants the car- bined a commitment to ceaseless acquisition nivalesque elements in 19th-century com- with a smiley-face view of human fate. It was merce-the exoticism and theatricality, tlie no accident tliat L. Frank Bauni was tlie author protuberant flesh and gaping orifices, just as of both The Art of Shop- Window Display and The he neglects the puritanical elements in 20th- Wizard of Oz, Leach claims; tlie latter book century management-the preoccupation embodied tlie sanitized religion of mind-cure with personal efficiency, witli systematic con- and positive thinking that seemed to suit con- trol of one's self and environment. Tensions sumer culture. Oz, as Baum saw it, was "a between release and control persisted modernized fairy tale, in which tlie wonder- throughout tlie 19th century and into the 20t11, merit and joy are retained and tlie heartaches but the idioms used to orchestrate harmony and nightmares are left out." Tlie same could shifted from moral to managerial. Tlie funda- be said for tlie world of pure wish that depart- mental process, though, remained tlie same. ment-store magnates fashioned to entice One might call it tlie containment of carnival. adults as well as children. In the 1890s as in. the 1980s, a strategy of cheery and systematic de- uropean carnival tradition celebrated nial obscured the destructive underside of the temporary upending of social au- ever-expanding consumption-the sweated E thority amid an overflow of sausages, labor tliat produced tlie elegant lace, tlie neigh- wine, sex, and aggression. By tlie 1600s tlie borhoods cleared to create new "business op- carnival was merging with tlie market fair, a portunities.'' congregation of peddlers, acrobats, musicians, Leach has abandoned any sympathy for and traveling scoundrels; in such a setting, lii- consumer culture and returned to tlie critical erarchies were not so much overturned as dis- tradition lie once rejected. What lie does from solved amid the centrifugal movements of tlie within that framework is often most impres- throng. Although in market fairs as well as . sive, as when lie writes that the consumer capi- carnivals tlie dissolution was temporary, both talist "conception of the desiring self" requires venues may have provided a frisson,a sense of rejection of the most desirable capacities of fluid selfliood and awakened possibilities for human beings: "their ability to commit tlieni- personal transformation. Exotic goods-jew- selves, to establish binding relationships, to elry, silks, spices, fragrances, and elixirs- sink permanent roots, to maintain continuity might seem to possess an ahnost magically re- with previous generations, to remember, to generative power, to promise a transfiguration make ethical judgments, to seek pleasure in of everyday identity. As market exchange work, to remain steadfast in behalf of principle spilled over boundaries of time and place, the and loyal to community or country (to tlie magic of goods was unmoored from tradi- degree that community or country strives to tional animistic frameworks and set afloat be just and fair), to seek spiritual transcen- amid a society of mobile, shape-s1-uftuig selves. dence beyond the self, and to fight a cause In tlie United States, these developments through to tlie end." This is a moral critique took place later and faster than in Europe. The tliat, however familiar, remains necessary arid point men of capitalist modenization were the eloquent. itinerant peddlers who swarmed across the Nevertheless, Leach's framework could countryside tliroughout tlie 19th century, sell- have been more capacious, both liistorically ing exotic finery as well as utilitarian items, and conceptually. The main historical problem bringing tlie carnivalesque pronuse of magi- is that Leach clings to a dualistic scheme, jux- cal self-transformationin a bit of silk, a pair of taposing 19th-century producer culture witli earrings, or a regenerative patent medicine. 20th-century consumer culture, assuming that But in the United States, as in Europe, estab- the latter marked a fundamental departure lished elites sensed the need to stabilize tlie

84 WQ WINTER 1994 sorcery of the marketplace, to control the cen- and female ideal body types remade on slim- trifugal movements of commercial culture. mer, more youthful, and more uniformly Institutional remedies such as peddler licens- Anglo-Saxon models, but exotic settings faded ing laws, the growth of credit reporting, and in favor of the bland and the familiar-the the enforcement of contractual obligations soda fountain and the suburban neighbor- were supplemented by a morality of self-con- hood. Yet to preserve some semblance of vi- trol and plain dealing; all of these measures tality, advertisements had to seek out and in- were designed to counteract chaotic economic corporate vestiges of spontaneity and excite- expansion and a flourishing subculture of sen- ment in the popular arts. One example of this suality-to contain the carnival of American strategy was the use of comic-strip formats in commerce. the 1930s. The comics had been a boisterous By 1900, new structures of containment product of urban commercial culture, bursting had appeared. The reorganization of the with burlesque humor and barely suppressed economy under the dominance of major cor- rage, sometimes rising to a vernacular surre- porations brought bureaucratic rationality to alist art form-as in Winsor McCay's "Little commercial institutions; a new managerial cul- Nemo." Advertisers appropriated comic ture recast the morality of self-control in a forms and shackled them to leaden, didactic, secular, pragmatic idiom. Rather than plod and ultimately self-parodic narratives about along a path of disciplined, steady work, am- lonely girls triumphing over b.0. and soiled bitious young managers were urged to culti- underwear to win the hearts of their hypercriti- vate a more demanding regime of personal ef- cal husbands-to-be. This was the dominant ficiency. The "chief end of man," psychologist pattern in managerial advertising-the con- G. Stanley Hall announced in 1920, "is to keep tainment of carnivalesque fantasy with literal- ourselves, body and soul, always at the very ist realism. tip-top of condition." The emerging perfor- mance ethic evoked metaphors of electricity: et the carnival was still in town, in the the "live wire" provided the "vital spark" that retail shopping districts. Leach dem- kept the "whole system" humming. Such lan- Y onstrates this with abundant descrip- guage captured the managerial emphasis on tions of Orientalist fantasies enacted in restau- dynamic energy subordinated to a smoothly rant murals and Turkish harems set up in shop functioning, ever-growing corporate economy. windows. It was as if all the exoticism of 19th- century commercial culture, having been et economic growth could not be se- largely excluded from the official iconography cured by managerial controls alone. of corporate capitalism (national advertising), Y As Simon Nelson Patten (whom had survived and flourished in retail stores, Leach discusses) and other economists began restaurants, and movie theaters. Perhaps this to understand, the avoidance of periodic cri- was partly because the managerial culture was ses induced by overproduction required the overwhelmingly WASP, and the retail trade maintenance of a mass-consumer market. more heavily Jewish.Whatever the reason, the Somehow even lumbering oligopolies had to distinction underscores some of the fault lines sustain the aura of variety and unpredictabil- between economic elites, and suggests that ity that had attracted people to the market- consumer culture was hardly monolithic. place since the great 16th-century fairs of Yet even on the retail side, the impulse Leipzig and London. toward rationalization was at work. As Leach The carnival atmosphere had to be perceptively observes, during the 1920s John evoked, but also sanitized and controlled. In Powers' modeling agency (and others like it) national advertising the sanitizing pattern be- promoted a "standardized conception of fe- came clear by the 1920s. Not only were male male beauty" and "freed . . . modeling from its

BOOKS 85 to work, Patten believed, tlie glittering world of goods would be tlie carrot tliat kept the worker showing up every day, seeking more money to buy more things. It was as if Patten foresaw tlie implicit bargain tliat would be struck between labor and manage- ment during tlie late 1930s, die bargain tliat formed the basis for tlie triumph of American con- sumer culture during tlie midcentury decades: steady work and a family wage in ex- change for restricted union association witli loose, off-color theatrical demands and labor discipline. living . . . by connecting it with 'naturalness,' Now business lias abandoned that bar- and 'the all-American way.' " This was tlie sort gain and fled overseas in search of cheaper of shift that was also occurring in national ad- labor. The institutional base of consumer cul- vertising. An even clearer illustration was tlie ture, a well-paid working population, lias be- transformation of Macy's Thanksgiving pa- gun to crumble. rade, which began as one of the "ragamuffin For tlie first time in decades, we have tlie parades" tliat were "probably rooted in Euro- opportunity to think about alternatives. The pean traditions of carnival," Leach observes. productivist tradition needs to be opened up Macy's replaced this undisciplined gathering and rendered more flexible. We need to re- of tlie people out of doors with a clean, well- alize tliat tlie problem witli consumer culture managed spectacle of technological display- is not materialism, but anti~naterialism:a gargantuan, helium-filled Katzenjammer tendency, tlirougli the promotion of planned Kids, Santa Clauses arriving by airplane and obsolescence and stylistic novelty, to discon- zeppelin: a foreshadowing of the theme park nect human beings from sustained, sensu- fun of tlie late 20th century. ous connection witli tlie natural or manmade The fundamental pattern of 20th-century world. And we need to revive an anthropo- consumer culture, at least at the level of na- logical perspective on tlie cultural meanings tional advertisers and big-ticket retailers, lias of goods, a recognition tliat material arti- been the effort to conjure up the promise of facts can acquire symbolic, even sacranien- unpredictability, excitement, and magic- tal meaning-not merely as status markers while at the same time subordinating that but as bonds between past and present, promise to a broader agenda of control. In- memory and desire. deed, as Simon Patten realized, tlie successful maintenance of equilibrium in tlie "economy -Jackson Lears, a former Wilson Center Fel- of abundance" required a balance between low, is a professor of history at Riitgers Uni- routinized work and consumption-dominated versity. His book on advertising and culture leisure. Far from undermining commitments will be published next fall by Basic Books.

86 WQ WINTER 1994 Paranoia Unbound

DEEP POLITICS AND THE DEATH OF JFK. This figure includes some who toil in the By Peter Dale Scott. Uniu. of Calif. Press. 413 pp. $25 halls of academe. Among the plethora of new CASE CLOSED: Lee Harvey Oswald and the offerings on the 30th anniversary of the assas- Assassination of JFK. By Gerald Posner. Random sination is Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by House. 607 pp. $25 Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at the WHO SHOT JFK?: A Guide to the Major University of California at Berkeley. In one Conspiracy Theories. By Bob Callahan. Fireside. sense, there is nothing remarkable about this 159 pp. $12 work. Indeed, its outstanding characteristics put it squarely in the tradition of most books t is instructive to contrast the mythology about the assassination. Deep Politics is an un- surrounding the assassination of Presi- readable compendium of "may haves" and I dent John F. Kennedy with the public 'might haves," non sequiturs, and McCarthy- and scholarly attitudes toward Japan's attack style innuendo, with enough documentation on Pearl Harbor-the other "flashbulb event to satisfy any paranoid. The assassination, that seared America's collective memory. Like Scott writes (in typically opaque prose), was the assassination of Kennedy, the surprise at- "the product of ongoing relationships and tack was the subject of an executive branch in- processes within the deep American political vestigation followed by congressional hear- process." What is this deep process? A virtual ings. As with the assassination, explanations political Disneyland: the CIA, drug dealers, based on conspiracy have dogged the official Somoza, Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, story about Pearl Harbor. (The latest accusa- Oliver North. And that's just from two pages. tion surfaced only three years ago.) The manuscript apparently went unpub- But distortions of the record and ques- lished for years, and one is mightily tempted tionable logic have always helped relegate to say that it should have remained so. As- Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories to the politi- toundingly, though, the book won the major- cal fringes; the official story remains intact. The ity approval of the 20 professors, including phenomena surrounding the JFK assassinstion four historians, who served on the University could not present a starker contrast. Here the of California's editorial committee in 1991-92. passage of time has only heightened public To understand the JFK phenomenon, it disbelief in the official account of the assassination, com- monly known as the Warren Report. After the Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964, a Gallup poll indicated that 56 percent of Americans believed the report's main finding: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was President Ken- nedy's assassin. Today, how- ever, approximately 90 per- cent of the public believes there was some kind of con- spiracy to kill JFK.

BOOKS 87 helps to revisit the classic lecture "The Para- one can hda conspiracy theory for practically noid Style in American Politics," delivered at every contingency and political belief: The Oxford 30 years ago by Columbia University Mafia did it; Robert Kennedy did; Jackie was historian Richard Hofstadter (and published in upset because her husband had extramarital a book of essays by the same title in 1965).The affairs, so she did it. The KGB, Cubans (both most prominent qualities of the paranoid style, anti- and pro-Castro), the CIA and/or FBI, according to Hofstadter, are "heated exaggera- right-wing Texas oilmen, tsarist Russians, tion, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." rocket scientist Wernher von Braun-and on Propagators don't see conspiracies or plots the zany list goes. The "friendly fire" theory here and there in history; they regard "a 'vast' holds that a Secret Service agent riding in the or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in limousine behind JFK fired the fatal shots, by historical events." To be sure, as Hofstadter accident. And apparently the latest trend noted, the paranoid style isn't unique to among conspiracy theorists is to bash one an- America. Witness Germany under Hitler or other for believing in the wrong conspiracy. the Soviet Union under Stalin, where it actu- ally came to power. But it is an old and recur- ommentators usually ascribe the ring mode of expression in American public public's paranoia to the disturbing life, as evinced by the anti-Masonic movement events that followed Kennedy's mur- in the 1820s, the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, der:c Vietnam, other assassinations, Watergate, Populists' claims about an international bank- exposure of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1970s, ing conspiracy in the 1900s, and Senator Joe and finally the Iran-contra scandal, all of wluch McCarthy's "immense conspiracy" of the undermined Americans' trust in their elected 1950s. Purveyors often feel threatened by government. But a more complicated argu- sweeping change, whether it be waves of new ment can be made. The assassination and its immigrants or a revolution in the economic aftermath have never been firmly integrated order. At other times, they articulate an acute into their place and time, largely because of sense of dispossession, such as that felt by the Cold War exigencies. Consequently, Ameri- far Right from the 1930s into the early 1950s. cans have neither fully understood nor come Although the Kennedy conspiracy choir to grips with the past. has some voices on the Right, the great pre- But the assassination is very much a part ponderance of books (450 since 1963) and ar- of the Cold War, an unintended consequence ticles (tens of thousands) have been written of U.S. policies. And once bolted down, it from the liberal/left perspective. Factual dis- ceases to be unfathomable and becomes an- putes have much less to do with this than one other defining post-World War I1 event, as might think. "Catastrophe . . . is most likely to much as Vietnam or the Cuban missile crisis. elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric," In a letter to the Nezu York Times last year, Hofstadter wrote. And putting aside venal William Manchester, author of Death of a Presi- reasons, clearly the liberal/left outpouring is dent, identified the key source of the public's related to its sense of political dispossession incomprehension: since 1963. (Democrats were out of power for 20 of the next 30 years.) Indeed, every wrong in America is considered traceable to the presi- To employ what may seem an odd meta- phor, there is an esthetic principle here. dency that was aborted and the future that If you put six million dead Jews on one died on November 22,1963. side of a scale and on the other side put Still, what is markedly different about this the Nazi regimethe greatest gang of phenomenon from previous manifestations of criminals ever to seize control of a mod- paranoia is that the distrust is so deep and ern state-you have a rough balance: pervasive. Glancing through Wzo Shot JFK? greatest crime, greatest criminals.

88 WQ WINTER 1994 But if you put the murdered presi- the covert operations to remove Castro. Such dent of the United States on one side of information, the agencies reasoned, would not a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on contradict the central conclusion and therefore the other side, it doesn't balance. You could be, and was, kept secret. Consequently, want to add something weightier to the Warren Report depicted Oswald as acting Oswald. It would invest the president's upon inchoate feelings (compounded by mari- death with meaning, endowing him with martvrdom. He would have died for tal troubles) but without acute political mo- something. tives. A conspiracy would, of course, do Twelve years later, however, Senator the job nicely. Frank Church's select committee on intelli- gence revealed the extent of anti-Castro plot- Actually, though, Oswald carries more ting and the fact that the CIA and FBI had lied weight than Americans have dared admit to by omission to another arm of government. themselves. As the Warren Report showed This shattered whatever trust remained in the and Gerald Posner, a former Wall Street law- official story and ripped the lid off a Pandora's yer, reiterates in Case Closed, Oswald was a box of conspiracy theories. A slightly highly politicized Marxist sociopath. Disap- amended version of the official story should pointed with Soviet-style communism, he re- have become the new dogma by the late 1970s: turned to the United States in June 1962 and The Kennedys' fixation with Castro had inad- began to see Cuba as the purest embodiment vertently motivated a political sociopath. In- of communist ideology, the only truly revolu- stead, the disturbing truths were again obfus- tionary state: In New Orleans, he started his cated by Cold War exigencies, and by own "Fair Play for Cuba" chapter and walked Kennedy partisans, who tried to disavow JFK the streets with a "Viva Fidel" placard. and RFK's knowledge of the plots. Oswald, who fervently read left-wing periodicals and monitored Radio Havana, he 30th anniversary of the assassina- was acutely aware of the depth and nature of tion, especially since it coincided with U.S. hostility toward Cuba. In all likelihood, he T the end of the Cold War, should have believed the worst rumors of U.S. attempts to been marked by attempts to integrate the as- overthrow-even assassinateÑCastroinfor- sassination into history. Of all the offerings, mation that was later kept from the Warren Posner's Case Closed would seem the most Commission. After leaving New Orleans, suitable. But though Posner exhaustively de- Oswald tried to obtain a visa to Cuba to enlist bunks every canard proposed to date about in the country's defense. But the Cuban em- the assassination, he largely ignores the con- bassy failed to see him as a "friend of Cuba," textual history of Oswald's act and provides and he returned to Dallas, embittered. little more insight than the Warren Comrnis- sion did as to why Kennedy became Oswald's month later, Kennedy came to town. target. In addition, Posner's stamina fails him The opportunity to subject Kennedy when he writes about events after 1964, and A to the same dangers plaguing Castro the aftermath is almost as important in under- presented itself. As Posner writes, Oswald, standing the assassination now as the act itself. who had failed at almost everything he tried, (In his new biography, President Kennedy: Pro- "was suddenly faced with the possibility of file of Power, Richard Reeves doesn't shrink having a much greater impact on history." from depicting Kennedy as a Cold Warrior, Jack Ruby was equally emotional, violent, and intent on overthrowing Castro. Yet he fails to opportunistic, though not political. draw any connections to the assassination; Because of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI indeed, Oswald is not even mentioned in the did not inform the Warren Commission about book.)

BOOKS 89 So long as it lacks historical coherence, tlie what might have been, or indulge in elaborate official story will probably never be believed, paranoid fantasies about their own govern- and Americans will continue to ask questions ment. Such states of mind hardly conduce to based on cunningly manufactured falsehoods. a rational consideration of America's role in a To be sure, every nation is sustained by its new world. own myths, which occasionally collide with reality. But when myths are as divorced from -Max Holland, a contributing editor of the reality as these are, they become dangerous. WQand a former Wilson Center Fellow, is Americans are encouraged to feel nostalgia for writing a biography of John McCloy, a ti~eni- a past that never was, wax dreamily about ber of the Warren Commission.

His toy around tlie simple notion that seeking God, or seeking an overarching meaning to tlie universe A HISTORY OF GOD: The 4,000-Year Quest under whatever name, is just one of those things of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. By Karen that human beings do. As many times as the n-iono- Ar11isfro;ig.Knopf. 460 pp. $27.50 theistic idea disappointsthem or fails to accord witli events,humans come back with yet another varia- Armstrong's sweeping history of tlie idea of God tion to bring their God into conformity witli is something of a hybrid. Parts of it read like what they've learned. This process has given rise philosophy and theology; parts might best be to an endless oscillation between conceptions described as the history of human psychology. such as the serenely impersonal God of Ari- The book as a whole reflects the experiences of stotle-unmoved mover at tlie top of the liierar- its author, who, she tells us, spent seven disap- chy of forms, existing in tlie state of divine and pointing years as a Roman Catholic nun, lost lier ~uvegardmgapnfheiatoward tlie Creation-and the faith, left tlie order, and turned to tlie study of tlie personalized deity in such forms as Jesus. history of religion. Today, she teaches at a rab- Much of this is familiar, though it becomes binical institute and is affiliated with the Asso- less so once Armstrong traces tlie same patterns ciation of Muslim Social Scientists. into the rationalist and nystic movements that Armstrong organizes lier sprawling material followed the emergence of Islam. "Just as there are

90 WQ WINTER 1994 only a given number of themes in love poetry," she mally constituted as a party-fell to brawling argues, "so too people have kept saying the same among themselves. By 1800 the nation's two things about God over and over again." leading Federalists were openly at odds, with The image is of a constant systole and diastole Adams disdaining the very idea of party and of belief: The monotheistic vision, wlde exercising Alexander Hamilton violently slandering what appears to be an irresistible draw on the Adams for "vanity without bounds," among imaginations of people born with a certain "spiri- other real and imagined defects. But Elkins and tual talent," is just abstract enough to be exceed- McKitrick, historians at Smith College and Co- ingly difficult to maintain. Slippage recurs in sev- lumbia University, respectively, argue that eral directions: toward idolatry, the reduction of deeper historical forces were undermining the God or God's will to some person or small part of Federalist cause. Seeking to extend into the post- the ideal; toward the antl~opomorplusi~~that fi- Revolutionary era the historical interpretation of nally makes it difficult to see the divinity as a Be- the American "mentality" begun by Bernard ing of a radically different order of existence from Bailyn in The Ideological Origi~tsof the American oneself; or, the opposite danger, toward the Pla- Revolution (1967) and lately enlarged by Gordon tonic idealism that becomes so remote that people Wood's Radicalism of the Ai1iericai1 Revolufion cease to apply human standardsof decency or logic (1992), they argue that changing "modes of to what's seen as God-inspired. As for the future, thought and feeling" in America during these Armstrong suggests, "The antl~ropomorpl~ic years rendered the Federalist idea unworkable. idea of God as Lawgiver and Ruler is not ad- That idea was a similar but more partisan equate to the temper of postmodernity." version of the Founding Fathers' vision of a so- Though the tone veers occasionally, as here, ciety ruled by men. of "enlightened views and toward the peremptory, the author surely is en- virtuous sentiments." It was a vision that could titled to a few wobbles in the course of writing accommodate neither the rise of new wealth and 400 pages on the (by definition) inexpressible. the political interests it generated nor the arrival The compendium hangs together because of her and integration of immigrants, especially the unfailing warmth of appreciation for the human Irish. It left 110 room for the rise of political par- phenomena she records: the steady pull toward ties. It was a vision, in short, that was spectacu- the "particularly difficult virtue" of compassion larly unsuited to democratic politics, and espe- and the continual "shock of human surprise and cially to the clash of interests and parties in the wonder" that anything should exist at all. commercial republic then aborning. (James Mad- ison, the chief author and defender of the Consti- tution, thus slufted to the Republican camp.) THE AGE OF FEDERALISM: The Early As the authors show, the Alien and Sedition American Republic, 1788-1800. By Stanley Laws of 1798, one of the Federalists' most dra- Elkins and Eric McKifrick. Oxford Univ. Press. matic blunders, amounted to little more than a 925 pp. $39.95 desperate attempt to stamp out the practice of politics. Under these laws, the Federalists in 1799 I11 the annals of political catastrophe, it is hard had John Fries and other rather meek German to top the story of the Federalists. From the com- tax protesters in Pennsylvania dragged from manding heights of American politics after the their homes in the middle of the night and tried ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the Fed- on charges of treason before what was virtually eralists plunged to nearly complete oblivion 12 a kangaroo court. Fries was saved from the gal- years later with the election of the Republicans' lows the next year only by John Adains's pardon, Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. which the president granted over the angry pro- The Federalists' collapse undoubtedly owed tests of his ow11 cabinet. But the Federalists lost much to their uncanny knack for the political the once-solid support of the Germans and with boner. Even before the brilliant and irascible it the entire state of Pennsylvania. So it went for John Adams succeeded George Washington as the Federalists in case after casein seeking an president in 1797, the Federalists-never for- active federal government and a standing army,

BOOKS 91 and in opposing the French Revolution, they ism in America meant that it never developed lu- proved to be hopelessly out of step wit11 the tunes. erarchical political and social cultures. But Ellis Unfortunately, this argument about the de- finds a great deal of hierarchy in American so- cline of the Federalists is really one of two books cial life: among Virginia's Anglican gentry, struggling to emerge from the roughly tluee and among 19th-centuryNew England Federalists, ill a half pounds of smallish print here. The other the civil-service reform movement of the late 19th is a conventional survey of the period, and both century, and, of course, in the system of slavery. books suffer from their cohabitation between the Armed with new data and theories on race same covers. Oddly, something that would have and class, scholars have been attacking the con- greatly enhanced both, an extended discussion sensus theory with some success since the 1960s. of the economic and demographic forces that re- Ellis brings a new lustorical/antlxropological di- shaped the country during the Federalist years, mension to this campaign. Unfortunately, the is missing. A delightful chapter-long digression framework he proposes is somewhat strained.He on the siting and construction of the new na- occasionally ignores the complexity of historical tional capital, which itself contains digressions figures and movements, and seems perplexed on matters such as the Egyptian hieroglyph for when they don't fit neatly into his pigeonholes. "city," is typical of the book's charms. Read as a 'Paine's credo was 'question authority' and kind of Federalist era omnibus, it succeeds. Madison's was 'check authority,'" he writes, citing Madison's success at limiting executive authority in the Constitution. But look harder: Madison's AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURES. By original draft, known as the Virginia Plan, pro- Richard Ellis. Oxford Univ. Press. 251 pp. $45 vided for a truly powerful national executive and a congress that could veto state legislation. Whatever else may be said about it, revisionism is What Ellis inadvertently shows is that there scholarslup's one dependable growth industry. 17as always been a consensus:a consensus of con- Elhs, a listory-minded political scientist, here offers tradictory attitudes. Americans-the People a new critique of Louis Hark's decades-old "con- of Paradox, as Michael Kam~nenput it 20 years sensus theory." According to that much-attacked ago-have agreed to disagree. Of course, how the theory, political and social disagreements in country has been able to live with antithetical America occur within the dominant and largely beliefs without ripping apart at the seams re- unchallenged framework of liberal capitalism. mains the unanswered question. Ellis urges historians to cast aside Hartz and consider the more capacious model of anthro- pologist Mary Douglas. While consensus schol- Arts & Letters ars deem competitive individualism the defin- ing aspect of the American social and political THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY: The experience, Douglas finds it to be one of five Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling. By "competing cultural biases." The other four are Diana Trilling. Harcourt Brace. 442 pp. $24.95 hierarchical collectivism, egalitarianism, fatal- ism, and "hermitude." (That's three more "isms" Long before his death in 1975, Lionel Trilling- and one more "tude," for those keeping score.) University Professor at Columbia and perhaps Ellis finds challenges to competitive individu- the most distinguished literary critic in America- alism everywhere: in Puritan New England, with was a distant figure. It was widely believed that he its strong group orientation and orthodox cornmu- had refined himself out of existence. If Morn- nity rules that limited individual autonomy; in ingside Heights were England, one ex-student the socialist utopian communities of the mid- griped, he would have been known as "Profes- 19th century; in Jane Addams's Hull House, sor Sir Lionel Trilling." When he spoke of human which, as Addams said, provided "little islands consciousness, he characteristically dropped the of affectionin the vast sea of impersonal forces." definite article and addressed himself directly to Louis Hark believed that the absence of feudal- "mind," as if it were a downstairs neighbor.

