THE WILSON Q'hrte-RLY

S&QQ S?ai^~ 1994 CuKbÃ $7^0 -. - ^ --

THE WILSONQ'hRTE-RLY -' -'. Can An Intelligent Person Be Religious?

Among the well-educated the myth still cir- Thomas More, Dorothy Day, C.S. Lewis, Martin xlates that religion is the preserve of the dim- Luther King, Flannery O'Connor, Mother Teresa, witted, unlettered, and irrational, that the price and Archbishops Romero and Tutu. 3f salvation is checking your mind at the Pearly An ecumenical monthly edited by lay Cath- Gates. Yet, from Harvard to Berkeley, and among olics, we've been characterized by George Will as inquisitive people generally, there's an undeniable "splendid," by the University of Chicago's Martin renewal of interest in the questions traditional re- E. Marty as "lively," by the Los Angeles Times as ligion raises and seeks to answer. This fascination "influential," by Newsweek as "thoughtful and is largely the result of the failure of secular sub- often cheeky," by Utne Reader as "surprisingly stitutes for religion (such as positivism, rational- original," by Library Journal as "brilliant," and ism, hedonism, consumerism, technological utopi- by Christopher Derrick, England's foremost Cath- anism, Freudianism, and Marxism) to give abid- olic apologist, as "by far the best Catholic maga- ingly satisfying answers to the truly significant zine in the English-speaking world." puzzles in life: evil, goodness, suffering, love, We publish Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans, death, and the meaning of it all. Eastern Orthodox, Jews, and an occasional non- Contrary to stereotypes, this religious renais- believer. Writers who've appeared in our pages in- sance does not imply a retreat from working for clude such diversely penetrating intellects as Rob- peace, justice, and human dignity; nor does it sig- ert Bellah, Christopher Lasch, Jean Bethke Elsh- nify a hostility to science, only an appreciation of tain, Daniel Bell, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, the limits of science and technology. Walker Percy, Norman Lear, John Lukacs, J.M. We at the NEW OXFORDREVIEW are soear- Cameron, Henri Nouwen, Avery Dulles, Gordon heading today's intellectual engagement with the Zahn, Will Campbell, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard sacred. Among other things, we scrutinize the reli- Mouw, and Sheldon Vanauken. We bat around a gious dimensions of the great events and issues of wide variety of issues and defy easy ideological the past and present, and probe the wisdom offer- pigeonholing. We'll keep you on your toes! ed not only by the Bible and Church fathers, but Whether or not you're Catholic, if you also by such giants as St. Francis, Aquinas, Dante, yearn for a sane, intelligent, and nonglitzy explor- Kierkegaard, Newman, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, ation of the religious dimensions of our lives and Bonhoeffer, Barth, Niebuhr, Gandhi, Buber, Au- our world, we invite you to get to know us.

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Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

8 THE IDIOCY OF RACE by Ivan Haizmford Fifty years after the Myrdal Report, race remains an American dilemma-in part because Myrdal's social-engineering remedies took no account of the importance of politics.

46 QUESTIONINGLEADERSHIP

Alan Briizkley Alan Ryan 0 Jacob Heilbrunn Amid talk of assorted crises of leadership, our authors explore the ways we have tried to understand and cultivate one of the least definable of human qualities.

36. Why Wright Endures by Witold Rybczynski

99. How to Avoid Date Rape by Nelson W.Aldrich, }r.

109. Mere Lewis by James Coino

DEPARTMENTS 2. Editor's Comment 119. Periodicals 4. At Issue 144. Research Reports 73. Current Books 146. Commentary 92. Poetry 152. From the Center

Cover: Detail of a first-century Roman fresco painting from Herculaneum, depicting a ceremony of the Isis cult. The original is in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.

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

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TheWilsonQuarterly (ISSN-0363-3276)ispublishedinJniii1nri/(Winter),April(Spring),Jiil^f(Summer),andOctober(A11ttiii1n)b\/theWoodrow Wilsonliiteri~itioiial Center for Scholars at 901 D Street S. W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biciniinl}y. Subscriptions: one year, 524; tzuo years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one war, 539; two wars, 573. Sinvie. copies. mailed upon reqiiest: $7;outside U.S. aiid possessions, 58;selected back issues: $7, includinf posta,qe and 1iaiidIiii.q; outside Ll .< , .-^ S~.w./-.Ii.-;i,.~at i-;-Â¥;.i t II l\'~..liiÃ§; ~Ã§Z, .in '!a.!.iui.)i!.71~i.iili~i< ,VII;:-' :Ill i.~-Â¥d/;:ir,'.niniiio:iqw -li'.'iitl.t/".I:. 111;~tii1~.l1w.i - ~l~-.~./.l~i~.i-.i~./it.n!ip~.l I'u:-L'I.I!JL.\l:'iiih~i 5,vi.i :!i.711?~'-i.>I i t.h,'.. an1 ill ;iibi-:ti~tiÃˆ : ui,~i~ iii i:ii::, ;.'it11 \\'il:,in Ou-irti-rlv in.-tiliu: I if,.'/ 11.^i.l~-.iil ci Si'r'iL~',Tlw \\'ilson Oi~irtcrlv. - '2 , - , ,> -, P.O. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0406. (Subscriber hot line: 1-800-829-5108.)Postmaster: Send all address cliniiges to The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0406. Microfilm copies arc available from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. U.S. nacsstand distribution by Eastern Naps Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Sn~idusky,Ohio 44870 (for information, call 1-800-221-3148). Editor: Jay Tolson Deputy Editor: Steven Lagerfeld Managing Editor: James H. Carman Literary Editor: Karen Lehrman (on leave: Jeffery Paine) Associate Editor: Robert K. Landers Poetry Editors: Joseph Brodsky; Anthony Heclit Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano Design Consultant: Tawney Harding f someone were to suggest that the way the United States Contributing Editors: Linda Colley, and other Western nations have gone about dealing with the Denis Donogl~ue,Max Holland, Walter problem of race for the last 50 years was fundamentally Reicl~,Akin Ryan, Charles Townshend, I Alan Wolfe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrong, even fatally misguided, you might be inclined to smile, nod your head ever so politely, and quickly walk the other way. In Researchers: Knsti Flis, Liubov this issue, Ivan Hannaford, a British scholar, makes just this Fortunova Librarian: Zdenek V. David suggestion, but we urge you not to rush off. We could say that Editorial Advisers: K. Anthony Appiali, Hannaford is proposing a new paradigm here, but this decade is Mary B. Bullock, Robert Damton, already awash in new paradigms. Besides, the antidote Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding, Hannaford offers to race-oriented public thinking and policies is Elizabeth Johns, Michael Lacey, hardly new. It is as old, he argues, as theGreek city-state, thepolis- John R. bmpe, Jackson Lears, and is, in fact, nothing less than politics itself, in the radical sense Robert Litwak, Frank McConnell, of the word. The beauty of Hannaford's argument lies, in part, in James M. Morris, Richard Rorty, his investigation of the classical formulation of political life, a Blair Ruble, Ann Slieffield, mode of governance shaped specifically in opposition to forms of S. Frederick Stare, Joseph Tulclh government based on blood and clan, kithand kin. Just as valuable Founding Editor: Peter Braestrup is his history of the life of this precarious ideal, which has been Publishing Director: Warren B. Syer repeatedly challenged by various forms of ethnic and, in recent Publisher: Kathy Read centuries, eugenic thinking. The barbarism of the latter was, of Business Manager: Suzanne Napper course, nowhere more evident than in Hitler's racist ideology, but Circulation Director: Rosalie Bruno the pernicious influence of race-based thinking continues to un- Direct advertising inquiries to: Kathy Read dercut the possibility of a true political life to this day. Heed 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704 Hannaford. He reminds us of a valuable paradigm lost-but one Washington, D.C. 20024 that can be reclaimed. (202) 287-3000

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2 WQ SPRING 1994 Call Toll-Free: 1-800-367- 4534 Extension 270-071 0 1993 MBI r ------RESERVATION APPLICATION------5,000 years of world history...more than 50 years in the writing... The Easton Press Call Toll-Free: ; ; 47 Richards Avenue 1-800-367-4534 over 10,000 pages ...a masterpiece that will never be surpassed!' Norwalk, Conn. 06857 Ext. 270-071

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Goodnight, Delight

o these many years later, the question piness that is short-lived. It is more modest has lost none of its power to stun: If than either, pleasure of a softer kind, a whis- you were a tree, what kind of tree per rather than a shout. Sure, it still exists in would you be? We never expected Barbara pockets here and there, as partisans endure in Walters to give Socrates a run for his money, caves for a while under continual siege after but this? In retrospect, the question probably they have lost the war. But delight rarely signaled a defining moment in the devolution shows its face, for fear of being picked off. of the TV interview. And yet its empty-head- You have only to say the word, nimble and edness is rather appealing today, when we airborne, to feel its attraction. In these earth- routinely expect our interviewers to follow the bound times, the volume of just about every- baton right to the knee, the knife to its target tiling is too high to hear delight's soft voice. It' s flesh. The cocktail of choice for Barbara and not in-your-face, and these are in-your-face her media compatriots is now a mix of six years. The Democrats caught the mood per- parts prurience and some shavings of concern. fectly in the 1992 war-room cry of which they Let's try to recapture the innocence and were so proud-"It's the economy, stupid!" imagine the arboreal-preference question put Like the professionals who had contrived it, not to some hapless celebrity but much of the country found the to the national public mood today. sentence amusing-this is the way What might the mood answer? we talk to one another-when it Not oak or pine or redwood, was merely demeaning. surely; nothing so sturdy or heroic. Places where delight was once A lemon tree, maybeand if not common-the theater, movies, the entire tree, then its workaday popular music, art museums, the fruit, which might roll to the corner of the pro- classroom, bed-are as stripped of it as pub- duce department and lie unnoticed for days, lic figures are of their privacy. Take sex. If sour and yellow and softening.Not unlike the you believe the hype, it will either kill or times. We live in a lemon of an age, and if it incriminate.How far can I go, at what speed, came with a warranty, we'd be entitled to a and in what order? Nothing is easy. In the refund. classroom, you must watch what you say. In Then again, who has ever thought the art museums, you must watch where you times, any times, were not out of joint? "Thou step. wouldst not think how ill all's here about my Or take music. The tune is out and aggres- heart," said Hamlet, even before receiving his sion is in; album notes thank not God but pa- fatal wound. Hamlet's heart had every reason role officers. On TV the true stories of rampant to weigh a ton, but what is our excuse for the victimization~ofwives beaten up and kids heaviness we have wrapped ourselves in like beaten down-leave you hungry less for jus- a stadium blanket? The popular culture is tice than for potato chips. Shakespeare had starved for wit and lightness and easy ingenu- Holinshed; TV has the tabloids that block your ity, and the society is full of groups deter- escape from the supermarket. mined to jump till every souffle falls. In the theater, those foreign megamusicals We are losing our capacity for delight. De- have been let onto the stage like so many Tro- light is not so explosive as joy, nor as deep- jan horses, mechanical and dead-no, worse seated and sustained as happiness, even hap- than dead, deadly-horse and horse by-prod-

4 WQ SPRING 1994 uct too. Thoughts too shallow for greeting material goods that explain who we are. We cards find their just expression in these shows. have been assured that we are entitled and Full of calculation but devoid of wit, they are have rights, not just to pursue happiness but said to give pleasure around the world. The to sit triumphant astride its lassoed and only pleasure is to be counted among those domesticated hide. Falling short of what we who have survived them. have been led to expect, we are disappointed Delight was once routine in the theater; it and act bereft of everything. We require Dr. lodged in the smallest details. The case can be Chekhov, and only Dr. Peter Kramer is on call. made even with frivolous evidence. For example, in a failed Sheldon Harnick-JerryBock hose of us too young to have known musical comedy called Tenderloin (1960), a firsthand are told heroic myths of mock 19th-century ballad told of a young ur- T America in the 1930s, when times were ban orphan named Annie who supported her- genuinely bad, and people struggled against self making artificial flowers out of paper and shortage and loss and hopelessness. At tlus re- wire and wax. Her career ended when her fin- move, it is hard to figure how they did it, for gers froze and, as the lyrics have it, "wiring we seem less capable today of coping with and waxing, she waned." It's not Pope, not adversity, for all our opportunities to prac- even Porter or Hart, but there is more wit in tice~naturaldisasters, casual violence, imper- that one half-line, sly and offlIandÃ‘delightfu1 iled careers. The impulse to surrender, or to really-than in all the outbursts of A. L. look elsewhere for rescue, is powerful, and the Webber and his imitators, wit11 their gassy larger culture reflects the stress of a center sewers and wobbly helicopters and traveling barely holding. chandeliers. Big loud stuff, right in your face, Yet, oddly, in the midst of all the gloom and avoiding the heart and the brain. But the pub- incentives to despair in the '30s, a capacity for lic is not inclined to hear the difference or delight seems to have persisted and to have judge the loss. And so, waxing, we have been given full rein. Consider only the evi- waned too. dence that survives on screen. This was the Why the leaden hand upon us? We are not great age of screwball comedy and of a certain at war, abroad at least, or in economic depres- kind of musical that brought the impossible sion at home. We are not sending children within easy reach and nourished dreams and under their desks in school to practice surviv- aspiration. Happy endings were the rule, ing nuclear attack. (They have only to survive against all probability. (Now, of course, we their friends.) We are not ravaged by disease, know these people were just fooling them- as parts of the world plainly are. We are liv- selves.) ing longer than ever, yet we can't shake the Perhaps the most gravely beautiful dance feeling that, after the years of health-club dues Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever per- and little salt and less fat and enough leafy formed occurs in the otherwise frivolous 1936 greens to carpet a continent, death is a defeat, film Follozu the Fleet. Gamblers down on their even at 82. luck and close to despair, the two meet on an Some days we are told that the country is absurdly elegant casino rooftop, where each headed for bankruptcy and that our children, has come to commit suicide. They look like a or maybe their children, will pay for our ex- million and are wort11 not a buck. Out of their cesses. Yet most of us do not live lives of ex- individual gloom, to Irving Berlin's "Let's Face cess, but merely ordinary lives. It's just that we the Music and Dance," they create ravishing fail to notice how extraordinarily high our or- romantic images (Ginger in a sexy dress that dinary expectations have become-expecta- moves wit11 a will of its own), and they leave tions for how we should be able to dress, to together as lovers, arm in arm. Just before they play, to travel, and to surround ourselves wit11 exit the stage, when the dance seems done,

WQ SPRING 19 94 5 there is a moment so surprising and audacious claim oneself a victim or to toss the hot coal of that it stirs the purest delight. The pair sink responsibility for personal failure into the lap side by side to one knee, rise slowly, move of someone, anyone, else~ancestor,neighbor, backward, then forward several paces; sud- bystander, ghost. denly they arch their backs, lift one knee high Nor are there constraints on the mental and triumphant, and lunge into the wings, the gymnastics we have learned to perform to dark, the future. excuse what common sense would once have allowed us to see plain-matricide, for ex- ere Depression audiences buoyed ample-in a more naive time, unvexed by sen- by this allegory of the national sitivity seminars and speech monitors, by mood, by Berlin's exhortation to individuals so emotionally fragile they find stare down adversity and make the most of insult everywhere, by legions of the abused, by chance opportunity? It's hard to think how "the healing process" raised to the level of they could not have been. Our dances look like Olympic event, by assertions of ubiquitous aerobic exercises-all work, none of Ginger's "community." ("The bimbo community is- airy gauze, lots of Day-Glo spandex, respira- sued a strongly worded protest today against tion not aspiration. If these dances are about its continued characterization as soft from top the heart, it's not the heart that dreams and to bottom." "The pedophiliac community will yearns, only the pump that's going to need a bring a court challenge against its standing exdu- by-pass unless adequately primed. sion from all Toys 'R Us stores.") Pick your ag- Is it that we now know too much to be grieved; pick your grievance; pick a number. taken in by the fantasies? Is that why our Every savvy Zeitgeist will keep a suitcase dreams have the zircon reality of the Home handy, for the moment it is sent packing, and Shopping Network? Or perhaps we have sim- many of us are counting the days till our grim ply embraced a different set of illusions and ghost gets the boot. Until then, goodnight, de- fail to see that we are complicit in their persis- light. Sleep well and keep your beauty. Your tence. There are no bounds, for example, to the time will come round again. We'll wake you space one may occupy in the society to pro- when the nonsense is over.

-James Morris

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The Greelcs referred to those who lived outside the realm of public life and politics as idiots-~6i(O~ai.In our unthinking acceptance of the idea of race, whose birth and development Ivan Hannaford here chronicles, we in the modern aye inay be guilty of a kind of collective idiocy. Genuine public life-not to mention a genuine solution to racial problems-becomes impossible when a society allozus race or ethnicity 510 B.c.)shows the Greeks' fascination with physical to displace citizenship as one's badge of identify. differences between the races, which they attributed not to innate qualities but to enviroiziiient 8 WQ SPRING 1994 For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, that is their passions and self- love, through which, every little payment appeareth a great grievance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses, namely moral and civil science, to see afar off the miseries that hang over them, and cannot without such payments be avoided. -Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

ifty years liave passed since Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944),a classic work that still defines-and constrains- American thinking about race and politics. When the Carnegie Corporation commis- sioned tlie Swedish economist to analyze "the Negro problem," the United States was looking with uncertainty toward tlie end of World War 11. Especially among liberals, unease over tlie possible return of economic depression mingled with alarm over tlie success in a de- pressed Germany of Hitler's racist ideology-with consequences whose terrible dimensions were by tlie early 1940s beginning to come clear. Myrdal was chosen from among a host of worthy contenders in part because lie was an outsider; his homeland was assumed to liave no history of imperialism, and it was thought that lie would bring enough academic detachment to tlie subject to mo- bilize tlie considerable expertise then available in the social-science faculties of America's leading universities. At these institutions, "race relations" had established itself, along with human relations and industrial relations, as a new and popular discipline during tlie 1920s and 1930s, even tliougli few of its practitioners liad ventured into tlie public realm.