92 WQ WINTER 1994 Lionel Trilling did not want to be remem- Diana Trilling concludes her memoir in 1950, bered this way, Diana Trilling claims, and, the year her husband established lus reputation thanks to lier memoir, lie won't be any longer. wit11 the publication of Jlw Liberal Imogimfioiz. hi the The Lionel Trilling who appears here is a sym- preface to tliat book, lie wrote tliat tlie "job of criti- pathetic, troubled, and coniplex man who was cism" is to "recall liberalism to its essential in-iagi- prone to bouts of depression and harbored a nation of variousness and possibility, wlucli im- secret contempt for "seriousness and responsi- plies tlie awareness of complexity and difficulty." bility." Like her liusband, Diana lierself hid "pri- These words were Trilluig's touclistones, his credo, vate timidities" beneath a confident and magis- and lie did not choose tliem hastily. terial public persona. Some of tlie exquisitely crafted ambivalences In this intimate, plainspoken memoir, Diana of The Liberal Imapi17afio11were experienced, his unflinchingly records tlie Trillings' illnesses and wife's memoir shows, as niessy and intractable phobias, as well as their faithful drinking habits contradictions. The man who always said, "It's (tliey were "never wholly sober" in each other's more complicated . . . ," was quite complicated company before tlieir marriage), clironic indebt- himself. Among other things, Diana Trilling's edness (wliicli lasted until 1970), and internii- book will forever silence those critics who charge nable adventures in psyclioanalysis (three of lier that her liusband led a life of airy abstraction. seven analysts died wlde tliey were treating lier). She lierself is proof to the contrary. The book has much wit, and little mirth. "For more tlian a decade," she writes, "Lionel and I squan- dered life not in pleasure but in fearfulness." MARK MORRIS. By Joan Acocella. Farrar, Considering tlieir low opinion of happiness, it Sfraiis. 287 pp. $27.50 appears their marriage was quite happy. Diana lent lier liusband confidenceand improved his writing. By the early 1980s American modern dance had Yet even as Lionel encouraged lier to develop an strayed far from its originators' intentions. independent public voice, she never doubted that Isadora Duncan's turn-of-the-century Grecian her "fast responsibility" was to die home. It was an improvisations and Martha Graham's n~idcen- unequal partnerslup,but a partnerslup all the same. tury expressionistic dramas had given way dur- As a female writer starting out in tlie 1940s, ing tlie '60s and '70s to conceptualist clioreogra- Diana overcame many obstacles, not tlie least of pliers' theater pieces: concerts staged on spiral tliem a Radcliffe education designed to teach staircases; musicless pieces in wliicli tlie dancers diligent wives how to recite "favorite poems of spoke; whole evenings in wlucli "real" people Shelley or Keats" while "drying our dishes." nondancers-stooped, sat, and ran. Altliougli Wlien slie began to contribute book reviews to modern dance liad always puzzled tlie unin- The Nation, Lionel's friends insisted slie write itiated, it liad become too self-absorbed to notice under lier maiden name so as not to embarrass that tlie audience was losing interest. him in public. She refused, and lier writing ca- But dance watchers stirred in 1984, when a 27- reer quickly acquired a momentum of its own. year-old choreographer named Mark Morris Her first reviews skewered the "little man" lie- presented tliree new works at tlie Brooklyn roes of left-wing novelists and challenged their Academy of Music. Morris was not "in-your- faulty assumption tliat "capitalism was respon- face," not even avant-garde; lie eschewed the use sible for all tlie woes of mankind, from stutter- of theatrical tricks to create visual interest. As ing to sexual impotence." Wlien Lionel Trilling dance critic Joan Acocella writes in lier new bi- wrote of the "dark and bloody crossroads" ography, "His work is not a Happening.. . . where literature and politics meet, lie may have There is no effort to break down tlie fourth wall.'' had his wife's work in mind. Prone to sudden Morris's goal, instead, is to communicate feeling, panics and fears, though, she pursued a life of logic, and emotion through dance steps. As he diffidence and caution: "I could more readily puts it, "My pliilosopliy of dance? I make it up, challenge Sidney Hook in political debate tlian and you watch it. End of pliilosopliy." defend my place in line at a supermarket." Now 36 and still actively clioreograpliing-

BOOKS 93 indeed, perhaps just entering lus artistic prime WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN Morris may seem not quite ready for the confin- HISTORY. By Joel Williamson. Oxford Univ. Press. ing entombment of a biography. Yet given tliat 509 pp. $35 Acocella credits Morris witli rescuing American modern dance from minimalist torpor, an explo- "History," says tlie young Stephen Dedalus in ration of liis methods may not be premature. James Joyce's epic Ulysses, "is a nightmare from An exceptionally talented dancer liimself- wliicli I am trying to awake." One can also imag- though tall and beefy, lie achieves a simulta- ine William Faulkner uttering such a lament neous playfulness and seriousness, massiveness about liis troubled cultural and liistorical lieri- and graceMorris soon became frustrated with tage. Unlike Dedalus, Faulkner was neither an the artifice of ballet ("[I] got tired of pretending escapist-lie rarely left liis native Mississippi- to be a straight guy in love witli a ballerina") and nor an idealist. Indeed, Faulkner's love for and tlie sl~ortsiglitednessof modern dance. In 1980 loyalty to tlie American South, the region he lie formed his own company and set to creating wrote about so obsessively, was tempered by a dances tliat unabashedly hearken back to the work strong sense of its failings: its ignorance, poverty, of modern dance's founders: the naturalism of and racism. Faulkner's literature, writes Duncan, the exoticism of Ruth St. Denis, tlie lonely Williamson, was "an exhaustive critique of inner landscapes of Graham, tlie exaltation of Soutl~ernSociety and . . . its failure to bring tlie Doris Humphrey, tlie heroism of Jose Lini6n. human values inherent in man, evident in the Yet Morris's choreography is distinguished from natural setting, into tlie world." 1Iis predecessors' by three traits [hat are strongly as- In his new biograpliy, Williamson, a profes- sodated with ballet and usually considered anatli- sor of history at the University of North Carolina, ema to modem. First, lie is not afraid to make dances examines four generations of Faulkner's prede- that tell stories. His inspirations range from pop cessors in Mississippi-William himself does novelist Anne Rice's Interoieiv with the Vampire to not appear until page 141-and tlirougli these the essays of Roland Bartlies. Second,Morris under- lives constructs a detailed liistorical image of stands music as well as lie understands dance. Al- "tlie world which constructed William tl~ouglilie favors baroque choral music, 1Iis tastes Faulkner . . . the universe of race, class, sex and range from Vivaldi to die Violent Femmes. Third, violence, of family, clan and community." In- Morris favors "classical" structure over ostensible quiring into whether Faulkner's great-grandfa- (or real) randomness. He's a sucker for symmetry ther, Colonel William C. Falkner, maintained a and doesn't worry, like the generation of choreog- "shadow family" (an unacknowledged marriage raphers before him, about coordinating his dance to and children witli a female slave), Willia~nsoii steps note by note with tlie music. provides an enlivening liistorical explanation of The source of Morris's appeal-itself subject miscegenation in the South, a central theme in to wide debate in tlie dance world-lies in liis Faulkner's literature. synthesis of existing steps, and in his accessibil- Altliougl~ Joseph Blotner's two-volume, ity, whether that accessibility is provided by a 2,000-page biograpliy of Faulkner, published in tragic story line, a witty costume, or a gesture that 1974 and revised in 1984, remains the most coni- means wliat it looks like. preliensive biographical source available, Unfortunately, Mark Morris as book is less ac- Williamson's tenacious sleutl~ingyields an occa- cessible than Mark Moms as choreographer. Some- sional nugget of fresh information for tlie serious times simphstically descriptive, at others tlie book Faulkner scholar. He debunks many commonly presumes the reader's familiarity with ballet tenni- held myths about Colonel Falkner: for instance, nology. Still, tlie clioreograplier emerges as fever- that lie was a great slavel~oldingplanter and that ishly creative, exuberantly ambitious, and disami- his wife Lizzie saved his life when she was only ingly vulnerable. It's too soon to tell if Mark Morris nine years old. Yet Williamson indulges in a bit is the savior of American modern dance, but of niytlimaking himself. One theory regarding Acocella's biograpliy offers an early glimpse of grandfather Charlie Butler's abrupt departure wliat may be a resuscitation in progress. that lie ran off wit11 an "octaroon" (someoneone-

94 WQ WINTER 1994 eighth black) and sired "perhaps three or four children who would have been William Faulkner's co~isins"-is so speculative that it is written under the qualifying section title "Maybe." Moreover, in his determination to find Faulkner's one and only literary inspiration in the culture of the American South, Williamson does not leave open the possibility that Faulkner was greatly influenced by other sources, notably liis artistic contemporaries-Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce. And Williamson's inter- pretation of Faulkner's literary texts often passes from the banal to the trite, with insights such as fought hard for nothing of importance. "The "buildings stood for artificial, man-made insti- agenda was a nonagenda," writes Kolb. tutions and the 'outdoors' for the natural order." Kolb lodges the standard Republican com- Nevertheless, the book is a valuable deinon- plaint against Bush: He wrecked his presidency stration of what the cultural historian can con- because he broke his promise. The "110 new tribute to literary interpretation. While William taxes" pledge was just campaign rhetoric. Busli Faulkner never read books about Southern his- might have recovered from this blunder after the tory, lie once noted that "he was just saturated Persian Gulf War by launching an attack 011 do- with it." So too was liis art. mestic problems with innovative proposals such as school choice and tort reform. But he decided to coast along 011 saved-up political capital. The Contempora y Affairs enormous egos of Chief of Staff John Suiiuii~~ and Budget Director Richard Darmaii only made WHITE HOUSE DAZE: The Unmaking of matters worse, Kolb claims. Both men unfail- Domestic Policy in the Bush Years. By Charles ingly blocked creative reform efforts. Kolb. Free Press. 387 pp. $22.95 The Busli administration's paralysis is 011 full HELL OF A RIDE: Backstage at the White display in Kolb's best chapter, which focuses on House Follies 1989-1993. By John Podhoretz. a single day, December 12,1990.On that day, the Simon & Schuster. 249 pp. $21 administration had to confront three small cri- ses: the poorly handled firing of Secretary of As George Bush's presidency recedes into politi- Education Lauro Cavazos, former "drug czar" cal history, two young Reaganites who served William Bennett's surprise refusal to assume under Busli have stepped forward to offer their command of the Republican National Commit- spin 011 the rise and fall of an administration. tee, and education official Michael Williams's Both books have a great deal in common: Each decision to ban funding for colleges and univer- scolds Bush for not being more like Reagan, each sities that administered or accepted race-based praises the same heroes and fingers the same scl~olarships.To be sure, any administration villains, and each falls under the category of would have had its hands full that Wednesday political memoir that Peggy Noonan has called morning. But to a White House with no inner "If Only They'd Listened to Me, the Fools!" compass, the day's frenetic activity achieved an I11 White House Daze, Charles Kolb, formerly almost comic quality as the nation's leaders aiin- a domestic policy adviser, engagingly describes lessly mucked about with no sense of what they a White House gripped by inactivity and arro- wanted to accomplisli. As Kolb shows in great gance. Since Busli himself never bothered to detail, almost every day was December 12. define a "vision thing" for domestic policy, his John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride offers much the senior underlings emphasized process over ideol- same diagnosis. But while Kolb pays close atten- ogy. Believing in little beyond themselves, they tion to actual policy, Podhoretz, who worked in

BOOKS 95 the drug czar's office for about half a year, fo- the latter acting as the external engine for an cuses more on White House "culture": the social unprecedented prosperity in a mainland Chinese chasm separating the West Wing from the Old region. This economic interdependence, Segal ar- Executive Office Building, the catty in-fighting gues, will also reduce the risk of Beijing's interven- over press leaks, an obsession with perks verg- tion. Moreover, further successes in the Guang- ing on parody. A series of "Freeze Frames" be- dong-Hong Kong region will accelerate the eco- tween chapters offers brief glimpses into the lives nomic decentralization of the country, making of unnamed staffers. Narrated in the second per- it easier for the outside world to deal with China. son, they provide readers with a vicarious tour Such large-scale forecasts, Segal admits, are risky. of the Bush administration. Podhoretz can turn At present growth rates, China could well be the a good phrase, but his metaphors need prun- world's largest economy after the year 2010. Then ing-career government officials "attach them- there's the fact of China's history: Healthy economic selves and their careers to the public trough with regionalism is quite different from a disunited China glue as strong as barnaclesu-and he sometimes in chaos, for wluch there are precedents. But while comes off as too clever by half. Hong Kong's economy will surely suffer in the trans- Both books convey a strong sense of betrayal fer, at this point the potential for overall benefit as they describe the Bush administration seduc- seems greater than that for overall disaster. ing, frustrating, and finally abandoning its many young and ideology-driven staffers. To them, Bush's failurenot as a Republican, but as IN EUROPE'S NAME: Germany and the Reagan's heir-was a personal affront. Divided Continent. By Timofl~yGorton Ash. Random House. 680 pp. $27.50

THE FATE OF HONG KONG: The Coming Timothy Garton Ash is among the more distin- of 1997 and What Lies Beyond. By Gerald Segal. guished contemporary journalists specializing in Sf.Martin's. 234 pp. $21.95 Central European affairs. He has written vivid accounts of the Solidarity movement in Poland What exactly will happen at midnight on June and the 1989 revolutions in Warsaw, Budapest, 30,1997, when the six million people living in tlie Prague, and Berlin. Now he turns his attention British colony of Hong Kong are handed over to to a question that is as big as any in the modern tlie People's Republic of China? Journalists and world: How will a reunited Germany exercise its businesspeople frequently envision nightmare power in the future? To find possible answers, scenarios. According to one, Hong Kong, accus- Garton Ash painstakingly reconstructs the his- tomed to running itself as a near-perfect market tory of West Germany's foreign policy from the economy, declares its de facto independence; the 1950s to the late 1980s, particularly its strategy Chinese Communist rulers then forceably put of Osfpolifilc. down the "rebellion" and in the process reduce The brainchild of Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, the island to an economic backwater. Even now, Willy Brandt, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the flight of worried emigrants from Hong Kong- Ostpolitik was West Germany's strategy for deal- who by 1997 may number one million-is putting ing with its neighbors to the east, and was con- a damper on the economy. sistently implemented right up to the fall of the Segal, editor of the Pacific Reuiezu, believes that Berlin Wall. Its central aim was "normalization": such fears are exaggerated. What may happen, establishing full diplomatic and other relations he argues, is in fact happening already. Deter- with the communist countries. Most important, mined that China avoid the Soviet Union's fate, it sought to "stabilize" East Germany both by Deng Xiaoping has put economic growth first recognizing its legitimacy and by providing hard and allowed China's regions to develop their currency when its economy faltered. The ulti- own trade with other countries. For the past mate goal was reunification. decade, China's southern Guangdong province Reunification was surely achieved, but, as has formed a trading alliance with Hong Kong, Garton Ash shows, the path to this end was

96 WQ WINTER 1994 "radically different from that intended or ex- erance, pluralism, democracy and the virtues of pected. It was hedged wit11 ironies and paved ever closer cooperation [will] spread from west wit11 ~~ncoi~sciousas well as conscious para- to east." But it is just as possible that "intolerance, doxes." The greatest irony is that Ostpolitilc tribalism and the forces of disintegration [will] achieved its goal inadvertently: By propping up spread from east to west." The re-emergence- East Germany with recognition and financial however inarginal~ofa very old-fashioned fe- support, West Germany allowed the communist brile nationalism at street level in Germany can regime to skate along without ever attempting only reinforce the sober view that Garton Ash the political and economic reforms that other takes of the likely future. Soviet satellites had to institute. This made East Germany a particularly 11ollow state, and helps explain why the regime collapsed so completely Science &Â Technology when it was challenged. To be sure, West German policy was "very AT THE HAND OF MAN. Peril and Hope for patient, consistent, predictable. . . waiting for Africa's Wildlife. By Raymond Bo~z~zer.Knopf. the big cl~ance."But when its "consistency hard- 322 pp. $24 ened into rigidity," it ended up putting West THE LAST PANDA. By George B. Schaller. Germany's interests-"order"-above the inter- Univ. of Chicago. 291 pp. $24.95 ests and ideals of Europe, most notably freedom. Moreover, it failed to take note of the broader Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi's 1989 deci- changes occurring in the communist world. sion to torch $3 million worth of confiscated el- Nevertheless, Ostpolitik did succeed in removing ephant ivory was not greeted with universal an unattractive image of Germany, arid, in con- acclaim by conservatioi~ists.Many felt the stunt junction wit11 the aggressive public diplomacy would serve only to blunt criticism of Kenya's in- of the United States, did contribute to "the nec- consistent enforcement of poaching laws, not to essary mixture of incentive and deterrent, pun- curb such slaughter in the future. Proceeds from the isl~inentand reward" that helped tear down the ill-gotten ivory might better be used to fund preven- Iron Curtain throughout Eastern Europe. tion programs, or even to help feed Kenya's people. Today, Germany is still "in the condition of The incident underscores many of the diffi- becoming." Unlike most powers in history, as culties surrounding contemporary conservation historian Fritz Stern has said, Germany is being efforts. Individuals and organizations devoted given a second chance. But its dilemma is essen- to saving endangered species often reside in tially the same as it was when the German state's Western countries far removed from the areas first chance arose a century ago. Being of that where such animals live. They have difficulty "critical size," which Cl~ancellorKiesinger de- appreciating the indigenous perspective on con- scribed in 1967 as "too big to play no role in the servation, and often fail to anticipate the poten- balance of forces, too small to keep the forces tial consequences of their proposals. around it in balance by itself," Germany has to Not surprisingly, the leaders of many African decide what kind of power it will be. Will it play nations, carrying bitter memories of the colonial the traditional great-power role or forge a new period, resent foreign intrusion into their affairs. role based 011 the conscious habit of not exerting Many nations, beset by civil strife and economic its power to the full? woes, also lack the resources or even the desire Garton As11 is not overly optimistic that Ger- to preserve endangered animals. A curious di- many will use its renewed power-both military lemma exists concerning large-animal herds. and econoinic-wisely. The style of Ostpolitik While government officials recognize that the will probably prevail, which could lead to a animals attract tourist dollars, maintaining large cynical exploitation of the ideal of a united Eu- preserves inhibits efforts to convert land to ag- rope for largely German interests. Moreover, the ricultural use. And sl~ouldan elephant wander distinctive characteristics of East German culture out of a park and trample a farmer's crops, it is have to be considered: "It [is] possible that tol- hard to convince the farmer not to kill it, espe-

BOOKS 97 cially since its meat can provide food and its conclusions are remarkably similar to Banner's: ivory can be sold on the black market. The "effort must involve local people, based on Bonner admires Zimbabwe's solution to the their interests, skills, self-reliance, and traditions, dilemma. There, tourist dollars generated by and it must initiate programs that offer them interest in wildlife "correlate as closely as pos- spiritual and economic benefits." Conservation, sible with where the wildlife is." This provides he adds, "cannot be imposed from above." local people with an incentive to protect animals; elsewhere, such funds go into national treasuries, from wluc11 they rarely filter down to the rural NUCLEAR RENEWAL: Common Sense About populations. Energy. By Richard Rhodes. Whittle Boole in association with Viking Publications. 127 pp. $17.50

Author of the prize-winning saga The Making of the Atomic Bomb (19861, Richard Rhodes here looks at the peacetime fallout from that en- deavor: nuclear power's current problems and future promise. Today about 100 nuclear plants operate in the United States, more than in any other country, but far fewer than the thousands once predicted for an era of electricity that would be "too cheap to meter." Rhodes blames nuclear power's "present impasse" on contentious political control by fed- George Scl~aller,a noted naturalist, finds eral and state authorities and unrealistic eco- similar circumstances threatening the giant nomic decisions that priced atomic-generated panda. The panda exists in the wild only in re- electricity out of the market. "The truth," writes mote sections of China, but the combined pres- Rhodes, "is that nuclear power was killed, not sures of poaching (a panda pelt fetches more by its enemies, but by its friends." These friends than $10,000 on the black market, while a live included greedy manufacturers and contractors bear can bring more than 10 times that amount) who escalated plant size (and costs) for elusive and diminished habitat have reduced its num- "economies of scale," federal regulators who bers to fewer than 1,000. ignored the financial consequences of their rules, In recent years, political and economic reali- utility executives and rate commissioners who ties have all but ended panda research, and while gladly passed rising expenses on to consumers, provisional plans exist to set aside preserves, no and members of Congress who pampered the real action has occurred. The declining numbers infant nuclear industry wit11 the 1957 Price- of wild pandas has forced Beijing to abandon the Anderson Act, which indemnified utilities from practice of sealing diplomatic relations with gifts liability for their nuclear accidents. of breeding pairs. (Hence the arrival in 1972 of But while Rhodes explains nuclear power's Ling-Ling, since deceased, and Hsing-Hsing to problems astutely, his account of its promise is Washington's National Zoo.) They have in fact misplaced. For example, he hopes to solve come up with an alternative practice that today's political and economic problems with a Scl~allerfinds more disturbing: lending out bears technical solution: the integral fast reactor (IFR). for limited-term zoo exhibition in return for cash. This sodium-cooled nuclear power plant is a Conservation officials feel the practice puts un- beguiling "breeder" reactor of the 1950s, once due stress on the remaining pandas and reduces touted for making extra plutonium fuel but the likelihood of their producing new cubs in now-in a still unproven metamorpl~osis-also captivity, and they have pressured the Chinese expected to consume plutonium from other re- government to reconsider it. actors. Rhodes says the IFR will dispel political How best to save the giant panda? Scl~aller's opposition because it is safer than today's water-

98 WQ WINTER 1994 cooled reactors and will ease economic pressures tion of science, we should not be surprised if the by burning some nuclear wastes. But besides premodern and nascent postmodern make com- being overly optimistic, Rhodes minimizes po- mon cause to bring science down. Yet Holton tential problems wit11 lug11-level radioactive waste tlunks scientists by and large are surprised, and disposal and scants the dangers of the IFR's sodium inadequately alarmed. coolant, which can bum in air or explode ill water. The largely disconnected pieces in this vol- Rhodes is right to praise the Japanese and the ume are given some coherence by the last essay, French for centralizing and simplifying their 'The Anti-Science Pl~enomenon,"which ex- nuclear-power programs. Their accomplis11- plores the nature, sources, and motivations of merits stand in marked contrast to jurisdictional the disparate forces in Western society opposed confusions that have hampered U.S. develop- to a scientific worldview. Holton assigns the ment. But such praise ignores how differently the skeptics to four categories: pl~ilosopl~erswho French, Japanese, and American political and view science as a social myth and seek to "abol- economic systems work. He also glides through ish the distinction between science and fiction," some conjectural risk-benefit statistics for differ- disaffected intellectuals who feel left behind by ent energy sources and activities, concluding the dizzying rate of modern scientific discovery, that coal burning, driving small cars, and taking "New Age" thinkers who believe that "one of birth control pills are all more dangerous than the worst sins of modern thought is the concept running nuclear plants-without conceding just of objectively reachable data," and a group that how controversial such calculations still are. worries that modem science is "the projection of I11 the end, this little book is persuasive but Oedipal obsessions." not convincing. Rhodes pleads for "leadership Appropriately, Holton is most concerned and public education" to beget safer reactor de- with how easily antiscience forces can be ma- signs and to boost political support for nuclear nipulated by political concerns. The Nazis ex- power. But because the nuclear enterprise must ploited Germany's alternative science move- be so tightly controlled, the real challenge still ment for the horrific policy of "race purifica- lies wit11 reforming the United States's wobbly tion." The Soviet Union imposed Lysenkoism- federal-stateregulatory system. To duck the fun- the notion that acquired characteristics can be in- damental problem only invites new grief from herited~onits scientific community. Scientists nuclear power's next generation of "friends." initially regarded Lysenkoism as a passing fad, but the theory reigned for several decades, wit11 disastrous consequences for the practice of sci- SCIENCE AND ANTI-SCIENCE. By Gerald ence in the Soviet Union. Today, right-wing ac- Holton. Harvard. 203 pp. $24.95 tivists such as Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson espouse antievolutionisin as "part of Vkclav Havel is not a creationist, but in Disturb- an attack on secular humanism," which they see ing the Peace (1990) the Czech president-play- as an element of a "Satanic ideology." wright voiced a sentiment shared by the cre- Holton reviews past and potential future ationists: that the decline of traditional religion strategies for defending science, but offers no has left a hole in the fabric of Western civiliza- panaceas beyond eternal vigilance. Nor does he tion that science cannot fill. It seems odd to speak argue explicitly that it is within science's power of Havel and the creationists in the same breath. to influence what does ultimately fill the void left To Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the by religion. His broad erudition and synthetic history of science at Harvard University, it is intellect help define the problem, but solutions, both natural and important to do so. If moder- as Havel would say, are beyond the scope of nity is defined by the culturally dominant posi- science.

BOOKS 99 POETRY

Selected and Introduced by Joseph Brodslcy

IT.the 20th century, German history has done its best to obscure German poetry. Murder makes better copy, and when foreign troops march into your country you are not in a mood to read their bards and classics, unless of course you work for intelligence. Nor does your interest get much of a boost from those troops' defeat. Nearly 50 years after World War II's carriage, we are still more familiar with the names of the Third Reich's lead- ers than with those of Else Lasker-Schuler, Gottfried Benn, Gunter Eich, Karl Krolov, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Peter Huchel. Apparently, the dust hasn't settled yet. Most likely, it never will, which alone turns dust into a form of existence. It turns out that, among its other properties, dust also possesses a voice: Gedenlh meiner, Fliistert der Staub. Remember me, whispers the dust. This is what the dust says according to one of the finest German poets of tlus century, Peter Huchel. Huchel was born in 1903 and died in 1981. He grew up on a farm in the eastern part of Germany, in Prussia, and studied in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna. Between wars, he traveled a fair bit in Hungary, Roma- nia, Turkey, and France. That was a lean time for most Germans, and he'd often pay for his sojourns in these places with the only marketable skill he had ac- quired in his youth: farm work. Huchel's poems were first published in various periodicals in the 1920s. In the '30s, he, like many a poet at the time, took up writing verse radio plays, which met with considerable success. In 1933, though, he withdrew his soon- to-be-published first collection of poems because he didn't want to be affili- ated with a pro-Nazi group of poets. The war found him rather late, appar- ently after some looking, on his family fann near Potsdam, arid he was drafted into the Welwmacht in 1941. By that time, he was 38 years old. Those who served with him in the trenches recall the man scribbling in his notebook while occasionally glancing out the embrasure. In 1945, shortly before the war ended, he deserted to the Russians and was interned. But, partly because of his reputedly anti-Nazi cycle of poems, "Twelve Nights," written during the war, partly because of the socialist sympathies of lus youth, he was soon released and started to work in East Berlin for the state radio. In 1949 he became the editor of a highly influential magazine called Sinn imd Form (Sense and Form). He stayed on at this job for the next 13 years, in the course of wluch he

100 WQ WINTER 1994 also published several collections of his poetry and reaped various awards in the German Democratic Republic. In 1962, however, because of his inde- pendent editorial policies, he was dismissed and placed under house arrest. Presumably because of his prominence on the GDR cultural scene, nothing further was done, and in 1971, as a result of appeals from PEN International, Huchel was allowed to leave. He settled down in West Germany where, 10 years later, he died. He was married twice and had two children.

y the standards of the time and especially of the place, this poet's life was rather uneventful. What's more, lus poetry carries very few references to his actual circumstances. One's mind is always more complex than one's reality, and the poet presumably thought it bad manners to draw on a biography so common. He simply was a complex man who ended up with a very primitive history on lus lap, or to put it a bit more accurately, he ended up in that history's clutches. To capitalize on his experi- ence in verse would amount to intelligence honoring instinct. Tlus had 110th- ing to do with escapism or even the spirit of privacy, paramount in German lyric poetry for most of this century. This had to do wit11 the man's preserva- tion of lus dignity: by showing history where it belongs. Peter Huchel is often billed as a nature poet. Definitions are always re- ductive, and in the case of Huchel this label is about as misleading as it is in the case of Robert Frost. They indeed have quite a bit in common, except that unlike Frost, for whom nature mirrors man's negative potential, Huchel, whose work is imbued wit11 a very strong Christian ethos, sees nature as a holy sacrament. Tlus attitude was so strong in Huchel that it led him tempo- rarily to perceive the GDR program of agricultural collectivizationas the long- overdue implementation of natural laws. Huchel's poetry is indeed marked by an instinctive reliance on the natu- ral environment,but the label won't stick. What his poems get from nature is a bit more than nature offers. The severest and most elegiac voice in the Ger- man poetry of his time, Huchel not so much describes a landscape as reads what's been wrought upon "terrestrial dungs" by a pen harder held and more dispassionate than lus own. Nature for him, to put it simply, is a page cov- ered dark with a fairly dark writ. The poems you will find here belong, however, to a later, postwar Huchel. Men's last words are often of greater consequence than their first, and tius goes for poets as well. As one perceptive critic of Huchel has remarked, he began with hymns and ended with psalms. Tlus is a fair description of this poet's evolution. In his later poetry, nature plays a lesser role, since it is no longer for him home or solace. But it is the same implacable, immanent pen, scrib- bling here slowly upon a terrestrial thing that is, this time, the poet's own heart: a shrinking page increasingly conscious of its finality. History enters here, but not so much that of Germany as of his whole life and with it, of the civiliza- tion to wluch he belongs and wluch he is about to exit. That is what accounts for that life and that civilization overlapping, and for the poems' long view. As perspectives go, this one is fairly universal. "How can one write poetry after Auscl~witz?"asked Theodor Adorno. It is for a German poet, obviously, to provide the answer.

POETRY 101 The Angels

A shadow stands, crosses the room, smoke, where an old woman, the goose-wing in her feeble hand, brushes the oven shelf. A fire burns. Remember me, whispers the dust. November fog and rain, rain and the sleep of cats. The sky black and muddy above the river. Time flows from gaping emptiness, flows over the fins and gills of the fish and over the frozen stare of the angels, who drop down with blackened wings, behind the gaunt twilight, to the daughters of Cain. A shadow stands, crosses the room, smoke. A fire burns. Remember me, whispers the dust. The Ammonite

Sick of the gods and their fires I lived without the law

in the deepest. part- of the valley of Hinnom. Gone were my old companions, the balance of heaven and earth; only the ram was true, his festering lameness dragged across the stars. Under his horns of stone, their smokeless glimmering, I slept at night, fired urns each day that I'd smash to pieces 011 the rocks in the evening sun. I never saw the twilight, a cat in the cedars, or the birds take wing, the water's splendor as it ran across my arms, while I mixed the vats of clay. The smell of death made me blind.

102 WQ WINTER 1994 Aristeas I

First light of dawn, as the gold of the dead lay buried in clouds. The wind slept there, in branches where the crow sat plumed in fog.

The branches flew, its wingbeat hard against the gray light of the alders, the milky skin of the steppe.

I, Aristeas, as crow has followed god, I wend my way, drawn onward by a dream, through laurel groves of fog, Aristeas I1 to search the morning on stiff wings. I've spied The solitude in snow-encrusted caves, of piers in brackish water; faces, one-eyed, lit by fires, at the leaky planking of a boat sunk deep in smoke. a dead rat scrapes. And horses stood, manes frozen, Here I sit at noon, hitched to posts with reins of soot. in the shade of the customs house, an old man The crow brushed past on a millstone. the wintry gate, through starved undergrowth. Once a river pilot, The frost stirred. later I steered ships, poor cargoes, And a parched tongue spoke: through the tides up north. Here is a past without pain. The captains paid in contraband, it was enough to live, with women enough and sailcloth.

The names grow dim; no one deciphers the text that lingers behind my lids. I, Aristeas, son of Caystrobius, am missing, presumed dead, exiled by the god to this narrow dirty harbor, not far from the Cimmerian boat, where people trade in skins and amulets.

At night the fulling mill still pounds. Sometimes I squat like a crow, high up in the poplars by the river, motionless in the setting sun, awaiting the death that dwells on ice-bound rafts.

POETRY 103 The Grave of Odysseus

None shall find the grave of Odysseus, no thrust of the spade the encrusted helmet in the mist of petrified bones.

Don't look for the cave beneath the earth, where a draught of soot, a mere shadow, injured by the torch's flaring pitch, went to its dead companions, its hands raised, weaponless, smeared with the blood of slaughtered sheep.

All is mine, said the dust; the sun's grave beyond the desert, reefs filled with the water's deafening roar, the endless noon, that still gives warning to the sea-pirate's son from Ithaca, the rudder, gnawed by salt, the charts and manifests (The Elder Tree) of the ancient Homer. The elder opens its moons, all passes into silence; the fluid lights in the stream, the water-borne planetarium of Archimedes, astronomical signs, Babylonian in their origins.

Son, Enkidu, my little son, you abandoned your mother, the gazelle, your father, the wild donkey, that you might go to Uruk with the whore. The milk-bearing goats have fled. The steppe is withered.

Behind the city gate with its seven bolts of iron Gilgamesh, who wanders both heaven and earth, has shown you how to cut the cords of death.

Noon burned darkly on the brickworks, Gold lay darkly in the chamber of the king. Turn back, Enkidu. What has Gilgamesh bequeathed? The graceful head of the gazelle downcast. The dust rained on your bones.

104 WQ WINTER 1994 Melpomene

Bitter, the forest, full of thorns, no coastal breeze, no foothills, the grass lay matted, our death to come with the sound of horses' hooves, endless across the low hills of the steppes, wereturned to search the sky for battlements that would not give way.

Hostile the villages, huts emptied in haste, smoked skins in rafters, snare nets and bone amulets. Throughout the land only evil venerated, It is your hour, animal heads in the mist, fortunes told man upon Chios, with cut wands of the willow. it draws near to you over the rocks and sets fire to your heart. Later, in the north, The evening breeze mows stag-eyed men the shadows of the pines. rode by on horseback. Your eye is blind. We buried our dead. But in the gull's cry It was hard you know the sea's metallic shimmer, to sink our axes in that earth, the sea with the dolphin's black skin, we used fire to thaw the ground. the stiff oar-stroke of the wind hard by the coast. The blood of roosters killed in sacrifice was not accepted. Down the path, where tufts of goat-hair wave upon the thistle, the cithara, seven-stringed, holds forth in the hum of telegraph wires. A single wall has remained, crowned with undulating tiles. The clay pot shattered, in which life's bill of sale, sealed, has lain.

Rock-high spindrift, rock-lapping breakers, sea with the cat shark's skin. At the cape of a cloud, awash in the swell of sky, white with the salt of wave after receding wave, is the moon's lightship. It illumines the voyage to Ios, where boys wait 011 the shore with empty nets and lice in their hair.

POETRY 105 Brandenburg

Behind cold pitch ovens I walked in the burnt fragrance of pine bogs, where a farmhand sat at his woodcutter's fire; he didn't look up, he set the teeth of his saw.

In the evening the red Uhlan still dances with farmers' daughters on the threshing floor of fog, his tunic open to the swarms from off the marshes.

Submerged in the water hemlock the Prussian calash.

View from a Winter Window White willows, rounded by dancing snow, brooms that sweep the mist. Wood and misfortune Under the Constellation grow at night. My gauge of Hercules the fever's curve. A town, Who goes there without light no larger and without mouth, than the circle dragging a steel trap a buzzard traces across the ice? in the evening sky. A wall, Sages of the forest, rough-hewn, stained the foxes with bad teeth, with reddish lichen. sit aloof in the darkness The sound of a bell, that carries and stare into the fire. over shimmering water the smoke of olive. Fire, fed by straw and damp foliage, stirred by voices you don't recognize. Already straining forward in the night, in freezing harness, Hercules drags the chained harrow of his stars across the northern sky.

106 WQ WINTER 1994 Winter Morning in Ireland

At night the devil sits in the fog's confessional and counsels desperate souls. I11 the morning he's transformed himself into a magpie, flying mute above the narrow path. The Ninth Hour In winter's dungeon on branches of scrub oak, the brittle gold of the dead. Heat etches into stone Light roots out the cold. the word of the prophet. Familiar faces of the rooftops A man labors reappear. up the hill, in his shepherd's bag Above the sea the ninth hour, the genuflection of the wind, the nail and the hammer. the first braying of a donkey. The shadow of a bird drifts In the air the dry shimmer of the flock across the cliff's rocky precipice. is torn apart and falls as tinder behind the horizon. The surf, its gliding ramparts of water and light, the Irish Sea does not confide, if the rain will bury the noon.

Peace

The ' 'irds' nomadic hour. In tl prickly awns of threshed corn the mild vacancy of summer lingers on. In the gun embrasures of the water tower the grass grows wild.

All poems except "Elegy" copyright Q Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. "Elegy" is taken from Cl~n~isseenClifll~sseen, copyright @ 1963 by S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Reproduced by permission. Peter Huchel's poems in this selection are translated from the German by Joel Spector. Translation copyright Q 1994 by Joel Spector, Iowa City, Iowa.

POETRY 107 LIFESTYLE

One measure of a word's currency is the frequency of its misuse. Now even historians talk about the "lifestyles" of Roman citizens and medieval peasants. Such anachronistic uses betray ignorance of the unique cultural conditions that gave birth to the word. Robert Enuin here recalls its proper provenance.

BY ROBERT ERWIN

nce the Americans had backed By the time Tocqueville came to inspect into independence by demanding America in 1831, it was obvious that the their rights as Englishmen, what Founding Fathers who rejected hereditary next? No one supposed they were titles and official churcl~eshad read Ameri- immune0 to the universal passions distin- can conditions and modern conditions as- guished by Kant: for possession, for power, tutely. The commercial value of property and for honor. To fend off anarchy and sus- outweighed "domain," and commercial tain a workable society they would have to activity in general-commodities, trans- govern and ration those passions, in the port, technology, industry-propelled the process evolving cultural norms that even society. Titles of nobility would have those who did not benefit immediately or brought civil war instead of order. Govern- equally would abide by. ment needed functionaries and partisans, Many foreigners and a fair number of not retainers. Instead of dwelling on nov- ultrafederalists did not see how this could elty as such or on the absence of old ways, be done without the equivalent of nobility Tocqueville was interested in how the so- as a social principle. Long live King George cial system actually functioned. Although (Washington)! Nobility, after all, had been American patterns might be peculiar by the linchpin of social order in Europe for comparison wit11 historical and world stan- 1,000 years. It specified rules for member- dards, they were, he thought, just as defi- ship in the ruling class, designated respon- nite as any others. People learned norms sibility by custom and statute, and allo- while growing up or settling in as immi- cated control over weapons, resources, and grants; they held values in common; they symbols. Holiness rivaled nobility in cul- regulated social transactions accordingly. tural prestige, but the highborn had privi- One thing Tocqueville discovered was leged access to the church. To justify its po- that Americans believed in the possibility sition, moreover, the aristocracy conscripted and desirability of starting over. Move to a language, loading the word noble wit11 posi- different part of the country, take up a new tive moral connotations. Intermittently at occupation, begin another family, break old least, Europeans of all classes acceded to a habits and acquire new ones, become best cultural strategy whereby the few lived well friends wit11 strangers. Besides the ups and for the many. downs of wealth and status intrinsic to a

108 WQ WINTER 1994 commercially frenetic society, in addition to believe they can shuck off the past and make the whirl of fashion and elections, on top of new lives. the itch to build new towns and tear up old neighborl~oods,they believed on principle uring the 1970s, a word came that the past could be disregarded and that into common use that perfectly individuals had a right to redirect their encapsulates this cultural as- lives. sumption and the social pat- Over the years, this faith in starting terns related to it. Lifestyle is the word. It over from scratch has fascinated America- was a brave word at first, hinting at rich watchers. "The stuff of self-improvement possibilities, a broad view of human devel- manuals generation after generation," opment and the life course, an order that writes Frances FitzGerald in Cities on a Hill, fulfilled rather than constricted. Unfortu- "is a major theme in Ameri- can literature." Attitudes to- ward this trait differ sharply among the reflective. Some- one from a country chewed up by history-a hell of pris- ons and massacres or a de- caying society that has car- ried certain values to exhaus- tion-might scorn American naivete and self-indulgence. Yet someone else from the same kind of place might rejoice that at least one lucky nation had preserved its in- nocence so long. One school of social critics might associ- ate starting over with the loneliness, superficiality, and incoherence of Ameri- can life. Other social critics might point out in good hu- "Haven't we met in a pre-ious life stj~le?''-- - -- mor that many so-called changes were simply more of the same, nately, however, journalists, salesmen, and grounded as always in human nature. (The pop psycl~ologiststrivialized it even more student who dominated the radical caucus rapidly than usual. Lifestyle already stands continues as the lawyer hell-bent on becom- mostly for the section of the newspaper that ing a partner in the firm.) The especially runs recipes for pumpkin mousse and tips optimistic and tolerant might hail the lati- on buying a futon. It sets a pseudoclassy tude to start over as freedom not available tone when movie actresses on talk shows in hidebound societies. Still other observers reveal that they own a dog. Encouraged by might be struck by paradoxes-a tradition of an interviewer to think big, a doctor in Bos- the new, unanimous individualism. What- ton recently recommended "lifestyle ever the attitude, the fact is not in dispute. changes such as . . . seatbelt use." Americans, and to a lesser extent people in In the short interval before it was triv- all highly industrialized societies, tend to ialized, lifestyle sounded more impressive

LIFESTYLE 109 than older terms from the same cultural By the time Elliott Gould, smiling cluster-terms such as moving on and self- sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, help. People who could barely count change was allowed to tell a national television from a five-dollar bill had fantasies of de- audience that he was glad to host "Satur- signing and redesigning their precious day Night Live" because the program, in selves as Picasso would approach a blank his words, "has balls," a certain number of canvas. Partly, the pretentiousness of the viewers were titillated, a large number word resulted from rhetorical battles of the could take it or leave it, and those who were times in which it came into use. But partly offended had a subconscious suspicion they it reflected the decline of a countervailing might be cranks. Just a few years earlier norm that had set limits to the idea of styl- Richard Nixon, villainous and squirrelly as ing oneself. they come, had stuck his neck out 10 times farther than Elliott Gould; but he was older, n place of the hereditary rank they and he by god wore a suit, pressed and refused to tolerate, Americans at the buttoned, even to board a private airplane. outset installed respectability as a so- Millions upon millions of decent citizens, cial anchor. It held in check notions of beside themselves wit11 anger, fright, arid starting over and anything goes. Achieve- shame, would have been ready to join a ment and character across class, occupa- lynching party had Gould broken the taboo tion, gender, and ethnic identity were mea- in 1860 or 1960. sured by respectability for two centuries. It To reinforce the point, against Gould's lasted as a norm through industrialization, show biz effervescence can be set a humor- depression, and war. less passage from the "Judgment Day" sec- The generation that came of age about tion of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, re- the same time as lifestyle probably cannot ceived as incendiary realism when it was fathom the hold respectability once had on published in the 1930s. In this scene a the whole society. The better-educated and housewife wit11 a baby is about to take on more affluent members of that generation four strangers for $2.50 each to recoup the are used to a portfolio mode of culture. Sell grocery money she lost to a bookie. When migrant workers and buy the l~omeless. Studs draws high card for first turn with Keep an eye on the greenhouse effect for her and one of the others says, "Leave a little potential growth in the environmental sec- for us," she becomes indignant. "This is my tor. As safe investments with a steady house," she snaps. "Get out if you're going yield, beer and exercise are dependable. to talk lewd." As the example suggests, re- College degrees are down slightly. The only spectability extended far beyond the bour- widely shared conception of the common geoisie. Forty years after Studs's fictional good now is sufficient order and support so lesson in etiquette, the historian Tamara that trading may continue. Poorer members Hareven interviewed former workers at the of the same generation are necessarily more Amoskeag mill in New Hampshire, in its limited in their options, but they make nu- day the largest textile plant in the world merous choices in a volatile market too. under one roof. Virtually every one of them Should they dye their hair blue or orange? avoided "off-color" talk, though these men Should they go for a continuance or a plea and women left school early and were poor bargain? all their lives.

- Robert Enviiz, a writer and former director of the University ofPennsylva11ia Press, is the author of TheCurrent Language Panic and Other Essays in Cultural History. Copyright 01990 by Robert El-win.

110 WQ WINTER 1994 Of course, youngsters did learn the un- practiced against minorities, immigrants, derground language by hook or by crook. and subjugated peoples. Taboos have to do with the forbidden, not necessarily wit11 the unknown. Some of n societies composed largely of peas- them, on the sly, managed a passable imi- ants and artisans, any deliberate de- tation of the toughest kid in town, destined parture from pomp had been a mani- to go directly from grammar school to festation of privilege by other means. prison. The boys often encountered an au- ThisI was obvious when ladies of the French thority-a straw boss, a coach-who used court played at being milkmaids or when rough language that impressed them. Later, English peers paraded in public "drunk as facility in the other language might come in lords." As Sartre pointed out, when Saint handy for coping wit11 or surviving among Francis handed back his clothes to the well- troops, laborers, tenants. Going to bar- to-do father who had paid for them, the rooms, brothels, pool halls, and cooch gesture was a moral luxury. The majority shows meant having your cake and eating around him had no choice but to go ragged it too: upholding the norm by breaking ta- and dirty. As per capita income rose and boos in a place prescribed for that purpose. the number of "things" commonly owned Usually by a more subterranean route girls increased in industrial societies, downward arrived at an equivalent "secret" knowl- departures took on a different meaning. In edge, though in some ways a worse state of their way-with pearl stickpins, donations duplicity. to the church, and the like-even hustlers, It would be a great mistake to shrug re- gangsters, and fixers followed the code of spectability off as antiquated taste, hypoc- respectability. Out-groups such as Gypsies risy, and squeamisl~ness.As industrializa- and circus performers, as well as occupa- tion proceeded, roles multiplied, popula- tional groups remote from centers of re- tion grew, and science put custom into spectability (such as cowboys, loggers, and question, something was needed to encour- sailors) were clearly exceptions, rare and age compliance among segmented, atom- exotic. By the same token, however, it was ized citizens. For stratified democracies and now easy to make dissident gestures administered authoritarian states, respect- against respectability. ability filled the bill. It suited conditions. It Bohemians, on the whole sufficiently worked. educated and sufficiently employable for respectability had they the inclination, in o spend one's life laying trolley fact made an issue of rejecting it in the con- track or packing mothballs did viction that they knew better than not preclude wearing a starched respectables how to live. They ranked collar on Sunday and subscribing themselves as aristocrats of the spirit, the nominally to "clean living, proper behav- elite few with intellect, imagination, taste, ior." Such behavior could be demanded by and moral courage. Sometimes aestheticism the eminently respectable from the barely swayed bohemia. The cultivated dandy respectable, or it could be rewarded wit11 appeared more debonair, witty, knowing, token esteem. (Address the washerwoman and, above all, interesting than any solid as "Mrs." and share her disapproval of citizen. At other times, antimaterialism spitting.) According to current needs for dominated bohemia. Dull respectables who cheap labor, dirty work, scapegoats, and cared about napkin rings and baths were disenfranchisement, the line could be ridiculed and despised. At still other times, redrawn expediently at the bottom, denial a "wild" mode ruled bohemia-drugs, out- of respectability justifying discrimination landish costumes and couplings, links with

LIFESTYLE 111 the underclass, living on the edge. relax-to become temporarily a watered- down Rimbaud, make-believe hoodlum, or or a long while a stand-off pre- attenuated carnival dancer-without losing vailed. On the one hand, enclaves the thread. It was believed-indeed opposed to or opposed by the re- hoped-that movie stars had orgies galore, spectable were often cordoned preferably on bearskin rugs. The few off-bohemianF quarters, shantytowns, red- should live licentiously for the many. But light districts, and the like. News from the the stars were expected to support the Code forbidden zone reached ordinary people of Decency by day and pull the shades at largely through stereotypes supplied by night. journalists, dramatists, politicians, and do- In short, respectability was a strong gooders-stereotypes of longhaired artists, norm. It had stamina, manipulative power, bomb-throwing reds, Wild West outlaws, coherence, and flexibility. And it is not dead scarlet actresses, and rascally sporting men. yet. A "respectable" way to behave en- Sustained, deliberate counter-respectability dures, fuzzy and precarious, residually en- rarely presented itself in the barnyard, the forceable at law, more or less adhered to by mill, the shop, the school, or the social call. the executive class and the old blue-collar On the other hand, crossing the line for class, deeply ingrained in many families. pleasure or profit was not too difficult. Numerous "mature" men would still be Novelists did it. The police did it. Real es- mortified to appear sockless in public, and tate operators did it. Dance halls and casi- numerous women would feel disgraced by nos lay close to the border. A majority ac- a loud belch. By the 1980s, however, re- cepted respectability in principle and up- spectability was simply a prominent norm held it or cheated as circumstances dic- in a boutique of norms. No explosion oc- tated. With the cooperation of his sisters curred if someone attended the symphony and servants, Emily Dickinson's brother, a in jungle pants or showed up wearing a prominent lawyer and treasurer of Amherst "gay" earring to sign a mortgage. People College, managed discreet trysts in the fam- said lifestyle without a second thought. ily dining room, which had a large fireplace and a stout door. From roughly World War ust as real wars frequently end with I forward, furthermore, a resourceful both sides worse off than they were speakeasy mentality helped preserve the before, so lifestyle is the uncomfort- stand-off. The cocktail party, the smart set, able and in the long run probably and cafe society accommodated "nice" untenable outcome of the cultural wars people. Blues became "entertainment." The Jof the 1960s and 1970s. Relatively disorga- mass media upgraded notoriety to celeb- nized, formerly unrecognized groups in rity. True, psychoanalysis showed respect- that period learned to use nonconformity ability in an ambiguous light. Revolutions, to wage politics. Countercult~~ralpresence anticolonial movements, and totalitarian- was shaped to make demands: stop the ism shook the whole world, and economic war, jobs for blacks, power to sisterhood. depression and another cataclysmic war hit Rather quickly, cultural politics became an the United States directly. Nevertheless, a issue in itself. For a brief time one could call socially intelligible balance held through the Beatles lower-class deformed (as the 1940s and 1950s. Mom and Apple Pie, Malcolm Muggeridge did) with only music God and Property continued to receive in mind. Soon those became fighting their due. Cultural instructions remained words. Respectables were held responsible clear: Get a haircut, be on time, carry for induced poverty, racism and sexism, proper identification. Yet room was left to stifling routines and alienating work, for

112 WQ WINTER 1994 police brutality, a vile war in Vietnam, and poor people. Off with the white shirts, you piling nuclear weapons on each other 50 swinging dentists of Cherry Hill. On with times over, for shoddy goods, phony sen- the double knits and the psychedelic ties a timents, and crooked deals, for mised- yard wide (in what clothing manufacturers ucation and the destruction of the environ- around 1970 called the Peacock Revolu- ment-in short, for the worst of human na- tion). Hoist skirts and tighten jeans across ture and an intrinsically defective way of the butt. Put on the gold chains of a good- life. As this message registered, a great doing pimp and his teenage whore. Pass for many old believers felt equally hostile and a hip comedian, a centerfold sexpot, a per- betrayed. Respectability had been painfully son who sings at Mafia hotels. In the end drilled into them, they had mastered the the result of the cultural battling and of the whole complicated code and strained to live dispersion of the counterculture was a so- up to it, and suddenly a crowd of young no- cial type nobody liked: yuppies. Those who bodies, pointy-headed intellectuals, and grew up under respectability but were criti- "agitators" seized the cultural initiative. As cal of it and hoped attacks on it would lead they saw it, respectability was being sold out to a freer, happier, more just society saw for nothing wort11 having-drugs, shoplift- their movement trivialized and half-forgot- ing, herpes simplex, a rising rate of youth- ten. Those who defended respectability and ful suicide, and weakness in the face of a Red hoped for full restoration found themselves Peril and a Yellow Peril. Aside from damage living in a cultural boutique among institu- done in the famous campus "disruptions," tions of impaired legitimacy. some serious force was used by both sides. The Weathermen, for example, broke win- efective institutions such as the dows and beat up professors, and urban ri- multiversity persist. To them oters torched their own neigl~borl~oods. have been added greater na- National Guardsmen gunned down stu- tional inequality and idiotic policiesD such as prosperity through debt. dents at Kent State, and police in Berkeley blinded a painter with shotgun fire during Non sequiturs are now the staff of life: com- the Battle of the People's Park. Symbolism modities trading Monday through Friday was the common weapon, though. On the and gathering wild foods on the weekend; one side, students with draft deferments and gay liberation and campaigning to return to job prospects burned the flag. Movie the mass in Latin; computer programming actresses-of the type who previously sanc- to produce astrological charts; save the tified the status quo by stepping out of lim- whales and serve sashimi. With all the jog- ousines in sheath dresses under blue and ging and hopping and weightlifting, whole rose spotlights-appeared with kinky hair, neighborl~oodshave been changed into gi- breasts dangling under worn T-shirts. ant track-and-field events, and yet at home Young ministers offered public prayers for the "athletes" use remote control buttons to Patty Hearst and her "associates" in the change TV channels. Respectability has be- spirit of cheerleaders. On the other side, come an option, part of a jumbled social negotiating and conceding details of respect- landscape through which individuals ability so as to guard more important levers thread their way according to whim and cir- of power, the established order cranked out cumstance. The Four-H club need never con- new merchandise: rolling papers, water front the meditation society, and neither beds, tape decks, mountaineer packs, so- need confront the single parents' group. cially significant overalls. Rules were Roles coexist and succeed each other with- dropped, and ways were found to loosen up out adding up. at a safe distance from hippies, radicals, and Among those old enough to view the

LIFESTYLE 113 lifestyleera as a phase, attitudes differ. Some was a crisis. Her grandson has no special resist, holding on as tightly as possible to talent for breaking taboos or expanding what they were comfortable wit11 in the first consciousness. He will not directly test the place-respectability or principled opposi- established order's capacity to deflect and tion to respectability. They assume the absorb. He will probably wear shined shoes storm will pass, and afterwards an equilib- if he has to go to court.Yet he may be ulti- rium such as they remember between social mately unreachable by both respectables stability and the urge to start over will re- and their traditional opponents. How much emerge. reality can he ascribe to a norm that for him Doubtful. The adulteration of the coun- has no interior? terculture is not to be taken lightly. Now The question of who he was in a previ- the future is partly in the hands of someone ous existence currently interests Barry. to whom lifestyle is not just a catchword. Next year it may be kayaks. Instead of de- Farrell's horse-playing housewife had a ploring and resisting this lifestyle mental- grandson. Barry, age 32, lives in Houston, ity, part of the older population joins in and where he works for a real-estate trust that counts on it functioning indefinitely. It suits manages shopping malls. To him lifestyle is rejuvenation schemes and dreams. Yet their the sea in which he swims, as it is for his assumption, the opposite of those waiting sister, who stayed in Chicago and became for the storm to pass, is doubtful too. one of the first women hired as a sales rep- resentative in the wholesale wine business. rivial productions do not neces- He considers himself to be a regular mem- sarily have trivial results. Life- ber of society, in that sense respectable. Yet style clashes with certain deep- his world tips in a different direction from seated and more important West- that of his grandmother. He comes home at ern ways that are still very much in force. no particular hour, throws his jacket on the The notion is in the air that out of countless floor, says the day was a pisser, throws his personal preferences will somehow flow mail on the floor, wonders whether or not public good-pushed along by an invisible to stay in, throws a towel on the floor. Af- hand such as Adam Smith imagined. In a ter a meal that may or may not be known as distorted way this continues a Western tra- dinner and that could equally well include dition of individualism: choice, conscience, a fast-food gristleburger or fresh-made assent, will as a faculty of self, values cre- pesto, he listens inattentively to a tape by the ated rather than granted. But it is hard to Booger Eaters, skims an article on tax shel- think of a social configuration up to now ters, and during the late news on TV comes that makes no provision for relating the to a consensus with one or more people who individual to a cosmos and a community. live with him for the time being that the tele- How is it possible for humans to live in phone company sucks, the weather sucks, groups and not share values? When lives and Somalia sucks. are styled in the same space, what keeps History separates this man from his them from tangling? To say that at present grandmother as evolution positions two we can't agree on a reason for human asso- species to receive light from different re- ciation in the public realm implies that ex- gions of the spectrum. Don't talk lewd. She plosive pressure for a new connection will clutched at that even while taking on the build up. neighborhood. Respectability was the code For good or bad, Western culture has her culture trained her to rely on, as it was fostered linear thinking. It is embedded in the code whose infringement made her feel concepts such as prime mover, cause and that the situation in which she found herself effect, means and ends, input and output,

114 WQ WINTER 1994 critical mass, formative stages. It is embed- They simply organize our experience, and ded in proverbs and literature and com- thus they are largely worthless if used capri- merce and science. As the twig is bent, so ciously. grows the tree. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. The child is father to the man. he advantage of organizing expe- Must have successful track record. Rate of rience on the biological level is return on investment. Relative contribution clear. Every organism has a ge- of nature and nurture. It is bound to be netic program, capabilities fitted toT an environment, patterned relations with unsettling to move daily between those as- sumptions and the idea that a life consists others of its species, and a boundary (such of styles that can be chosen, altered, discon- as skin) to regulate inflow and outflow. tinued at will, and replaced like fabrics. Perception automatically sorts experience: Perhaps the greatest pressure for a cul- focusing attention, triggering response, and tural framework more settled than lifestyles enabling skills to develop. arises from the strain of assembling the That culture continues in this direction world from moment to moment, like walk- is obvious-economizing effort, standard- ing a long distance by reinventing the step izing encounters, pooling experience. But every two and a half feet. We endure and existence under the dispensation of lifestyles participate in a welter called experience. The becomes jittery. It is exhausting to hew categories into which we divide the welter- selves and connections over and over. It is such as forces, conditions, stimuli, intervals, intolerable to have to make up rules each feelings, perplexities, and relationships-are time for each set of social transactions. If not exhaustive and do not necessarily ex- nothing else, a culture ought to provide press fact or wisdom in an absolute sense. points of reference in a whirling world.

LIFESTYLE 115 In the nezu spirit of criticism as performance, a number of literary critics have gone so far as to take up novel-writing. Michael Levenson explores the creative zuorks of four of these enterprising intellectuals and finds that each overcomes not only the constraints of his or her theoretical past but the traditional division between creation and a~zalysis.