The Camegie Corporation was not to be disappointed.- - Myrdal dutifully consulted with such great names of the academy as Ralph J. Bunclie (who accompanied him on his dangerous travels into tlie South), Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Otto Kleineburg, Robert Linton, Robert Ezra Park, Edward Reuter, Louis Wirtli, Ashley Montagu, Edward Sliils, and Arnold Rose. With tlie additional help of more tlian 30 research assistants, lie produced a manual for the eradica- tion of racism in the United States. Myrdal began by examining tlie ideas and mental constructs of ordinary people, not of intellectuals, historians, or political pliiloso- phers-an odd choice, in view of the considerable racial mischief tlie latter group liad been up to for more tlian a century. "In a sense and to a degree present conditions and trends can be analyzed without consideration

RACE 9 of their antecedents," Myrdal declared. His study was, he said, an analysis of morals, not an analysis in morals; not a historical description so much as an analytical prescription for future social and political action. Its aim was scientific investigation, purged of all possible bias so that a logical foundation could be laid for practical and political conclusions. The hope was that change, driven by education, and linked to social action in jobs and housing, would eliminate prejudice, reduce the practice of stereotyping, remove the causes of aggression and frustration, and create a sense of identity among those living anomic and unproductive lives. This was the social-engineering approach par excellence. The Myrdal Report not only set the standard for public policy in the United States but also influenced the United Nations in the early 1950s (and later the British, who blithely transported the model across the Atlantic in the 1960s to deal with their "local difficulty" of immigration from the West Indies and Asia). There was a great fear that the eugenic principles and practices adopted throughout the developed world between 1904 and 1935, and implemented with such horrible effectiveness by the Nazis, might spread to the emerging countries of the underdeveloped world. If that were to happen, all that could be expected in the long run was continuous war between innumerable ethnic and racial groups. And so from the United Na- tions Economic and Social Council (UNESCO) came a number of pronouncements written by leading intellectuals declaring that all men belonged to the same species and that most modern notions of race had no scientific basis, and repeating the call for education, understanding, and other palliative measures. The remedy for bad social engineering was to be, implausibly, good social engineering.

ore than any other document, An American Dilemma helped establish a social-engineering approach as a global orthodoxy, and it is this approach that today prevents us from viewing the idea of race in any other way than through Hobbes's "notable multiplying glasses." It is true that Myrdal's case for rationalism in politics appealed to the American ideal of equality and went some way toward bringing about a wider understanding of the injustices of segregation. But in its inspiration and in the chief remedies it advocated, the report was fundamentally antipolitical. It encouraged the belief that the correct social operations, conceived and carried out by skilled "experts," social workers, and the like, could cure the body politic of its ills. Most destructively, it seemed to relieve citizens of the political obligation to rethink the meaning of the national community. Long before the Myrdal Report was published, the young Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Politics (1913), recognized that the advocates of applied social science had missed the point of the American dilemma-and indeed of all tragic human dilemmas. Lippmann held up the Chicago Vice Re- port of 1911 as an example of how studies of this kind can become abstract

Ivan Hannaford, a former Wilson Center Guest Scholar arid Visiting Fellow nt Wolfson College, Cambridge, is a Fellow on the faculty of human sciences at Kingston University in Great Britain. His boolc, Race and the Political, will be published next year by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Copyright 01994 by Ivan Hamwford.

10 WQ SPRING 1994 The Walls (1955),by Hughie Lee-Smith. contestations, utterly removed from the realities of life. In the world of the social engineer, politics qua politics becomes an abstraction without substance, a counting of heads, and then a relapse into indifference. Or it can become a fanatical form of activity, a prairie fire of hot politics consuming everything reasonable in its path. What Lippmann asked for in 1913, and did not get, was a new start for political thinking. He was not optimistic that documents such as the Chicago Vice Report would remove prostitution, sex, and lust from human affairs. On the contrary, the authors of such reports were too comfortable with a change of legal status. They lacked an understanding of the dynamic and passive forces and human impulses at the heart of the perceived "problem." Just as "white slavery" was not abolished in Chicago, so the Emancipation Proclamation (and for that matter the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act) did not eradicate all vestiges of chattel slavery in America. It may have broken the legal bond, but as Toni Morrison has shown so movingly in her novel, Beloved, the historical resonances of tragedy live on in the social bonds that shape, dis- tort, and clarify our "rememories."

hese "rememories" are part of the stuff from which a meaningful politics must be made. In his famous "I have a dream" speech at the Lin- coln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., took up the task of fashioning such a politics. But the sponsors of the notable civil-rights laws that followed, captive to the assumptions of social engineering, seemed to believe that a change of legal status would be enough. Ending Jim Crow and extending voting rights were great political achievements that helped bring black Americans into the political realm, but they were not matched by a continuing debate over the meaning of citizenship, with its rights, duties, and obligations. America's "race problem" was left to the ministrations of lawyers and bureaucrats and to rules and procedures (such as affirmative action) that com-

RACE 11 bined short-term benefits with long-term political enervation. In the absence of a real politics, die road departed upon with such lug11 hopes 30 years ago has led to an empty politics of endless interest-group remediation and race thinking. In Washington, D.C., last summer I watched the reenactment of King's Marc11 on Washington, and as I stood listening to the speakers at the Lincoln Memorial I could not suppress tlie unhappy feeling that the political dimension that King had captured in his "dream" speech had, as Virgil wrote on a like occasion long ago, "passed into tlie moving air." All that remained, it seemed, was the shell of an orthodox race-relations policy that only exacer- bates the state of civic entropy. The Greeks taught us the importance of living as a community of citizens bound together by law. If we are to rise above our current condition-a natural society of ethnic groups cleaving only to kith and kin-Americans, as well as Bosnians and innumerable others, will need to act politically, rethinking the nature of citizenship and of the civic compact.

In discussing tlie challenges of the 20th century, one is always tempted to rely upon the shibboleths of tlie modern era-the concepts of self-determination and mass democracy-and to ignore the more important liistorical foundations upon which such ideas rest. What I argue herein the company of Hannah Arendt, Eric11 Voeglin, and Theophile Simard (tlie much-neglected secretary of the Belgian Academy of Sciences in the 1920s)-is that tlie principles and practices of antiquity cannot be ignored if we are to begin to understand the challenges that confront us in modern "ethnically determined" societies. In 1970, Frank M. Snowden, Jr., a professor of classics at Howard Uni- versity, published Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, a study of the epigraphical, papyrological, numismatic, and archaeological evidence of tlie early encounters of Europeans and Ethiopians in tlie Mediterra- nean region. From painstaking study of tlie liistorical evidence, Snowden reached tlie conclusion that the Greeks and Romans did not, as is popularly supposed, possess racial attitudes such as we find in the modern world. That is to say, in ordering the form of state that emerged between 1000 B.C. and 300 B.c., they did not link skin color and other physical and physiognomonical traits to assessments of a man's worth. Snowden elaborated upon this in detached and scholarly style in later texts and articles, the foremost of wluch is 1us contribution to the Menil Foundation's three-volume Image of the Black in Western Art (1976-89), which surveys countless pieces of art from ancient Egypt to World War I. In his part of this vast collabora- tive study, Snowden writes that the frequency with which blacks appear in Greek art and the skill and care wit11 which they are depicted "prompt the inference that die sentiment of the kinship of all men as expressed by Menander and later adapted by Terence7 am a man; I consider nothing human foreign to me'-was not limited to philosopher or dramatist." The Greeks and Romans, Snowden showed, depicted Ethiopians very differently from the way the Rationalists, Romantics, and Utilitarians of the 18th and 19th centuries did. They seldom, if ever, referred to

12 WQ SPRING 1994 them except in terms of The Greeks' all-encompassing sharing a mortal exist- sense of human kinship is ence and an awareness of reflected in this statuette of a the fragility and tempo- young black musician from the rary nature of all life. Taking my cue from Snowden, among others, I argue here, and in the book that I have just completed, that we in the modern world have largely abandoned eunomics, the ancient moral and civil science of being "well-lawed bequeathed to us by Western civilization, and are all in bondage to the presuppositions and dispositions of modem eugenics, the pseudoscience of controlled birth and breeding, even if we no longer use that name. In considering the works of the ancients, and particularly the mythologies of Hesiod, the Politics of Aristotle, Cicero's De Republica, De Legibus, De Oficiis, Virgil's Aeneid, The Histories of Polybius, and stretching even to the politics of Niccolo Machiavelli's Discourses (as opposed to TliePrince), we see a constant concern with the question of what it means to found, maintain, and sustain a polity capable of cultivating a civic disposition-the belief that what matters in a man, that what makes a man and distinguishes him from others, is his participation in political life. The civic disposition is what distinguishes men from brutes and from one another. Beginning with the Greeks philosophically and the Romans philodoxically there is a peculiar belief, albeit fiercely contested by some, that there was a novel and different way in which people could pass from one form of life and exchange it for another. Those who were naturally tied to the monotone of household (oilcia)by virtue of kinship and the need to subsist could elevate themselves above the menial, boring realm of the private into something which, as Pliny the Younger says, extended the limits set to life by chance, and by their actions in a public sphere as citizens (another strange invention) leave a mark upon the course of existence.

egmning with Hesiod in the eighth century B.c.,these thinkers recognized that the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Egyptian forms of governance, which relied upon households, families, tribes, estates, and administrative, religious, and military castes to maintain social order, were no longer adequate for organizing the extremely complicated activities of peoples of diverse and uncertain origins. People were now on the

RACE 13 move physically and intellectually, and social organization had outgrown the limits of kin. Some other form of governance had to be seriously considered if daily life was to be secure and peaceable.

he Greeks in their academic philosophy distinguished very clearly between states that were political, or "nomocratic," and states that existed in ethos, a state of barbarousness and viciousness. Later, Cicero exploited their formulation of the political state to the full in his trea- tise on the virtues of the Roman Republic and its laws, and centuries later the Greek idea of politics also inspired a number of the American revolutionaries. The political idea contained at least seven novel features:

a constant repetition of the idea that all human beings have a common beginning, and share in the uncertainties of this life, especially in matters of sex, intellect, and property a great concern for immediacy-immortality comes only to those who have acted pro bono publico; no man, high or low, can be guaranteed immortality the identification of a general public arrangement, which published rules made by a category of people called citizens bound together by law, and not by heads of households acting privately on the sole basis of blood and kinship the resolution of difference by "speech gifted men" on the basis of sound critical argument about ends, wit11 a commitment to balance, moderation, settlement, composition of difference, expression of doubt and uncertainty, and ample room for eccentricity the accommodation of difference by compromise the institutionalization of risk and the clear delineation in the mecha- nisms of governance of the limits of public and private action an emphasis upon articulate speech, argument, and discussion in a public place.

What was distinctive about these political communities, from the Greek polis to the American republic, was the notion that diverse peoples assembled together as citizens-not as administrators, generals, worshipers, subjects, or slaves-should be able to express opinions despite the unacceptabihty or in- convenience of those opinions, and that those temporarily and constitution- ally charged with governance should be expected to listen intelligently, and to act in the best interest of the whole. Aristotle asks us not to confuse this nomocratic state with the democratic state, which is his sixth and worst form of private apolitical rule. Politics was about listening not to ignorant mobs but to "speech gifted men"-men in possession of arete, that elusive quality of excellence in knowledge of both polis and self that distinguished the true citizen from the barbarian and the corrupt backslider. The Greeks insisted upon clear distinctions between the antitheses of the political and the natural (nomos and plzysis), the political and the barbarian, between political states and brutish or vicious states, between civic dispositions and slave dispositions, between justice and law, private and public, virtue and

14 WQ SPRING 1994 vice, liberty and license, citizenship and kinship, politics and war, republic and empire, and later between faith in all its forms and the via politico of Hellenistic Rome. In all that vast treasury of Western literature I see a marked absence of racial thought, unless of course we read it in from later racialized sources. There are instead distinctions relating to the political and to civic virtue that we find difficult to accommodate within our modern understanding of self-determination and mass democracy.

With the collapse of the city-state and the Roman Republic we enter a period from the first century A.D.to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 A.D. when the peculiar activity that the Greeks and Romans called "politics" was called into question by the rise of faith and religion. The first full-fledged assault on the political idea came from Josephus Flavius (37 A.D.-95A.D.?), in The Antiquities and his later reply to his critics, Against Apion. A Jewish general who reluctantly took part in Judea's revolt against Rome (66-70 A.D.)and later became a Roman citizen, Josephus attacked Greek philosophy and politics as dishonest, unoriginal, and unhistorical. Scarcely a Greek is spared, from Pythagoras to Herodotus. Josephus l~igl~ligl~ts the superior skills of the Greeks' predecessors, the Chaldean, Egyptian, and Phoenician historiograpl~ersand genealogists-from whom, in his view, the Greeks had borrowed without acknowledgment. For these and other reasons, Josephus rejected Greek nomocracy in favor of a theocratic form of rule based upon the Mosaic Code and the Covenant. Josephus saw politics as irrelevant or worsean opportunity for aimless, purposeless chatter-and the laws that arose from it a denial of the unfailing Covenant that bound God to Man. Unlike the Greeks, Moses "left nothing to be done at the pleasure and disposal of the person himself." In place of the Greco- Roman concept of citizenship, which in principle would sweep all tribes, all clans, all peoples in a condition of enslavement into a state of civility, Josephus chose to stay wit11 the single more certain God, who had created the world and all the peoples in it.

he foundation of his theocracy he found in five stories that have since become pivotal to the understanding of race thinking in West- ern Europe: the Creation, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, the division of the world and the curse on Ham's posterity, and Moses' exhortation to his people in the wilderness. Josephusborrowed his account of the division of mankind, for example, from Berosus, a Chaldean priest of the third century B.c.,and despite attacks on its truthfulness by the Catholic Church the account would pop up again and again in ensuing centuries. Much of Josephus's rendition accords with the standard version. When Noah's son, Ham, comes upon his father lying drunk and "naked in an unseemly manner," he laughingly calls others to see the spectacle. But Noah's other sons, Japhet and Shem, refuse to look, instead covering their father. "And when Noah was made sensible of what had been done," writes Josephus, "he prayed for prosperity to his other

RACE 15 sons; but for Ham, he did not curse him, by reason of his near- ness in blood, but cursed his posterity." But Josephus's gloss on the story has Noah's son Japhet inhabiting Europe; Shem the region of the Indian Ocean, Persia, Chaldea, and Armenia; and Ham the land of Africa, Egypt, and Libya. The inhabitants of Africa, in other words, are cursed. The faith that Josephus expressed in his polernic was not intended to bridge the gap between faith and politics, between Jew and Gentile, Christian and Chris- tian, or pagan Roman and barbarian. Nor, I hasten to add, can it be used as a confirmation of the vulgar notion, often expressed by the great scholars of the 19th century, that the origins of race thinking may be traced unequivocally to Hebrew teachings about a chosen people of pure blood. Josephus was interested not so much in estab- lishing ethnic affinity as in separat- ing true believers from unbelievers. It was a religious system with ample provision for the conversion of strangers. The issue, in short, was faith, not race. The task of reinstating politics amid a bewildering variety of A 16th-century edition of The City of God. new faiths fell to a North African Christian from Souk11 Aras in western Algeria, Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.). Augustine wrote The City of God (circa 413426 A.D.) only a few years after the Goths sacked Rome. The barbarians who had formerly dwelled on the fringes of classical civilization now occupied the epicenter of politics, and Augustine was compelled to search history for an explanation, as well as for an understanding of what could bridge the gap between the old civility and the new faith. Augustine began with Josephus's account of the settlement of the earth, and from his intensive examination of the history of mankind from early to modern times concluded that the competing genealogies of the Hebrews, Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians were so complicated and confused that it was not possible to give a certain account of any true origins. Augus- tine preferred to see his own work not as a historically correct account of the

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or the purposes of our story the significant element in this framework was Augustine's reinterpretation in Christian terms of the biblical allegory of the settlement of the earth and its division into three parts Fby Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. The version favored by Josephus and Berosus stressed the transgression of Ham and his banishment to the dark regions of Africa after the Deluge. Japhet and Shem occupied more propitious territories. Into this basic view were injected additional beliefs about good and evil, and about magic. Ham, the African, was a flaw in nature, a demon, irre- vocably a blot on humanity. Augustine rejected all these explanations of difference as fraudulent. He argued that all men are descended from Adam, and whoever is born of man is a rational mortal animal. "No matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in power, part or quality of his nature," Augustine declared, "no Christian can doubt that he springs from one protoplast." Augustine went on to argue that what a man looked like and where he came from were not the important considerations. He justified the inclusion of the Scythian, the Ethiopian, the Greek, the Jew, and the northern barbarian peoples, the invaders of the earthly civitns, within the ambit of a unified Christian civilization. Augustine's assertion of the natural unity of mankind, and his rejection of any attempt to use the natural genealogies as justification for multiple religious and secular origins, left him with the immense philosophical problem of reconciling matters of faith with the pressing realities of the city of the flesh. One of those realities was that people were not associating in any kind of civil arrangement that allowed faith to coexist with politics.