BY MICHAEL LEVENSON

isleading to call it a move- cations of modernism, especially those forbid- ment, and still worse to think ding experiments of the third decade-Joyce's of it as a program, but we now Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, Eliot's The Waste have seen enough minor liter- Land, Pound's Cantos-works more than will- aryM eruptions to suspect that it is a cultural ing (in T. S. Eliot's phrase) to disturb and alarm symptom that bears some reflection: this burst the public. This tliey did. of novel-writing from people who liave lived One slowly building consequence of those the conceptual life, the life of method and ar- literary agitations was tlie creation of criticism, gument, who often carry leather cases, or who criticism as we know it now-professional, give public lectures and contribute essays to sopliisticated, ambitious. In significant re- learned journals. In tlie past five years, some spects, tlie modern professoriate within tlie of the world's leading literary critics liave humanities is one of tlie lasting (though inad- turned novelists, and at the same time turned vertent) achievements of the avant-garde. It is from tlie coterie audience gathered in tlie uni- scarcely an accident that this century has seen die versities to the wider public made up of any- emergence of these rival siblings: a revolutionary one who wants to read. Why do tliey do it? avant-garde intent on speaking a new word, and What do tliey want? Are they merely slum- an academic establishment that has perfected ming in the bad streets of tlie imagination? Or tlie skills of interpretation. Indeed, the aca- are these just new cases of a few gifted people demic standpoint must often be seen as a de- who always hoped to grow up to be novelists fense against tlie aggressions of modernism. and decided to act before it was too late? Literary critics are not alone in suddenly it11 the great postwar expan- feeling the charm of novel-writing; it happens sion of tlie university and with to historians and journalists, among others. the exciting lure of interdisci- But I intend to give reasons for taking tlie lit- plinary collaboration, the criti- erary academic drift of tlie tide with special cal project took on ever more heady ambitions. seriousness. I'll start by proposing a story of Hopes of a grand synthesis-among, say, this century, inevitably a story witli many Marx and Freud and existentialism-led to chapters left out. It begins witli tlie old provo- tlie vision of a Total Theory, an exhaustive

116 WQ WINTER 1994 method that would take into account all rel- labor is leading anywhere in particular, schol- evant details on the way to its definitive inter- ars give themselves to self-contained gestures pretations. Jean-Paul Sartre gave one version of critical power. So, with the consummate of this comprehensive system of explanation, dexterity of a practiced performer, new his- Herbert Marcuse another, and Northrop Frye toricist Stephen Greenblatt (University of Cali- a rival third. Theirs was a great dream of the fornia, Berkeley) takes his audiences from the 1950s and early '60s, when it seemed possible trial of a hermaphrodite to the green woods of that many disciplines would meet in a grand Shakespearean comedy. And with a keen methodological union. sense for the intellectual funny bone, Sandra But the theory project has fallen into a cri- Gilbert (Princeton)and Susan Gubar (Univer- sis. The dream of a Total Theory is no longer sity of California, Davis) leaven their feminist able to soothe any historical revisionism with the hilarity deep academic sleep. comedy duet. To per- It just hasn't worked riticism at full men- out: There were too stretch, to do so before the ap- many fissures in the reciative glances of one's well- great globe of perfect ained colleagues, to provide understanding. Total through the course of an Theory has itself be- evening one full measure come a primary tar- of conceptual edifica- get of theoretical at- tion-this now often tack; the very idea of seems sufficient, the best a seamless explana- that can be hoped for. In- tion that would find a deed, there seems to be a home for every detail general acceptance of the of a life, a text, an ep- fact that as fast as it may och now seems be moving, literary criti- charmingly quaint. cism isn't headed any- With the fading where in particular. of the missionary Tongues needn't goal there has cluck at this develop- emerged a conspicuous ment; it's no worse than of individualism in a many others. Moreover, life.Of course, academics have has freed intellectuals never been free from the taint r more daring swoops of self-interest. But now that ought, more adven- it's so hard to believe that par- urous tones of voice. ticular essays and boo press the horror stories folding collective structure, everywhere you of violent rumbles between strong and weak look you see eye-catching individual display. political correctness factions, and you cringe. We The dazzling feat of interpretive ingenuity, the all cringe. But this is what happens when the bravura reading of a well-worn text, the cauldron bubbles-it spatters the walls. memorably witty lecture, even the rhetorically With the vogue of criticism as perfor- bold introduction to the witty lecture, now mance, with the shattered confidence in Total comprise the intellectual currency of academic Theory, with the admiration accorded to indi- life: the public working of the quick mind as vidual virtuosity at the expense of common high theater. enterprise, the idea of criticism as a science No longer convinced that their academic (vintage 1966) seems a picturesque relic of a

CRITIC AS NOVELIST 117 simpler time. Many now have unlearned the at every step the legitimacy of the project, and compulsions of Total Theory, and some have how wide the sky must have seemed when come to yearn for pleasure that no theory can Eco let himself out of the theory coop and give. Who can be surprised if the writing of wrote lus first novel. novels suddenly seems an irresistible lure to Once The Name of the Rose (1980) had be- these restless academics? come an international publishing sensation, nothing seemed more natural than that Eco the theorist should have found a home as a nov- elist. As a journalist for daily and weekly pa- 11 the 1960s and '70s, Italian scholar pers and as a distinguished professor, Eco Umberto Eco was one of the bright wrote criticism that carried him into many dis- young things who set out to bring into ciplines across many centuries. He wrote literary criticism the bracing rigor of the about Thomas Aquinas and Superman; he harderI sciences. Semiotics, the theory of the studied the lustory of monsters and devised a sign, was Eco's special subject at a time when theory of lists. When he began to put lus novel the model of linguistics seemed to open the together, he had the many resources of his prospect for a newly systematic study of both large and eccentric knowledge. The lustory of literary texts and the wider text of culture. The the church, medieval philosophy, the Sherlock great project, as he put it, was "to explore the Holmes canon-all this, among much else, theoretical possibility and the social function could come into romping play in the form of of a unified approach to every phenomenon of a lustorical/detective/Biblical/pl~osoplucal signification and/or communication" from mystery plot, where each murder shimmers film to food to fashion. across the centuries, from the Apocalypse to Eco couldn't have known that just as he Dr. Watson. was perfecting the house of semiotics, Jacques Having taken one whack at the novel, Eco Derrida was gnawing through the founda- did not stop. In Fo~icaidt'sPendiilion (1988),an tions. Eco's work has always been a fountain even more extravagant plot tempts the of distinctions-distinctions between open haunted minds of its principals-a great Plan and closed works, between the rights of the stretching across many centuries, through text and the responsibilities of the reader. He many countries, into many sects and secrets. was never rigid in lus schematism, but he had The Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Masons, a strong penchant for an analytic precision the Jesuits, the Slxiites, the Nazis-all get knit- captured in clipped, numbered paragraphs ted into the interpretation of a secret lustory. with boldface headings. When Derrida's de- Everything, or almost everything, seems to construction nibbled away at the clarity of the connect into an endless web that only one mas- structure, Eco suddenly found himself marked sive explanation can reveal. The book is a tour as a stick-in-the-mud believer ill determinate de force of encyclopedic learning, and at the meanings, forced to argue that in the theoreti- same time an unmasking of the pathology of cal rush of the past three decades "the rights interpretation. of the interpreters have been overstressed." Eco says that when he writes his fiction, It had no doubt been exhausting labor to he leaves his critical self back in the closet; let work slowly at the foundations of a general others play at explanation. But at least one of theory of the sign, but how much more fatigu- Eco's critical preoccupations-or their very ing it must have been to be obliged to defend nemesis-is clear. In both of lus big novels, the

Michael Levenson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1991). Copyright 0 1994 by Michael Leueizson.

118 WQ WINTER 1994 signal event is the overreaching of interpreta- a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, "al- tion. William of Baskerville~Eco'sHolmes as though at a later time than suggested here." philosophic Churchman-devises the most Eagleton ends his note by observing that cunning explanation, based on his reading of "most of the rest is invented." the Apocalypse, to solve the murders of The But "invented" is too weak. What gives Name of the Rose. But William fails. This, says the novel its comedy and its charm is not Eco, is "a mystery in which very little is dis- merely that it spins out new fancies but that it covered and the detective is defeated." So too so cheerfully refuses claims of historical fact. in Foncaidt's Pei~d~~l;it~~,the "Plan" is laid bare In its opening pages, which describe James as a fantasy imposed on the world-"wanting Connolly on the point of connections, we found connections"-an execution by firing elaborate intellectual construction, which, squad, Saints and once projected, takes on its own grotesque and Scholars looks to be a murderous reality. conventionally scru- The laughing, lurching energy of these pulous lustorical fic- careening plots plainly comes in some signifi- tion of the Irish re- cant part from Eco's flight from criticism, his volt. But it is exactly flight from the excess and the failure of con- scrupulous history temporary literary theory, what he calls its that the book ex- "interpretative frenzy." And when Eco's own plodes. Faced with invention flags, nothing seems to bring it back the awkwardness of to life more quickly than the memory of his old "facts," it invents critical opponents. They challenge- his theory; new ones. he writes them into hii novel. At the center of the book is a debate be- tween Connolly and Wittgenstein, the one upholding the imperative of revolution as the only response to crushing Irish misery, the n 1987 Terry Eagleton, well established other insisting that revolution is just another as an internationally prominent Marx- dangerous dream of purity. The dialogue be- ist critic, published a novel called Saints tween them is the best thing in the book. An and Scholars. It takes the Irish uprising of exhausted Connolly, badly suffering from his 1916I as its pressing lustorical context and then wounds, holds on to revolutionary speech, imagines a set of improbable circumstances. even as his conviction weakens. The excitable What if the wounded revolutionary James Wittgenstein finds himself deeply moved by Connolly, on the run from the British, hides in that speech and begins to try on Connolly's a cottage that had been rented by Ludwig revolutionary truth: "What if he is right that Wittgenstein, still a young philosopher ge- crisis is common?" This is the Wittgenstein nius? What if Wittgenstein has been traveling who had told Bakhtin earlier in the book that with Nikolai Bakhtin, the boisterous brother of "out there in Europe the most dreadful war in the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin? history is now being waged. I came to this And what if in the midst of this improbable place because I couldn't stand it any longer. So encounter Leopold Bloom steps out of the I'm on the run-in hiding from history." pages of Joyce's Ulysses and stumbles into the The Wittgenstein we know from the bio- panic? graphical record was scarcely on the run from In a prefatory note to the book, Eagleton history in 1916. On the contrary. He had left points out that "this novel is not entirely fan- the security of Cambridge in order to join the tasy." Wittgenstein and Nikolai Bakhtin were Austrian army, in which he served at great indeed friends; Wittgenstein did spend time in personal peril; an artillery officer, he was taken

CRITIC AS NOVELIST 119 prisoner of war by the Italian army. Tlus was Wittgenstein leans swiftly across and anything but a flight from history. Better to call grabs a half-empty bottle of wine from it a determined press into the midst of Bakhtin's cabinet. He says lightly: "I history's most dangerous confusion. For Ea- think you should drown in this." Bakhtin gleton's purposes, though, Wittgenstein must gives no response. "Do you hear me, be cast as a philosoplucal purist who has fled Nikolai? I said I think you should drown in your own disgusting mess." the impure swamp of social life. Bakhtin opens his eyes for a moment and twists 11;s lips upward in the shape t must have been very shortly before he of a slobbery kiss. sat down to compose his novel that Eagleton wrote a rather traditional essay So why does Eagleton do it? Why does he called "Wittgenstein's Friends." It use- play out in fiction what he had soberly en- fully places Wittgenstein in relation to recent acted in his criticism? And why does he ex- poststructuralist theory, showing, for instance, travagantly "reinvent" a lustory that he knows the common ground between Wittgenstein so well? and Derrida. From Eagleton's standpoint, The beginning of an answer is that Eagle- both the school of Wittgenstein and the school ton, like many others, must feel the desire to of Derrida make telling critiques of meta- break free of the usual academic constraints- physics, with its longing for impeccably secure historical exactitude, intellectual precision, foundations and systematic truth, but both sound evidence. This must always be a temp- scl~oolsfail to engage the reality of politics. At tation in academic life: to be done with its cau- tlus moment of impasse, the essay invokes a tions and respectabihties. What makes it more third figure to split the difference, Russian urgent in Eagleton's case is that his career as theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. For Eagleton, a critic has been devoted to a vision of his- Bakhtin shows how it is possible to make a tory-a revolutionary vision of social libera- strong philosoplucal criticism of metaphysical tion-that has come under such tremendous abstraction from the standpoint of social en- stress. He has not blinked in the face of the gagement. The key thought is that the meta- oppositions, internal and external, within the physics of the philosophers and the tyranny of Marxist tradition he has sought to extend. the politicians are in a fearful partnership that Competing methodologies, as well as sharp can be opposed only by a subversive energy. turns in political history, have brought large "Carnival" is Bakhtin's answer to oppression, and difficult changes in Eagleton's life as a where carnival implies a lusty release of the political critic. wild body, free to laugh, to mock, to enjoy. Of all these changes, perhaps the most In the fictional world of Saints and Schol- interesting has been Eagleton's recognition ars, Nikolai Bakhtin stands in for lus brother's that pleasure-immediate delight, as in the theory of carnival. Off in their Irish retreat, love of a single line of poetry~canno longer Wittgenstein becomes appalled by Nikolai's be neglected by even the most committed criti- taste for food and wine; he calls Bakhtin a cism. We live at a moment, he writes, when "disgusting walrus," at which point, "the relation between the kind of pleasure people take in art, and the pleasure they derive from striving to realize their political needs, Bakhtin begins to croon a Russian folk has become extremely obscure." Our age has song inaccurately to himself. Then he breaks off and remarks, "Somebody is 'a political problem about pleasure." slaughtering somebody else." He licks Saints and Scholars is a fantasy of histori- his lips contentedly. "I think it's you, cal coherence, a fantasy of our century's forces Ludwig, who's killing us all with your and powers brought into consoling relation. ridiculous purity." What Eagleton struggles toward in his theory,

120 WQ WINTER 1994 he brightly paints in his novel: a universe sign of art. Her novel's big sales and favorable where pleasure and politics can meet and reviews make it impossible to confine her where the significance of our historical strug- within the prison marked Critic. gle has reassuringly distinct outlines. The com- Her early fiction was bred in the late Eu- edy of Leopold Bloom set free from Ulysses to ropean modernism of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, enter into drunken dialogue with Witt- and Sarraute. Linguistically adventurous and genstein, Bakhtin, and Connolly is ticklishly formally severe, it came out of an admiration sharp. But transcending the comedy of the for others, admiration for the achievement of image is its sheer romance, which reassur- late lug11 modernism-not just the experirnen- ingly lets us feel that our modernity is not an tal fiction, but the cin- ugly chaos but that it might have a tidy plot ema of Godard, the of its own. If we feel let down by history, iin- theater of Artaud. plies Eagleton, then it's for us to reimagine the Within the tradition historical legacy, to revive ourselves wit11 a of modernist experi- daydream, a fully conscious daydream that ment, few tastes ex- admits its own need to find a refuge. tend more widely than Sontag's. But that taste finds its limits in usan Sontag is no academic. Her what Sontag sees as ability to resist university confine- the debased forms of ment has been one of the strengths popular art-i.e. tele- of her long career. Nor is she a re- vision. In a symposium on kitsch at Skidmore cent first-time novelist; her fiction writing be- College a few years ago, Sontag growled at the gan in the 1960s. But she belongs in any con- thought of taking television seriously. She has sideration of tlus cultural current, first because always held to the necessary difficulty, the she is by any sensible measure a common-law strenuousness, of authentic engagement with academic who lectures in that sprawling uni- art. It's not that she has taken difficulty as an. versity called New York Culture, and second end in itself; rather she has clearly understood because if she has not recently been born as a it as the precondition for the keenest satisfac- novelist, she has been born again as one. tions. The great danger in kitsch, she argues, From the time of her first successful es- is that it "unfits people from having certain says in the early 1960s, Sontag has refused the kinds of attention spans and an appetite for name Critic and fought hard to keep alive her complexity." claims to be called Novelist, and later Film- And yet it's hard to resist the thought that maker. She stubbornly presented herself as a as a result of that awkward discussion at Skid- creative artist who also happened to write in- more (and others like it), Sontag reconsidered teresting essays. But it was a losing battle. Her her views on pleasure, and that in relaxing experimental fiction was politely acknowl- some of her modernist sternness, she found a edged; her films less politely received; her es- path back to the vocation of novelist. No one says were triumphantly influential. Through is likely to confuse The Volcano Lover with tele- the 1970s and '80s she was never the visionary vision: The novel continually employs distanc- artist but always the supremely lucid critic- ing techniques (shifts in point of view, the in- writing of illness as metaphor, of AIDS, of pho- trusion of the narrator's voice, the insertion of tography. mini-essays on such subjects as collecting and All of tlus is what makes Tile Volcano Lover history and revolution).But these techniques, (1992) such a revealing case: It is Sontag's late, though sometimes interesting, are best seen as large attempt to place her career under the Sontag's attempt to keep faith wit11 the mod-

CRITIC AS NOVELIST 121 ernist formalism that she is teaching herself to emotions inside old conventions, releases an- half-unlearn. cient energies of the love story, but then has- The real event in The Volcano Lover is not tens to distance its voice and to stylize its the play with perspective, and not the lucid- forms. If the conflict remains unresolved, we ity of intelligence; it is the unveiling of the the- can still learn to love the agitation at a moment ater of desire, romantic desire, sensuous de- of creative instability. sire, as performed in. the famous menage of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma (born Em- ily Lyon), and Lord Nelson. The circumstances are irresistible. You have Hamilton, the fa- ore than any of the other fig- mous art collector and naturalist, the great ra- ures discussed here, Julia Kris- tionalist connoisseur who, as ambassador to teva has entertained hopes of a the Kingdom of Naples, grows obsessed with transformation of the world the eruptions of Vesuvius. You have Emma, through an art guided by a theory. Arriving in his second wife, a legendary beauty whose Paris from Bulgaria in 1966, she soon found face and whose wits carried her from poverty herself moving among the French luminaries; to courtly privilege. You have the one-armed she bathed in their glowing aura, and then Nelson with all his impure mystique, the tac- quickly acquired an aura all her own. Within tical genius, the impetuous adventurer, who a very few years she had built a subtle picture deserts his wife and neglects his duty in order of modernity, language, and literature that to play the tirelessly eager lover. took its place as one strong, coherent view con- Sontag has confronted many of the same tending with the many others. disturbances that jarred Eagleton-for one, In Kristeva's influential sketch, we all the disturbance in the claim of a pleasure that come out of our mothers dripping with the won't be purified but won't go away. At one needs of the body. The howling, weeping, point, the novel draws a sharp distinction be- laughing infant will come to submit to the tween the Collector and the Lover. father's law, and will learn the rules of gram- mar. But obedience can never be complete. The collector's world bespeaks the Some, the psychotics, continue to howl; others, crushingly large existence of other worlds, the poets, acknowledge the social codes and energies, realms, eras than the one he lives linguistic conventions but refuse to surrender in. The collection aiulildates the collector's the truth on the tongues of those called incom- little slice of historic existence. The lover's petent. Speech from the body, speech in chant- relation to objects annihilates all but the ing rhythms, the speech of nonsense, the hard world of the lovers. This world. My speech of obscenity-these are the resources world. My beauty, my glory, my fame. of a poetic language that is our revolutionary century's greatest gift. It's not too much to say that Sontag as a For the young Kristeva, our epochal hope critic has been a Collector who has come only lay in the struggles of a literary avant-garde to recently to feel the full urgings of the Artist as overturn the oppressive word with the strong Lover. What she says of her Emma, we might poetic word. The father's law, the social law, now say of her: "She needs her fix of rapture." strangles poetry; poetry must reach into old, The other drama in the book, the drama be- dark speech to defy the law. In the works of neat11 the plot, is the strugglebetween Sontag's those such as Mallarme, Celine, and Joyce, es- old need to understand writing as a serious pecially the Joyce of Fin;zega11s Wake, Kristeva aesthetic gesture and the new thrill of writing located the "positive subversion of the old what fancy whispers. This is a drama without universe." It is a vision of the avant-garde as conclusion. The Volcano Lover activates the lion rampant, snarling into the frightened

122 WQ WINTER 1994 faces of the cool rationalists. novel and her audacious theoretical challenges. When her novel The Samurai appeared in In The Samurai,Kristeva has not written a 1990, the first excited reaction fastened onto novel that her energetic theory taught her to the thin disguises worn by its lightly fictional- write; rather she has written a novel about the ized characters. There they were, the glittering theorists. This itself suggests a good deal. It minds of the Parisian boulevards strutting suggests that, quite apart from any conceptual their mentalities through her pages. It was ~LIII ambitions, the Theory Life stirs creative ener- (for an hour) to identify gies for those once connected Fabien Edelman as Lucien to it. Ideas aside, the idea Goldmann, or Maurice people claim an interest all Lauzun as JacquesLacan, or their own. With their alliances Saida as Derrida, or Olga as and betrayals, their deepening Kristeva herself. But now intensities, their trips to Cluna, that the players are identi- their unusual minds and their fied, it's possible to set the usual bodies, they now often detective game aside and seem to Kristeva more interest- concentrate on what an odd ing for the gestures they made book this is-odd because it than for the conclusions they is the perfectly conventional reached. work of an adventurous The effect is not always thinker. Nothing, after all, pleasant. When Kristeva tells could be easier to absorb, the grimy anecdote of Lau- easier to digest, than a ro- zun/Lacan betrayed by his man 2 clef that puts Parisian lover and his faithful dis- intellectual celebrities ciple-a story of knowing through their familiar paces. glances and public humilia- Where is the poetic language? Where is tion-it's impossible not to feel the cruelty of the shock to "father's law"? How does a pas- her gaze. But The Samuraiconfronts the recog- sage such as the following-prompted by a nition that intellectual life is not the mind's game of tennis-"positively subvert" the old pure labor. It is, rather, active, sensuous, dra- muverse? matic, public, impure. As her career in theory has developed, These fine distinctions struck Olga as Kristeva has moved steadily from the vision- typically "structuralist." Talk about split- ary hopes of her daring early writings. Her ting hairs, even when it came to war! It political skepticism (born with her ill Bulgaria) was astounding how they tracked down has spread: Trained as a psychoanalyst, she meaning in the smallest fraction of time, has increasingly made love the subject of her space, or action. Admittedly it was an intellectual work. These turns of interest have attractive theory. But its adepts seemed rather otherworldly and vague, as if exposed her to much challenge from disap- they'd unlearned everything that had pointed theoreticians, but she has not stopped ever been known. So did they really need turning. Her novel, in its very conventionality, to learn anything anymore? with its undemanding structure and its soft love plots, upbraids the purists of the avant- Kristeva, of course, isn't obliged to live up to garde and marks her furthest reach from the her portentous views of the 1960s and '70s. She sacred precincts of high theory. doesn't need to apologize for what she writes. Eco's semiotics, Eagleton's politics, Son- But then we don't need to apologize for pointing tag's aesthetics, Kristeva's avant-garde-all to the contrast between this cozily diverting under pressure, these once-confident projects

CRITIC AS NOVELIST 123 struggle in varying stages of retreat. What has you find a giddy delight in sinuous plot, in its been lost is the note of inspired intellectual self- romance or its comedy, alongside a rueful, assurance, the contagious sense of a large cul- tacit awareness that such writing is not what tural project unfolding its prophecies. What was dreamed of one, two, and three decades has been found is the undead novel. ago. This double consciousness captures some of the unsettling complexity of the current cul- one of these figures denies or re- tural moment. A new sensibility (Sontag)and pudiates his or her theoretical a new society (Eagleton) are what they pur- past, but each uses the past some- sued with daunting vigor, but nowadays it times in a mood of nostalgia, takes no special skeptical turn to see that sen- sometimesN in mockery, sometimes in cool de- sibility and society are nothing so simple as taclment-in ways that would certainly have "new." Their careers, their lives, and their surprised their former selves. Kristeva's ro- writing provide sobering tokens of a milieu man 2 clef only makes explicit what all of them (ours) in wluch a (literary)opportunity seized have done: They have passed beyond their old coincides with a (critical) ideal abandoned. austerity and have learned the joys of bring- What is likely to happen to this current of ing intellectual life down into the muddy, up- writing? Impossible to say. Still, it only takes roarious world. a slightly generous view to see it as a sparkling The pleasures in Umberto Eco's work are tributary into the pool of culture. Whether it the pleasures of deep release, a full-souled in- will yield work of lasting quality is unclear. difference to the proprieties of critical dis- But while we wait to find out, we can enjoy the course. When The Name of the Rose (and less fresh stirring of the old waters. That academic frequently Foiicault's P~II~II~LL~II)succeeds, it is intellectuals should suddenly feel bouncy and because Eco has allowed himself to forget the vigorous at the thought of writing fiction-tlus obligations of the perspicuous axiom and the may be a harbinger of the kind of hybrid we clinching argument. If, in The Samurai, the could sorely use, a hybrid that overcomes the pleasure is rarer and weaker, this is largely division between those who imagine and because as a novelist Kristeva is all the time those who ratiocinate, those who create and remembering her other, older incarnation as a those who review their books. It's no ultimate glistening intellectual, and because as she synthesis, but it makes a colorful little picture writes of that time she tastes bitter ashes. within our larger gray: the sight of these self- But it may be the mixed satisfactions of reinventing theorists, these feeling intellectu- Sontag and Eagleton that are most revealing. als and pleasure-seeking rationalists, these In The Volcano Lover and Saints and Scholars academics laughing and weeping.

124 WQ WINTER 1994 THEPERIODICAL OBSERVER Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

Health-Care Reform: Where's the Pain? A Survey of Recent Articles

his health-care system of ours is badly But a prescription that raises awareness of broken, and it is time to fix it." So de- costs may fly in the face of public feeling: Ameri- T clared President Bill Clinton to Congress cans are "satisfied with their current health-care last September. His perception is widely shared. arrangements-except for the price tag," as Rob- Unfortunately, the specialists and the general pub- ert J. Blendon and John M. Benson of the lic are at odds about just what needs to be fixed. Harvard School of Public Health put it in the The specialists, their opinions amplified by Public Perspective (March-April 1993).To the sat- the news media, look mainly at the "big picture." isfied majority, adds Newsweek (Sept. 20, 19931, They worry that the nation's health-care expen- "change can only be threatening." ditures in 1993 amounted to 14 percent of gross Clinton's health-care plan tries to be national product (GNP)and are projected by the unthreatening. His complex proposal would Congressional Budget Office to grow to 18 per- define a standard package of benefits that all cent by 2000. Most Americans agree that health- Americans would be entitled to receive (along care costs must be controlled, but the costs they with a "11ealtl1 security card). States would es- have in mind are their own. They do not want tablish regional "l~ealtl~alliances" that, on behalf less care; they want to pay less, or at least not of millions of consumers, would bargain with more. And that, many specialists believe, is a doctors, hospitals, and others. Most alliances large part of the problem. would offer consumers a large selection of plans, Many Americans seem to have the notion but all would offer at least one traditional "fee- that they are (or should be) getting a "free for-service" option, which would almost cer- lunch." Employers or insurance companies foot tainly cost more than the other choices, particu- the bill, so let's have another helping of health larly health maintenance organizations (HMOs). care, please, and with all the advanced techno- Clinton's proposal thus aims to keep costs down logical trimmings. In reality, of course, notes by making consumers more aware of them and Princeton University economist Uwe Reinhardt by encouraging competition among the pro- in Health Affairs (Special Issue, 1993), higher i11- vider networks. A National Health Board would surance premiun~sfor employers mean lower wages for employees-a fact also noted by con- tributors to a National Review (Dec. 13, 1993) POLITICS & GOVERNMENT supplement on health care. Some employers, Rachel Wildavsky reports FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE in Reader's Digest (Oct. 19931, have been trying to ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS 132 make workers aware of costs. For example, they have begun offering bonuses to those whose SOCIETY 134 annual medical claims do not exceed a certain PRESS & MEDIA 138 amount. At Fortes magazine, claims plummeted and reimbursements fell by more than one- RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 140 fourth after employees were offered bonuses if SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY 142 they kept their 1992 claims below $500. Wildavsky believes that such an approach, if & ENVIRONMENT widely used, "could help rescue American ARTS & LETTERS 145 health care from possibly dangerous 'reforms.' I11 the process, it could save big money and help OTHER NATIONS 148 expand health coverage to those now witl~out."

PERIODICALS 125 monitor the system. If this "managed competi- ford to pay more for health care. A jump in the tion" does not work, the Clinton proposal has a cost of a certain medical treatment from, say, $1 backup approach ready: government price con- to $10 does not matter much if a general rise in trols on insurance premiums. Costs are to be productivity also lifts zuages so that it still takes kept to 17 percent of GNP in 2000. only an hour of labor to pay for the treatment. The Heritage Foundation's Stuart M. Butler, linton and First Lady Hillary Rodham writing in the New York Times (Sept. 28, 19931, Clinton insist that their reforms-in- calls the Clinton plan a prescription for "perrna- eluding the extension of health insur- nent price controlsby stealth." It is "folly," he says, ancec to the 37 million Americans now without to expect such a system to deliver quality health it~canbe accomplished "without enacting new care at a lower price. "Price controls have never broad-based taxes." Others are not so sure. achieved such results in the past, and they won't Clinton's plan, the editors of the New Republic work now." (Nov. 8,1993) complain, "asks no sacrifice from Even if managed competition worked exactly anyone. Every American will be guaranteed a as its proponents wish, says Harvard's Joseph P. lifetime of health security; quality will be main- Newhouse in the Health Affairs special issue, it tained; individuals, businesses, and the federal would not slow the rate of increase in medical- government will all pay less for care. Only drug care costs more than temporarily, so long as "it and insurance companies have been slighted." continues to be true that much of the cost in- From a financial standpoint, asserts Rich Tho- crease reflects enhanced medical capabilities that mas in Nezuszueelc (Sept.20,19931, Clinton's blue- society is mostly willing to pay for." print is an "exercise in wishful thinking." His plan assumes that the rate of growth in Medicare illard Gaylin, president of the Has- and Medicaid, now running at 13 percent a year, tings Center for bioethical research, can be cut to under five percent, for a savings of w contends in Harper's (Oct. 1993) that $238 billion between 1994 and 2000. the Clinton administration has embraced the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, one of the ideas of "efficiency experts" who assume "that advisers on the Clinton plan, claims in the New the elimination of waste will obviate the need for Repi~blic(Dec. 6, 1993) that the proposal "pre- 'rationing' health care." He argues, in contrast, sumes neither a free lunch nor any fiscal fanta- that "the greatest part of the increase in health- sies. . . . As states carry out reform beginning in care costs can best be understood as the result 1996, expanded coverage will raise spending by not of the failures of medicine but of its suc- about eight percent, while other reforms aimed cesses." Some advances, such as the polio vac- at stimulating cost-conscious choice, backed up cine, have reduced outlays over the long term, by a regional cap on premium increases, will cut Newhouse notes, but most, such as invasive car- the rate of increase in per capita costs." diology and renal dialysis, have increased out- In the same magazine (Nov. 22, 1993), New lays. The very concept of health has been ex- York University economist William J. Baumol panded, Gaylin says. Infertility, for example, argues that concerns about the economic impact did not used to be considered a disease. In sav- of rising costs is exaggerated-a view shared by ing lives, effective medicine increases the num- a number of other economists. Baumol argues ber of ill people in the population. that the problem in health care is not, as the Controlling waste will save money only for Clintons and others assume, an absence of com- a while, Gaylin believes. The time thus bought, petition. Competition has been rising, as the he says, should be used "to figure out a way to growth of HMOs suggests. The real problem is confront the deeper and more challenging rea- slow productivity growth: Medical care simply sons for escalating health costs: our unbridled does not lend itself to labor-saving techniques appetite for health care and our continuing ex- because physicians still must see patients one- pansion of the definition of what constitutes by-one. But if productivity is rising elsewhere in health." That confrontation may necessitate a the economy, Baumol notes, consumers can af- debate about much more than just "reform."

126 WQ WINTER 1994 POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

The President "I do not know how our institutions could en- dure," Harrison said on one occasion, "unless we As Preacher so conduct our public affairs and society that ev- "Civil Religion and the Gilded Age Presidency: The ery man who is sober and industriousshall be able Case of Benjamin Harrison" by Charles W. Calhoun, in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fall 1993), 208 E. 75th St., to make a good, comfortable living and lay some- New York, N.Y. 10021. thing aside for old age or evil days; to have hope in his heart and better prospects for lus clddren. Theodore Roosevelt was not the first president to That is the strength of American institutions. What- see his office as a "bully pulpit." A dozen years ever promotes that I want to favor." What pro- before luin, Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888, moted that, he maintained, was the Republican grasped the opportunities tl-ie presidency offered economic program, particularly a stable currency to preach to the nation. Indeed, Harkon's "exercise of the 'priestly func- tions' of the presidency," argues Call-ioun, a historian at East Carolina University, helped transform tl-ie office. The grandson of an earlier president, William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) of Indiana served a single term in the U.S. Senate before nuu"m~gfor the presidency in 1888. A con- temporary said that Harrison had "a very President Harrison, who sought a direct rapport with the people, cold, distant temperament," but "if he receives a procession at the Wlzite House after his inauguration. should address 10,000 men from a pub- lie platform, he would make every one 1+3friend." and the protective tariff. That gift proved to be lus greatest political asset, Harrison has risen in the estimation of lustori- Calho~uisays. Presidential candidates of tl-ie period am lately. With the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act were obliged to stay off the campaign trail and and other measures, Calhoun writes, lus adininis- appear to be above politics. Candidate Harrison (ration laid the groundwork for later Progressive waged a brilliant "front-porch campaign," deliver- reforms. And by addressing the nation so vigor- ingbrief "homiletic" remarks to throngs of visitors ously from the "pulpit," Harrison helped change and reporters virtually every day. He defeated the presidency. TR and otl-ier presidents would Democrat Grover Cleveland 233 to 168 in the Elec- build on what Harrison began, "echoing l* civil re- toral College wlde narrowly losing the popular ligious concens but pleading more boldly and forth- vote to the incumbent chief executive. rightly for government action for the public good." 111 the White House, Harrison continued to seek a direct rapport with the citizenry.M-ig 1+3 single term (Cleveland won back the presidency in 18921, An Unlimited Future? Harrison spoke publicly on 296 occasions, half as "Term-Limitation Express" by Mark P. Petracca and many as all of his predecessors combined. After Darci Jump, in Society (Nov.-Dec. 1993), Rutgers-The Harrison, presidents would find it harder to view State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903. the office as strictly administrative; increasingly, they would feel obliged to exert leadership through The term-limitation movement, born in 1990, direct appeals to the public. shows no sign of slowing down. Wit11 the addi- "At a time when the disruption of modenka- tion of Maine last November, voters in 17 states ti011 wrought profound disarray in personal and have limited the terms of federal or state legis- national values," Call~ounsays, "Harrison effec- lators, and in 14 of those they have limited the tively exploited the national pulpit, invoking the tern-is of both. Activists are working to get ini- tenets of a civil religion that comprel-iended both tiatives on the ballot in eight other states this year spiritual and secular goals." and are lobbying legislatures elsewhere. Not

PERIODICALS 127 since the Progressive era has there been so much Jump note. Court or other legal rulings kept grassroots activity aimed at redesigning repre- term-limit initiatives off the ballot in three states sentative government, observe Petracca, a politi- in 1992. Speaker of the House Thomas Foley (D.- cal scientist at the University of California, Wash.), along with the League of Women Vot- Irvine, and Jump, a 1992 graduate. Polls indicate ers, has filed a suit to overturn the congressional that 70 to 80 percent of the public backs term lim- term limits adopted in 1992 in his state. A 1992 its. The remaining obstacles to a nationwide tri- study by the Congressional Research Service umph may soon fall. concluded that state-imposed limits on congres- One barrier is that 24 states do not permit citi- sional terms are unconstitutional. zen initiatives, the favored device of term-limi- That objection would be moot, of course, if tation activists. Few legislators, after all, are in- the Constitution were amended. How likely is clined to vote to put a definite end to their legis- that? Petracca and Jump contend that the lative careers. Nevertheless, activists in some movement's victories thus far-particularly the states, such as Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, "overwhelming success" it enjoyed in Novem- and New Jersey, have organized campaigns to ber 1992, when 14 states opted for term limits- pressure candidates for the legislature to pledge show that such an amendment is quite possible. to support term limitation. In New Jersey and They cite the precedent of the Progressive-era South Carolina, term-limit advocates are seeking movement for direct election of U.S. senators (in- to amend their state constitutions to allow initia- stead of selection by state legislatures). Reform- tives; activists in Mississippi have already suc- ers in Oregon managed to get a law enacted in ceeded in doing so. 1901 that enabled voters to express their (non- Legal cllallenges pose another big obstacle for binding) choice for senator. The reformers then the term-limitation movement, Petracca and demanded that candidates for the state legisla-

A Tale of Two Buzzwords Veteran news commentator Daniel Schorr ers of the 1950s turned thnt inward with "inter- notes in the New Leader (Oct. 418,1993) that nal security." candidate Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed agent Although "security" appears in thedictionary of change, has turned into President Clinton, as a warm, fuzzy noun, connoting shelter and agent of security. protection, it has not been universally popular, particularly with those inclined tozvard wedin- In Chapel Hill, North Carolina,on October 12, the dividualism. General Douglas MacArthur once president asserted that people would fear change said, "There is no security on this earth, there is less if thqfelt more secure. He went on to pro- only opportunity." And General Dzuiglzt D. pound four kinds of security as an umbrella over Eisenhomer, while president of Col~~i~zbiaUniver- diverse administration programs ranging from sity, said, "If security is diaf Americans want, health care to crime control to the North Ameri- they cango to prison." Theclosest flwt the Reagan can Free Trade Agreement. 771q are: health secn- admininistration came to the notion of security was rity, economic security, personal security, and the "social safety net." con~tnunitysecurity~the last including shared That was before not only the poor but the responsibility for our children. . . . middle class, in increasing numbers, began to feel "Security," the nau buzzword, has over the insecure in the face of memployment, family dis- years been put to many uses. . . . FDR called his location, and crime on the streets. The word "se- pension plan "Social Security." Defense became curity" zuas test-marketed by the WhiteHouseas "national security." An internationalist versioiz it prepared to sell its health-reform program, and of same was "collectivesecurity." The Red-hunt- was found to resonate a lot better than "clwnge."

128 WQ WINTER 1994 ture sign pledges to vote for the winner of the ages for the entire 148-year period was very high primary. Progressives in other states followed and "judicial activism" very low. (Usually fewer suit. By 1910, 27 state legislatures had been than a dozen laws were overturned in each two- pushed to petition Congress for a constitutional year period.) From the 1890s to the 1930s, his amendment. Two years later, the Senate finally index of activism rose to an average of 30 and gave in, and in 1913 the 17th Amendment be- voter turnout dropped. From the 1930s until came law after it was ratified by three-fourths of 1960, the opposite pattern prevailed; and between the states. A 28th Amendment, the authors say, 1960 and 1988, the pattern reversed itself again. could be only a few years away. Since most people have only a very limited knowledge of what the Supreme Court is doing, a question arises: How does judicial activism Court Costs depress turnout? Klinkner suggests that activism by the Court has its most direct impact on labor 'Dwarfing the Political Capacity of the People? The Relationship Between Judicial Activism & Voter unions and other organizations that get out the Turnout, 1840-1988" by Philip A. Klinkner, in Polity vote. The activist Warren and Burger courts of (Summer 1993), Thompson Hall, Univ. of Massachu- 1953-86, for example, often let liberal interest setts, Amherst, Mass. 01003. groups achieve their goals without having to Legal scholars have long debated whether or not win popular support; hence, such groups put Supreme Court activism discourages public par- their money and energy into litigation rather ticipation in electoral politics. Klinkner, of Loy- than voter mobilization. ola Marymount University, sides with the crit- The possibility that judicial activism may result ics of activism. Comparing voter turnout in con- in more voters staying home on Election Day does gressional and presidential elections between not mean, in Klinkner's view, that the high court 1840 and 1988 with the number of federal, state, should always sit on its hands. In Brown v. Board and local laws overturned by the Supreme Court of Education, the 1954 ruling outlawing school during the two years before each election, he segregation, the requirements of justice were finds a troubling pattern. clear. The lesson, Klinkner asserts, is rather "that Until the 1890s, turnout relative to the aver- judicial activism may not be cost-free."

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

Filling a Vacuum bling. "China and other countries have become nuclear powers without making the world a "The Emerging Structure of International Politics" by more dangerous one," he argues. "Why should Kenneth N. Waltz, in International Security (Fall 1993), Center for Science and International Affairs, 79 John F. nuclear weapons in German and Japanese hands Kennedy St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138. be especially worrisome? Nuclear weapons have encouraged cautious behavior by their With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United possessors and deterred any of them from States stands supreme, its power virtually threatening others' vital interests." unchecked. This will not last, promises Waltz, a Will Japan or Germany, already economic prominent political scientist at the University of powerlxouses, want to become great powers? California at Berkeley. Within the next 10 to 20 Probably, Waltz believes. As memories of World years, he predicts, Germany (or perhaps a War I1 fade, so will Japanese and German 'United States of Europe"), Japan, and China may nuclear inhibitions. "Countries have always well become great powers-probably joined by competed for wealth and security, and the com- Russia-all armed with nuclear weapons. petition has often led to conflict. Why should the Waltz does not find the nuclear prospect trou- future be different from the past? Given the ex-

PERIODICALS 129 great-power roles, and the United States will liave to learn The New Crusaders a role it has never played be- hi the National Interest (Whiter 1993-94), AlaiiTonelson, research fore," Waltz says. No longer director of the Economic Strategy Institute, discerns a new will- will Washington be able to ingness to use force abroad on the part of certain liberals, such make policies unilaterally. In- as Nau Yorlc Times columnist Anthony Lewis. ternational politics, however, will remain basically anarchic, Although many of the nezo internafio11aIists opposed fifhtit~g"a Waltz believes. Strategic nuclear war for oil," they have favored using miditary force~evenunilat- weapons are useful only for de- erally, if necessq-in areas such as Kurdistan, Bosnia, Somalia, terrence. Since all the great pow- and Haiti. No significant U.S. interests are at stake ill these regions, ers will have such deterrents, but liberals liave portrayed intervention as necessary to advance the importance of conventional internationalism's key systemic goals: greater international pros- military forces will be reduced. perity and stability, as well as a kinder, gentler z~lorld.If success- That "will focus the minds of fill, such peacekeeping, peace-making, aid nation-budding opem- national leaders on their tech- tions zuo~ildalso further the grander internationalist objective of nological and economic suc- a true world community governed by law rather than force-an cesses and failures." objective thysee as the ultimate guarantor of American security Altl~ouglithere may be more and prosperity, and zuhich has been dear to liberal hearts since the democratic, and fewer authori- Enhghtemnent. . . . tarian, states in the new world, So strilcing has been the contrast between Gulf and post-Gulf that does not mean that "the stances of liberals, that some of their critics sardonically accuse Wilsonian vision of a peaceful, them offavoritzg militanjactions only when 110 serious purely U.S. stable, and just international interests are at stake. But this jibe points to a central truth about order" is on the verge of realiza- liberal internationalism. Wietherdiirii~gthe Cold Waror after the tion, Waltz cautions. Demo- Cold War,purely U.S. national interests were never its top prior- cratic states, too, have conflicts. ity. In fact, they were not even supposed to exist. The War of 1812 was fought by two democracies (Britain and the United States); so was the Civil War. "A relative harmony pectation of conflict, and the necessity of taking can, and sometin-,es does, prevail among na- care of one's interests, one may wonder how a tions," he says, "but always precariously so." state with the economic capability of a great power can refrain from arming itself with the weapons that have served so well as the great de- The Few, the Proud, terrent." Japan, for example, must worry about China The Single (and vice versa). "China is rapidly becoming a 'Your Honey or Your Life" by Allan Carbon, in Policy Revfew (Fall 1993),The Heritage Foundation, 214 great power in every dimension: internal Massachusetts Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002-4999. economy, external trade, and military capabil- ity. . . . Unless Japan responds to the growing When Marine Corps commandant Carl Mundy power of China, China will dominate its region announced last August that the corps would and become increasingly influential beyond it." cease accepting married recruits and discourage China, India, Pakistan, and possibly North Ko- postenlistment weddings, he was swiftly over- rea, all liave nuclear anns to deter threats against ruled. Nevertheless, "the weight of American their vital interests. "Increasingly,Japan will be history and military tradition was firmly on pressed to follow suit." General Mundy's side," writes Carlson, author What will the new world be like? "Germany, of Family Questions (1988). Japan, and Russia will have to relearn their old 'A 'bachelor' military force was the Ameri-

130 WQ WINTER 1994 can rule from 1776 to 1940-and, arguably, to full-time professional officers and noncoimnis- 1947," Carlson notes. "Military regulations uni- sioned officers. Beguu-diigat age 21, all males would fomily forbade the peacetime enlistment of mar- be required to serve six years in the active militia, ried men, and discouraged marriage thereafter." but they would be free to marry. In time of total war, of course, married men were called to arms. The bachelors-only policy stemmed partly from the traditional American Giving Up the Bomb aversion to standing armies. But it also was a "Why South Africa Gave Up the Bomb" by J. W. de Villiers, time-honored way of reconciling "the military's Roger Jardine, and Mitchell Reiss, in Foreign Affairs (Nov.- need for a soldier's full obedience, immediate Dec. 1993), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. availability, frequent movement, and extended service with a man's natural desire to settle Who could have guessed that the first nation down and procreate." Only senior officers were ever to engage in unilateral nuclear disarma- exempt from the marriage stricture. ment would be South Africa, long one of the But the Cold War, Carlson notes, resulted in world's "pariah states"? After confirming suspi- "a kind of permanent mobilization." The armed cions that South Africa possessed "a limited services swelled to several million. By 1960, de- nuclear deterrent capability," President F. W. de pendent wives and children for the first time Klerk announced last March that his country had outnumbered uniformed personnel in the active disarmed itself. De Villiers, chairman of the force. Today, about 60 percent of those on active Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa, Jar- duty have spouses or other dependents. A new dine, national coordinator of science and tech- twist was added wit11 the integration of women nology policy for the African National Congress into the services, beginning in the 1970s. The (ANC),and Reiss, a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow changes raise difficult sexual and child-care is- Wilson Center, say that Pretoria had come to real- sues, not to mention costs. I11 fiscal year 1994, ize that its nuclear weapons "were not only super- outlays for dependent health care, family hous- fluous but actually co~u~terproductive." ing, and other items may consume $25 billion, or South Africa, wluch possesses abundant re- one-tenth of the nation's military budget. serves of uranium, decided by the late 1950s to cre- With the Cold War over, Carlson argues, ate a nuclear research and development program America should get women and married men- for peaceful purposes. By the late 1960s it had con- and a lot of other people~outof the military. He structed a uraiumii-enriclunentplant, wluch made favors a radically reduced army: An "expedi- the manufacture of material for nuclear weapons tionary force" of only 250,000 to 300,000 profes- possible. In 1974 John Vorster, then prime minister, sionals. For the possible "big war," he proposes approved development of a nuclear-explosive ca- a Swiss-style citizen force, aided by up to 50,000 pability limited, the authors say, to such purposes as mining excavation. During the next several years, Pretoria decided to build a nuclear deterrent. Ultimately, six bombs were fully assembled. That decision, formalized in 1978, "is best understood in light of [South Africa's] interna- tional standing at the time," the authors say. Pretoria's relations wit11 the rest of the world were rapidly deteriorating; it feared, as de Klerk noted in March, "a Soviet expansionist threat to southern Africa," and it was worried about the imminent independence of neighboring Ziinba- bwe under an actively antiapartheid regime. It was alarmed by its "relative international isolation and the fact that it could not rely on outside as- -. $+-+&&- sistance should it be attacked." Under the strat-

PERIODICALS 131 egy adopted in 1978, the government would nei- Klerk won the presidency in September 1989, the ther confirm nor deny that it had a nuclear- decision was made to dismantle the nuclear ar- weapons capability; but in the event of a military senal, close down the enrichment plant, and de- threat, it would reveal that capability covertly, stroy technical drawings. This was accom- or if necessary overtly. plished by early July 1991. "Toward the end of the 1980s-after the col- South Africa signed the NPT on July 10,1991, lapse of the Soviet Union, the independence of and two months later concluded a safeguards Namibia, the cessation of hostilities in Angola, agreement with the International Atomic Energy and the withdrawal from that country of 50,000 Agency. After next April's unprecedented non- Cuban troops-South Africa saw clearly that the racial elections, an ANC-led government is ex- nuclear deterrent was becoming superfluous," pected to take office. There remains the question the authors write. Indeed, the deterrent was be- of what the new government will do with the coming a burden. Signing the nuclear country's stockpile of enriched uranium. The Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), for example, authors are hopeful: "ANC President Nelson Man- "would have distinct advantages for South dela has declared that South Africa must never Africa's international relations, especially those again allow its resources, scientists, and engineers with other African countries." Soon after de to produce weapons of mass destruction."

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

Did Deregulation ston notes, many popular analysts simply com- pare the "before" and "after" snapshots, and if Work? the latter seems worse, conclude that deregula- "Economic Deregulation: Days of Reckoning for tion failed. Winston argues that the trouble with Microecononusts" by Clifford Winston, inJourna1of Economic Literature (Sept. 1993), American Economic that approach, as the airline case illustrates, is Assoc., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. that it fails to take into account the impact of the business cycle, technological developments, or Soon after the Carter administration began other changes in the economy that may be tak- deregulating airlines in 1978, airfares rose and ing place at the same time. airline profits dropped. Does that mean that Studies in which economists try to account deregulation failed? Not at all, argues Winston, for such changes, Winston says, show that de- of the Brookings Institution. The 1979 energy regulation has indeed improved the economy's crisis drove fuel prices higher-and it was that efficiency: "Society has gained at least $36-46 bil- increase that brought about the hike in fares and lion (1990 dollars) annually from deregulation, the drop in profits. Isolate the effects of the en- primarily in the transportation industries. . . . ergy crisis, as some economists have, and it turns This amounts to a seven-nine percent improve- out that fares were lower and profits higher than ment in the part of GNP affected by regulatory they would have been without deregulation. reform." Consumers have been the main benefi- During the 1970s and early '80s, other indus- ciaries. For labor, the impact has been mixed, tries-including railroads, trucking, cable TV, with some small wage losses but some modest telecommunications, banking, natural gas, and employment gains. Producers, surprisingly, petroleurn-were also deregulated. The share of ''have actually benefited, on net, from reform." gross national product (GNP)produced by fully Airlines have enjoyed a substantial increase in regulated industries fell from 17 percent in 1977 profits; the well-publicized financial difficulties to less than seven percent in 1988. Economists, they experienced at various times during the through their research, generally supported this past decade resulted from rises in fuel prices, movement. In trying to assess its impact, Win- general economic downturns, or other factors,

132 WQ WINTER 1994 but not from deregulation. Indeed, Winston says, ent from that of earlier generations of reform- the industry's periodic large losses would have ers," Brinkley says. Agrarian dissidents, work- been even greater had it not been for deregulation. ers, small producers, local merchants, and con- So far, however, the public seems unaware of sumers all had their own versions of the anti- the good economic news. "Despite the large actual trust idea, but all sought "to combat concen- and potential benefits from airline, telecommuni- trated power and restore the authority of indi- cations, and cable television deregulation," Win- viduals and communities." Arnold did not share ston notes, "only airline deregulation enjoys a sub- their conviction that "bigness" was a "curse." Big stantial majority of support and even this support business, he believed, was here to stay. That could be in jeopardy." made big government a necessity. In Arnold's view, government had to monitor and regulate business practices constantly in order to control The Last Trustbuster monopoly power and ensure competition. It was a view that "implicitly rejected the concept of "The Antimonopoly Ideal and the Liberal State: The returning economic authority to 'the people,' " Case of Th~~rmanArnold" by Alan Brinkley, in The Join-mil of American History (Sept. 1993), 1125 E. Atwater Brinkley notes. Ave., Bloomiiigton, Ind. 47401-3701. In The Folklore of Capitalism, his acclaimed 1937 book, Arnold argued that "administrative gov- The antimonopoly movement was once one of ernment" deserved the same respect accorded the more potent forces in American politics. It the courts and private corporations. In his anti- seemed on its way to new heights when Thur- trust job, he greatly enlarged the Antitrust Divi- man W. Arnold (1891-1969) took over the Justice sion. Its budget increased more than fivefold Department's Antitrust Division in 1938, during between 1938 and 1940, and the number of law- the New Deal. Arnold had a radical new notion yers on staff went from 58 to more than 300. The of trustbusting, and while his tenure was quite number and scope of prosecutions likewise ex- successful in some respects, he failed to win the panded during Arnold's tenure. public over to his approach. By leading the Big business was not Arnold's only target, antimonopoly movement up a blind alley, con- Brinkley notes. "Whatever artificially inflated tends Brinkley, a historian at Columbia Univer- consumer prices . . . whether the anticompetitive sity, Arnold and liberals who agreed with him practices of a great monopoly, the collusive ac- helped forever to diminish its role in American tivities of small producers, or the illegitimate public life. demands of powerful labor organizations-was Arnold "embraced a conception of the anti- a proper target of antitrust prosecution." trust laws that was profoundly, if subtly, differ- Arnold was unable, however, to get the pub- lic to embrace his radical ideas. His sardonic way of talking in public did not help, and after Pearl Harbor, the war effort took priority over antitrust cases. "But most of all, perhaps," Brinkley writes, "Arnold was unable to make an effective case . . . that aggressive antitrust en- forcement was essential for promoting mass pur- chasing power and protecting consumers." Keynesian economics seemed to offer less con- troversial ways to pursue those aims. In 1943, shortly after he was directed to abandon a case against the railroads for price fixing, Arnold re- signed. Despite occasional flare-ups of interest in the decades since, the antimonopoly crusade New Dealer T11iirt71an Arnold stirred controversy became, in historian Richard Hofstadter's words, by seelciizg to apply antitrust lazvs to labor unions. "one of the faded passions of American reform."

PERIODICALS 133 Can't Buy Me Love in most developed countries, Lane writes. What does make people happy? Family comes "Does Money Buy Happiness?" by Robert E. Lane, in The Public Interest (Fall 1993), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. first, followed in most surveys by friendship 530, Washington, D.C. 20036. and then by satisfying work and leisure. Only middle-class intellectuals, Lane remarks par- Money can't buy happiness, they say, and enthetically, are likely to be surprised by the they're right. Or at least mostly right, says Lane, discovery that work satisfaction is not closely a Yale University political scientist. related to income. Why, after all, should we The fact is, surveys conducted during the past expect the highly paid paper pusher to be hap- two decades show that people in rich countries pier in his work than the highly skilled wall- are happier than those in poor ones. This re- paper hanger? verses the findings of earlier polls. It's not so Government, Lane says, can help people in much that money buys happiness, writes Lane, their pursuit of happiness. Since family is the as that it buys "relief from sorrow" by means of number-one source of well-being for most better health care, lower infant mortality, and the people and family troubles go hand in hand with like. For much the same reason, money can buy poverty, policies that alleviate need would help. a degree of happiness for poor people in afflu- And since satisfying work is more essential to ent countries. well-being than a fatter paycheck, economic By and large, however, "there is no substan- policies should be designed to promote full em- tial relation between income and well-being" ployment rather than bigger incomes.