ugustine resolved this difficulty in two ways. First, he pro- claimed the alternative histories profane and heretical, and resisted all attempts to use the stories of the Deluge as justification for mul- A tiple religious and secular origins. The men in isolation, the clanless and hearthless-the remote African tribes, the barbarian war bands of Germany, the uncivil Britons-were not races as we understand them, Augustine insisted, but symbols of heresy against the Christian faith. They still could be brought into the housel~oldof God to become part of the body of the faithful in Christ. The device that Augustine used for entry into the faith was conversion, and the institutional overseer was the church based in Rome. It did not matter whether men were the sons of Noah, speech gifted or mute, barbarians, brutish or vicious, black or white~thefocus of civic and religious participation was simultaneously widened to make all men eligible for membership in coi~zi~z~mitas, clzristinnitns, and l~ui~~nizitnsby faith through the taking of the sacrament. Second, Augustine recognized that faith and membership in a Christian community would not by themselves overcome all the divisions of secular existence. Unlike Moses, Jesus, Josephus, and later Moharnmad, Augustine did not insist that existence was simply concerned with the observance of the rules

18 WQ SPRING 1994 and precepts of faith found in sacred texts. On the contrary, his acceptance of the intervention of both church and state provided a syncretic (some would say a hypocritical) solution. It temporarily legitimized an agency established to provide moral guidance and pragmatic advice (the Catholic church) to rulers who had to rule and subjects who had to obey, and at the same time allowed it to coexist with incumbent rulers possessing many priorities other than those of faith. It addressed the problems of diversity that existed between the church and states, and between states, by retain- ing those important "political" elements of Greco-Roman experience in the practices of dialogue, conciliation, settlement, talk, argument, and discussion in and between church and state, and between the denizens of West- ern Europe and North Africa who were not of the faith. This dichotomy between matters of faith and matters of politics, which Josephus had solved by disposing of politics and nomocracy in favor of theocracy, was resolved in The City of God (albeit as an incidental element) by giving encouragement and nurture to the antique Ciceronian notions of citizenship, of being "well-lawed," of cultivating a civic disposition within a res publica serving a popidus bound together in a nexus of law. In this way the worst excesses of blind faith within the church would be tempered, while the tendency to tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy outside the church would be curbed. In short, Augustine built upon the political idea of extending the humanizing civilization of republican Rome, while allowing that civilization to exist within a system of faith. One need not be sacrificed to the other.

his Augustinian compact between church and state in Western Eu- rope was to last a millennium. It survived the Moors' invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 71 1A.D. and laid the foundation for a contentious, but continuing, intellectual and religious dispute about the proper rolesT of church and state, and of faith and politics, among Christians, barbarians, Jews, and Muslims mediated by the Catholic Church. It was, to say the least, an uneasy and anxious arrangement that often erupted into persecution, cruelty, and war. The Moors marched into portions of Europe as far north as Tours, and Spain was occupied for almost 800 years. Christians wishing to expel the Moors or to occupy Jerusalem launched frequent crusades, while Moors launched jihads to extend the frontiers of Islam into Europe. Yet for all the excesses committed in the name of faith, the political tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine hindered and moderated the worst effects of religious zealotry for Christian, Jew, and Moor alike, and gave the migrant and the invader more than a toehold in a rich Western European civilization. It was not until after 1200, when the dispute about faith was transmogrified into a dispute about genealogy and blood, that the persecutions effectively deprived the Jews and the Moors of their vestigial "citizenship" in regnum and sacerdotizmz. Moses Mairnonides, born in 1135 in Cordoba, then at the center of the Muslim world, sought to respond to Christian and Islamic intolerance brought about by an upsurge of Islamic invasion. In his Guide for the Perplexed, written after he had fled to Cairo to avoid persecution, Maimonides, the greatest teacher of the Hebrew world, set out in the language of Greek teaching and thinking his opposition to the system and method of Is-

RACE 19 lamic theology. In his "Greeking in" of the Hebrew and Mutakallemim (orthodox Islamic) texts he established a compatibility between the scriptural account of Creation and Aristotle's teachings about nature, and thereby between the Christian and Hebrew faiths in Western Europe. On the basis of a close textual analysis of the Muslim texts he concluded that these texts were greatly mistaken concerning the corporeal and incorporeal nature of God. On these grounds Maimonides established allegorically that those who were beyond the methodological limits of mathematical science, logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and had their backs to it in their faith, should not be given any mercy, and could be swept from the face of the earth:

Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, a mental faculty above that of the monkey.

From the beginning of the 12th century, therefore, we have a justification for the extirpation of human beings on grounds of faith-albeit a perhaps un- witting oneand it revived an interest in all that Augustine had striven to suppress in The City of God: the mark of Cain, the Tower of Babel, and the pernicious legend of the banishment and the curse of Ham. In 1492, the year of the "discovery of new worlds," Europe discovered another darker world-a world in which Maimonides' arguments about faith were turned against his own people. There had been a Jewish community in Spain for more than a thousand years, and it had made enormous contributions in service to the Spanish kings. Indeed, many of the Christian bishops were converted Jews. For the contribution they had made, the Jews managed to wrest some measure of religious protection and security from the Christian monarchs and grandees. In the early days the church had intervened to mod- erate attacks upon Jews, and a system of ghettos and aljamos (safe havens) was set up to ensure the protection and recognition of the right to worship. After Maimonides, the status of Jews as castizos-men having an honorable historical lineage-within a system of nomocratic tribunals of inquiry increasingly came into question. Did these people who were so close to the monarchs and the church, some of whom had converted to Christianity, really belong or not?

y 1204, Pope Innocent 111, who earlier in his reign had issued decrees protecting Jews from unjust treatment, was chastizing the king of Aragon for excessive tolerance. In 1209, Innocent sanctioned the destruction of the French city of Beziers, which was thought to house heretics who favored Jewish over Christian law, with the words, "Strike down; God will recognize his own." As the absolutist executive and administrative inquisitions began to press harder upon the question of identity, which in earlier times had not been considered worth asking, the desire to know exactly who and what people were intensified, and the Jews became subject to the worst effects of unrestrained faith and reason. After 1215, there was a social census which enabled every backslider in faith to be identified and assigned a mark

20 WQ SPRING 1994 to distinguish him as of "true" Christian lineage, a converse (one who had embraced the Christian faith by taking the sacrament), or a marrano (one who claimed to be a Christian, took the sacrament, and observed the faith publicly, but continued to be a Jew privately). Practicing Jews were required to wear a badge on their hats or bonnets.

he protections that remained for Jews in certain quarters of Europe vanished after the mid-14th century with the spread of the Black Death, which was widely blamed on the Spanish Jews. What was discovered in Spain between the rise of the Black Death and 1492 were new tests of belonging that no longer relied upon the contribution citizens made to the body politic. Especially after the onset of the Spanish Inquisition, which commenced in 1478 with the reluctant approval of Pope Sixtus IV, the investi- gators turned to the doubtful and confused criteria of astrological signs and por- tents divined from the shape of the face, the characteristics of the body, the tests of language proven by reference to the Hamittic heresy, and the purity of blood (liinpieza). With the final defeat of the Moors at Granada in 1492, the political nexus was completely broken. The external threat was gone, the Spanish monarchs were established, the intervention of the Roman church was minimized, and absolutism was ascendant. The Jews and the Moors had no one left to speak on their behalf, and they had no status as citizens. Some 300,000 Jews were expelled from Spain with only three months' notice, leaving behind a country that bears their mark to this very day. They at least were able to resettle in significant numbers under the protection of the papacy and the Orthodox church- the bulk of them in Constantinople itself, the rest in various places in Europe. The fate that befell the Moors, which is largely ignored by Western history, was even more horrendous. In 1502 the inoriscos, who had inhabited Iberia for almost 800 years and had contributed so much to Western civilization, were likewise stripped of all they possessed and banished to North Africa. Only a fraction of the million or so expelled ever reached their unwanted destination. Most were picked off, plundered, and killed as they made their way to Gibraltar.

t is one of the great ironies of history that the Spanish reached a very different conclusion when they pondered the identities and genealogies of the peoples they discovered in Africa, the Americas, and the East Indies. At first, arguments derived from Maimonides prevailed. The conquest and enslavement of the Indians was seen as just because these alien people were naturally inferior. They were without law, property, and civilization, and, like the Jews and Moors, could be forcibly converted, enslaved, or extirpated. These ideas were formally contested by Bartolorn6 de Las Casas (1474- 1566), a missionary and historian, at a formal proceeding of theologians held at Vallodolid in 1550-51 to discuss how a just conquest was to be conducted. Las Casas, who had lived in the West Indies, rejected outright the arguments of his chief opponent, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, that the Indians were by nature inferior on the grounds that Sepulveda, like most lawyers and academics (then and now), had misinterpreted the Aristotelian theory of slavery and na-

RACE 21 ture in the Politics. Las Casas won the argument with a declaration that was widely circulated in Spain:

All the people of the world are men . . . all have understanding and voli- tion, all have the five external senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these, take satisfaction in goodness and feel pleasure with happy and delicious things, all regret and abhor evil.

These findings were incorporated into the laws of church and state in South America, but that is not to say that the colonization, enslavement, persecution, and cruelty there were any less severe than they were elsewhere. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1570s the worst aspects of the doctrine of purity of blood, which had been used to expel the Jews and Moors from Spain, were tempered and mitigated abroad. Henceforth, neither the practice of chattel slavery nor the doctrine of race would gain much ground in South America- though alas they would flourish elsewhere in the New World and in Europe.

The word race reached Scotland in the middle of the 14th century, and was used to denote someone running in a raiss-literally a test of speed or course to the king. Although its precise origins are unclear, it is probably derived from the Spanish raza, the Portuguese raca, the Italian razza, and the French race, and has some tenuous connection with the Arabic ras, meaning chief, head, or beginning. Whatever the origin, it is clear that it did not in the beginning have the meaning it has today. It was not until John Foxe, the English clergymen who wrote the Book of Martyrs (1563),referred to "a race and order of kings and bishops" in 1570 that there is any faint resemblance to the idea of race as we in the modern world think of it. Between 1570 and 1813, a radical change in the meaning of race took place, and it materially affected the way human beings saw themselves. Instead of symbolizing their experience in terms of their membership in a polis and res publica in the Greco-Roman sense and the sacramental entry into the body of the faithful in Christ in the Augustinian sense, European writers began to explain right ordering and governance in an entirely different way. One cause of this change was the revival of the heretic legend of Noah and the division of the world as told by Berosus and Josephus. In his Coi~znzen- tan/ upon the Works of Diverse Authors Spoken of in Antiquity (1498), a Dominican friar named Juan Nanni (Annius of Viterbo) reprinted "missing" volumes of Berosus and other early writers, attractively and fraudulently refurbishing the legend for popular consumption. Church intellectuals assailed this story, and even showed that Annius had engaged in forgery. All to no avail. Indeed, the story that Annius told was so powerful-and its spread so strongly abetted by the rise of literacy and the release from church strictures that accompanied Lutheranism-that even today we remember it better than the original. It came along at a crucial time, when the learned men of Europe were struggling to

22 WQ SPRING 1994 absorb the implications of discoveries and new contacts not only in the New World and Africa but in places such as Iceland, Russia, and Finland. In the hands of English natural philosopl~ersand French rationalists the revived story of Ham's transgression and curse was transformed into a stock account that explained the ancient division of the world and therefore the bizarre discoveries of the explorers. Of course, the story's biblical origins were sheared off and it was covered wit11 the trappings of science. It served as a useful vehicle for bridg- ing into the idea that man was a member of a vast-and vastly differentiated- animal kingdom,- and that therefore he could be understood more accurately through the new natural lusto- ries than through the teachings of the Greek and Roman pl~ilosopl~ers. The rise of race thinking between the age of discovery and the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 was driven by many de- velopments, but two writers stand out as major contributors. The first is Germany's Johann Blumenbach (1752- 1840), widely considered the father of anthropology. In On the Natural Varieties ofMankind (1775), Blumenbach synthe- sized the earlier attempts of Franqois Bernier, Georges Buffon, and Carolus Linnaeus to explain the discoveries of the 16th- and 17th-centuryex- plorers and scientists according to rational laws and scientific method. Blumenbach disposed of the notion that the world was divisible into three distinct parts and reasserted the Aristotelian notion that all men, including wild men and brutes (those who know no political community and live in a barbarous condition) belonged to a single species, homo sapiens. He set about doing so by carefully scrutinizing the evidence using the best available scientific methods.

lumenbach strongly resisted the claims of "caprice mongers" who, faced with the demise of the convenient Noachic account of division, now sought to establish out of "skin-and-bones" anthropology a pl~ysiologicalrelationship between the orangutan and the Negro. Closely examining anatomical and other evidence concerning the four recently discovered "wild men" who were being held up as possible "missing linksJ'- the so-called Hessian boy, Zell girl, Champagne girl, and Peter the Wild Boy of Hamelin-he showed that the four unfortunates were indeed members of

RACE 23 the human species. Within the species of gemis humanorurn Blumenbach distinguished five varieties of mankind determined by climate, pigmentation, and skull size. He called them Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malay, and Caucasian (a term he coined to describe the European division, and which he derived from the name of the peoples who occupied the southern slopes of the Georgian region). Blumenbach went to great lengths to make clear that these divisions, or varieties, were simply useful classes for analyzing the incredible diversity within the unity of mankind. "For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations. . . ," he declared, "you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them." Blumenbach insisted that three rules had to be followed in considering evidence of the variety of mankind: 1) that the human species stands alone; 2) that no "fact" should be admitted without a supporting document, that is, anatomical data; 3) that no natural scientist should pass from one explanation to another without heeding intermediate terms and shadings. Where there were doubts about such matters as the comparability of skulls and bone structures, Blumenbacl~thought that almost always they could be resolved by pressing harder on Newtonian method in the examination of the evidence available rather than by falling back on hearsay evidence or the legend of Noah.

et Blumenbacl~did leave a door ajar. Where doubts about how to account for differences did remain, he suggested, an explanation could be found in a curious energy he called the nisus formativiis (formative force). In On the Formative Force and its Influence on Generation and Reproduction (1780) and On the Force of Nutrition (1781), he portrayed this force not as a cause-ultimate causes were hidden and beyond his purview-but as a perpetual and invariable effect of the stimuli of natural life. It responded, in other words, to things such as climate and mode of life, and altered human beings accordingly. Immanuel Kant had already discussed this energy or "life force" in his lectures at Jena in 1765-66.Kant had set out a method for the study of what was enduring in human nature and attempted to place humankind in an ethical context in creation rather than in the purely physiological context that Blumenbach and the physical antl~ropologistswere considering in their work. This "life force" itself became a kind of formative force in the emergence of Romanticism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In lus Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08),for example, Kant's pupil, Johann Fichte, argued that the life force was realized through personal quality in blood. Fichte held that Germany's incomparable advantages in geography, climate, and biology showed that the German race had been "naturally elected by God to greatness. Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) saw nature as a single living organism working toward self-consciousness in the human intellect. Johann von Goethe (1749-1832) recast the life force, seeing personal identities derived from the state and nation revealed in the volklied (folk songs) and poetry of past peoples. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's revolt against the inhibitions and constraints of past politics, advocated a return to nature, and emphasized the role of drama and lync poetry in his notion of Stunn

24 WQ SPRING 1994 A 1791 study of human and animal facial angles by Petrus Camper, a Dutch anatomist. Camper warned against drawing any but physiological inferences4was ignored by later race "scientists."

und Drang (storm and stress)-a term taken from descriptions of the Ameri- can Revolution and attached to Germany's literary ferment.

ne of the first thinkers to ponder the idea of hidden causes was Gott- hold Lessing (1729-81), a dramatist, philosopher, and critic. An ad- mirer of the new natural science, he nevertheless pointed out that 0the emerging skin-and-bones anthropology left unexplored the wondrous world of the aesthetic, the cultural, and the artistic. Chafing, like other German writers and intellectuals, under the domination of French influences-such as Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille-Lessing was inspired to develop a new understanding of art and culture. In his preface to Laokoon (1766), an extended work of literary criticism, Lessing argued that, thanks to these French influences, German literature had embraced false concepts of beauty and ugliness. In attempting to chart a new aesthetic, he began with the proposition that there were certain things that aroused acute feelings of repugnance and disgust-scars, harelips, the absence of eyebrows-though they offended neither touch nor any other common sense. Such reactions, he insisted, could only be understood as manifestations of an "inward sensation" of beauty and ugliness. From there, it was but a short step to show that this "inward sensation" varied among different peoples: "Everyone knows how filthy the Hottentots are and how many things they consider beautiful and elegant and sacred which with us awaken disgust and aversion." Thus while Blumenbach used the idea of a formative force to illustrate

RACE 25 the unity of species, and to explain residual hidden causes, Lessing's work suggested that there were interesting ways beyond the material realm in which the spiritual and intellectual, the dramatic and artistic, could be used to give integrity and authenticity to a changing world. Lessing advanced the idea that the world's major religions each generated a distinct "noble character," and he depicted Christianity as a living force that had existed before the textual record of it in the New Testament. This force had been encum- bered by the antique constitutional arrangements of church and state. The Protestant Reformation, in his view, was a return to a purely spiritual pri- meval Christianity-an idea that would loom large in Romantic racial thought thereafter. Lessing provided a foundation for a Germanic literature independent of the rationalism of French aesthetic forms and tastes. It established a philosophy, a science, a history, and a practice that were distinctively different. From Kant, Fichte, Hume, Coleridge, and Wordsworth came the Ro- mantic idea that nobility and noble character, and the psychic and physical expression of it, could be distinguished in the structures and features of the face and in facial expressions. The Romantic writers thought that the individual "races" that displayed certain superior pl~ysiognomonicalcharacter- istics-notably the German, French, and English-were somehow descended from ancient noble peoples of different geographical origins. The lesser races, often seen as "species," were thought to possess innate dispositions in blood that distinguished them in character from their superiors. Challenging the old idea that civilization is the product of political life, the Romantic idea proposed that the cultures of ordinary people, working through the operation of personal psychic quality and blood, were the motive force in civilization. The advance of civilization depended upon the liberation of these people's innate racial, cultural, or political energies. To minister to the unbound volk, a pure spiritual Christianity would be required, one liberated from the shackles of biblical exegesis and the corrupt Catholic Church. What a man was could be discerned in purity of Christian soul and purity of blood. The state was a manifestation of both.