SOCIETY

Which Way Feminism? A Survey of Recent Articles

olls indicate that most American women That much about feminism is quite familiar strongly support the ideal of equality be- to veterans of the 1960s and '70s. But for many Ptween the sexes, yet do not call them- in the movement, the sort of equal-rights femi- selves feminists. Do these women still just not get nism that came to prominence then has become it? Or does modem felninism itself need to have its passe. For them, the difference between the sexes collective consciousness raised? Feminists of vari- is fundamental. Central to this kind of feminism, ous hues have lately been pondering a number writes Kaminer, "is the belief, articulated by the of such "state of the movement" questions. psycl~ologistCarol Gilligan [author of the influ- "The widespread belief in equality . . . is a be- ential In a Different Voice (1982)], that women lief in equality up to a point-the point where share a different voice and different moral sen- women are drafted and men change diapers," sibilities. . . . In a modern-day version of Victo- attorney Wendy Kaminer writes in the Atlantic rian True Womanhood, feminists . . . pay tribute Monthly (Oct. 1993). "After 30 years of the con- to women's superior nurturing and relational temporary women's movement, equal-rights skills and their general 'ethic of caring.'" Some feminism is still considered essentially abnor- "difference" feminists draw reformist conclu- mal." To the extent that feminism questions sions from their beliefs about male-female differ- women's traditional familial roles, Kaminer says, ences; others push on to radical notions, arguing it demands "profound individual changeu-and that "female" ways of doing things such as sci- naturally runs into resistance. ence, intuitive and antihierarchical, should be

134 WQ WINTER 1994 given parity with (if not be allowed to replace) interfere with family responsibilities.Sears won "male" ways. its case." Irrelevant,in Pollitt's eyes, evidently,was That there may be basic differences between the possible truth of Rosenberg's testimony. men and women is not, of course, a recent aca- A form of difference feminism predominates demic discovery. Nor, as Deborah Tannen, a among academic feminists. Karen Lehrman, Georgetown University linguist and author of now literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, the bestseller You Just Don't Understand: Women toured the world of women's studies in academe and Men in Conversation (1990), argues in Utne last spring, visiting the University of California Reader (Sept.-Oct. 1993), does difference imply at Berkeley, the University of Iowa, Smith Col- inequality. "Whether or not the genders are the lege, and Dartmouth College. She reports in same," she notes, "is irrelevant to whether they Mother Jones (Sept.-Oct. 1993) that for the most should be treated as equals." part the professors were serving up an academi- cally thin and heavily politicized gruel. "Most nfortunately, others have not found it women's studies professors seem to adhere to so easy to reconcile the two ideas. Femi- the following principles in formulating classes: nism "has always been plagued by bit- women were and are oppressed; oppression is ter civil wars over conflicting ideas about sexu- endemic to our patriarchal social system; men, ality and gender which lead to conflicting vi- capitalism, and Western values are responsible sions of law and social policy," Kaminer ob- for women's problems." That feminism itself, as serves. "If men and women are naturally and Lehrinan points out, is "a product of Western consistently different in terms of character, tem- culture based on moral reasoning and the perament, and moral sensibility, then the law premise that some things are objectively should treat them differently, as it has through wrong," is seldom noted. Nor, Lehrinan found, most of our history, with labor legislation that is much classroom attention given to women protects women, for example, or with laws pre- with accomplisl~mentsin the public realm; in- ferring women in custody disputes: special pro- stead, students pore over the writings of women tection for women, not equal rights, becomes a who are cast as victims of the "patriarchy." In- feminist goal." On the other hand, she says, "if stead of elevating women who succeeded by sex is not a reliable predictor of behavior, then male, capitalist standards to heroic status, some justice requires a sex-neutral approach to law." professors said, society needs to value women's "Difference feminism" does not sit well with distinctive roles and forms of expression. the Nation's (Dec. 28, 1992) Katha Pollitt. That focus seems quite correct to Susan "Women embrace Gilligan and Tannen because Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War they offer flattering accounts of traits for which Against American Women (1991). Responding to they have historically been castigated," she Lehrman in Mother Jones (Nov.-Dec. 19931, maintains. "Men like them because, while they Faludi writes: "The capacity to analyze the world urge understanding and respect for 'female' val- in political terms is not a disease; it's a healthy ues and behaviors, they also let men off the and fundamental prerequisite for moral engage- hook: Men have power, wealth, and control of ment in the world. . . . Feminism in the academy social resources because women don't really is about more than women getting the right to want them." The "pernicious tendencies" of a absorb the male-defined curriculum; it's about feminism that accepts sex differences are illus- challenging the foundations of that curriculum." trated, Pollitt says, by the 1985 Sears Roebuck and Company sex discrimination case, "in or some feminists, radical change is at the which Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of very heart of the feminist movement. "To women's history at Barnard College, testified for me," says bell hooks, a professor of Sears that female employees held lower-paying women's studies at Oberlin College, in a round- salaried jobs while men worked selling big-ticket table discussion on the movement's direction in items on commission because women preferred Ms. (Sept.-Oct. 1993), "the essence of feminism low-risk, noncompetitive positions that did not is opposition to patriarchy and to sexist oppres-

PERIODICALS 135 sion. A lot of women who go for the notion of feminists, liberal feminists (who tend also to be equal rights cannot go for the notion of oppos- political feminists), anti-porn feminists, eco- ing patriarchy, because that means a fundamen- feminists, and womanists." Not to mention New tal opposition to the culture as a whole." Age feminists and goddess worshipers. Disagreements among feminists remain deep. That the feminist movement has not achieved "Vying for power . . . ,"writes Wendy Karniner, the ideal of equality is no surprise to Karniner. "are poststructural feminists (dominant in 'We haven't even defined it," she notes. "Nearly academia in recent years), political feminists (of- 30 years after the onset of the modem feminist fice-holders and lobbyists), different-voice femi- movement, we still have no consensus on what nists, separatist feminists (a small minority), nature dictates to men and women and de- pacifist feminists, lesbian feminists, careerist mands of law ."

Colonial America: of a butcher and small farmer, Flohr volunteered when he was nearly 20 for the Regiment Royal- A Viewfrom Below Deux-Ponts,which the duke of Pfalz-Zweibiticken leased to the French crown. The regiment was part "AGerman Soldier in America, 1780-1783: The Journal of the French force that King Louis XVI sent to of Georg Daniel Flohr" by Robert A. Selig, in The William and Mary Quarterly (July 1993),Box 8781, America to aid the revolutionary cause. Unlike Williamsburg,Va. 23187-8781. some of his fellow soldiers, Flolw went "joyfully" to the New World, an-iving in Newport, Rhode Is- Many visiting foreigners recorded their impres- land, in July 1780 and serving until the Battle of sions of 18th-centuryAmerica, but few, if any, had Yorktown (1781) ended the war. quite die qualifications of Georg Daniel Flolv. Like other visitors of higher birth, Flohr was "Relatively unburdened by book learning or pre- impressed by the religious tolerance, prosperity, conceived ideas, he had fewer prejudices" than and egalitarian outlook that he found in many well-born observers of American life, writes America. The people, he wrote, "talk to every- Selig, a visiting professor at Hope College, in Hol- one, whether he be rich or poor." While some of land, Michigan. his officers complained of the "coldness" of the Born in 1756 in southwestern Germany, the son Rhode Island colonists, Flohr said that he "got along very well with them." The soldiers encamped in New- port all tried to learn some En- glish, mainly to be able to con- verse with the "beautiful American maidens" who lived nearby. The freedom the girls enjoyed surprised him. "Once they are 16 years old, their fa- ther and mother must not for- bid them anything anymore . . . and if they have a lover he can freely go with them." But the slavery that Flohr found in New England and the South shocked him. On wealthy Flohr's remarkablejournal contains 30detailed iua~ercolorviezusofAmerican plantations in the North, the and Caribbean towns, including this one of Providence, Rhode Island. slaves "are bought and sold . . .

136 WQ WINTER 1994 Writing about America in the 1950s in Co11z- let, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the mentary (Sept. 19931, essayist Joseph Epstein oppositesex, and other solaces of adulthood." Ev- notes that young people then were eager to erything in the culture of the '50s provoked one to leave youth behind. grozu up. ("Oh, wow up," sisters would say to troublesome younger brothers.) The ideal, in the Weof tl'ie'50s were not rebels, with orwithouta cause movies and in life, was adulthood. (a damn poor '50s movie, Rebel Without A Cause, In the '50s, one was encouraged to be adult and by the zuay). To be a rebel, to be in revolt, implied yet one believed in progress and hence in the fii- being loclwd into yo~~tlzfl~l~Â¥;essFar from wishing to ture. Since the '60s, one has been encouraged to stay young, we who wereyo~~ngin the '50s mere ea- remain young for as long as possible, and yet not ger togrow up. Groimng up meantgrmm'ng infofree- many people believe in progress and the future dom, winch was the name of our desire. seems terrifying. This has all the makings of a I am reminded here of the English poet Philip paradox, until one realizes that the difference be- Larkin's saying that his religious sympathies first hueen the two cultural injunctions is that the fist began to wane zuheiz he discovered that in the comports with biological reality and the second Christian version of heaven one zuould becomeas does not. Since one cannot really hope to stay a little child again. Staying a child zuas not zuhaf young for long, the future brings with it nothing Larkin, or my friends and Iin the150s,had in mind so inexorably as the prospect of growing old, at all. Like Larkin, we wanted "money, keys, zual- zulzich is to say, the prospect of certain defeat. like cattle." I11 Williamsburg, Virginia, the black A New Paternalism? slaves had to do "their master's work, men and women, young and old," in the cotton fields "with- "I11 Loco Parentis: Helping Children When Families Fail Them" by James Q. Wilson, in The Brookings Review out any clothes on." White Virginians told Flolv (Fall 1993), Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts that clothing the slaves "would cost too Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. much . . . and the slaves were not worth that much." Unlike many of lus military superiors, Policy wonks may debate what is behind the rise Holu did not regard the harsh treatment as neces- of America's urban underclass, but ordinary sary, nor did he echo the usual claim that the slaves folks tlunk they know. The criminals and chroni- were lazy, ungrateful, and given to stealing. Sla- cally poor people who occupy society's lower very, 11e declared, was und-instian and "completely depths, they say, lack vital attitudes and charac- against human nature." ter traits. Wilson, a political scientist at the Uni- Flolu's view of the New World's "savages" was versity of California at Los Angeles, tends to not so very different from the views of other E~ru agree. The problem is that individuals acquire peans. He wrote sympathetically of some Indian these traits-such as self-control and the ability customs and practices but also reported, inaccu- to delay gratification-from their families, and rately, that die Iroquois sacrificed some of their own even policy wonks do not know what to do if, people to their gods. as is increasingly the case, the family falls apart Flohr's journal says nothing about the ideals of or falls down on the job of inculcating them. liberty or the pursuit of happiness, but he found Government efforts to compensate have not enough to like in America that, after bouncing yielded encouraging results, Wilson observes. around a bit-and witnessing the execution of As part of President Lyndon B. Jol~i~son'sWar Louis XVI in 1793-he returned. He became a on Poverty, for example, the Pentagon in 1966 Lutheran minister in. Virginia and lived there until launcl~edProject 100,000 to try to improve the his death in 1826. lives of a group of "low aptitude" recruits. Al-

PERIODICALS 137 though most of these young men later said that and Development Program intervened in the the experience was good for them, researchers lives of 1,000 prematurely born children, spon- found that these veterans were worse off in soring home visits by counselors and special terms of employment status, educational classes. After three years, the youngsters had achievement, and income than nonveterans higher IQs and fewer behavioral problems than from similar backgrounds. Other troubled others born prematurely. young men, admitted to the military between The lesson of these scattered experiences 1976 and 1980, were later found to be no better seems to be that intervention works best when off than comparable nonveterans. it is deep and long-lasting. W11ic11 leads Wil- Results from early-childhood intervention son to a radical proposal: Why not provide programs are a little more encouraging but still public subsidies to allow the poor to send their inconclusive, Wilson says. Most optimism about children to public or private boarding scl~ools? Head Start, for example, derives from the niod- The well-to-do have always had this option for est success of a single model preschool in the upbringing of their children, he argues, Ypsilanti, Michigan. In another somewhat en- and it would be in society's interest to extend couraging experiment, the federal Infant Health it to the poor as well.

PRESS & MEDIA

Are the Media Obsolete? of its product, information. With tecl~nologicaltools such as C-SPAN, "The Mediasaums" by Michael Crichton, in Wired (Sept.- Oct. 1993),544 2nd St., San Francisco, Calif. 94107-1427. e-mail, and computer networks, today's con- sumer has direct access to high-quality infor- Michael Cricl~ton,author of Jurassic Park (1990) mation of personal or professional interest, and other novels, should recognize a dinosaur and demand for such access is growing rap- when he sees one, and he thinks he has one in view. "To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within 10 years. Vanished, without a trace," he declares. Since the American Revolu- tion, the news media have en- joyed a monopoly over infor- mation, Crichton writes. They have treated informa- tion the way John D. Rockefel- ler treated oil-as a coininod- ity, in which the distribution network, rather than product quality, is of primary iinpor- tance." A complacent industry has failed to recognize that tecl~nological advancement Tl1e co11zi17gworld in whiclz (if Criclzton is rigkf)newspapers and other has forever altered the nature mass 111ediawi1ll be obsolete may be less than an information paradise.

138 WQ WINTER 1994 idly. The front-page editor and news anchor, economy is grossly distorted. Their case rests Crichton says, are like the old-fashioned tele- on two studies that examined more than phone operator: "If you've ever had the expe- 17,000 network news stories aired since 1982. rience of being somewhere where your call Between 1982 and 1987, according to a study was placed for you, you know how exasper- by the Washington-based Media Institute, ating that is. It's faster and easier to dial it more than 85 percent of the 5,300 economic yourself." news stories that had a discernible "spin" had Attempting to maintain their audience, the a "negative tone," even though these were news media use catch phrases and glitzy good-and at times spectacularly good-years graphics, endlessly repackaging information for the U.S. economy. Indeed, the networks as merely another form of entertainment (de- seemed to grow gloomier as economic condi- signed chiefly to get people to look at adver- tions improved. The ratio of negative to posi- tisements). But "news isn't entertainment-it's tive stories on the economy increased from a necessity," Crichton writes. Information now five to one in 1982 to seven to one in 1987. has value, which is why consumers are will- The bad news bias continued into the 1990s. ing to pay extra for things such as on-line coin- Analyzing 2,100 sound bites aired between Oc- puter services. tober 1990 and May 1993, Lichter's organiza- Crichton thinks this technological revolu- tion found that 86 percent came from tion will have a profound impact on the char- naysayers. The networks turned even good acter of public debate in America. Today, the news into bad. When housing prices rose dur- news media vastly oversimplify complex is- ing the 1980s, they focused on people who sues and polarize political debate. On the coin- were priced out of the market; when prices puter networks that already exist, according to began to drop in the 1990s, the cameras turned Crichton, the level of debate is far more nu- to l~omeowi~erswhose equity declined. anced and sophisticated. The spread of these On television, the authors note, "the coin- networks will end the news media's monopoly plexities of economic affairs are often reduced and gradually create a more informed public. to simple and familiar stories about villains, 'I will have artificial intelligence agents roam- victims, and heroes." Rather than report 011, ing the databases, downloading the stuff I am say, the complex economic realities of the interested in, and assembling for me a front computer industry-much less hard economic page, or a nightly news show, that addresses data-network news focuses on a single laid- my interests," writes Crichton. "How will Pe- off IBM worker. ter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspa- The simplification and melodrama of eco- per compete with that?" nomic reporting foster the illusion that the av- erage citizen is somehow a victim of careless government policies. The networks' critical The Bad News Bias eye is nonpartisan. President George Bush may have lost the 1992 election in part because "Bad News Bears" by Robert Licliter and Ted J. Smith, 'many people thought [economic] conditions in Media Critic (1993), P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921. were worse than they were," as political soci- ologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, but Watching almost any batch of network televi- the same overwhelming network negativism sion newscasts in recent years, one would has afflicted his successor. come away feeling that the nation's economy Lichter and Smith think that this relentless was poised on the brink of ruin. carping springs from journalists' assumption In fact, contend Lichter, codirector of the that never-ending prosperity is "a kind of Center for Media and Public Affairs, and birthright enjoyed by every American." Any Smith, associate professor of mass comm~ini- departure from this norm produces charges of cations at Virginia Commonwealth Univer- failure and malfeasance as well as "demands sity, the standard TV news portrait of the that someone set things right." Prosperity, as

PERIODICALS 139 journalists see it, "is only to be expected," and were. The trend has been much the same in TV thus barely rates a mention. news. Now, developments in business, health, and culture seem just as newsworthy as Wash- ington doings. The Hidden Congress Advances in technology also have had an impact. 'When Waslungton had the only coaxial "Decline and Fall of Congressional News" by Stephen cable that fed directly into theTV networks' New Hess, in Society (Jan.-Feb. 1994), Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903. York headquarters, often more than 60 percent of the items on the evening news programs origi- Once a staple of front pages and nightly news nated in the capital," Hess points out. Satellites, shows, regular coverage of Congress is now tape, and portable equipment helped change scant, especially on TV. CNN is now the only TV that in the early 1980s. news organization that has correspondents cov- At first, the use of satellites increased TV 's ering both the House and the Senate full-time, focus on the nation's capital, as some local sta- observes Hess, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings tions inaugurated their own Washington cover- Institution. age. Membership in the Senate Radio and Tele- One reason for the change, he says, is a shift vision Gallery jumped from 750 in 1979 to 2,300 in power within many "mainstream" news or- by 1987. Before long, however, many Washing- ganizations. Key decisions about what gets cov- ton bureaus were shut down. As one news direc- ered now are often made, not by a bureau chief tor explained, "Government news is boring." in Washington, but by home-office editors, to The problem with the decline of congres- whom the intricacies of the lawmaking process sional coverage, Hess says, is that wlde the "bor- seem a good deal less fascinating. ing" regular business of the nation's legislature gets The definition of "news" also has changed. In less attention, any hints of official corruption draw 1965,84 percent of the front-page stories in the throngs of reporters. The result: a distorted pic- New York Times during one week were about ture that suggests to the public that Capitol Hill government and politics; in 1992, only 55 percent is little more than the capital of scandal.

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

The Crackup of Philosophy of Nature (1979), and W. V. Quine's Word and Object (1960) have produced "large ripples" in "American Philosophy Today" by Nicholas Resclier, in the pond of academic philosophy, Rescher ac- Review of Metaphysics (June 1993), Catholic Univ. of knowledges. But even the most influential phi- America, Washington, D.C. 20064. losopher is, these days, just "another-soine- what larger-fish in a very populous sea." The Early in the 20th century, American philosophy odd fish without approved credentials is not was dominated by a handful of giants-men such even welcome to join in the swim. A Spinoza or as William James, John Dewey, and George a Nietzsche, he says, "would find it near to im- Santayana-and their writings affected the think- possible to get a hearing in the North American ing of people in many walks of life. For better or philosophical world of today." worse, observes Rescher, of the University of Pitts- The number of academic philosophers (and, burgh, American philosophy today has become thanks partly to the "publish or perish" ethic, ''democratized-and the influence outside the most professors of philosophy can claim to be academy of its leading tlin-ikers is virtually nil. not just teachers of philosophy but "philoso- Books such as John Rawls's Theory of Justice pliers") has grown enormously. Membership in (1971), Richard Rorty's Philosophy and theMirror the American Philosophical Association has in-

140 WQ WINTER 1994 creased more tlian threefold since 1965; the Di- jumped into tlie right-to-life movement and rectory of American Philosophers for 1992-93 lists published lengthy pastoral letters on U.S. de- more tlian 10,000 academic pliilosopliers in the fense and economic issues. As early as 1976, United States and Canada. some got involved in national elections. Byrnes, What is most striking about American plii- a political scientist at Colgate University, con- losopliy, Resclier maintains, is its fragmentation: tends tliat the bisliops' new prominence in "Every doctrine, every theory, every approach politics was not entirely their own doing. finds its devotees somewhere witlun tlie overall Earlier in this century, when many Ameri- community. On most of the larger issues tliere cans still looked upon "papists" witli great are no significant majorities." Indeed, tliere is not suspicion, tlie bisliops spoke out mainly in even a consensus on what the urgent problems defense of the patriotism of American Catlio- in pliilosopliy are. lies. In some cities, bishops came to liave clout "Specialization and division of labor run ram- witli local political leaders. By the 1960s, liow- pant, and cottage industries are tlie order of tlie ever, this "parochial" era was essentially over. day," Resclier says. One cottage industry, for Prosperous and well-educated, American example, has to do with ethical questions in tlie Catliolics no longer needed clerical apologists professions; another, with the epistemology of to provide political leadership. Jolin F. information processing. Issues tliat once would Kennedy's election symbolized tlie movement have been considered merely bizarre (e.g., "Is of Catholics into tlie mainstream. But tlie bisli- Polygamy Good Feminism?") now are solemnly ops, encouraged by Pope John XXIII's Second discussed at professional meetings and in tlie Vatican Council (1962-65), strengthened tlie pages of journals. Entire professional societies National Conference of Catholic Bishops are devoted to subjects tliat no one a generation (NCCB) and began to apply Catholic social ago would liave deemed plulosopliical (e.g., tlie teaching to national issues. Society for tlie Study of Ethics and Animals). At tlie same time, Byrnes points out, tlie Wlule American pliilosopliers were once in- breakdown of the long-dominant Democratic spired by religion, then took natural science as New Deal coalition led some politicians in their guide early in the 20th century, today they both parties to appeal to voters on religious draw from a wide variety of sources, ranging grounds. Roman Catholics make up nearly a from French philosopher Jacques Derrida to quarter of tlie U.S. population (57 million in mathematician Jolin von Neumann. 1990). The bishops do not control Catholic "Pliilosophy-which ought by mission to be voters, Byrnes observes, but many politicians and is by tradition an integration of knowl- "believe, or perhaps fear, tliat tlie bisliops can edge~liasitself become increasingly disinte- still exert a substantial influence" on them. grated," Resclier laments. Yet American Hence, many candidates liave sought to play pliilosopl~y's"pluralistic character" is just "a up their areas of agreement with the bisliops realistic and effective accommodation" to tlie and to minimize differences. American environment. "One must," Resclier Thus, in 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, says, "accept tlie inevitable." Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, met witli the NCCB executive committee and tried, unsuccessfully, Bishops' Move to paper over his differences with the bisliops on abortion. Republican president Gerald 'The Politics of the American Catholic Hierarchy" by Ford, meanwhile, proclaimed his support of an Timothy A. Byrnes, in Political Science Qiiiirtdy (Fall 1993), Academy of Political Science, 475 Riverside Dr., antiabortion constitutional amendment and Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y.10115-1274. liad the NCCB executive committee to tlie White House. The American hierarchy of tlie Roman Catlio- By 1984, the bishops liad expanded their lie Cliurcli became very active in national poli- public agenda to include opposition to nuclear tics during the 1970s and '80s, as tlie bisliops arms and were divided over whether or not

PERIODICALS 141 abortion alone should serve, in effect, as a po- Geraldine Ferraro, was the Democratic candi- litical litmus test. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of date for vice president, gave the bishops a larger Chicago urged that the church's "pro-life role in the 1984 campaigns than they otherwise position . . . be developed in terms of a compre- would have played. Four years later, with differ- hensive and consistent ethic of life." This, Bymes ent candidates and different circumstances, the observes, provided "a kind of moral cover" for bishops had a much lower profile. How big a role 'pro-choice" Catholic Democrats. The partisan they play in national politics in the future, Byrnes implications of the bishops' conflicting posi- concludes,will be determined, in considerable part, tions, and the fact that a pro-choice Catholic, by the parties and candidates themselves.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

Computerized Q.E.D.'s demonstrate through proofs-that is, a series of logical steps leading from a set of axioms to an 'The Death of Proof" by John Horgan, in Scientific irrefutable conclusion. Now the doubts riddling American (Oct. 19931,415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.10017-1111. modern human thought have finally infected mathematics. Mathematicians may at last be When Princeton's Andrew J. Wiles announced forced to accept what many scientists and plu- last June that he had solved Format's last tlieo- losophers already have admitted: Their asser- rem, his fellow mathematicians gasped iii aston- tions are, at best, only provisionally true, true ishment. More than 350 years ago, Pierre de until proved false." Fermat claimed that he had found a proof of the The computer, Horgan says, is forcing math- proposition that for the equation Xn + Y" = Z, ematicians "to reconsider the very nature of there are no integral solutions for any value of proof." Some proofs have required enormous N greater than two. Fermat did not disclose his calculations by computers, and cannot be veri- proof, however. Now, Wiles claimed to have fied by mere humans. Two years ago, Laszlo found one. And largely on the basis of his repu- Babai of the University of Chicago and several tation, other mathematicians accepted his claim. colleagues developed a technique for "computer But his proof ran to 200 pages (and could have proofs" that offer the probability-but not the been five times longer, if he had spelled every- certainty~oftruth. Still other investigators have thing out), and only one mathematician in 1,000 been using computer graphics to produce was qualified to evaluate it. "video proofs," which they hope will be more Unsettled situations such as this are not un- persuasive than traditional, formal proofs. common these days. Mathematical proofs often But computational experiments, whether in- run hundreds of pages and can take years to be volving graphics or numerical calculations, can confirmed. In one case, a demonstration that was be deceptive, Horgan notes. All the calculations completed in the early 1980s consisted of some that computers make are based on the manipu- 500 articles totaling nearly 15,000 pages and lation of discrete, whole numbers (namely, ones written by more thanl00 workers; only one per- and zeros). As a result, computers can only ap- son is said to have grasped the proof in its en- proximate numbers such as n or the square root tirety, and he died in 1992. of two, and that can result in errors. Even most The increasing complexity of mathematics, of the mathematicians taking advantage of com- together with the rise of the computer, is bring- puter graphics and other experimental tech- ing about profound changes in the ancient dis- niques agree that seeing by computer should not cipline, Scientific American senior writer Horgan be believing. David A. Hoffman of the Univer- reports. "For millennia, mathematicians have sity of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of those measured progress in terms of what they can mathematicians, worries about the decreased

142 WQ WINTER 1994 emphasis on traditional proofs. "Proofs are the prescribed three effective drugs may suspect only laboratory instrument mathematicians that the three medications are causing his up- have," he says, "and they are in danger of being set stomach. Without consulting the physician, thrown out." he decides to take only one of the drugs. The patient may feel fine for a while, because the lone drug still kills vast numbers of the organ- The "New" ism. But all the bacilli resistant to that particu- lar drug "continue to reproduce, ultimately Tuberculosis reaching numbers sufficient to recreate the 'APlague Returns" by Mark Earnest and JohnA. classic symptoms of tuberculosis: progres- Sbarbaro, in The Sciences (Sept.-Oct. 1993),New York sively severe fatigue, weight loss, night sweats, Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. and coughing." At that point, the patient 10021. reaches for one of the drugs he had stopped Along with the rise of acquired immunodefi- taking, but it is too late: By the normal process ciency syndrome (AIDS) and human immuno- of genetic mutation, a whole new generation deficiency virus, there has been an unexpected of organisms resistant to the new drug and the resurgence of tuberculosis (TB) in recent years. old one has emerged. By taking just one drug The newspapers report ominously that today's at a time, instead of all of the prescribed medi- TB is drug resistant. Yet all but "a minuscule cations together, the patient has allowed a fraction" of the 27,000 active TB cases today monster of resistance to emerge. are treatable, note Earnest and Sbarbaro, of the How can TB patients be made to take their University of Colorado Health Sciences Cen- prescribed medications? The use of newly de- ter. The chief problem-and danger to veloped combination pills will help, but they uninfected Americans-is that a large propor- are not a cure-all, the authors say. What needs tion of patients almost certainly will fail to take to be done, they contend, is what the Denver their prescribed medicines. Health Department did as early as 1965. It as- When the two front-line TB drugs signed staff members "to bring high doses of (isoniazid and rifampin) are combined with the medications to the patients (or the patients one or two back-up medications, most patients to the medication)." That approach is not can be cured within six to nine months. The cheap, of course, but it may be essential, the problem that physicians face in treating the authors say, if the plague of TB is to be beaten disease is that mutation by the TB bacillus can back again. result in organisms resistant to one or more of the drugs. "Luckily," the authors write, "mu- tations of M.tuberculosis are rare: Only one of Tempest In every 100,000 organisms descended from one bacillus is resistant to the action of isoniazid The Tropics and ,iust one in a million can withstand the ef- fects of rifampin or streptomycin." "The Deforestation Debate" by Richard Monastersky, in Science New (July10,1993), 1719 N St. N.W., But victims often Washington, D.C. 20036; "Tropical Deforestation and fail to cooperate, Earnest and Sbarbaro note. Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon: Satellite Data "Studies in the past 40 years have consistently fro111 1978 to 1988" by David Skok and Compton Tucker, in Science (June25,1993), American Assoc. for 35 percent the Advancement of Science, 1333 H St. N.W., losis patients and otherwise-do not take the Washington, D.C. 20005. medications prescribed for them." That puts others in danger, since tuberculosis needs only Deforestation became a household word during an exchange of air to spread. (Each contagious the late 1980s, when rock stars, movie actors, and person, on average, infects five other people other celebrities cranked up a crusade to save before the disease is discovered.) tropical woodlands, particularly in the Brazilian A TB patient whose doctor has correctly Amazon. Tropical forests are indeed important.

PERIODICALS 143 Although they occupy less than seven percent of and the National Institute for Research on the Earth's surface, they are home to at least half Amazonia, based in Manaus, Brazil, have mea- of all plant and animal species. Moreover, loss sured deforestation another way, by mapping of forests increases the amount of carbon diox- cleared areas on images taken by Landsat satel- ide in the atmosphere, and thus might affect the lites. Studies that relied partly on that technique planet's climate. But recent studies, reports indicated that forest losses in the Brazilian.Ama- Monastersky, a Science Naus writer, suggest that zon averaged 2.1 million hectares per year be- the extent of deforestation in the Brazilian Ama- tween 1978 and 1989-about one-quarter of zon has been much exaggerated. Nevertheless, Setzer's original estimate for 1987. In 1989 and the threat to biodiversity still may be consider- '90, losses average 1.4 million hectares. able. The latest estimate is even lower. Skole, of the In 1988, Alberto Setzer of Brazil's National University of New Hampshire, and Tucker, of Space Research Institute (INPE) calculated that the National Aeronautics and Space a whopping eight million hectares (or 19.8 mil- Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center lion acres) of forest had been cleared during 1987 in Greenbelt, Maryland, compared 210 Landsat within the legally defined Brazilian Amazon images covering the entire Brazilian Amazon in (which includes only part of the country's tropi- 1978 and 1988. They found that the deforested

The Brazilian Amazon, with more 3.5 million square kilometers of tropical forest, is the largest continuous region of such forest in world; next are li~doizesia(1.1 million) and Zaire (1 million). cal forests). Setzer and his team of researchers area grew from 7.8 million hectares in 1978 to 23 arrived at that alarming figure~wl~icl~repre- million a decade later, for an average annual loss sented more than two percent of the forest-by of "only" 1.5 million hectares. Overall, they using data collected by infrared sensors on a U.S. found, the "closed-canopy" forests of the Ama- weather satellite to gauge the number and extent zon shrank by six percent over the 10 years. of fires in the region. They then assumed that 40 Unfortunately, there is bad news along with percent of the fires were on newly cleared forest. that relatively good news. Skole and Tucker Their estimate, though challenged by other re- found that the area of disturbed habitat sur- searchers, found its way into several well-pub- ro~iizdiizgcleared areas in the Amazon grew by licized surveys of deforestation worldwide, in- more than four million hectares per year be- cluding one by the Washington-based World tween 1978 and 1988. Vast areas of Amazon for- Resources Institute. "Brazil emerged from the est, although not being totally cleared, are being [World Resources Institute] study looking like broken up or stripped of some of their trees. As the ultimate forest destroyer, responsible for a result, the threat to biological diversity is not roughly one-third to one-half of the global defor- all that much less than Alberto Setzer's faulty estation total," Monastersky notes. 1988 estimate of total deforestation led people to In recent years, however, researchers at INPE think.

144 WQ WINTER 1994 ARTS & LETTERS

Miles Ahead once said. jilf the mistakes aren't there, too, it ain't none of you." ''(kt ofNotes: Signification, Il~terpretation,and tlie Problein of Miles Davis" by Robert Walser, in U7e Ml~sicol Davis deliberately took risks in his playing. Q~[flrtcrly(Su~nrner 1993), Oxford Univ. Press, Jo~~nials At one point in his 1964 recording of "My FUIUI~ Dept., 200 Madisoii Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. valentine," for example, he plays an A-flat in the normal way, wit11 the first valve of the trumpet Trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-91) helped create depressed, but then he slides down to a G with- the "cool" sound in jazz during the late 1940s, out changingvalves. "Tlus is a teclmique t11at~on and later in 11is career he was a pioneer of jazz- the trumpet, is difficult, risky, and relatively rock "fusion" and other jazz idioms. Most crit- rare," Walser observes. "Acoustically, the trum- ics acknowledge Davis's importance as a cre- pet sl~ouldnot be able to play any notes between ative force in jazz, but in assessing him as a per- A-flat and E-flat wit11 only the first valve de- former they are made uneasy by the "mis- pressed; Davis must bend the note with lus lips takesJ'-the cracked and missed notes-that 11e witl~outletting it crack down to t11e next 11ar- made. "Davis has long been infamous for miss- monic. T11e result is a fuzzy sound, not quite in ing more notes t11an any other major trumpet tune." Such a somd would have no place ~IIclas- player," Walser, a professor of music at sical trumpet playing, yet in Davis's solo, "it is Dartmoutl~College, observes. the audible sign of [lus]effort and risk, articulat- Some critics have apologized for, or tried to ing a moment of strain that contributes to the explain away, Davis's fluffs. Bill Cole, for in- effect of lus interpretation." In that instancef he stance, says the musician built a style out of his managed to hold t11e note; elsewhere in the solo, "mechanical problems" and turned "liis mistakes into a positive result." Is this the best that can be said of Davis: t11at 11e was an important uu~ovatorbut a bad trumpet player? Walser tl~inksnot. From Tlze Birth of the Cool (1949) to Ki~zdof Blue (1959) and Bitclzes Brau (1970), Davis's performances had great power-and l~ismistakes were just the price he paid for that power. Davis l-imself, Walser points out, did not k~dldelf about l* errors. "He 11ad absorbed a dislike of tecl~nicalfailings fro111 many sources, including his first trumpet hero, Harry James, who was famous for 11is stylisl~ pl~rasingand flawless tech- nique." At the same time, how- ever, Davis looked upon jazz, at least his sort of leading-edge jazz, as necessarily entailing high risks. "Wl~enthey make records wit11 all the mistakes UI, as well as the rest, then tl~ey'll really make jazz records," 11e

PERIODICALS 145 he loses some of his "wagers." the most powerful images of American life "Ideally," Walser writes, "11e wo~11dalways during the Great Depressioi~.Those pl~otos play 011 the edge and never miss; in practice, 11e were among more t11an272,OOO taken by the played closer to the edge t11a11 anyone else and small pl~otograpl~icsection of the U.S. siinply accepted the inevitable missteps, never goveri~inent'sResettlemei~t Admii~istration, retreating to a safer, more consistei~tperforming establisl~edii~ 1935, and its successor, the Farm style." His audiences were @veil not a polisl~ed Sec~lrityAdministratio11 (FSA). In recent de- "prod~~ct,"but sometl~~gthat was, ii~lus case, cades, contends Hurley, a l~istoriai~at Mem- inore impressive: "a dramatic process of creatioi~." phis State Ul~iversity, revisioi~istscl~olars have prod~~cedgrossly distorted accounts of this New Deal enterprise, portraying the pho- Retouching History tographers as victims and the project itself as "Tlie Farm Security Ad~~~i~iistratioiiFile: 111 and Out of little inore than a propaganda macl~inefor the Focus" by F. Jack H~~rley,in History of P/lotogrn;di!y federal goveriImeilt or other sinister forces. (A~lt~~nin1993), Taylor & Francis Ltd., 4 Jolin St., In his muc11-praised Atnerican P/zotograp/zy: London WClN ZET, United Kingdoin. A Critical History, 1945 to the Presenf (1984),for Dorotl~ea Lange's "Migrant Motl~er" and example, Jonatl~ai~Green quotes a 1940 letter Arthur Rot11stei11's "Dust Storm" are amoilg from Roy Stryker, director of the photography section, to photograpl~erJack Delai~o.Wit11 war approac11- ing, Stryker was getting calls for pl~otosthat empl~asized the positive aspects of Ameri- can life. He asked Delano to get some pretty pictures of New England in autumil: "I know your damned pl~otographer'ssoul writhes but to hell wit11 it. Do you tl~ii~kI give a dam11 about a pl~otograpl~er'ssoul with Hitler at our doorstep? You are notl~ii~gbut camera fodder to me." Green, according to Hurley, solemnly viewed this

Revisioizists level zir~fozmiedc/zarges against t/~eNezu Deal's fai~zo~~s p/zotograp/zers, says Hurley. They accuse Dorot/zea Lmzge of Izaving directed her "Migra~ztMot/zerl' (left) to bring /zer and to Izer face and claiitz that Artlz~irRot/zstei~~ staged "Dz~stStori~z.'' T/zey also portray Rot/~stei~~'s "Bleac/~edSkz~ll of a Steer" as a complete fake.

146 WQ WINTER 1994 any evidence wl~atsoever,ac- cuses Lange of 11aving intru- sively directed the "Migrai~t Motl~er"in order to suppress the woinan's individuality "so that she could become a11 ar- cl~etypalrepresei~tative of the values sl~ared by LangeJs middle-class audience." The danger in all this slanted scl~olarsl~ip,Hurley says, is that the l~istoricalcon- text in which the me~norable FSA images were created will be lost. "If we allow that to l~appenwe will have done damage to the images and to American l~istory."

as a direct order to prod~~ce~rntn~tl&l images for the govenune~~t.He ignored, Hurley says, the con- text and the l~~unorin Strykefs comment. Delano, moreover, was no oppressed pawn; he believed ~II the agei~cy's~nission of l~elpingsmall fanners. Sally Stein, in her i~~troductio~~to Mario11 Post Wolcoff:F.S.A. Pl~ofograplzs(19831, simi- larly distorts a 1940 telegram froin pl~otogra- pl~erMario11 Post Wolcott to Stryker, in order to portray her as l~avingbeen victimized by him because of her gender. "You are a cruel and heartless inaster. I feel like a Fii~i~isl~Boy Scout . . . a111 fii~gerless,toeless, earless. Wish you were liere wit11 the wind wl~istlil~g tl~rougl~your britches too," she told Stryker, w110 11ad sent her to snap wintry scenes in New England. But she, too, was oi11y kidding, as a "Bleacl~edSluill of a Steer, Solit11 Dakota long letter she sent to Stryker fo~~rdays later Badlaiids," by Artlzlir Rotlzsteiiz. makes ab~~~~da~itlyclear-aid indeed as Wolcott herself angrily nude clear to H~~rley after the Stein st~ldyappeared. Two other recent works-Maren Stangers Syti~bolsof Ideal Life: Social Doc~~ttientaryPlzotog- Arnold's Prescription raplzy iiz At~zerica,1890-1950 and James Curtis's Mi~zd'sEye, Mii~d'sTmtlz: FSA Pliofograpl~yRe- "Ciilt~weoird A~iorclyToday" by Steven Marcus, in The Soi/tlier~iReuieiu (July 1993), 43 Allen Hall, coizsidered, both publisl~edin 1989-look at the Louisiana State U~~iversity,Baton Rouge, La. 70803- FSA pl~otograpl~stl~rougl~ "nee-Marxian 5005. deco~~str~~ctio~~ist"lei~ses,Hurley says. Stange sees Stryker as a conspiratorial agent, "ma- Relativism r~~lesAinericai~ c~~lture today. The nipulating the poor pl~otograpl~ersin the in- "isn~s"of the lno~nel~t-~nulticulturalism,decon- terests of capitalisn~."Curtis, witl~o~~toffering structioi~is~n,and postn~odenusin,ainong 0th-

PERIODICALS 147 ers-have made it virtually impossible to agree matched. By supposi~igtliat they could, that on objective standards for judg~lie~itsabout "culture" could take tlie place of Cliristianity, htliand quality. Tlus perplexi~igsituation, says Marcus says, Arnold built Culture nizd A~zarclztj Marcus, a professor of Englisll at Colu~nbia on a foundatio~~of sand. Paradoxically, liow- University, is not wliolly unlike tlie one tliat Victo- ever, this "logical vul~ierabilityand impainnent" rian poet aid critic Mattliew Aniold (1822-88)con- of the work stre1igtlie11it, give it "lustorical rel- fronted i~i1~ fano~~sCultwe and Ai7arclzy (1869). evance and life." Just as the sacralization of art Witnessing refonn agitation and tlie broaden- and tlie artist tl~atwas taking place during tlie ing of tlie francliise in E~igla~id,as well as tlie rise sanie period in Europe led eve~ituallyto "de- of ~io~ico~ifor~nistProtestalit sects, Ar~ioldwor- structive l~egatio~i,subversio~~, and disintegra- ried about increasing anarcliy, botli social and tio~i,"so Arnold's sacralized culture led eventu- spirit~~al.hi Cultm md Ai1nrcl7y, lle addressed the ally to "aridity, triviality, and a~iomicdespair." question of liow to reco~icileprogress or clia~ige To the problem of finding " 'a source of au- wit11 order and conti~iuity.He offered two related tliority,' a ground upon wliicll we can establish remedies. Tlie first, Marcus notes, was increased some 'strict standard of excellence,' " Arnold educatio~~for middle- and working-class cliil- gave an answer that is "pragmatic, a~~ecdotal, dreli. "The second, wlucli hi some sense includes and experientially, if not logically, convi~icing," tlie first, is tlie inculcatio~iby a variety of means Marcus writes. "He asserts tliat there can be of tlie ideas, attitudes, practices, and liabits of so~netlii~iglike 'a certain centre of correct infor- temperament and se~isibilitytliat are implicit in mation, taste and i~itellige~ice,'and that we can his master term, 'culture.' " Salvation, Arnold be nearer to or farther away from suc11 an ideal said, was "a liarmo~iiousperfection only to be in our opinions." won by cultivating Inany sides in us." Culture was the province of tliose able to rise Tliese recommendatio1is could be given above tlie constrictio~isof social class, Arnold be- "suc11 a liigli spiritual priority," Marcus points lieved. Culture, lle wrote, "does not try to teach out, only on tlie presupposition tliat revealed down to the level of inferior classes; it does not religion, specifically Cllristianity, was no longer try to win tlieln for tliis or that sect of its own, "tlie ~dtimateautliority or standard of values and witli ready-made judgnie~~tsand watcliwords. It spiritual ordering, and that modern societies seeks to do away wit11 classes; to make the best must, i~itlus primary sense, make do witliout it." tliat lias been tliouglit and known in tlie world Yet the "credent certitude" carried by the current everywliere. . . . Tlus is tlie sociol iden; and truths of revealed religion could liardly be the men of culture are tlie true apostles of equal~ty."

OTHER NATIONS

Mighty MITI? A Sz~rveyof Recent Articles

or a long time after tlie Tokyo stock mar- role in shaping industries and markets, tlie what- ket crasli of 1990, all the news out of Ja- is-tlieir-secret debate lias been revived. It has pan was about that nation's unaccus- sprawled over successive issues of several pub- tomed eco~iomicaclies and pains, and tlie scribes lications and consumed dozens of pages. wlio once avidly debated tlie sources of Japan's The debate, rife witli blustery assertions and marvelous eco~~omicsuccess were little lieard accusations, comes down to a single q~~estion: from. Lately, liowever, witli tlie advent of a new How n1uc11 credit does Japan's famed Ministry American admi~iistratio~iseeking a more active of Internatio~~alTrade and Industry (MITI) de-

148 WQ WINTER 1994 serve for the country's economic success? Next quite as robust as Fingleton imagines. The weak- to none, says Karl Zinsmeister, an adjunct nesses of Japan's economy go unreported by lxim sc1101ar at the American Enterprise Institute, in and others, while the true strengths are ignored. the Policy Reviezu article (Spring 1993, excerpted The real credit for Japan's economic health, in the Wall Street ]oz~rt~al,March 11, 1993) that Zinsmeister contends, lies "with her strong, se- kicked off the latest fracas. rious primary education system; with the ex- "Many of Japan's strongest businesses-[in- traordinarily high savings rates of her people cluding] consumer electronics, cameras, robotics, and all the government policies that encourage precisio~~equipment, pianos, bicycles, watclles that; with her low inflation and low tax policies; and calcuIators, numerically controlled machine and with her powerfully cohesive families that tools, and ceramics-deve1oped mostly on their allow youngsters to grow into productive citi- own, without much help from MITI or other zens and workers." agencies," Zinsmeister asserts in Policy Rmiau. Zinsmeister's springtime sally provoked an "And where government mandarins have inter- unusually strong response. James Fallows, au- vened most actively-[for example, in] slupbdd- thor of More Like Us (1989), along with 32 others ing, agriculture, petrochemicals, and aerospace- representing "a broad spectrum of views about they often have done little more than provide Japan's policies-and about appropriate re- costly life support to fossils and failures." sponses for the United States," wrote a lengthy rejoinder in Policy Rmiezu (Summer 1993)and the hgthe 1950s, Zinsmeister says, MITI Atnerican Prospect (Summer 1993). 111 the latter tried ~unsuccessful1y~to eliminate forum (but not the former), Zinsmeister's "mis- conlpetitio~~in Japan's auto industry informationand bogus claims" were said to have by turning it into a single company. The minis- come largely from editorials and op-ed pieces in try also initially refused a request from a small the Wall Street ]ourtzal (which refused to print company named So11y for permission to buy most of the rebuttal). transistor-manufacturing rights from Western "Had Mr. Zinsmeister known more about Electric; Sony founder Ako Morita "even~ally MITI's history and its policies," Fallows and as- badgered the bureaucrats into giving Sony the go- sociates write ~IIone of their numerous, point- al~ead."A more recent fdure of indutrial policy by-point responses, '11e would have realized that involves lugh-definition televisio~~(J3DTV). there were other and more probable explanations Twenty-five years ago, Tokyo began to set tar- for its attitude toward Sony" UI refusing pemussion gets for a new HDTV broadcasting standard, to buy the transistor-manufacturing rights. "In and in 1991, after more than $1 bdlion was spent, those days, MITI routinely vetoed applications the state-owned NHK television network put the for imports of tecl~nologyon the grounds that world's first worki~~gHDTV system into opera- the price was 'too high.' Thus, MITI's role, tion. U.S. industrial-policy advocates were envi- among otl~ers,was to provide the Japanese ous, but they sl~ouldn'thave been, Zinsmeister buyer with a no-lose pretext to negotiate further says."In their office-bound wisdom, the uapa- concessioi~sfrom foreign technology suppliers, nese] targeters picked the wrong-and now se- who then were principally Americans." riously obsolete-teclu~ology. American compa- The evidence, they insist, is "overwhelming" nies, following consumer and market signals, have that MITI and the Japanese state were ~~strume~l- developed a far more advanced dig~talHDTV stan- tal in Japan's postwar success in steel, autos, dard, and are now poised to do~ninatevideo trans- semiconductors, and supercomputers. mission and receptio~lin the coming decades." But press reports about Japan reeling from insmeister, needless to say, disagrees, one economic disaster to another in recent years and does so at great length in the same have been greatly exaggerated, Irish journalist summer issue of Policy Rmiezu. What is Eamonn Fingleton asserts in the Atladc Montl~ly more interesting, perhaps, is that, according to (May 1993). Japan is in "robust economic him, the Japanese also disagree. He quotes healtl~,"he says. Yes, says Zinsmeister, but not Sony's Morita: "MITI has not been the great

PERIODICALS 149 benefactor of the Japanese electronics industry agement of their economy-a widely that some critics seem to think it has." And to- underreported fact in the West." Fact or not, it day, Zinsmeister asserts, the Japanese "are dis- does not seem to have ended the raucous debate carding industrial policy and government man- over industrial policy in the United States.

Democracy in Africa has taken place in 24 others. Only five coun- tries-two of them, Somalia and Liberia, with- out any functioning governments whatsoever- "Democratisation in Sub-Saharan Africa" by Carol have made no progress at all. In three other 11a- Lancaster and "The Failure of Democratic Reform in Angola and Zaire" by Keith Somerville, in Survival tions, however-Angola, Zaire, and TogoÑde (Autumn1993), International Inst. for Strategic Studies, mocratization has been cut short by violence. Do 23 Tavistock St., London WC2E 7NQ. similar fates await Africa's other nascent democ- racies? Progress toward democracy in the 47 African Somerville, a BBC specialist in African affairs, nations south of the Sahara has been widespread, is quite pessimistic. Hopes for Angola and Zaire, if uneven, in recent years. Fifteen African nations he notes, were high just a few years ago. People can now be regarded as den~ocracies,notes danced in the streets of the Angolan capital of Georgetown University's Lancaster, an adviser Luanda 011 May31,1991, in celebration of a peace to the U.S. Agency for International Develop- agreement ending a 16-year civil war. In Zaire, ment, and at least some political liberalization a new democratic constitution was to be drafted by a national conference, in accordance with the promise made in April 1990 by President Mobuto Sese Seko. Today, however, Angola's civil war has resumed and Zaire is in near-chaos. Mobutu, who agreed only grudgingly to democratic reforms, has used his control of the security forces and the army to keep the government set up by the national confer- ence, headed by Prime Minister Etienne Tshisekedi, from functioning. With Zaire's economy in ruins, Mobutu has relied on the black market, including the diamond trade, to pay his military and other supporters. Since the 1991 cease-fire in nearby Angola, Zaire has continued to play a role there, backing Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and, to their mutual profit, serv- ing as a middleman for the sale of diamonds smuggled out of Angola by UNITA and private individuals. During the Cold War, Savimbi's rebel UNITA had U.S. backing, while the Angolan TliesuccessfillFree Namibia Caiizpaip used thisoptimistic print government of the Popular h'hement for by Nai7zibiaiz artist John Ndeuasia M~~afaizgejo(1943-87). the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) enjoyed

150 WQ WINTER 1994 Soviet and Cuban support. With the Cold War known the Cuban leader for more than three over, Portugal, the United States, and the Soviet decades and is the author of a 1986 biography, Union were able to bring about the 1991 accord. Fidel: A Critical Portrait, believes that Castro re- Implementation got off to a good start, alizes that his revolution and regime have run Somerville notes. The cease-fire held and the two their course. Anti-Castro incidents, most taking main protagonists appeared to shift to verbal place under the cover of darkness, are on the rise. warfare. The September 1992 elections were held There have been attacks on police stations in the without major incident, but when UNITA lost, countryside, windows smashed at Communist Savimbi tried to seize control of the airport in Party offices in provincial towns, and anti-Castro Luanda-and the civil war resumed. Thousands graffiti scrawled on walls. "This has never hap- of Angolans have since died. pened before," Szulc says, "and there are more Western leaders, Somervillebelieves, overes- and more reasons to believe that despite his still- timated the impact of the Cold War's end and set fiery rhetoric, Castro himself would be amenable their hopes for African den~ocracytoo high. to a negotiated settlement if he were allowed a Lancaster, however, is less gloomy. Africa's face-saving exit." "economic conditions, social diversity, and po- The Cuban economy, no longer propped up litical history do not provide strong grounds for by the Soviet Union, can scarcely get much optimism," she acknowledges, but important worse. "Eleven million Cubans survive on the political changes have taken place. edge of disaster today with much of their labor Growing numbers of individual Africans force unemployed, with nagging food shortages, support democracy, she notes. Many of them and amid deepening social decomposition," have suffered under authoritarian regimes and Szulc notes. Fanners, lacking fuel, have replaced do not want to repeat the experience. Also, hu- their tractors with oxen. In the cities, cars, buses, man rights, civic, and other nongovernmental and trucks have been replaced by bicycles and groups have sprung up. The collapse of So- horse-drawn carts. viet-style communism has made it harder for How long Cuba can continue in this condition aspiring autocrats to provide ideological jus- is uncertain, but the danger of an explosion tifications for their rule, and Western govern- grows with each passing day, Szulc warns, "es- ments have put pressure on African govern- pecially if Washington allows the Florida-based ments to implement reforms. All this does not armed mercenaries of Castro's exiled opponents guarantee a bright future. But "as the to appear to challenge him with threats of mili- experience[sl of Europe and Latin America tary incursions. The resulting civil war would have shown," Lancaster concludes, "political inevitably bring a lethal wave of vengeance and freedom can be addictive." a bloody settling of personal and political scores." Such bloodshed, taking place only "90 miles from home," could suck in the United A Golden Parachute States. For now, Szulc notes, Castro's position is For Mr. Castro? "reasonably secure." The Cuban leader retains "Waiting for the Blowout-Hurricane Fidel" by Tad the support of the military and the security Szulc, in The Washington Spectator (Oct. 1, 1993), forces. There is "no widely organized opposition London Terrace Station, P.O. Box 20065, New York, N.Y. 10011. to his rule, and no threatening rival waits in ex- ile." Because he still is popular with many Cu- After nearly 35 years in power and at age 66, bans and has no known serious rival, Castro is Cuba's Fidel Castro is almost certainly nearing in a good position to negotiate with the United the end of his rule. The question is whether or States over his own departure from power. For not the transition from his "socialist" regime to its part, the United States-if it can set aside its whatever comes after it can be accomplished long-standing animosity toward the Communist without civil war and massive bloodshed. Szulc, Maximum Leader-is now in a position to ease a former Nau York Times correspondent who has the transition to a post-Castro Cuba.

PERIODICALS 151 RESEARCHREPORTS Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States." Cornell Univ. Press, 124 Roberts PI., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.261 pp. $34.50 Author: Peter Douglas Feaver "The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons." Princeton Univ. Press, 41 William St., Princeton, N.J. 08540.286 pp. $29.95; paper, $16.95 Author: Scott D. Sagaiz "The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War." The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.364 pp. $36.95; paper, $16.95 Author: Brace G. BlaM

lie end of the Cold War ons also eroded during the 1950s, It signaled tliat nuclear war liad has brought new infor- Feaver says. President Dwight D. begun. Pilots rushed to their T mation and new perspec- Eisenhower granted to the com- nuclear-arrnedF-106Ainterceptors tives on the era's nuclear tensions. mander of theNorthAmerican Air and headeddowntherunway. For- Specialists examining how both Defense Command the authority tunately, diebasecommandercon- sides tried to avoid the accidental to use the nuclear weapons under tacted Dulutli and learned that the or unauthorized discharge of his command, and Eisenhower suspected Soviet saboteur had nuclear weapons have made some may have delegated the same turned out to be a bear. An officer troubling discoveries. Their find- power to the commander of the sped his car, lights flashing, onto ings may hold important lessons StrategicAir Command and to the therunwayand stopped the planes for the post-Cold War world. supreme allied commander in Eu- before they took off. That U.S. nuclear weapons are rope. The pictureismurky because Most specialists, says Blair, a under civilian control is widely much relevant material remains Brookings Institution researcher taken for granted. In fact, says classified. However, the Kennedy who once served as a U.S. missile- Feaver, a political scientist at Duke administrationmay have reversed launch officer, have thought tliat it University, varying degrees of de those Eisenhower decisions. All was only the United States that facto control of nuclear weapons nuclear weapons based in Europe instituted nuclear alerts (as it did liave been given to military com- were at least ordered fitted wit11 during the Cuban missile crisis, die manders at various times since locks to prevent detonation witli- Paris summit meeting in 1960, and World War 11. out a code. No reliableinformation the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973). Some delegation of control was has emerged on delegation of au- The researchersbelieved that there unavoidable, Feaver says. "When thority sincethe 1960s,Feaversays. was "a deep-seated Soviet reluc- theU.S. [nuclear]arsenalwassmall, Wherever the control has re- tance to increase the combat readi- civilians were able to use physical sided, Sagan, a political scientist at nessof iiuclearforces." In fact, Blair control to maintain absolute con- Stanford, makes it dear tliat over says, "tlie historical record trol over." The military liad the the decades there liave been some is . . . replete with episodes of So- bombers but the civilian Atomic "close calls" with nuclear weap- viet nuclear alerts." Energy Commission kept the ons. During the 1962 Cuban mis- The Sovietswent "to extraordi- bombsinitspossession.Ordyupon sile crisis, for example, a sentry nary lengths to ensure tight central the president's order would the patrolling the perimeter of a mili- control [of]nudearweapons," Blair weapons be turned over. "As the tary base near Duluth, Minnesota, points out. "Their safeguardswere arsenal grew, tills procedure be- thought lie saw someone climbing more stringent than those of any came more unwieldy and less reli- the base fence, fired some shots, other nuclear power, including able, particularly against a surprise and sounded the sabotage alarm. the United States." Those elaborate attack, and so [during the 1950~1 Armed guards rushed into the safeguards included dividing the physical control gradually shifted night, and similar alarms sounded military command-and-control to the military." at airfields throughout tlie region. structure in two, with a technical But "assertive" civilian control At Volk Field in Wisconsin, how- wing charged with keeping the of thedecision tousenuclearweap- ever, tlie wrong alarm was set off: nuclear forces up to snuff and an-

152 WQ WINTER 1994 other responsible for combat op- command system's vulnerability. ing a plan to ease the "hair trig- erations; keeping nuclear war- In a crisis, protection of the lead- ger" problem by "de-targeting" heads away from their delivery ership had to be the top prior- nuclear missiles, aiming them units; and using locking devices ity-and the means of achieving only at the open seas. Blair told to impede unauthorized use of it had to be "launch on warning," the Times that he favors stronger nuclear weapons.Nuclear author- with all its risk of inadvertent measures, such as removing war- ity was confined to the top Soviet nuclear war. heads from missiles.] leaders; there is virtually no evi- That is the same strategic "pos- Awareness of command sys- dence that any of that authority ture," Blair contends, that the terns' vulnerability creates danger- was ever delegated to military United States (despiteofficial deni- ous instability. That will be as true commanders. als) was driven toward by the vul- in the future as it was in the past, This "extreme centralization" nerability of its command appara- Blair says, which 'lends further strengthenedtheSoviet capacity to tus,even thoughitwas less central- importance to the prevention of avoid the accidental or illicit firing ized. [The New York Times (De- nuclear proliferation." The Cold of a nuclear weapon, Blair notes. cember 6,1993) reports that U.S. War is over, but the dangers of the However, it also increased the and Russian officials are discuss- nuclear age are not.