till, Enlightenment ideas of race remained contained within a set of "political" ideas that drew upon classical sources.Race was not yet all. The final leap was largely the work of the era's second influential race theorist, Bartold Niebuhr (1776-1831). A Prussian diplomat and historian, Niebuhr was credited by Comte Arthur de Gobineau, France's chief 19th- century advocate of Northern white superiority, with providing to those who were searching for the causes of Europe's midcentury upheavals "an analytical tool of marvelous delicacy." Niebuhr's unique contribution, beginning with his Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography in 1813, was to set aside conventional historical methods in the study of Rome and use the kind of literary comparison and criticism advocated by Lessing. No longer would history be a dry gathering of facts; now much would depend upon the interpretation of texts. Niebuhr gave pre-eminence, for the first time, to a synthesis of ethnography, chorography (mapping technique), narrative history, and philology in

26 WQ SPRING 1994 the understanding of Euro- pean origins. In its emphasis on politics, he argued, all previous history had over- looked "the dark shades in character." He found a new past of nobility and spiritual- ity in aspects of Greek and Roman literature that were not political. In his three-volume History of Rome (1811-32), which greatly influenced generations of English historians, Niebuhr depicted Rome's history not as a conflict between classes or religions, not as a history of politics properly and constitu- tionally conducted under Aristotelian or Ciceronian te- nets, but as a history of racial conflict between Romans and Etruscans. "The order of the history of the world," he wrote, was "to fuse the num- berless original races together, and to exterminate such as cannot be amalgam- ated." He judged that Rome had done more to carry this With zuorlcs such as Richard Wag~zer'sacclaimed opera, mixture forward than any Gotterdammerung (1874),Romanticartistsofthe19th century other empire. In a compli- forged nezu German, Anglo-Saxon, and French race mythologies. cated rendering of German racial history, he argued that those Germans who had resisted Rome had nevertheless benefited from Rome's dominion:

It was not by the forms which our ancestors . . . imported from thence and from classical ground, that the noble peculiarities of our national genius, peculiarities for which nothing can compensate, were smothered; but sec- ondhand artificial spiritless Frenchified forms and tastes and ideas . . . these are the things that for a long time have made us lukewarm and unnatural. And so, while the nations look back on the Romans as holding a place among their progenitors, we too have no slight personal interest in their story.

This reinterpretation of the history of Rome set the stage for the racialization of history. It gave enormous impetus to the search for the "authen-

RACE 27 tic" origins of the noble Germanic peoples in the kith and kin of the fifthcen- tury-a search carried out by artists and writers as much as by scientists. There arose a vision of Europe once occupied by primitive peoples of innocence and purity, untainted by Roman politics-the Aryans, Celts, and Teutons-who were thought to have shared a common origin. They constituted an alternative past, "Another Rome." To root the new industrial civilization of the 19th century in this alternative history, European intellectuals-a cast of characters ranging from Thomas Carlyle to the Brothers Grimm-now began to reconstruct the histories of different racial types, building on a bewildering variety of shaky monogenist, polygenist, transformist, creationist, vestigialist, environmentalist, and evolutionist authorities. It is from this muddy trough that we continue to drink today. During the period before the Franco-Prussian. War of 1870-71, there were at least 10 contending hypotheses of race and ethnicity in Europe and the United States. Each was incompatible with the others, yet all persist to some degree in the analytical frameworks we continue to embrace in the closing years of the 20th century. The one that has held pride of place since the publication of Herbert Spencer's Proper Sphere of Government (1842) and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) argues that everything in nature has its laws, that the fit will survive, and that evolution is as much charac- teristic of political and economic life as it is of the natural world of flora and fauna. Ergo, laissez-faire. As Spencer put it:

The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working 11u- inanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.

The movement inspired by Darwin and Spencer provided a logical basis for decrying all those aspects of the Greco-Roman polity and Christian civilization that were out of step with the new industrial civilization. It permitted "society" to be viewed as a natural entity in a state of war in the classic Hobbesian sense. Power in the hands of the correct classes or races, scientifi- cally applied, would lead inevitably to progressive ends. Thus, bepinmg in the middle of the 19th century all aspects of legal right, feeling, justice, treaty, compromise, settlement, conciliation, arbitration-the essential components of political society-were eclipsed by a doctrine of natural forces. The priorities now were biological necessity and managerial efficiency. It was not a big step from there to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

nto this maelstrom stepped Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). His contemporaries in Europe-eminent scientists, historians, philosophers, musi- cians, and artists-had argued for the existence of communities of blood, language, religion, and interest based upon a relationship between land and environment. They had developed from Gobineau and Darwin a natu- ralistic and evolutionary history in which they attempted to construct an

28 WQ SPRING 1994 idea of race from the synthesis of heredity, biology, genius, and will impelled by the Hobbesian right of conquest. The analogies they used were biological, pl~ysiological,and psychological, and their notions of state, especially among those who wished to make the idea of state coterminous with nation and race, more natural than political.

n 1886, Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil, an interpretation of his earlier Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-84). Nietzsche expressed revulsion against the deceit practiced by exponents of modern education and culture on the question of origins. It was not so much that the "plebianI counterfeiters" who put forward these views were right or wrong, but that there was a general lack of understanding of the fact that, following the Niebuhrian acquisition of the sixth sense of history, every culture, every past, and every taste had been opened up to intensive scrutiny. "We ourselves are a kind of chaos," he wrote. In that chaos, in which individual man was nothing more than a collection of limbs, assorted bits and pieces, large ears on thin shaky stalks, "present mann-the man of entertainment and happiness-was part of a great physiological process expressing itself in the concepts of civilization, humanization, and progress. "Evolving man" was locked into a process driven by increasing democratization toward a leveling and mediocratiza- tion. In the next century this would create the conditions necessary for the birth of human beings of "the most dangerous and attractive quality" and a future nobility of dazzling human potential. Unlike his contemporaries, Heinrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke, whom he called "wretched historians," Nietzsche had no time for searches into the European past for evidence of racial origins in art, literature, and poetry. Those who sought their origins in race and nation and justified their title to rule in those terms were, Nietzsche declared, patho- logically estranged from other men, anti-Semitic "screamers," victims of a debilitating "nerve fever." Nietzsche saw that the state could not live without the fully developed personality and the self-sufficiency of the individual, and yet the scientific and political principles upon which the new industrial civilization was being constructed had paralyzed myth and had created a class of barbaric slaves bent on vengeance.

ut in rejecting nationalism and anti-Semitism, Nietzsche also turned away from the antique Aristotelian and Augustinian formulations of politics and religion. He discovered a new art of metaphysical culture in a primordial artistic drive that predated Niebuhr's critical history. He abandoned the biblical exegesis upon which the five stories of Creation were based, and went instead to the Zend. Avesta, the scripture of Zarathustra, the seventh-century B.C. founder of the Persian faith of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche found the solution to his problem in the twin propositions that God had died and that the antique model of the Greco-Roman state had totally disintegrated. Man was on his own, and the only truth was that created by the human mind. All past politics, philosophy, justice, and civilization were mere deceptions. To overcome the terror

RACE 29 of existence, self-determining man had to will forward something suprapolitical on the grand scale. Nietzsche concluded that classical formulations of political life were all fruitless. What could not be settled and reconciled in the agora by debate, compromise, and law could only be mastered by the Will to Power- self overcoming-and a successor to God in the beauty and shadow of the entirely self-sufficient noble personality, the Overman. Nietzsche kicked over the traces of classical political theory and postulated a future Macht Stat (a "made" state dependent on the Will to Power) in which there would be a compulsion to large-scale superpolitics-a fight for the dominion of the earth in "a war of and for minds." The deceptions of polity would be ex- punged by noble Overmen manipulating the conditions of mass democracy, statelessness, and normlessness now in existence with all the power at their command.

t did not take Nietzsche's contemporaries long to misunderstand him. His strictures against nationalism, anti-Semitism, and race thinking for the most part went unheeded. His emphasis upon the idea that human beings, as successors to God, belonged to something noble was used toI prove that the key physical motive power that bound person to person in a "folk state was the fact of race, aided by the fact of natural selection, as expressed in the language of war. One of those who most misunderstood Nietzsche was Houston Cham- berlain (1855-1927), a British-born writer who married the composer Rich- ard Wagner's daughter and settled in Germany. Chamberlain's Origins of the 19th Century (1899) is generally considered an influence on Adolf Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf (1924), and Chamberlain himself is usually dismissed as a madman by modern scholars. But he was a respected intellectual in his day, writing squarely in the company of many distinguished anthropolo- gists and biologists peddling the eugenic and biometric line during the years between 1883 and 1914. The first edition of his book, which nobody could possibly understand without a life of deep immersion in the classics, sold 60,000 copies. If it was rubbish, as many well-intentioned people have since argued, it was rubbish that thousands of intellectuals in Germany, Britain, and the United States wanted to hear, and, alas, continue to propagate in watered-down versions. In The Origins of the 19th Century Chamberlain put forward a complicated explanation of history that enlisted the confused biological views of the time in the service of the power state. Much like his predecessors, he believed that formative forces resided in certain wandering "folk-the Ro- mans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs. These isolated folk peoples broke the political ring and made their initial entry into recorded history in 146 B.c.,when Rome coldly set aside moral considerations and destroyed Carthage. This, in Chamberlain's view, was the first blow for natural selection and inbreed- ing-the dynamic forces that create races. The second appearance of the folk in history came with the challenge to Rome and Greece by the barbarian peoples in the fifth century A.D. The third appearance came with the Refor- mation, the "Teutonic" event, Chamberlain said, that created modern civi-

30 WQ SPRING 1994 lization. In this great turning point in history, the political ways of Rome were progressively replaced by the connection of anthropology and science to a new spiritual barbarian Christian brotherhood purged of all ignoble Roman (Catholic) characteristics.

pon this slippery historical foundation. Chamberlain's intellectual inheritors built a massive racial edifice. Between 1883 and 1914, people became obsessed with race and ethnicity as the key to the understanding of all history. Race management came to seemu the only solution to the problems afflicting the world. The eugenicists saw the Teutonic race state as the great bulwark against the "swamping" of the Teutons by impure peoples and against the mixture and "miscege- nation" from which all the ills of the world were supposed to flow. By the same token, the management of the breeding variables within the race state would breed in the "good" qualities and, in time, through the processes of public health and sanitation "cleanse" the folk state of imbecility, feeble- mindedness, and physical disability. The eugenicists were not at all a fringe movement. Indeed, eugenics became part of progressive-minded conventional wisdom, shared by the likes of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. By the late 1920s roughly half the American states passed laws allowing state prisons and other institutions to sterilize inmates who were epileptic, insane, or "feebleminded." Perhaps the intellectual capstone of the eugenics movement was Madi- son Grant's Passing of the Great Race (1916). In his introduction to the volume, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a fellow zoologist and president of the Ameri- can Museum of Natural History, argued that Grant had finally swept away competing theories-even Herbert Spencer's. The influence in history of environment, education, politics, and government were now shown to be only fleeting. There was nothing but race. "Race implies heredity, and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government," Osborn wrote. The correct scientific approach was to treat history as heredity writ large. The race was on.

The volatile ideas of race were thus latecomers to Western experience, their rise occurring in proportion to the decline of the idea of politics. With very few exceptions, most of the writers on the subject of race from 1813 to our time have preferred to avoid or escape political reality and to reject out of hand the antique idea of the coexistent state created politically by its citizens. In place of the political state, the proponents of the natural state have substituted, or superimposed, a notion of state that concerns itself with human beings either as pieces of biological material categorically fixed by the physical or social fact of ethnicity or, in the case of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as producers, consumers, and distributors. In recent times we have seen the dramatic collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the Marxist-Leninist version of the natural economic state, which at one time

RACE 31 was supposed to have eliminated all social and racial conflict. It may be that in the aftermath of the Thatcher-Reagan era we are witnessing a similar collapse of Adam Smith's version of the natural economic state, brought about by the spread of private license, viciousness, agoraphobia, corruption, and civic entropy. At the same time that these momentous changes are occurring, however, the concept of state in which categories are fixed by the physical or social facts of race and ethnicity is rapidly gaining ground. In Western political regimes we see the transmogrification of civil and political communities into "no go" areas as ethnic regions, ethnic streets, and ethnic neighborhoods challenge-often in the name of democracy, freedom, and self- determination-the authorities, laws, and conventions of the coexistent political state. And, as Donald Horowitz in his massive Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985) and Senator Daniel Patrick Moyn- ihan (D.-N.Y.) in his aptly titled Paizdae- moizizinz (1993) have noted, the forces re- leased from Pan- A long way from the Greeks: Physical racial characteristics are linked in dora's occidental box this poster with things that are alien and sinful, as well as seductive. during the past two centuries are now sweeping virtually unhindered in the name of "democracy" across Central and Eastern Europe into Southeast Asia. Everywhere there is a fever for the coterminous arrangement of state, nation, and race- the volkstaat. We see the worst excesses of this model ostentatiously paraded in the breakaway Afrikaner volk groups of the South African Republic, which is struggling to reestablish politics within the framework of a coexistent state; and we see it in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, where all attempts to resusci- tate politics have so far failed. Surveying the 38 ethnic wars already raging

32 WQ SPRING 1994 around the world, it seems a faint hope that new ones will not be ignited in the many countries that have emerged from the old Soviet Union and its borderlands. Does science have nothing to tell us about race? The problem here is that the lessons of science have been mistaken for lessons of politics. In their 1936 book, We Europeans, Julian Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon took a new and late tack, exposing the science upon which the eugenic race state was based, demonstrating that it was fallacious even to use the word race. They also challenged the 19th-centurybelief that language was a criterion for race. No Celtic race or Aryan race could be adduced from the fact that people nowadays speak certain languages. The same skepticism, they argued, should be applied to art, institutions, gestures, habits, traditions, dress, and nations as criteria of race: "None of these can serve as any criterion of racial affinity between peoples." But Huxley and Haddon's appeal, like UNESCO's appeal after all had been lost in the nightmare of Hitler's corporate race-hygiene war, was not to the values of the political state and classical political thinking. Rather, they argued for a more scientific explanation of how the pseudoscientific racists had got it all wrong, and for a more rational and "scientific" politics that might get it all right in a better-educated world.

hat my history has attempted to show is that, for all its well- meaning intent, the palliative race-relations approach em- bodied in Myrdal's American Dilemma has outlived its purpose. Not only has it failed miserably to prevent the balkanization of America into a collection of distinctive ethnic societies but it has also accelerated the process by which the natural resentments of narrow tribal, religious, and social units are perceived to be due to ethnicity, and to no other factor. Even as I write, a new, more "correct" derivative of the orthodoxy is imposing itself upon the literature and language of West- ern politics, an orthodoxy that vainly seeks to end racial discrimination by identifying pernicious language wherever it appears, in the home, the fac- tory, the school, even the university, and eradicating it entirely from the conversation of humankind. Such efforts only distract us from the more important tension between the political and the apolitical. As racial and ethnic tensions increase, it becomes important to reject the idea that race and ethnicity are inevitable premodern remnants irremedially visiting themselves upon the modern state like some syphilitic affliction. Race and ethnicity are phenomena invented in very recent times. As we have seen, the appellation race was not adopted until the 14th century, and did not come to have its modern connotation until the late 18th century. It was only after 1813 that race and ethnicity became organizing ideas of real significance. The 18th- and 19th-century ideologies of self-determination spawned the idea that a nation can be legitimate only if it is comprised of peoples who are ethnically or racially compatible, and that a state can be a state only if it succors the binding idea of kith and kin in nation and race. Such an idea is anathema to the concept of the political state comprised of good citizens living in a community under the rule of law, and

RACE 33 it is folly to believe that reliance upon any aspect of its pernicious doctrine will release us from its bondage.

here is, however, something to be learned from the genetic discoveries of Francis Crick and James Watson and their successors. In The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1988), Richard Dawkins, a distinguished zoologist at Oxford University, argues thatT the basic unit of natural selection is the gene and that the predominant quality in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. Genes are the survivors; the bodies they inhabit are survival machines and individuals mere fleeting presences: "In a few generations the most you can hope for is a large number of descendants, each one of whom bears only a tiny portion of you- a few genes-even if a few bear your surname as well." Whatever we may feel about this bleak analysis (and there is a fierce theological controversy about it), it deprives racial and ethnic concepts of their pride of place in the larger scheme of life. Where once it was possible to conceive of an existence in which individuals, nations, or races competed

A broad vision of politics, loizg since narrozued, inspired the civil-rights marchers of 1965.