"Baby Boomers in Retirement: An Early Perspective." Congressional Budget Office, 2nd and D Sts. S.W., Washington, D.C. 20515.70 pp. No charge

etirement looms in the 65 need to work. eligible for their own Social Secu- minds of many "baby It may come as a surprise to the rity and pension benefits. R boomersu-those Amer- boomers, but they are currently For most boomers, income icans born between 1946 and doing better financially than their from private wealth-which pro- 1964Ña a troubling prospect. parents did as young adults, says vides one-fourth of the income of Among their fears: the collapse the CBO. Median houseliold in- 65-and-olderl~ousel~oldstoday- of Social Security, inadequate per- come (illconstant dollars)for those will be crucial to a comfortable sonal savings, and slow income aged 25 to 34 jumped from $22,300 lifein retirement.Boomers todate growth. Wlule admitting that it is in 1959 to $30,000 three decades may be saving too little, but they too early to say for sure, the Con- later. That is a 35 percent increase. still have working years left in gressional Budget Office (CBO) Income rose 53 percent for those which they can correct that. In concludes from census and aged 35 to 44, from $25,100 to addition, the boomers stand to household survey data that the $38,400. Also up is the ratio of inherit substantial wealth. boomerssl~ouldrelaxa bit. In terms housel~oldwealth to income. The prospect of retirement is of real income and wealth, it ap- As long as real wages con- not uniformly bright. The poorly pears that most of them will tinue to grow at least modestly educated, unmarried women be better off in retirement over the next 20 to 40 years, the with children, and boomers who than their parents have been. CBO says, boomers will have do not own their own homes That is good news, because lugher earningsbefore retirement may have to struggle. (Nearly the older generation has been than their parents had. That will one-third of lateboomers aged 30 doing quite well, thanks tostrong increase their Social Securityben- to 34 in 1991 were not home- growthin real wages during their efits and their ability to save. Pen- owners.) Moreover, all boomers peak earning years; expanded sion coveragewillextend tomore face the possibility that, because Social Security benefits; higher people, and benefits (which are of longer life expectancy, grow- rates of private-pension cover- likely to be an important source ing medical-care costs, and the age; the increase in housing val- of retirement income, particularly increased costs of educating their ues during the 1970s and '80s; for upper-income boomers) will children, they may need more and Medicare benefits. Nowa- also be higher. And today's le- money in retirement than their days, relatively few of those over gion of working women will be parents did.

RESEARCH REPORTS 153 0 ENTARY

We welcome Hindi/ letters from readers, especially tliose who wish to aniplih/ or correct ii~foriiiatio~~/~iil~lisl~eif in tlie Quarterly ai~d/orreact to t11e views expressed in our essays. The writer's telephone number and address shoiild be included. For reasons of space, letters are iisuaIh/ edited for publicatioii. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

Looking at the Tube nasty, brutish, and, urn, short. Perhaps all three men forgot where tliey were. Television is not a place for In your interesting survey, "Television and American genuine debates, interviews, or rallies. It is for sofa-to- Culture" [ WQ,Autumn'931, there is a common theme sofa communication. that TV works on us as ifwe were all passive lumps of No one knows how many votes changed sides as a clay. Only Frank McConnell alludes (in passing) to tlie result ofthese talk showdowns. But whatever switch- possibility that we bring something to our evening ing occurred did sobecause ofthe contrast in manners. viewing. That was what was striking, and memorable, about I remember my first TV in tlie mid-1950s. My then- these broadcasts. They instructed Americans on the young children importuned us endlessly to buy tlie proper way to discuss national issues. products they saw advertised. Oftenenough, we gave Television accommodates a range of acceptable in. In particular, I recall a cereal named Maypo, which civic behavior, from Moyers to McLauglilin. But tlie had as its slogan: "I want my Maypo!" The kids most favored style of argumentation is tliat of the detested it. Tlie iiisiglit I had tlien was that advertising, bright, white, adolescent male: informed,but not stu- having been given this powerful petard, was hoisting dious; miscliievous, but not mean; evasive ofcommit- itself upon it. merits, but lionest about that if cornered. Thanks to Sure enough, my children, like their fellow baby television, tlie reigning model for future leaders of boomers, grew upwith a degree ofskepticism beyond American public opinion is Jerry Seinfeld. anything seen in any earlier generations. They learned Micliael Cornfield early-and powerfully-that television lied to them. Charlottesville, Va. To thisday,I believe that tliissliaped their thinking and their behavior in profound ways. And it happened because tliey were not merely passive recipients of Tlie articles on television do not examine tlie threat messages. They interacted, as people always do with television poses to democracy. WilliamJ. Bennett (Wall all messages, electronic or otherwise. McL~11ianwas Street Journal, 3/15/93)has presented data that indi- only partly right; the recipient is also tlie message. We cate tliat in several vital areas our culture is rapidly are not potatoes. Weare people, and even whensitting declining. The past30 years have seen SATscoresdrop apparently mesmerized by tlie TV screen, our minds 75 points, the percent ofillegitimate births increase4.9- are not disengaged. fold, the percent of children on welfare increase 3.4- Arnold Brown fold, tlie teen suicide rate increase 3.1-fold, and tlie Cliairninii, Weiiier Eifricli Brown violent crime rate increase 4.7-fold.Liberals and con- New York, N.Y. servatives generally agree that violence on TV contrib- utes to violent crime. Conservatives believe tliat the attack on family and family morals on TV contributes I agree with Todd Gitlin that "television's largest to tliecliangein all aboveindicators. Liberalscuriously impact is probably as a school for manners." As far as hold that this attack is innocuous. civics lessons are concerned, the medium's most im- Stanford W.Brings portant classroom is tlie talk show. Holland, Mich. Semicasual chat has become the primary mode for political discourse in American public life. Consider three historic confrontations: Kennedy-Nixon, 1960; Spain Through British Eyes Bush-Rather, 1988; and Gore-Perot, 1993. Tlie losers "lost" because they violated norms ofconduct insinu- I was thrilled to see tlie cover of your Autumn issue ated through thousands ofhours oftelevised talk, not depicting a masterpiece from the golden age ofone of just in the format tliat bears the name, but in situation the great civilizations of our global history, from a comedies, soap operas, local news programs, and country that during the Dark Agesserved as repository sports broadcasts as well. Nixon tried to best his of what was tlien left of Western culture in the only opponent instead ofimpress liis audience. (And in tlie libraries standing at that time. firstdebate,ofco~~rse,l~elooked awful.) Rather seemed I started reading "Spain in Search of Itself" [WQ, rude to liis "guest" on the nightly news. Perot was Autumn 19931 without payingattention to theidentity

154 WQ WINTER 1994 of its author. But after the first few pages, I said to nostic attitude, which laid aside the clamorous de- myself, "I bet this article has been written by a British mands of the opinionated ego. It could be that the subject." Sure enough. academic discipline of comparative religion offers a It isnot surprising that Mr. Hooper tries to paint the similar opportunity in our own day. Professor Eck was worst picture possible of Spain; the British have, after correct to see the World's Parliament of Religions in all, been doing that for centuries. What is surprising 1893 as a symbol of a major change in religious con- and disturbing is that the WQ, affiliated with an inter- sciousness worldwide. For the serious pluralist it has national center for scholars, would publish it. Worse become blasphemous to assume that one tradition has still, why didn't the WQ find someone moreinclined to the monopoly on truth. put forth a balanced view? Shame on you. Thisview,unfortunately,seems profoundly threat- ama absolutely sure thatifyo~wer~to bepresented ening to the fundamentalists who have erected new with an articleon present-day Britain concentrating on, barriers against the "other." As Professor Eck points among other things, thedebauchery oftheBritishroyal out, this fundamentalism is an essentially modern family from time immemorial to the present day; the phenomenon, but it also has its precursors. There have rapaciousness and brutality of Britain's ferocious pi- always been people who have used religion not to rates; the role of the British as the foremost opium, overcome the ego but to affirman imperiled identity, slave,and rum traders in recorded history; the fact that oftenin a violent manner. the British were the first Europeans to expel the Jewish This has been particularly true ofWestern Cluistian- people;and the brutality oftheBritish colonizersin this ity, which, since the Crusades, has found it notoriously century in India, Cyprus, Nigeria, and other places difficultto liveside by side with other religions;it has also comparable to thatperpetrated by theSpanishover500 tended to lose sight ofthe agnostic approach and to seek years ago. . . . you would not dare to publish it. Yet an anunrealisticcertaintyin religious matters.Wein the West article completely denigrating Spain seems to be another are fond ofcastigating others for their intolerance,but the matter.Mr. Hooperdoesnot writelikea scholar,butrather conservativeventurel~asaspecialurgency for us,if weare like a member of the infamousBritish yellow press. not to fail the test of our century and are to hand on a There is much discussion today about the role of compassionate faith to the next generation. America in the post-Cold War period. To me, the most Kflreu Arrnstr(~~ig important role for our great nation is to serve as a new Antlior, A History of God beacon of light and hope to bring together humanity London, Ei7gIai7d fromallcornersofthe world,representingall religions, cultures, and subcultures, to live together in peace and mutual respect. One way todo thisis to present articles Diana Eckpairsa project with which I am involved and about the best that every nation in the world can offer one of hers in her realistic and hopeful essay. Mine is and not to try to perpetuatehalf-truthsand innuendoes the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chi- from thepast. Every four years,& theOlyinpicGames, cago for the American Academy of Arts andsciences ~mericaisthe onl$ nation on the planet that presents and hers is the Pluralism Project at Harvard. I was a team made up ofpeople whose backgrounds repre- especially interested in how she framed her topic, the sent every corner ofthis earth. It behooves us to set the fact that 1993 was the "Year of Interreligious Under- example at the scholarly level as well. standing and Cooperation," in a setting ofthe years of Felix Ricsgo Fernaiidez religious misund~rstandingand conflict that mark so Berwi/ii,Pa. many of the hardline and extremist versions offunda- mentalism that we study. More blood than incense marks the story of reli- Comparing Religions gion around the world these years. Few intense ~eligionistssit down at peace tables;more are behind The way in which scholars of comparative religion fortifications,exploding bombs, or in happier repub- have continually found it necessary to revise their lics like ours, plotting to get or get back what they vocabulary, abandon their preconceptions, and recog- regard as their fair share of power in culture, society, nize the inadequacy of their traditional categories in and nation. It was interesting to me that she used the Diana L. Eck's account ["In the Name of Religions," centennial ofthe World's Parliament ofReligions to do WQ, Autumn '931 is uncannily reminiscent of the temporal framing tomatch thisspatial framing.In 1893 disciplines whereby pl~ilosophersand mystics of the the Parliamentarians were split between those who past made themselves conscious of the inadequacy of wanted to show the superiority of Christianity to the words and concepts when applied to the ultimate. restof theworldand thosewho wanted todisplay what TheChristianvia negntiva, theMuslim tnwi1,and the they thought was the reconciling power of religion Kabbalistic diI1;lg all had their equivalents in the non- because the religions, at heart, were one, theistic traditions, enabling adepts to cultivate an ag- In 1993 the Parliamentarians were split between

COMMENTARY 155 those who wanted to display the wares of their many Brodsky deplores. We canalso apply Davies'sinsights faiths and those who wanted to show that they aspired and perspective to the emptiness of much modern to produce concord in a world of revolutions, bomb- painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. ings, and subversions. The America of 1993, like that of "Incidentally," Davies maintains, "your reading 1893, still has a huge Christian majority. But the evan- may bring you information or enlightenment but un- gelical one-fourth of the population was virtually less it brings you pleasure first, you should think unrepresented at the 1993Parliament, themainstream carefully about why you are doing it." Furthermore, Protestant one-fourth produced some leadership but it "Poetrv that has decided to do without music, to did not seem to have its heart or its numbers in it, the divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its Orthodox minority walked out, and the Catholic reason for being.'' fourth only paid a kind of courtesy call at the Chi- Perhaps appreciation of poetry declined when edi- cago event. Christianity almost looked like anAmeri- tors decided that rhyme and rhythm were "old-fash- can minority among the Parliament people. . from ioned" and unnecessary. around the world. - At family three generations often want Everyone knows how lethal and how healing,- how to hear Kipling's "Ballad of the East and the West." killing and consoling,religioncan be. The bombing and Why? Because poetry should be recited and the "Bal- assassinations make headlines and the varliaments lad slips easily off the tongue with its rhythm and and congresses, the consultations and the dialogues, rhyme and it has a universal message. donot. Professor Eckisa leader in11elpingHarvardians youcanhear thedrumbeat of hoovesin therl~~tl~m, in particular and Americans in general tobecome aware and the rhyming is music to the ear. Then listen to his of their pluralism. It will take more than her Pluralism 'Seal's Lullaby," in which you can feel the slow, Project, our Fundamentalism Project, and a World's Par- swinging seas. I cannot imagine three generations of liament of Religionstohelp thehealing and consolingside people listening spellbound to Kees's morbid, atheis- rewin anything of the place given the 1893 Parliament in tic, and depressing poetry from the examples given, a more optimistic, progressive, and illusion-filled time. which Brodsky tells us we should admire. Diana Eck's Project and her prose are at least signals of Or perhaps we should admire "A Poem about the a better way, invitations to other local, national, and Pancreas," which was deemed worthy of printing in international communities to begin the tasks we need the eminent New England Joiirnal of Medicine: to faceif thereis to bea Parliament, or a World, in2093. Martin E. Marly 'I'm sorry, but it's cancer Divinity School Of the sweetbreads. Yes, Univ. of Chicago And with proper medical management Early surgery and A very rigid diet You can look forward The People Speak To at least Another three months. When the pancreas goes The "At Issue" essay, "Vox Populi" ( WQ, Autumn'93), It goes." was neatly done. Please publish more 011 this subject. (Excerpted by permission from the Fred M. Clainpitt New E11gIai7dfo~iriial of Medicine) St. Augustine, Fla. There must be real poets now extant who are smothered by the gurus of poetry who dignify such as Poetry's Power these by calling them poetry although there is no grace or music, rhyme or rhythm, and no deeper insight Joseph Brodsky's explication and translation of Sextus unfolded for us. Propertius's elegy ("Poetry," WQ, Autumn '93) is su- Maxwell Berry, perb-a poignant addition to our-my-life. Thank you. Panama Cihy, Fla. Myrtle Postnantz~r Chicago, Ill. Questionable Calls

In t11eSpring 1993 WQare two contiguouspieces-the Summary or not, I expect accurate information from poetry of~eldoi~~ees,introducedb~~ose~h~rodsk~,your publication, notuncritical acceptance of propa- and "A Reading Lesson," by Robertson Davies. The ganda,asin "TheForestfor theTrees" ["The Periodical latter explains why people who are well educated, Observer," WQ, Summer '931. affluent, world traveled, and supportive of the arts, The article by J. H. Adler, which you summarized, practice "benign neglect" of modern poetry, which is another variation on the timber industry's "party

156 WQ WINTER 1994 line": "Don'tworry about tl~enationalforests,thereare learn that "peopleused to tap their feet and smile when plenty of trees left;more than ever." A barefaced lie! they listened to~mericanpopular music. Now they sit Seedlings and saplings hardly qualify as "timber" but open-mouthed." Who are these people who used to they are counted as sucli in these statistics. smile but now open their mouths? All people? Only Adler's figures oncurrent and past forestland area rely older people? Perhaps white, middle-class people? ontlus manipulation offact. It is anattempt to cover upthe One ofthe most outrageous statements appears on wholesale destruction and overl~arvest&~of our page 18: fro-~mericai; music is solnetilcountry music and neoclas- opinion piece more suited to the op-ed pages ofa tabloid. sical jazz have very different aims and accomplis11- My complaintsare,essentially, threefold:thewriter's inents, but that they belong to the same "family." No for absol~~teswl~endiscussing cluantities, her listing ofthese different"a& and accomplisl~ments" almost complete refusal to supply examples tosupport was provided, nor did she explain what she meant by points made about the types of rock and rap she "family." The fact that not even a cursory mention of dislikes,and her failure todefinesomeof the important harmony, rhythm, form, instrumentation, or other terminology. elements was offeredto illuminate what was meant by The flip journalistic tone and Bayles's penchant for "family" leads again to a rather uncomfortablefeeling absolutes are evident in the first two sentences. We that the author is full of opinions, but somewhat less

COMMENTARY 157 full of hard data. ductive comparatively advantaged jobs. What a beau- At the end, Bayles states that "blues feeling has the tiful theory! power to transcend race, sex, generation, and most The problem is that often we don't practice "free other human divisions." Certainly we've all had "the trade," we practice "freesell." Free sell theory has our blues," but it seems clear that she's talking about blues nation letting in someone else's comparatively music. If a statement is being made about the univer- advantaged exports-which put our workers out of sality of blues music, however, the most successful jobs-while not demanding that they buy our com- music at crossing spans of ethnicity, nationality, gen- paratively advantaged exports. As a result, the Ameri- der, "and most other human divisions" are the kinds of can workers who lose their jobs to imports are not popular product that appear on Billboard's various rehired. If we want to practice free trade, then those mainstream lists. I hasten to add that they are success- who sell here have to buy here. fill commercially, in terms ofsales of recordings, but I Real free trade is impossible. But fair trade, in which don't think Bayles finds anything wrong with the workers who lose their jobs to imports are not made to marriage ofcommerce and music, because she writes pay all the costs of trade but have a chance to regain on page 12 that the blues has also "always been com- employment, has immensely beneficial possibilities. mercialized entertainment." Philip 1. Le Be1 The WQ generally does a good job when it comes to Clifton, Va. choosing manuscripts in the areas of political and economic theory and history proper, but if you con- tinue to publish articles on the arts that are of the same caliber as this one, I fear the WQ may turn into another ANNUAL STATEMENT Wall SfreetJounwl-a publication that juxtaposesoften OF OWNERSHIP stimulating, and irritating, views on politics and eco- nomics with what in myopinion are themost banaland Statement of ownership, management, and circulation laughably provincial reviews ofthe arts to be found in (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of The Wilson Quarterhl, any of the nation's major broadsheets. publishedfourtiniesa yearat901 DStreetS,W.,Suite704, Washington, D.C. 20024 for October 1, 1993. General Daniel N. Thompson business offices of the publisher are located at 901 D Columbia Univ. Street S.W., Suite 704, Washineton," D.C. 20024. Name New York, N.Y. andaddressofpublislierisKathy Read,901 DStreetS.W., Suite704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Nanieand address of editor is Jay ~ols&901 D Street S.W., Suite 704, Wash- ington, D.C. 20024. Owner is the Woodrow Wilson Inter- Free Trade or Free Sell? national Center for Scholars, Sinitlisoiiiaii Institution Building, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., Washington, D.C. Unlike many essays I've read concerning trade, your 20560. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other se- "At Issue" essay "The Real Trade Question" [WQ, curity holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of Summer '931 comes close to understanding the theory total amount of exempt status for federal income tax behind free trade. purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 Free trade, as the essay indicated, is based on the months (Section 424.12, DMN). The average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months is: theory ofcomparativeadvantage. Theessay states that (A) Total number of copies printed: 74,206; (B) Paid "the best way for all to prosper is for each region to circulation: (1) Sales tliro~iglidealers and carriers, street produce the goods it can manufach~remost cheaply vendors, and counter sales: 1,839; (2) Mail subscriptions: and efficientlyand to trade them witl~otl~erregionsfor 66,955; (C) Total paid circulation: 68,794; (D) Free distri- the goods that they produce most efficiently." This is bution by mail, carrier, or other nieans: 942; (E) Total distribution 69,736; (F) Copies not distributed: (1) Office correct but it fails to explain why following compara- use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: 1,290; tive advantage is "the best way for all to prosper." (2) Return fromnewsagents:3,180;(G)Total: 74,206;The The theory says that when a region specializes in actual number of copies of single issue published nearest producing thosegoods that it ismost efficientinmanu- to filing date is: (A) Total number of copies printed: fach~ring,the workers who were forced to abandon the 76,507; (B) Paid circulation: (1) Sales through dealersand inefficientindustries will go to work for the efficient carriers, street vendors, and counter sales: 1,804; (2) Mail subscriptions: 69,659; (C) Total paid circulation: 71,463; industries. The reason it's "the best way for all to (D) Freedistribution by mail, carrier, orother means: 959; prosper" is that those thrown out of workby imports (E) Total distribution: 72,422; (F) Copies not distributed: are rehired by our expanding comparatively (1) Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after print- advantaged industries that export. ing: 1,239; (2) Return from news agents: 2,846; (G)Total: All prosper for four reasons: more goods for all; 76,507. Icertify that thestatementsmadeby meaboveare possibly better quality goods for all; we lose some of correct and complete. our most inefficientjobs; and those workers who lost (signed) Kathy Read, Publislier their jobs are rehired into our more efficientand pro-

158 WQ WINTER 1994 CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING For information on an ad in the Wilson Quarterly Classified Section, please write to Advertising, The Wilson Quarterly, 907 D Street, S. W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024, or call (202) 287-3000, ex. 223.

BOOKLOVER'S SMORGASBORD issueorwrite toTHE WILSON CEN- Please include your membership num- for a pittance! Tempting book bar- TER, Membership Department, P.O. ber or a copy of your membership card. gains to enrich your library. Write for Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL The Wilson Center Calendar of free catalog. IRON KETTLE BOOKS, 321 42-0406. Events,The Wilson Center Reports, 85 Hancock Road. Williamstown. Publishing Program, CalendarlRe- Mass. 01 267. ports, 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704, BOOK ASSOCIATES: Specialists Washington, D.C. 20024. HOMESTUDY COURSE ineconom- in out-of-print books. World-wide ics. A 10-lesson study that will throw search-no fee. Contact: Bob Snell, Smithsonian Foreign and Domes- light on today's baffling problems. P.O. Box 687, Orange, Conn. 06477. tic Study Tours, Associates Recep- Tuition free~smallcharge for materi- (203) 795-3107. Catalogs issued. tion Center, Department WCA, als. Write Henry George Institute, 121 Smithsonian Institution Building, E. 30th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. Washington, D.C. 20560. ATTENTION WILSON CENTER If you are a serious reader who ASSOCIATES: Are you aware that Smithsonian Gift Catalog, wants to stay informed, subscribe as a subscriber to the Wilson Quar- Smithsonian Institution, Gift Catalog, to THE WILSON QUARTERLY to- terly you are entitled to many exciting Department 0006, Washington, D.C. day. One year/$24, two years/$39. benefits? Write to the addresses listed 20560. Use the postage-paid card in this below to obtain the desired items.

Credits: Cover, From the Leslie0. Memll collectionat theHenry E. Huntington Library, Sail Marino, California; p. 2, Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Sniithsoiiian Insti- tution, Washington, D.C.; pp. 10, 11, 16, 17, Courtesy of the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois; p. 13, Cour- tesy of BurlingtonNorthern Railroad, Fort Worth,Texas; pp. 14, 18 (bottom), Photographs supplied by Mark Reutter, from the collection of W. Kent Hamilton; p. 18 (inset), From Strennili~ii~ig America, Courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearboni, Michigan; p. 22, From Streamline: Le Design Aniiricain des Auneis 3040 by Olivier Boissiere, Copyright 63 1987 Editions Rivage; p. 24, Photograph by Wayne Leeniaii (c. America's Biggest 19651, Courtesy of Kaluibacli Publishing Co., Waukeslia, Wis- consin; p. 29, From The Streamline Era by Robert C. Reed, Copy- Selection of right@1975 by RobertCarroll Reed,Golden West Books; pp.32, 64, 87, 127, 133, The Bethnaiin Archive; p. 38, Radio Times I-Iulton Picture Library; p. 41, Mary Evans Picture Library; p. 43, Reproduced by permission of Punch; p. 50, Illustration by Becky Eason,Easoii&Associates,Washiiigtoii,D.C.;p.53,TheGraiiger Collection; p. 57, Care of the Scottish National Party; p. 59, Reproduced by permission of William McPlierson; pp. 70,71, Overstocks, Remainders, Imports and Reprints Reproduced by permission of David T. Gies; p. 77, Fotomas from all major publishers. Books recently priced at Index; p. 83, Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pa.; p. 86, $20, $30, $40 -now as low as $1.95. $2.95, $3.95. Courtesy of the General Research Division, New York Public Thousands of titles, from yesterday's best sellers Library, Astor, Leiiox, and Tilde11Foundations; p. 90, Scala/ to books you never knew existed. Art Resource,N.Y.; p. 95,TOLESCopyright@ 1993TheBuffalo Over 40 subject areas: Biography, History, Fiction, Nms,Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndi- Sports, Literature, Politics, Health, Nature and more. cate. All rights reserved; p. 98, Photo by George B. Sclialler, Fast Shipment, normally within 48 hours, and a Courtesy of Univ. of Chicago Press; p. 109, Drawing by moneyback guarantee. Frascino; Copyright @ "190, The Nw Yorker Magazine, Inc.; p. 131,Cartoonby Ed Fisclier,Copyright@TheRochesterPost- Bulletin; p. 136, Courtesy of Dr. Robert A. Selig, Dept. of I Name 1 History,GrandValley StateUniversity;p. 138,By permission I I of Mike Lukovich and Creators Syndicate; p. 144, The Food I Address I and Agriculture Assoc., Rome; pp. 146, 147, Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress; p. 150, Hope I city I I I a1idOptiinisi~,[email protected]~1afaiigejo,care State Zip of 0.Levinson, John Muafaiigejo Trust. I HAMILTON------Box 15-448. Falls Village CT 06031,

WQ WINTER 1994 159 hen the Trustees of the Woodrow sored meetings of every kind-from brown-bag Wilson Center suggested a few luncheon discussionsto large international confer- years ago that this brief column be ences-that are literally too numerous to count. added to the already rich content Their topics have ranged from health care and the wof the Wilson Quarterly, their intention was ex- environment and the law of the sea to early British plicitly not to turn the WQ into a house organ historiography and Mozart and the Riddle of Cre- replete with news of our softball team's record (a ativity. They have been heldnot only at thecenter, respectable nine wins, 12 losses, and one tie last but alsoinsuch far-flungplacesasPotsdam,Prague, summer), of marriages and births (happily, a Moscow, Tokyo, and New Delhi. very considerable number), and of deaths (mer- The true character and quality of the Center cifully, none). Rather, the aim was to make more cannot, of course, be conveyed by mere num- visible the happy and fruitful relationship be- bers. More than anything else, the Center's char- tween the WQand the Center of which it is such acter and quality depend upon the extraordi- an important part. This aim, indeed, is reflected nary men and women who come here each year in one of the double meanings of the column's as Fellows and Guest Scholars, to work on indi- title, as well as in the fact that my colleagues and vidual projects of their own choosing while at I have deliberately avoided more than an occa- the same time forming a genuine community of sional reference to the Center's activities in writ- learning. It is the quite unpredictable interac- ing the column. tions of these people, drawn from almost every I mention these facts because on this occa- discipline and from an astonishing number of sion I am departing from my customary prac- countries, which in my view constitute the tice. This issue of the WQ appears midway be- Center's greatest strength. Perhaps the most heart- tween the 25th anniversaries of the creation of ening words I have heard here were spoken by a the Center by Congress- and the first Fellow who had just come from the meeting of its Board of Trustees un- staff of the ~atiokalSecurity Coun- der the chairmanship of Hubert Hum- cil to writea book on thereunification phrey. This seems to me a fitting of Germany: His book, he predicted, occasion to report briefly to the Wil- would be both different and better son Center Associates on the accom- because of the opportunity the Cen- plishments of that quarter-century. ter had given him to spend time in a Much of the information can be conveyed totally unhierarchical setting with people so dif- by numbers. The Center has been host to more ferent from those with whom he had been pro- than 1,300 Fellows and Guest Scholars; 860 of fessionally associated-with historians, sociolo- these have come from the United States, repre- gists, philosophers, and even literary critics and senting 43 states; 485 have come from 65 other biographers, as well as political scientists and countries. For our 25th anniversary the Wilson diplomats. It is the work of men and women like Center Press has published a bibliography of 718 this-our 1,300 alumni and their successors, books written at the Center by Fellows and who contribute to the WQ,speakon "Dialogue,'' Guest Scholars, and a11 additional 145 Center participate in our meetings, and write the books publications. During my first two years at the and articles published by our Press and others- Center, books written here won the National upon which the Center's success in fulfilling its Book Award for nonfiction:NeilSheel1an's Bright congressional mission of "strengthening the re- Shining Lie (1988) and Thomas Friedman's From lations between the world of learning and the Beirut to Jerusalem (1989); this year, two books world of public affairs" willultimately be judged. written here were among the five finalists in that I am confident that we are ahead of the sched- competition. Our radio program, "Dialogue," is ule set by one of our founders, Daniel Patrick now heard on 155 stations through the American Moynihan, who wrote 25 years ago that, "what we Public Radio Network. And the WQ,now begin- are proposing is an institution that the 22nd cen- ning its 18th year, reaches more than 70,000 sub- tury will judge to have had a beneficial impact scribers, a circulation unequaled by that of any upon the 21st." comparable publication in the United States. Charles Blitzer During thesesame years, thecenter has spon- Director

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