34 WQ SPRING 1994 in a struggle for the "survival of the fittest," it now appears that if there is any competition it is among submicroscopic genes. As Dawkins argues, all that biological life is then is statistical probability on a colossal scale operating cumulatively over eons by slow and gradual degrees. In this blind, unconscious process the races, as we call them, are little more than gigantic gene pools, ever-shifting chance variables that we have barely begun to understand, and about which we must reserve judgment. Dawkins observes that existence in this scientific metaphor has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. It was a similar vision of existence (physis) that horrified the ancient Greeks, and from which they sought release in the activities of politics, law, and citizenship. It reminds us that humans have not inhabited this planet for any great length of time, and that the span of years allocated to each one of us, whoever we are, wherever we live, whatever the size of our nose, whatever the color of our skin, whatever the current state of our bank balance, is short and very fragile. Faced with the terror and horror of existence and the fleeting presence of life, we have a human choice: Either we rely upon the fictitious unities of race and nation whipped up by the philologists, anthro- pologists, historians, and social scientists of the 19th century, and invent cun- ning new ideological forms of governance to create new unities; or we face up now to the immense difficulties of constructing a more realistic political way from the ingredients we have at our disposal.

hat we face is not strictly an American dilemma. Nor is it confined to Bosnia and a few other "hot spots." And yet it is to America that one turns for solutions. Today, some 250 million human beings live and work in countries that are not theirw place of birth, and those numbers will vastly increase in the future. In preparing for this future, we need to restore lost confidence in the efficacy of domestic and international politics. Only then can we avert the terrible excesses that invariably follow when managers and soldiers, bereft of political guidance, are left to confront anarchy and chaos. There is no prescriptive remedy that an "expert" can give for the re- creation of politics. Yet continuing to choose race as the organizing principle of our public life is clearly the path to tragedy; in conceiving of our collective identity and destiny we must reach higher. Before World War I, Lord Acton warned that we should assiduously attend to our past and to our politics, and to our perceptions of political, national, and international boundaries, lest in our passion for symmetry we "relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men renouncing intercourse with their fellow men." The conquest of space may have replaced the conquest of the wilderness as the great social adventure of America; it remains to be seen whether, as the most important player in world global politics, the United States can respond to the greatest challenge of all-the creation of a secular, demystified politics that embraces all citizens, and which secures and maintains their future safety and security in a dangerous world of accelerating apolitical change. Dmspiro, spero-while I breathe, I hope.

RACE 35 BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

The enduring fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright~evincedmost recently by this year's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art-is a tribute to an architectural genius whose distinctive style ''spoke, and still speaks, to most Americans."

ast summer, having accepted a positionL at the University of Pennsylvania, I came to Philadelphia to look for a house. Going through the pages of a real estate agent's directory, I chanced upon a post- age stamp-size photograph of a structure that looked familiar, a building I remembered visiting 30 years ago as an architecture student on a traveling scholarship. The house was of unusual design: A sort of quadraplex, it was one of a four-unit cluster whose cruciform arrangement ensured privacy for each of the dwellings. According to the directory, the house was located in Ardmore, a suburb on Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937.

36 WQ SPRING 1994 Philadelphia's Main Line. It was not where my house can turn a pancake with one hand while wife and I were intending to live, but I tl-iougl-it chucking the baby into a bath with the other, the house itself would be worth a visit. father meantime sitting at his table, lord of it The brick and lapped-cypress exterior of all, daughter meantime having the privacy of the building was almost completely hidden the front room below for the entertainment of from the sidewalk by trees. We went up the her friends." short driveway, under a large balcony that sheltered the carport (which previous own- he architect was Frank Lloyd ers had partially enclosed to create a study), Wright. And while his notions of and turned right to face an unprepossessing gender roles are excusable relics of front door. Once inside, we found ourselves the past-after all, he was born in in the corner of a room that rose unexpect- T 1867-there is nothing old-fashioned about the edly and dramatically to a 16-foot height. Ardmore house. The only thing that may be Two tall walls, entirely glass, not only al- old-fashioned is the example of someone of lowed light to fill the interior but also made the stature of Wright, then the most famous the garden outside seem like an extension of architect in the United States, applying himself the room. There was a deep fireplace in one to the humble problem of the small suburban corner and a cozy built-in settee in the other. house. Famous architects today seem to be too Built-in cupboards and bookshelves lined busy building grand museums and luxurious the brick walls, and the floor was polished corporate offices. Wright built those, too, but concrete. The owners were in the process of he never lost his concern for the common man. moving out, but the room, even though That generosity and breadth of vision explain empty, was a beautiful, serene space. why, 35 years after his death in 1959, Wright The modest materials and the profusion and his work maintain such a strong hold on of built-in furniture throughout reminded me the public imagination. that when the quadraplex was built in 1938, it Even by the frenetic standards of contem- was intended to be an affordable starter house porary architectural publishing, which chums for young couples. Each 2,300-square-foot out illustrated monographs on individual ar- unit, which cost $4,000 to construct, had a chitects-living and dead, famous and ob- master bedroom and two additional bed- scure, gifted and talentless-by the score, last rooms with bunk beds. Each unit had three year's flurry of books on Frank Lloyd Wright levels, with two large roof terraces that aug- is impressive. Rizzoli, in conjunction with the mented the outdoor space of the small garden Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, is issuing a and made the upper rooms feel like pent- multivolume series of the celebrated arch- houses-features that no doubt accounted for the itect's collected writings. So far, it covers the development's original name, Suntop Homes. period from 1894 to 1939. The editor, Bruce A narrow stair led from the living room Brooks Pfeiffer, once a Wright apprentice and to an eat-in kitchen overlooking the living now director of the Wright archives, has also room and the garden beyond. An ingeniously written the text that accompanies the lavish designed clerestory window provided addi- photographs of 38 Wright buildings contained tional light, and the kitchen table was flanked in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterzvorlcs (1993). by a built-in banquette. Also on this level were He includes several lesser-known houses such a compact bathroom (which reminded me of as the Zirnrnerman house in Manchester, New a Pullman sleeper), the master bedroom, and Hampshire. Alvin Rosenbaum, a plam-ier who a tiny nursery; the two children's rooms were grew up in a Wright-designed house ii-i Ala- above. As the architect himself explained in bama, has produced an uneven memoir en- 1948, the kitchen was conceived as a kind of titled Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright's Design for command post,"where the mistress of the America (1993),and this year, Pedro Guerrero,

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 37 Wright conceived Simtop Homes in Ardmore, Pennsylvania as an experiment in affordable housing. who was Wright's photographer for 20 years, life. About 300 of these are still in existence, published Picturing Wright (1994), wlxiclx in- carefully maintained by their owners or restored cludes some charmingly candid pictures of the by corporate or individual effort, and Storrer pro- architect at home. vides a useful index of their street addresses for Academics have always found in Wright the interested traveler. This year, fueled by a com- a rich lode to mine, and two new studies ex- prehensive retrospective that recently opened at plore the international influences on his de- the Museum of Modem Art in New York City, signs: Kevin Nute's Frank Lloyd Wright and Ja- Wrightiana will continue to flourish. pan (1993) examines the role of traditional Japanese art and architecture in Wright's he public interest in Wright's work work, and Anthony Alofsin's Frank Lloyd has always been sustained by the Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922 (1993) offers personality of the man himself. "He a fascinating analysis of tlxe middle-aged is a fascinating, adorable, and ut- Wright's European travels. terly irresponsible genius, full of magnetism, Then there is William Allin Storrer's valu- selfish to the extent of violating all tlxe con- able Frank Lloyd Wriglzt Companion (1993), a ventions if he sees fit; and an artist to lxis fin- comprehensive guide to the almost 500 build- gertips," wrote lxis friend, Frederick Gookin ings that Wright realized during his fruitful in 1919, in as good a capsule description of

Witold Rybczynski holds theMeyerson Chair in Urbanism at the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Home: A Short History of an Idea (1987), Waiting for the Weekend (1991), and, most recently. Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture (1993). copyright 01994 by Witold Rybczynski.

38 WQ SPRING 1994 Wright as anyone has provided. surrounded by young acolytes, making oracular The melodramatic contours of the fa- pronouncements, the most famous architect in mous architect's life, which are recounted in the country, just as his mother promised. two recent popular biographies, one by Meryle Secrest, the other by Brendan Gill, he only other 20th-century Ameri- are well known: The rube from Wisconsin, can architect who stands compari- whose domineering mother told him that he son with Wright is Louis Kahn. was to be a famous architect, comes to Chi- (Mies van der Rohe's buildings are cago in 1888 and catches the eye of an old predominantlyT in America, but their roots- master-Louis Sullivan-at whose feet he and their essence-like those of their trans- learns the rudiments of his profession. Im- planted maker, are firmly European.) Kahn's patiently, the youngster soon strikes out on talent flowered late. Nevertheless, among his own, and almost immediately-effort- the less than 50 buildings that he did com- lessly-he begins to produce work that bears plete before his death in 1974, there are some his own individual stamp. His career blos- undoubted masterpieces, such as the sub- soms, the clients come, the commissions lime Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth, multiply. And then, willfully, he throws it all Texas, and the great capital complex in overboard-family, six children, flourishing Dacca, Bangladesh. But Kahn never practice-and runs away to Europe with the achieved the public recognition that was ac- wife of a client. They return, and though corded Wright. For one thing, his buildings, they are the objects of scandal, they live to- despite their cool beauty, are intellectual ex- gether in a beautiful country house of the ercises in minimalism of a sort that architects architect's design. He resumes his practice find attractive but that often leaves the lay- and attracts new clients. Then, in 1914, trag- person unmoved. The unplanted, paved edy: A deranged servant kills Wright's mis- courtyard of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, tress and her two children, and burns the California, for example, drew plaudits from beautiful house to the ground. However, the critics, despite the fact that it provides an un- architect is unstoppable. He rebuilds the comfortable setting where a shaded and wel- house-it is even more beautiful. He remar- coming garden was surely called for. Kahn's ries and produces more masterpieces. By architecture, which is characterized by the age of 50-not old for an architect-he monumental forms based on abstract geom- has already built three great buildings: the etry, is often described as timeless, but it Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, could as well be termed placeless. His de- New York, Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illi- signs look equally at home-or not at nois, and the Robie House in Chicago. He home-in Bangladesh or a southern Califor- takes up with a young Montenegrin balle- nian industrial park.* This placelessness rina, they have two children out of wedlock, gives Kahn's work a mysterious, almost mys- and as a result of the ensuing scandal (he is tical air, which may explain why, although his threatened with indictment under the White influence in the United States was short-lived, Slave Traffic Act) he almost goes to jail and his ideas have taken root in India, where they is driven to the edge of bankruptcy. He is continue to be explored by gifted architects now 60, but there are still 31 years of the saga such as B. V. Doshi and Anant Raje. to go, years during which he will design In Wright's buildings, the American pub- some of his best-and best-known-build- lic recognized a homegrown product. This set ings: the "Fallingwater" house, the Johnson him apart from almost all of his contemporar- Wax Building, the Guggenheim Museum, *There is a small house designed by Kalin in the Philadelphia and his own remarkable desert retreat in neighborhood where I live; it is a beautiful gem, but it looks Arizona. He lives to be 91, a grand old man absolutely divorced from its surroundings.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 39 ies, and from succeeding generations of The postmodern architecture of the 1970s, American architects. Classicists such as John which was a (chiefly American) reaction Russell Pope, John Carrere, and Paul Cret against the abstract internationalism of glass- were every bit as SW,but their skill derived box building, might have signaled a return to directly from the Parisian Beaux-Arts; eclec- a native American architecture. Indeed, the tics such as Stanford White and Horace domestic work of Robert Venturi and the late Trumbauer met the demands of their East Charles Moore is rooted in the American ver- Coast clients by manipulating the historical ar- nacular, as Vincent Scully has convincingly chitectural styles of Europe. The influence of argued. Moore was particularly adept at play- Europe was equally strong in the first genera- ing with regional styles (Californian, south- tion of immigrant modernists-not only Mies western, New England) in a series of wonder- van der Rohe but also Walter Gropius, Rich- fully exuberant houses. Venturi, too, played on ard Neutra, and Marcel Breuer-who dorni- American motifs. But the interest of both de- nated the American arclutectural scene in the signers in arclutectural history also led them postwar years, and whose successors (and, of- to explore European themes; so did Robert A. ten, students)-Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, M. Stern's fascination with early 20th-century and Philip Johnson-followed in their foot- eclecticism. The buildings of Michael Graves, steps. To modernist architects, Wright-who arguably the most talented of the postmod- had known such historical figures as Louis ernists, progressively owe more and more to Sullivan and Daniel Burnham, but who con- European classicism, especially to the ancient tinued to practice until the end of the 1950s- cultures of the Mediterranean. appeared to be an anomaly or, at best, a left- Nor is Americanness an issue in the work over from the past. "America's greatest 19th- of what passes for the avant-garde today. Not century architect," quipped Johnson, in an ill- only is the outlook of architects such as Frank disguised attempt to put Wright in his place.* Gehry and Peter Eisemnan international, like their practices, but if deconstructivism has any 'In turn, Hilton Kramer once described Johnson as "the most roots-other, that is, than in the Euro-Ameri- successful artistic failurein the history ofAniericanarchitecture," which is likely to remain the judgement of posterity. can world of lug11 fasluon-it's probably in the

40 WQ SPRING 1994 The Ha1111aResidence (1936) in Stanford, California, was one of the early "Usonia11" homes. The near-acronymÃ‘derive from United States of North America-reflected Wright's search for a national architectural idiom. Typical features include an L-sJwed plan, a cantilevered roof, a large "zuindozu wall," and generous interior space.

abstract arclutecture of the Russian construct- use of concealed electric lighting), a love of ivists of the early Soviet Union. novelty and a willful evasion of history-all As the millennium approaches, it is obvi- add up to a style that spoke, and still speaks, ous that Johnson was mistaken: Wright was- to most Americans. is-America's greatest 20tlz-century architect, not only by dint of his considerable architec- t's not just the style of the buildings tural accomplishments, which have proved though; it's also the style of the man. remarkably durable, but also because of their Brash, self-promoting, largely self- very Americanness. His buildings belong to taught, individualistic, Wright embodies America in the same way as Whitman's po- most Americans' notion of the great artiste: bo- ems, Faulkner's novels, or Gershwin's music. hemian in behavior and dress, extravagant, Wright's Americanness is not merely a ques- emotional, inspired. The Bauhaus architects tion of style, although style has a lot to do wit11 dressed themselves up like proletarians in it. The use of natural materials, the drive to leather jackets and flat caps; Le Corbusier pre- simplify, the fascination wit11 what are often ferred black suits and severe, wire-rimmed tecl~nologicalgimcracks, the unabashed use glasses. Wright, on the other hand, wore strik- of dramatic effects (especially the masterly ing costumes of his own design, and drove

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 41 flamboyant Cords and Packards, specially Although Wright did not always alter his ar- painted in his favorite color, Cherokee red. chitecture to suit different regions-the con- Decades before the term came into common crete block technique he developed for a house use, Wright made himself into a celebrity. in Los Angeles pops up later in Oklahoma, His untutored self-sufficiency-also a Ohio, and New Hampshire, and the great part of his Arnericanness-was carefully cul- sweeping roofs of his so-called prairie houses tivated. No European architect had influenced show up in Colorado and northern Califor- his work in any way, Wright consistently nia-he did develop ways of using local ma- maintained. This was true at least to the extent terials that seem, on the whole, admirably that Wright avoided explicit references to suited to their climate and geography: heavy European classicism as well as to European stone walls in the Southwest, patterned con- modernism. Nevertheless, as Anthony crete and flat roofs in southern California, Alofsin's book amply demonstrates, Wright plant-draped trellises and pergolas in Florida, learned many lessons from Europe, especially wood walls and protective overhangs in the from the Austrian Secessionist architect Jo- Midwest. But regional as they may be, these seph Maria Olbrich, and from other artists and buildings are always recognizably Wrightian. craftsmen associated with the Wiener What makes Wright's architecture Werkstatte. At an earlier moment in his life American, however, is not only its appear- Wright was also influenced by Japan, and he ance. Most of his work was residential, and developed a style of perspective rendering his acceptance-and celebration-of the that was openly derived from Japanese picto- single-family house is also quintessentially rial art. It may also be, as Kevin Nute suggests, American. Wright did design some grand though not altogether convincingly, that villas in the British country-house tradition Wright drew on Japanese architecture for the (apart from his own homes in Wisconsin open planning of what he came to call his and Arizona, "Wingspread is probably the Usonian houses. But while it is possible, and grandest Wright country house). But most even valuable, to question Wright's blatant of his houses were middle-class homes and, assertions of creative autonomy, this does especially after the 1930s, projects such as nothing to diminish the extraordinary impact Suntop Homes were intended to be afford- of his work. You don't have to be an architect, able to families of modest means. These are or an architectural historian, to appreciate not scaled-down versions of Tudor man- Wright's buildings-their impact is immedi- sions or Palladian villas, nor are they imita- ate, and visceral. tions of Cotswold cottages. They are different from these predecessors not only be- efore Wright, most famous Ameri- cause they look different but because they can architects were associated with are designed to contain a way of life that is a particular city or region: H. H. different: less formal, more comfortable, Richardson with Boston and New more connected to the outdoors, more England, Louis Sullivan with Chicago and the aware of technical conveniences, that is, Midwest, Frank Furness with Philadelphia, more American. Bernard Maybeck with the Bay Area. There In the popular imagination, a Frank Lloyd are more Wright-designed buildings in Illinois Wright house is surrounded by a natural land- and Wisconsin than elsewhere, but he was scape, is built on the flank (never the top) of a really a national architect-and not only be- hill or in the open desert. There were such cause he undertook projects in 37 of the states.* houses but, more typically, they were situated on streets, dose by other houses. (This was not *The only buildings Wright completed outside the United States always evident in the photographs of his so- were several in Japan, including the famous Imperial Hotel, a handful in Canada, and six tiny beach cottages in Egypt. called prairie houses, which were really in the

42 WQ SPRING 1994 acre. Shopping was to be in "wayside markets" and "distributing centers for merchan- dise of a11 kinds" located at highway intersections. Office buildings, factories, and community centers were scattered. There was nothing resembling a downtown in Wright's suburban vision. In- deed, his first book on town planning, published in 1932, was titled The Disappearing City. Wright continued to tinker with Broadacre City for the rest of his life, but to most architects and planners, whose allegiance was to the traditional central city, this proposal was a bit of an embarrassment, an old man's foible. It turned out that the old man was right- or, at least, mostly right. The latest census confirms that the United States has become a nation of suburbs-more Wright with apprentices in his Hillside studio at Taliesin in 1948. people now live in the suburbs than in traditional cen- Chicago suburb of Oak Park.) Here is, I think, tral cities. And these suburbs are no longer another aspect of Wright's continued popularity: dormitory communities but self-sufficient He was America's premiere suburban architect. metropolitan areas, with retail and enter- Unlike almost every other architect of the tainment facilities, and with employment 20th century, Wright did not live and work in opportunities. (Nationwide, only 19 percent a city. For the first 16 years of his independent of worker commutes are from suburb to city, practice his home-cum-office was in Oak Park; while 37 percent are from suburb to suburb.) later he moved to rural Wisconsin, and still Moreover, the physical environment of later he constructed a winter retreat outside these new suburban cities, or "edge cities," Scottsdale, Arizona. Nevertheless, urbanism as Joel Garreau christened them in his book did interest him, and, in 1935, Wright unveiled of the same name, resembles Broadacre City a theoretical proposal for a new kind of city, to an uncanny degree. as unusual in its own way as the earlier Ville Radieuse proposal of his European rival, Le t seems likely that, in one way or another, Corbusier. Broadacre City, as Wright called it, succeeding generations will continue to consisted of buildings in the landscape, linked find their own meanings in Wrighfs rich to each other through a system of roads and oeuvre. For example, his exploration of figurativeI ornament in the second and third highways. The residential areas consisted of individual houses-the smallest lots were one decades of this century is surely something

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 43 that current architects, many of whom not have to negate architectural quality. are, once again, interested in decoration, Perhaps most appealing is Wright's abil- would do well to emulate. Wright's use ity to combine individualism with a of stained glass, murals, and handmade broader sense of humanity. In a period furniture in his buildings also antici- when the individual feels increasingly pates a contemporary concern with the powerless in the face of corporate and crafts. His attempts to develop low-cost governmental bureaucracy, Wright's building methods for houses, while they valiant protracted struggle to affirm may be technologically obsolete, remain his-and others1-personal worth may a telling lesson that affordability does be the most moving example of all.

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'Close to 3,000 books and articles have been published on the subject of leadership, mostly within the past three decades," notes business writer Richard Luecke-in a new book that adds to his statistic. Perhaps no coincidence, these same three decades 1mve given rise to a consensus that great leaders no longer move among us. Our authors here propose that the usual ways of addressing the leadership question might themselves be a problem.

46 WQ SPRING 1994 What's Wrong with American Political Leadership?

BY ALAN BRINKLEY

isible occasionally among tlie ening and bewildering as those of our own time, numbing political advertisements many Americans developed a similar contempt of tlie 1993 election season was a for and cynicism toward their political leaders. commercial promoting tlie New Political cartoonists portrayed public officials Yorkv City ballot initiative proposing term lim- with tlie same gleeful disdain that the advocates its for elected officials. The spoken text was of term limits used in 1993. The pages of such reasonably predictable, but the visual image magazines as Judge and Punch were filled witli was striking: several enormously fat men sit- derisive images of bloated, complacent politi- ting together, chomping on large cigars, and cians and plutocrats, tlieir vests covered witli chortling-as if expressing tlieir contempt for dollar signs and shiny gold watch chains tlie law, or the people, or both. Wlietlier tlie stretched across tlieir enormous midriffs. They commercial had anything to do with tlie over- too smoked cigars and chortled as they planned whelming success of the term-limits initiative, new ways to betray die public. it did, it seems clear, convey what has become an increasingly common image of American n the 1890s, as in tlie 1990s, there were political leaders: cynical, complacent, corrupt, fevered efforts by people across the ideo- cut off from any real connection with the logical spectrum to explain tlie political people they ostensibly represent. crisis-to determine what liad gone Something is clearly wrong witli a politi- wrong, to decide who was to blame, to suggest cal system in which tlie men and women how to fix a system that had somehow come charged with governing are held in such con- unglued. And in both tlie 1890s and the 1990s, tempt by so many of their constituents. It is those explanations tended to cluster into two something more serious than the normal dis- broad categories. Each of them liad then, and order, intrigue, and depravity that have al- has now, valuable things to say about Ameri- ways characterized democratic politics in the can political leadership. But each of them, then United States and other nations. The bonds and now, has also obscured some of the more that link our leaders and our political system important causes of our discontent. with tlie larger public-the bonds of at least The first explanation is what might best be minimal respect and confidence that are essen- called the populist critique of American poli- tial to the stability and effectiveness of a demo- tics. It is based on tlie assumption that most of cratic state-are badly frayed. There is, per- the problems of our public life are a result of haps, reason to fear that they may soon snap al- the frustration of popular will-by smug elected together. An almost palpable cynicism has pen- officials, by corrupt party bosses, by rapacious etrated our public life, a cynicism that seems to party organizations, by selfish special interests. be felt at almost every level of society. There is a In tlie 1890s, the populist critique focused widespread popular belief that no one in poli- on monopolists and robber barons, the men tics is to be trusted, that nothing government Theodore Roosevelt once called "malefactors attempts works, even that nothing govern- of great wealth." Standard Oil, it was said, had ment attempts can work. We are experiencing done everything to tlie New Jersey legislature a crisis of political leadership and legitimacy. except refine it. The railroads, many midwest- This is not the first time die United States has ern and southern farmers believed, regularly faced such a crisis. A century ago, in tlie face of controlled the election of United States sena- social and economic problems at least as friglit- tors and dominated the workings of Congress.

LEADERSHIP 47 dal," and even President Clinton's haircut in Los An- geles suggests the almost re- flexive hostility to the idea of political life that fuels the populist outrage. In the 1890s, the populist critique produced, among other things, a series of proposals to get the parties and the politicians out of the way of the public, to let the people exercise more direct control over the nation's public life. Such proposals, many of And, in an age when many Americans be- which were enacted, included direct election lieved corrupt party bosses had almost unlirn- of United States senators (to replace election ited power, the criticism focused as well on the by the easily corrupted state legislatures), the paucity of political leadership. National politi- initiative, the referendum, and the recall. cal leaders were widely disparaged, either as There was a new, and briefly successful, po- stolid defenders of entrenched wealth (for litical organization: the People's Party, com- example, Grover Cleveland) or as unprin- mitted, at least at first, to creating a more di- cipled schemers intent on advancing their rect democracy through which ordinary men own careers at any cost (for example, James and women might once again control their G. Blaine, who was dubbed "the continental own lives and futures. liar from the state of Maine"). In the 1990s, the populist fervor has pro- The 1990s have produced a similar as- duced a series of similar efforts to allow the sessment of politicians and of the selfish people to circumvent politicians and control private interests that seem to control them. their public world more directly. The wide- This critique has taken many forms, among spread support for term limits is a particu- them a virulent popular outrage at the larly vivid example. So is the popularity of undeserved perquisites public officials pre- Ross Perot and other antiparty politicians, sumably receive and their seeming con- who propose a direct pipeline between pub- tempt for the needs and desires of the people lic opinion and public action. they serve. The image of Washington, D.C., At the heart of the populist view is the as an inspiring symbol of our nation's hopes belief that the real wisdom and decency of and ideals, presided over by the spirits of American society resides in the people, that Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington, must if only the politicians and the special inter- now compete with a counter-image: a city of ests would get out of the way, the people intrigue and corruption, swarming with could be trusted to deal fairly and honestly with greedy special interests. The ferocity with our problems. This is, of course, an old and en- which much of the public and the media re- during element of American folklore. Among responded to such trivial issues as the congres- cent examples of its hardiness is William. sional pay raise, the House banking "scan- Greider's Wl-io Will Tell the People?: Tlie Betrap1

Alan Brink/ey,aformer Wilson Center Fellow, is professor ofhistory at Columbia University. He is tl~eauthor,most recently, of The Ui-ifinishedNation: A Concise History of the American People (1993)and The Transformation of American Liberalism, to be published by Knopflater this year. Copyright @ 1994 by Alan Brinkley.

48 WQ SPRING 1994 of American Democracy (1992), a dismal service reform created a cadre of professional chronicle of the corruption of the American public servants, protected from the pull and political system tliat rests squarely (as tlie tug of politics. Cities created city-manager and slightly overwrouglit title suggests) on a be- commission governments, in which the day- lief that the greatest cost of this corruption to-day running of municipalities was en- is the way it frustrates popular will. trusted to professional elites, never directly an- Competing with the populist critique is swerable to the people. Independent regula- another interpretation of our present political tory commissions emerged at botli tlie state ills, one tliat, for lack of a better term, might be and tlie national level; their members, too, called the antipopulist analysis. It rests on a were to be insulated from politics, exercising quite different assumption: tliat the problem control over economic activities on tlie basis of with American politics is tliat leaders are ex- a disinterested sense of the public interest, cessively responsive to popular will, too eas- rather tlian on the basis of their own political ily swayed by the immediate, short-term de- needs. A cult of expertise and professionalism mands of unreflective voters, and insuffi- emerged as a central element of tlie reform ciently willing to resist tlie politically popular sentiment of tlie early 20th century-a cult tliat in the name of tlie larger public interest. Far ' produced, among other things, a celebration from being unresponsive to popular will, poli- of tlie "engineer," the trained professional ticians liave become skittishly sensitive to pub- whose only interest was in the smooth opera- lic opinion. They slavishly gauge tlieir actions tion of systems, the technician who could be to the most recent public-opinion polls, to tlie trusted to run society on the basis of scientific character of tlieir mail, to tlie number of phone principles, not popular pressures. calls they receive from constituents on this issue or tliat. The result is a politics in which the n the late 20th century, the antipopulist people liave, on tlie whole, gotten what they critique is less well articulated (and less demanded; and what they have demanded- politically viable) than it was a century low taxes and high services-11as produced an ago and certainly less well articulated epic fiscal disaster tliat will require several tlian its populist counterpart. But it is visible generations of sacrifice to undo. Hence an ef- nevertheless in the interstices of our political fective political system, according to the culture, botli in die rising emphasis on state se- antipopulist analysis, requires a buffer be- crecy and in the persistent belief tliat there are tween popular will and public action. It re- educated elites capable of understanding our quires, in effect, an enlightened elite, capable long-term needs in a way that elected officials of seeing tlie nation's long-term interests cannot. Not many years ago, New York City through the thicket of short-term demands. handed effective control of its municipal finances to an unelected panel of experts (tlie Municipal lie version of this diagnosis articu- Assistance Corporation).There are similar pro- lated in the late 19th century took posals today for insulating the federal budget tlie form of an extraordinary loatli- process from popular pressure. Some (al- ing and fear of the populists among tl~ougliby no means all) of the pressure for a educated elites of all political persuasions (and balanced budget amendment to the Constitu- a particular fear of tlie disaster tlieir demand tion reflects not just a distrust of politicians but for the abandonment of the gold standard also a distrust of the public. would presumably visit upon tlie economy). These two interpretations of our political And it produced a series of prescriptions for problems are, of course, very different, even handing control of government over to ex- in many ways antithetical. But they also share perts, who would be insulated somehow not something very important. Both rest, in the just from politicians but from voters. Civil- end, on the premise tliat there is an identifiable

LEADERSHIP 49 public or community interest-a set of con- move beyond the limited perspective of tlie cerns and goals tliat transcends politics, that prevailing diagnoses. Tliere are two areas in transcends tlie particular interest of individu- particular where an effort to reshape politics als and groups and reflects tlie essential needs may be wort11 pursuing and wliere a genuine of the nation. The goal of politics, therefore, change holds at least some promise of restor- should be to sweep away tlie obstacles to the ing public life and public leaders to a position discovery of tliat public interest and create a of respect in our society. government that reflects it. Tliere is a basic difference between these ne reason for tlie present disaffec- two views over where a reliable conception of the tion with our political system is public interest can be found. Populists believe it reasonably well described by the resides in the wisdom of die people; antipopulists populist critique: tlie absence of any0 sense of connection between most indi- believe it resides somewhere else-in the disinterested knowledge of trained elites or in time- vidual citizens and the political process. The less public truths inherited from earlier eras. decline in voter turnout that has characterized But both stances reflect a belief that a unitary public life tl~rouglioutmuch of the 20th cen- public interest exists and tliat it can and tury and has, it seems, accelerated in the last should be identified. Both envision a world 20 years is one sign of tlus sense of discomec- free of political faction and selfish interests. tion. So, of course, is the cynicism that has helped produce that decline. he search for a "public interest" is a The growing disconnection of people worthy effort. It is, indeed, essential from politics has many causes, but among the to the functioning of any political most important are some changes in tlie style system. But much of today's politi- of politics tliat have occurred in tlus century, cal discourse reflects a rather too-easy accep- particularly during the last several decades. In tance of a set of illusions about what it is our tlie 19th century, and to a lesser but still sig- society is seeking. The idea tliat a "public in- nificant extent throughout the first half of the terest" exists somewhere as a kernel of true 20th century, American politics relied heavily knowledge, untainted by politics or self-interest, on mass popular participation: on the mobili- is an attractive tliouglit. But it is also a myth. We zation of thousands, even millions of people cannot identify a public interest outside of poli- not just to vote but to work in campaigns and tics, outside of competing conceptions of self-in- join in partisan events. Politics was something terest, because in a democracy-and particularly people cared about not just because of issues in a democracy as diverse and contentious as our but also (as tlie historian Michael McGerr has own-any conception of tlie public interest will argued) because of its importance as a social always be contested. And as a democracy, we and cultural activity. For many, politics was a are obligated to provide a means by which form of self-identification, as important to that contest can occur. some people as religion or ethnicity. That means is politics. And so our best An example of the power of this partisan hope for dealing with our problems is not es- loyalty was David B. Hill, a generally unre- caping from politics, but rehabilitating and markable Democratic governor of New York relegitimizing our political system and its in the 1880s, who once attended a political leaders so tliat tliey can contain the inevitable meeting wliere some dissidents were tlireat- conflicts of our society in a way tliat gives all ening to desert tlie party. Hill stood up and Americans a sense that tliey have a stake in tlie made a short speech in wliicli lie said he process and its outcomes. would never bolt the party, no matter what it did One way to begin is to search for some of or who it nominated, because, lie said, "I am a tlie causes of our present discontents tliat Democrat." And that single sentence became a

50 WQ SPRING 1994 great political rallying ay,repeated constantly all everdwindlingnumbers, they go to the polls and over tlie country as a statement of profound vote. For most people, apparently, that is not emotional force and significance. It helped enough to make politics seem significant. make David Hill a national hero to his party The presidential campaign of Ross Perot and, for a time, a highly touted contender for in 1992, among its many significant (and orni- the Democratic nomination for president. nous) implications, suggests tlie allure of an Politics was even a kind of sport. To many alternative political style. In the early months people, caring about a party or a campaign of that campaign, in particular, before Perot's was much like caring today about a football or precipitous and temporary withdrawal from baseball team-an irrational attachment at the race, it produced something that had long times, but a passionate one. Politics meant at- been missing from American politics: It gave tending rallies and barbecues, marching in millions of voters the chance to feel that they parades, distributing bumper stickers and were part of a genuine popular movement. As a buttons-trivial activities, perhaps, but ones result, tlie Perot campaign enjoyed astonishing tliat gave many people the feeling of being a success.The enthusiasm of those citizens was not part of the public world and that created life- just for, perhaps not even mainly for, Perot hirn- long habits of political participation. self; it was an enthusiasm for tlie idea of politi- Americans began to lose those habits cal participation: for collecting signatures, orga- nearly a century ago, but during the last 20 nizing local campaign committees, passing out years the level of interest and participation in buttons and bumper stickers. Perofs followers politics has dropped more rapidly and experienced a small dose of die sense of empow- steadily than ever before. Politics has moved erment that made the civil-rights movement, the out of local party offices, out of the streets and antiwar movement, the New Left, and the right- auditoriums, out of any significant place in tlie to-life movement so all~~511gin the United States. lives of communities and families and indi- Perot gave his supporters tlie chance to feel that viduals, and into consulting firms, advertising they were controlling die process and not being agencies, and television studios. One result is controlled by it. tliat the parties themselves play an increas- Perot's campaign demonstrated, if noth- ingly attenuated role in public life. Another is ing else, that a yearning for political empow- that it is now far more difficult for individual erment remains strong in America. To many voters to feel any real connection with the can- voters, apparently, Perot's position on issues didates and campaigns they are asked to support. Politics has become remote, impersonal, unapproachable. And so most Americans have simply ceased to participate very often in, or even to think very often about, public life. In- stead, politics has become an almost entirely passive activity in wluch most voters rarely and glancingly engage. They read capsule descriptions of campaigns in newspapers and magazines. They listen to the radio. Above all, they watch Parades aiidhoopla made 19th-ceiztziry American polif ics a popular activity. television. And occasionally, in Here Democrats in Nezu York march for their candidate in the 1868 election.

LEADERSHIP 51 (or his unwillingness to take positions on (in Democracy and Poetry) of this concern, wluch them) was beside the point. He gave them had shaped his own tl-linkil~gabout politics something they considered more important: a throughout much of his life. He described chance to feel democracy at work. Replicating that feeling in more conven- the tragic ambiguity of the fact that the tional political campaigns will be difficult, per- spirit of the nation we had promised to haps even impossible, given the erosion of create has often been the victim of our astonishing objective success, and that, in party structures and the overwhelmingpower our success, we have put at pawn the very of television in our world. But involving citi- essence of the nation we had promised to zens in public life need not be restricted to createthat essence being the concept of campaigns, as the impressive growth of local, the free man, the responsible self. grass-roots political movements in recent years demonstrates.Leaders who wish to cre- To Warren, democracy had meaning only ate some real sense of connection with their when based on tlie concept of the "responsible followers would do well to recognize that self." It had meaning only when citizens could thousands of Americans have found a sense of aspire to understand tlie world in which they engagement in working for specific, some- lived and their place in it, and only when they times local, causes-environrnentalism, edu- could expect tlieir leaders to do the same. That cation, feminism, antifeminism, and many oth- was important, Warren argued, because without ers. Politiciansmight look for ways to make these understanding there could be no effective pub- people participants in the work of government. lic action. But it was also important because, But there is another, equally important, without understanding, individualswould have task awaiting those who hope to relegitimize no control of their own lives, no sense of tlieir political life in America. And that is the task connections to their fellow citizens, to tlieir of introducing into political discourse habits of community, and to their government. reasoned reflection capable of making it an activity we can take seriously as an intellectual hat separates tlie 20th century endeavor. Achieving this goal is even more from all the historical eras pre- difficult than meeting tlie voters' demand that ceding it is, he argued, this: It our leaders tell die truth, although without a re- is a world in which the gulf spect for truth political language will remain as separatingw individuals from tlie institutions empty and unrespected as it is now. What is and processes that govern tlieir lives grows needed is a vision of leadership as a search not ever larger, and in which tlie entrenched moral just for power but also for knowledge. and social norms that once shaped and con- strained the public world have lost much of n recent years, in particular, our politics tlieir power to persuade. One response to such has often seemed to be precisely tlie op- a world is simply to withdraw from it, to re- posite. It has seemed a flight from knowl- treat into a private universe where one can at I edge. The cultivation of ignorance-ig- least pretend to exercise control. Another re- norance of tlie real nature of our problems, sponse is to place faith in leaders who prom- ignorance of tlie predictable consequences of ise simple solutions to complex problems. our actions-has been a deliberate political Both responses, Warren suggested, represent style. It is little wonder that contempt for po- abdications of tlie responsibilities that come litical language and political life has risen with being part of a democratic community. significantly in the last decade or so and that They represent, in particular, an abdication of leaders at all levels now find it much more diffi- tlie responsibility to seek knowledge~ofour- cult to enlist even modest public confidence. selves and of our world. Without knowledge, The poet Robert Perm Warren wrote in 1975 he argued, we have no contact with our past,

52 WQ SPRING 1994 with our community, and with ourselves. cia1 scale. Human thought has had to en- Without knowledge, we move through the large its scale in order to meet the situation." world without really living in it. Without a re- And human thought, Lippmann and oth- sped for knowledge, the political world becomes ers believed, was capable of doing so, particu- an empty place. Its leaders become cynical, larly if society was capable of producing lead- amoral, wit11 no moral compass, no guide to ers committed to genuine understanding of what they can and cannot do, creatures of empty the world. There is, in Drift and Mastery, a tone political ambitions. of real contempt for "anyone who picks his Historians writing of the late 19th and way through the world as if he were walking early 20th centuries have noted, looking back on eggs." Such people, Lippmann wrote, will on the anguished political rhetoric of those find the world "a difficult and unsatisfactory years, how imperfectly contemporaries un- place." The worst qualities in leadership, derstood the great social and economic Lippmann believed, were "timidity of forces that were the most important sources of their problems, how often they focused their anger and fear on things that were marginal to their plights, or irrelevant to them altogether. Future historians of our own time may say the same of us: that we flailed away at ephemera and phantoms without understanding that our real task was to comprehend a series of profound structural changes in our society and our world. But there were people in that earlier period of political crisis that presidenfid electioi~Ã£Ã flÃ intense iÃ£Ã£lÃ£Ãof his Ã£,Ã of folloÃ£, Americans could find a way of genuinely understanding their dilemmas, tl~ougl~t,hesitancy and drift." (It is not surpris- and that effective political leadership could ing that Lippmann's great political hero was help them do so. One of these people was Theodore Roosevelt.) Walter Lippmann, who as a very young man Drift was a word Lippmann returned to wrote several now-classic books about poli- repeatedly, with contempt, even loathing. It tics in which he confronted directly what he was a sign of weakness and failure. Like many considered the major crisis of his age: a cri- intellectuals in those years, Lippmann was sis of knowledge. In one of the most impor- profoundly influenced by Freud, and he drew tant of those books-Drift and Mastery, pub- from Freud a belief (perhaps not completely lished in 1914-he described an America synonymous withFreud's own) thatindividu- that had been "passing through a reorgani- als must set as a goal the mastery of their own zation so radical that we are just beginning inner lives. But the more important political to grasp its meaning. . . . The scope of 11u- task, Lippmann believed, was for the nation, man endeavor is enormously larger, and and its leaders, to do the same-for their col- with it has come . . . a general change of so- lective life, their political life. They should

LEADERSHIP 53 strive for mastery, for a coherent understand- That is what mastery means: the substitu- ing of themselves and their destiny. In. one of tion of conscious intention for unconscious his most powerful passages, Lippmann wrote: striving. Civilization, it seems to me, is just this constant effort to introduce plan where there has been dash, and purpose into the We drift into our work, we fall in love, and jungles of disordered growth. our lives seem like the intermittent flicker of an obstinate lamp. War panics, and financial panics, revivals, fads sweep us before Americans in Lippmann's time never did, them. Men go to war not knowing why, and of course never could, achieve real mas- hurl themselves at cannon as if they were tery over the great historical forces that were bags of flour, seek impossible goals, submit shaping the world. But their effort to do so to senseless wrongs, for mankind lives to- was responsible for some of the notable pub- day only in the intervals of a fitful sleep. There is indeed a dreaming quality in lic achievements of the early 20th century. In life. . . . Men often wake up with a start: our own time, in a world considerably more "Have I lived as long as I'm supposed to complicated and considerably more danger- have lived? . . . Here I am, this kind of per- ous than the one Lippmann described, it son, who has passed through these experi- would be foolish to assume we could do much ences-well, I didn't quite know it." better. And yet we too, through the way we live our own lives and the way we conduct our poli- There is, in this passage, a contempt for the drift tics, have an opportunity, even an obligation, as that Lippmann believed characterized so much Lippmann put it, to "cultivate reflection," to at- of life, but also an implicit admiration for the tempt to understand and, when possible, "mas- "waking up," for recognizing the aimlessness of ter" the forces that buffet us and bring such un- life, because through that recognition can come certainty and insecurity into our lives. the determination to control one's own life and control one's own world. Lippmann continued: olitical leadership in a democracy- be it from the president or from any That, I think, is the beginning of what we one else who presumes to represent call reflection: a desire to realize the the interests of other people-can do drama in which we are acting, to be only so much; one of the tasks of modern lead- awake during our own lifetime. . . . ership is to help citizens understand that. But When we cultivate reflection, [when] we political leadership can do something. Lead- draw the hidden into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of ing us in an effort to comprehend our world, it, note its history, reflect on error, . . . we and what we can and cannot do to control it, find that our conscious life is no longer a would be a good place for those who hope to trivial iridescence, but a progressively refurbish the tattered reputation of American powerful way of domesticating the brute. public life to begin.

54 WQ SPRING 1994 UESTIONING QEADERSHIP

Do We Overstate the Importance of Leadership?

BY ALAN RYAN

olitical argument is so obsessed with should like to argue that the extent to which leadership that it might seem per- leadership is a central element in political life verse to claim that it is a local pas- and the extent to which the understanding of sion, not a universal one, and that leadership is central to the understanding of evenP in the United States it has been intermit- politics are easy to misunderstand and to extent and not constant. It is certainly a claim aggerate. that would be hard to make in a gathering of To be sure, there are many forms of initia- orthodox social scientists. It would be equally tive needed in any political system, and it hard to persuade the public. American politi- would be silly to launch a campaign against all cians and voters are much concerned with as- talk of leadership. My aim is not to persuade sorted "crises of leadership" as described in the reader to stop thinking about leadership the contemporary but to emphasize that mass media. Ronald initiative in the cre- Reagan and Mar- ation of policy is not garet Thatcher re- always leadership, main convinced that and that leadership their success during does not always im- the 1980s reflected ply leaders. It may be the public's hunger noncharismatic, pro- for leadership. To- vided by a group day, in the face of one rather than an indi- "crisis" after another, vidual, based on whether the Bosnian knowledge rather crisis, the health-care than a surfeit of tes- crisis, the education tosterone, and may crisis, or some other, have much more to the cry for leadership do with eliciting the continues to go up. moral attachments of Crisis and lead- a political commu- ership may be made Plato feared that great orators such as Demosthenes nity than with creat- for each other, but I could upset the workings of the well-ordered state. ing them.

LEADERSHIP 55 Let us begin witli our existing linguistic power-but to avert change, not to bring it habits. Consider the distinction between lead- about. Tliey have "auxiliaries," soldiers who ers and rulers.* While rulers have commonly are ready to defend the polls in wartime, but led those over whom tliey ruled-Elizabeth I they have no foreign policy save isolationism. both ruled the British and led them to victory Tliey regulate economic activity, but only so over tlie Spanish, did she not?-there are two it does not run amok, with artisans becoming tasks, two roles, two statuses liere. George 111 obsessed witli wealth and consumers acquir- ruled but did not lead; 1% successors did not rule, ing a taste for foreign products. Altliougli tliey even "through" Parliament. possess tlie unusual, perhaps impossible, at- Conversely, we would not say that Lee tributes that make them philosopher-kings, Iacocca "ruled" Chrysler unless we wanted to the authority of the Guardians is not personal. make a particular point about lus managerial They do not charm their subjects as Alcibiades styleas in "ruled witli an iron fist." To say charmed his followers; tliey do not persuade he led Cluysler during the period of the firm's tliem as Demostlienes persuaded tliem. Be- recovery, liowever, says only that he was in cause the poets and playwrights have been charge. CEOs lead; only some of tliem rule. It sent out of the city, Plato's Guardians can is a moot point whether any of them may employ none of the theatrical arts on which plausibly be said to govern. Are these linguis- politicians liave always depended. Guardians tic habits more than a quirk of idiom? are not party leaders, faction leaders, or popular leaders, not in any plausible sense leaders think tliey are. Talk of leaders does, but at all. We may be led by tliem, but tliat does talk of rulers does not, imply a struggle, not make tliem "leaders." a fight against other persons or a hostile They are rulers. Their status is peculiar, environment. A leader mobilizes follow- inasmuch as their authority is the authority of ers to achieve that task for which they join to- reason itself and not the authority of birth, in- gether. Rulers lay down the law, and may do dividual charisma, or past success. Nonethe- it with an iron fist. It's a distinction one can see less, if tliey are philosopher-kings, tliey are also in one of the first great works of political re- plulosoplier-kings. In fact, the label "plxiloso- flection, Plato's Republic. Consider the differ- plier-king" is regrettable. Talk of "kings" stops ence between Plato's Guardians-the "phi- a democratic age such as ours from appreci- losopher-kings" lie tliouglit we must institute ating the virtues of an administrative elite if a just political order is to be created-and whose claim, to authority rests on knowledge, the demagogues lie so disapproved of. The acquired skill, and public spirit. We see that demagogues were leaders and would-be lead- such autliority is not democratic and stop our ers; tliey led factions, and tried to rally the ears. We ought not to. Modern "Guardians" Athenian people behind the projects tliey had must be answerable to the electorate in some in mind. way or other, but tills by no means excludes die Not so the Guardians. Anyone who read thought tliat tliey would possess an authority the Republic in college will remember the ques- based on solid claims to a disinterested expertise. tion every undergraduate has asked: What do A different and almost equally substantial the Guardians actually do? They hold supreme difference between Plato's vision and anything one might borrow from it must be ac- 'A quick search of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill knowledged, however. Plato installs tlie reveals the interesting fact that it is only in Rousseau and Mill that 'leaders" are much talked of at all; in Macliiavelli, "leaders" only Guardians to stop things from happening, appears where military or faction leadership is under discussion. while we liave learned all too well tliat if we - Alan Ryan, a contributing editor of the Wilson Quarterly, is professor of politics at Pri~zcetonUniversity. He is the author of Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (1988) and is now at work on a study of Jo171z Dewey.

56 WQ SPRING 1994 do not move forward we move backward. himself devoted an interesting section of his That is a real difference between what he Politics to arguing that Plato's ideal republic wanted and what we want. That Plato's had no politics, and a moment's reflection on Guardians do not do much is no defect in Aristotle's complaint may be useful, since it Plato's republic; the Guardians surely do not will enable me to make my case that Plato and spend their days dashing around Athens put- Aristotle both offer little scope to leaders. It is ting out brush fires of popular discontent. not the absence of leaders that Aristotle com- What they do is set up arrangements that have plains of but the failure to accept the legiti- the force of law, that regulate everyday life, macy of plural interests and plural values. assign people to appropriate work, encourage And this has implications for anyone who them into appropriate marital arrangements, wants to take seriously the leading role of non- and teach them to do without the things that "leaders" and wonder whether we need a would lure them into foreign adventures. modern Guardian class. Just as I readily agree Then, they maintain the tuneless structure in- that modern Guardians would have to be tact. If we need our own Guardians, it is be- democratically answerable, so I readily agree cause we need a flexible structure, one that is that they would have to consider the welfare anything but timeless. of a pluralist society, not a monolithic one. Plato's desire that the Guardians set up a None of this challenges the thought that we timelessly valid structure within wluch indi- have recently undervalued rational guidance viduals would live their lives contained no im- and overvalued charismatic leadership, and plication in favor of freedom of choice. Plato that Americans pay too much attention to mostly treated freedom of choice as mere will- presidential leaderslup. fulness, and attacked Athens for placing too high a value on liberty. What mattered was ristotle charged Plato with exag- that the citizens should lead the lives that gerating the degree of unity a were good for them. Wlule this strongly dis- state could and should achieve. tinguishes lus ideas from liberalism, it remains Politics is possible only where a true that liberal constitutionalism and the Pla- degreeA of unity prevails~citizensmust recog- tonic republic have something in common: nize one another as citizens of the same state, The Guardians provide structure rather than accept common institutions, and share a num- leadership, or, better, they play a leading role ber of social and cultural values. Otherwise, without becoming leaders. they could not live with one another at all. Nonetheless, their interests are not identical, lato's antipathy toward individual and politics is the art of reconciling divergent self-expression in fact reinforces the interests-not finally and forever, but for long point. Citizens-or subjects-of enough to shelter the search for the good life. Plato's ideal polis have 110 voluntary As the similarities of this account to the allegiances; there is thus no such task as per- conventional wisdom of American pluralism suading them to subscribe to any particular might suggest, this vision of politics leaves goal, 110 such art as that of rallying a polis of plenty of room for the middle-level political such people behind any particular cause. The leadership in which American politics is so emphasis on a rational structure maintained rich, and American political scientists have by a dispassionate elite displaces the entire often acknowledged Aristotle as a founding phenomenon of political leaderslup from the father of pluralist political analysis. It is thus center of attention. an interesting fact about Aristotle's own ac- It is an old complaint that Plato's stress oil count of politics that he skates over the ques- structure and rule as opposed to personal tion of leadership. He doubtless took it so leaderslup simply abolishes politics. Aristotle much for granted that Athenians knew their

LEADERSHIP 57 own interests and could press them in the dures whereby we assemble an army and charge agora that the idea that anyone might special- someone to lead it in battle. We use the laws in ize in "interest articulation" and "interest ag- doing those things that need leadership, but gregation," as political scientists say, was ab- lawmaking is not itself an exercise in leader- surd. The problem rather was that people who ship. Indeed, what we call lawmaking is almost fancied themselves as tyrants would use their better thought of as lawfinding in Aristotle. No skills as faction leaders to seize absolute power one who writes thus is likely to emphasize the and would then exploit their fellow citizens. role of the man on horseback, or to have a mod- Hence Aristotle's famous wish that laws, not em conception of executive initiative. men, should rule. The idea that when we set up a regime we t is easy to object that Aristotle's account might build "a machine that would go of it- of politics reflects the prejudices of edu- self" was only latent in Aristotle's Politics, but cated Athenians of two and a half thou- it was latent. It was not a major theme because sand years ago and has no bearing on ourI situation. There is no quick answer to that his main concern was with citizenship. Greeks cared so much whether they were or were not objection. Here all I can do is offer a quick citizens that the question of the qualifications sketch of one 20th-century view of political life and benefits of citizenship was a pressing one. that paints a similar picture, even though its What citizens got, according to Aristotle, was, ancestry is Hegelian rather than Aristotelian, famously, the chance to rule and be ruled in and its author's allegiances were as quirkily turn. The phrasing is significant. They did not liberal as Aristotle's were not. English pluloso- get a crack at being the Senate majority leader, pher Michael Oakeshott, who died in 1992, ap- or the leader of the people in arms. People pealed to a small but discriminatingAmerican would rather rule than be ruled, and justice audience. In his elegant and strikingly difficult required a sort of equality. So a just polis book On Human Conduct (1975), he gave an would have everyone capable of office taking account of the nature of a modern state that turns to hold it. Although Aristotle stressed pushes leadership to the margins of inquiry in the psychic benefits of being a free man who the same way that Aristotle did. Oakeshott shared in the polis's capacity for self-govem- borrowed from medieval legal arguments to ment, there is no emphasis at all on the plea- distinguish between a societas and a sures of occupying a leading position. Indeed, universitas-words about as unhelpful for a there is a presumption against any such taste useful distinction as could be imagined. Both for eminence. societas and universitas refer to "organizations" or "groups"; but a societas is a union that has ristotle's picture of the polis is thus no exterior or ulterior purpose beyond itself, a picture of a system that provides while a universitas is a union constructed for the government of laws; citizens some such purpose. contribute by taking part in a pub- A state may be either or both, and indeed lic process of deliberation about what was sometimes called a societas cum conduces to the public good. That sounds ba- universitate. Oakeshott wanted to rescue the nal, but it gets a good deal more force if we idea of the state as societas from writers who contrast it with the emphasis on decision mak- assume that all associations must have a col- ing that permeates modern accounts of politi- lective purpose, and that their merits are a cal activity. Laws do not make decisions and matter of how well they fulfill that purpose. In they do not lead. They shape, provide a frame- spite of the obscurity of the expression, the work, open opportunities; they do not rally distinction is one that most people grasp intu- troops, or summon us to some particular itively. To be an American citizen is a matter cause. They will doubtless lay down the proce- of being legally and morally tied to other

58 WQ SPRING 1994 American citizens, regardless of what indi- tinuous debate about the conditions under vidual and collective purposes one may have. which the game can go on, the ship can remain To be an employee of General Motors is a afloat, the argument can continue. There is a matter of having a particular task to fulfill. role for leadership here, but not for leaders. Why does the distinction matter? It im- Leadership is a matter of helping to elicit or to plies a view of politics in which leadership is articulate a view that the hearers already ac- played down. Leadership goes with assem- cept, but only implicitly. It sometimes seems bling people to carry out projects, and that Oakeshottian politics was best practiced Oakeshott thought that even such projects as in 18th-century England. Parliamentary politics the achievement of "the welfare state" have was not devoid of leaders and followers, but they unnoticed dangers. Politics, in Oakeshott's conceived of themselves~orat least Edmund view, ought to be concerned with preserving Burke offered an idealized portrait suggesting the legal and institutional framework that al- that they conceived of themselves-as de- lows particular, noncollective goals to be cho- voted to preserving a constitutional frame- sen and pursued by the citizenry. Once we work. Yet it doesn't do to think these men had make a goal such as maximizing social welfare no sense of a collective purpose. The greatness central to the legitimacy of the state, it becomes of the British Empire moved them to enthusi- credible that we might achieve that goal by asm; the promotion of national prosperity was some process of a technical or managerial a constant goal, as was the maintenance of a kind. This erodes the idea that each person has particular moral and religious culture. Nor, in his own life to lead. It also makes each of us fact, does Oakeshott wish to say that a politi- vulnerable. Once politics is instrumental, we cal community, what he calls a "civil associa- are in danger of being discarded, either as a tion," is all societas and not at all universitas. In threat to the goal, or as simply redundant. A practice, states will engage in a mix of instru- Marxist party that thought it had mastered the mental and noninstrumental activities, but key to history is an example of a group that Oakeshott wanted to pick out the characteris- claimed the right to lead society down the path tic that he thought Utilitarians, Rationalists, to the socialist utopia because of a technical Weberians, and almost anyone who wrote too competence in getting us there, and the Marx- readily about the "machinery of government" ist habit of consigning opponents to "the would overlook. In other words, we need dustbin of history" an example of the danger. leaders, but not as generally as they suppose, Oakeshott thought that, in such a regime, and leadership, but not always provided by citizens were no longer citizens but human leaders, and not always in the form of rallying building materials. He remarked, in a phrase the people behind a particular project. that caused some resentment, that the welfare state is the first step on the road to the concen- he point can be made without Oake- tration camp. That was exaggerated, but not short's allegiances and antipathies. foolish. Anyone who has read Aldous We might content ourselves with Huxley's Brave Nezu World knows that one of saying that one conception of poli- the more chilling aspects of the book is its de- tics emphasizes the importance of keeping a piction of what can occur when many hu- constitutional framework in good repair and mane, sensible, and eminently defensible ideas ensuring that legislators understand their task for the amelioration of the human lot are taken as the provision of a framework, not achiev- to the extreme. What is disgusting is just that ing particular outcomes. People who were the inhabitants of Brave New World have no "good at" politics so defined would be capable lives of their own, and are the manipulated of arguing a case and thinking about what objects of other people's arrangements. made good law; people who were "good at Politics in Oakeshott's universe is a con- public administration" would be skilled at

LEADERSHIP 59 devising systems of rationing, queuing, or Mansfield argues from both sides of the de- superintendence,and the distribution of ben- bate I have set up. On the one hand, he efits to the needy or deserving. Both might stresses the need for general rules, procedures have the qualities of a leader in their particu- that tie the hands of anyone wit11 aspirations lar spheres, that is, might be particularly good to leadership, and on the other sees even at the game, deft at getting people to take the Roosevelt and Reagan as the heirs of same view as themselves, and so on. But the Machiavelli's prince. provision of leaderslup would not be defini- tive of either activity; nor would it be quite the 'hatever the justice of the same tlung in different contexts. charge, Machiavelli is associ- Oakeshott's avowed object of discussion ated wit11 the doctrine that was "the character of a modern European politics is centrally about the state." An American audience might wonder acquisition of power, and that there is a tech- how this bears upon American concerns-es- nique for its acquisition that can be learned pecially on the American concern with presi- and applied by anyone with the nerve, ruth- dential leadership. In Taming the Prince (1989), lessness, energy, and ambition to do so. Tlus Harvey Mansfield, Jr., provides an answer. focus on technique displaces the concern of His discussion of the authority of the modern previous political pl~ilosopl~ersto elaborate executive starts from what Mansfield, a pro- the ends of political association, and it is this fessor of government at Harvard University, that is often simplified into the charge that he takes to be Aristotle's tactful burial of the topic teaches evil. More important, Machiavelli of executive action. The topic needed to be writes as though the daring, skill, ambition, buried because Aristotle did not wish to dwell and ruthlessness of the would-be prince for on the ugly deeds that leaders must often do. whom he writes fill the whole of political Aristotle throws the burden of government on space. The skeptical note I want to sound-it the whole (qualified) people and suggests, is the theme of tlus second part of my essay- without quite saying, that rulers can be held is that writing about politics in these terms in check-that princes may be tamed. suggests that the common people, those who are not striving to become the supreme power achiavelli is the proper foil to in the state, are entirely plastic, and will re- Aristotle. He insisted that ceive whatever impress the prince cares to stamp princes could not be tamed, and on them. To overemphasize leaders is to treat that they needed their untamed public opinion as endlessly manipulable. power if they were to be effective. The U.S. The step to Max Weber is a small one. Constitution then turns out to be an attempt Weber argued that the convictions of a mod- to square the circle-to create a prince and ern society must be given to it, or impressed then to tame lum-and the current obsession upon it, by a leader, whose personality would wit11 presidential leaderslup, an anxiety not to enable him to carry a conviction carried by tame him so tl~oroughlythat he cannot act. nobody else. Part of Weber's argument was Mansfield himself does some squaring of the that moral and cultural values, and the politi- circle. He admires the Constitution, but takes cal projects they validate, are not discovered the same pleasure as Macluavelli did in insist- but chosen-imposed rather than found. A ing that politics is played for lug11 stakes-we feature of contemporary politics is that conser- rightly speak of executing both policies and vatives talk a good deal about leaderslup but enemies. The rise of the modern executive is believe in the existence of objective moral and thus the rise of a power that is beyond the religious rules that greatly curtail the leader's reach of constitutional checks and yet has to freedom, while moral and religious skeptics be somehow kept in check. In that sense, are anxious about what leaders may lead us

60 WQ SPRING 1994 The title-page of the first edition of I1 Principe (1532).Machiavelli (inset) cited Cesare Borgia, subject of this 16th-century portrait (artist unknown), as an example of the nezv "Prince." into. Tlus may reflect a sound judgment. It is picture of someone imposing a moral and easier to be confident that leaders will do noth- political commitment where none was. To ing too destructive if you believe in an objec- my eye, this exaggerates a feature of uncom- tive moral universe to which they will feel mon situations into a defining feature of themselves answerable. modern politics. Weber, however, was a skeptic who believed in leadership. Weber's concept of et us backtrack briefly. In The Prince, Fiihrerdemolcra tie-"leadership democ- Machiavelli discusses the qualities racy1'-emphasized two things that seem to needed by a would-be holder of be at odds: the modern phenomenon of the power in the chaotic conditions of earlyL 16th-century Italy. He generalizes to a rational, bureaucratic administrative order on the one hand, and, on the other, the wider canvas, but rulers who can rely on tra- elected leader who brings the vigor and dition, on habits of deference, and on the rutl~lessnessof Machiavelli's prince to the props of established religion do not interest task of setting goals, standards, and pur- him in the same way as "new men." The virtu poses for that administrative system. What of such men is not "virtue," since it embraces is absent is any suggestion that views and such qualities as Hannibal's extreme cruelty convictions may need to be elicited from and Cesare Borgia's readiness to bring about and articulated for the public, but not im- the ostentatious and savage murder of lus lieu- posed or stamped upon it; the public has de- tenant Remirro de Orco. Politics does not aim sires for comfort and is susceptible to certain at the virtuous life as described by Aristotle. sorts of appeal, but this is not a picture of a What it aims at is the acquisition and mainte- give-and-take between leader-as-facilitator nance of power. The Prince is advice addressed and people-as-source-of-inspiration. It is a to a man contemplating a bid for power in a

LEADERSHIP 61 rough world. It is amoral. Some kinds of vio- complaint against Weber's work. lence and cruelty are so disgusting that they The more important thing is something subvert the pursuit of what the prince wants- quite simple. Weber thought of a bureaucratic glory, or a great name in the history books. If administration as a headless entity, just as he a prince can obtain power by morally reputable thought of the mass of the population as a means, so much the better. It is hard to acquire blank sheet on wluch charismatic leaders were thus, but, if acquired, easier to hold on to. to inscribe their plans. A bureaucracy needs a political input; it has to be given a purpose and have said that Machiavelli treats tech- a direction from somewhere other than within nique as all-powerful and the people as its own body, just as the public needs a sense passive until molded in what the ruler of direction. Fiilzrerdeii~okratiethus answers to wants them to be. This makes the two needs at once. Leaders acquire the author- "prince"I the most interesting character in the ity to govern by getting it from the people in story and conveys an implausible image of an election, and the people find legitimate rul- popular vacuity. Yet, it is the well-being of the ers in charge of the administrators with whom common people that is ultimately at stake. The they have to deal in everyday life. self-aggrandizement of the prince is not Mach- This picture animates the most impres- iavelli's project. A "good" prince will leave a sive, if rather depressing, account of democ- legacy of sound law and stable institutions, racy offered in the past hundred years. Joseph and acquires greater glory by building a stable Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Denzoc- polity than by any other act. Machiavelli also racy (1943)is hated by participatory democrats wants one kind of polity more than another, and other radicals. Schumpeter offered what one kind of political result rather than others: he called a "realistic" theory of democracy that He wants Italy to be unified and powerful, he he contrasted with the so-called "classical" wants the ordinary people to be contented and theory offered by writers such as Rousseau prosperous, and he wants them to live in and James Mill. Democracy was not govern- popular republics on the Roman model. It re- ment by the people, since government by the mains true that lus great "discovery" was that people was impossible. Nor was it govern- we can discuss the acquisition of power as a ment by the people's delegates, since it was technical matter. Althougl? Machiavelli never impossible to secure that sort of control over employs the word "leader" except when he is the people's delegates and still have them do discussing leaders of armies or leaders of fac- what was needed. Democracy was the system tions, it is this emphasis on the capacity to ac- of government in which elites acquired the quire power that has fed into modern under- power to decide by means of a competitive standings of leadership. struggle for the people's vote. The connection between Machiavelli and Weber then runs as follows: One-man ow well democratic government rule cannot provide for the administration worked did not depend on how of a modern state. The only thing that can is democratic it was but on the local a technically competent bureaucracy that political culture. This brings us follows clear rules. Weber was interested backH to leadership. Where Machiavelli's both in the technical efficiency of bureau- prince got lus power by the exercise of virtu, cratic administration and in its adherence to the modern ruler has his crown placed on lus predictable and calculable rules of conduct. head by the people. This presents a danger Getting things done and handling cases on that Machiavelli's prince did not face. The a uniform basis are not always compatible people who have the right to place the crown with each other, and his vagueness on which on their ruler's head may think they have the was to give way to the other is a common right to remove it. If democracy is to work, the

62 WQ SPRING 1994 people must show a great deal of self-control, and Schurnpeter does in fact urge that once a government is voted into office it must be allowed to govern. But Schurnpeter did not emphasize ill quite die way Weber had done die role of charismatic leaders. To borrow from my opening claim, Schumpeter stresses leadership without romanticizing leaders. Tlie political system as understood by Schurnpeter is animated from tlie top, not from the bottom. Tlie people do not form a view of tlieir own welfare and search for someone to help them attain it. They may reject the vision on which their rulers have op- erated, but the vision comes from above, not below. Just as consumers are incompetent to design the goods they consume and must respond to what they are offered, so must voters. As the analogy suggests, Schumpeter saw elections as marketing operations, not as moral and evaluative transformations. Indeed, Schumpeter ended his realistic Sir Stamford Raffles of the East India Company. account of modern democracy by insisting on the importance of an elite civil service, not by politics are peculiarly vulnerable to ideologi- looking for a man on horseback. Scl~umpeter cal and religious passions. (Schumpeter was looked to several constitutional and cultural an Austrian in exile in tlie United States and factors to make sure democracy did not col- wrote when Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were lapse into factionalism or dictatorship. A tra- at the height of tlieir power.) Having a ruling ditional ruling class was one thing on which class of tlie sort Schurnpeter thought the Brit- he relied. If peace was to be kept, politicians ish had possessed in tlie 19th century would had to be able to lose gracefully and then find do no good if it were swept away by an in- plenty of other things to do with their lives. flamed mob. The inflamed mob must be Schumpeter expected to find this grace in defeat stopped from forming. Tlie obvious means only in a ruling class that saw political service as was to take inflammatory matters out of poli- a duty, not as psychic compensation or psychic tics. It was irrelevant whether this was done thrill. In otlier words, democracy would only by a constitution as in the United States or by work with a large admixture of aristocracy. A so- the conventions that preserved tlie same sense defy that did not possess a social stratum that of what was and was not politically discuss- took it for granted that it ought to provide politi- able in Britain. Fundamentally, what mattered cal leadership would find it itself governed by in- was the thought that it was no part of the po- ferior types who sought power for personal grati- litical process to sustain religious orthodoxy or fication or compensation. racial purity or some particular revolutionary Schumpeter did not put the whole burden ideology. This was yet another element in the of successful democracy on the character- idea of popular reticence and leadership ini- ological dimension. Two other things do a tiative. The public was not to swamp leaders great deal of work. Tlie first comes in response with insatiable and ideologically driven de- to a standard truth of liberal democratic mands, and leaders were not to chase fantasies. theory and practice: tlie fact that democratic Tlie otlier essential requirement that

LEADERSHIP 63 Schumpeter set down was the existence of an It is the idea that the civil service ought to impartial career civil service ready to serve generate policy in a steady and continuous, any government with equal skill and public rather than a crisis-oriented, fashion that is spirit. These civil servants were not paper hard to get across. Altliougli this view first pushers and order takers, but people who reached the English-speaking world in the could formulate policy and who would be Nortlicote-Trevelyan Report in the mid-19th able to guide, check, and otherwise assist the century, I do not suggest for a moment that the political leaders of the state. They were a more United States ought to adopt most features of tlie autonomous source of policy than Weber British civil service and its relationship to Parlia- seems to have thought tliey could be. Once ment; the attractive combination is the (rather again, Schumpeter appears to have had in mind notional) American attachment to fierce congres- the British civil service as it was popularly sup- sional scrutiny by well-informed committees posed to be at the end of die 19th century. together with a cadre of public servants much like the British administrative class. Each side of t the risk of sounding like die Atlantic has one half of what's needed. Lord Bryce, who preached this The more serious the need for indepen- doctrine at Johns Hopkins Uni- dent sources of policy, for disciplined admin- versity a hundred years ago, and istration, and a selfless attention to the needs A of tlie public, tlie more persuasive the idea of even convinced Woodrow Wilson for a time, I should say that I think Schumpeter was right, leadership without leaders.When John Stuart not so much about the British civil service as Mill defended the about-to-be-abolishedEast about the problem to be tackled. The demand India Company in 1858 before a committee of for leadership cannot-save perhaps in time the Parliament, he argued tliat under the rule of of war-be satisfied by anything done by a disinterested civil servants, both British and na- president, but it can be bypassed by spreading tive Indian, India had made a degree of progress tlie burden over a differently constituted cabi- that could not have been achieved by any other net and an enlarged senior civil service. means. It was precisely because India liad not Tills is not a novel view-something like been tlie object of political competition be- it was argued by Walter Lippmann in Public tween tlie leaders of the British parliamentary Opinion in 1922-and it has never made any parties tliat progress liad been possible. impact on American opinion. One powerful It would perhaps be tasteless to wonder objection is that tlie American people distrust whether the British themselves might have elites and do not like government by "ex- done better had tliey been governed by the perts." Another is tliat the people who would East India Company; it is certainly against have to fill those posts do not exist. My sense the whole spirit of Mill's argument, which is tliat it is the first objection tliat matters. So was tliat it was essential that tlie East India far as the second is concerned, we don't so Company should answer to an elected par- much lack the persons who could do the job liament in some fashion. We thus arrive at one as an understanding of what the job is and, defensible recipe for leadership witliout therefore, of tlie institutional arrangements leaders, and witliout the obsession with that would attract tlie appropriate people. 'leadership qualities" that distorts current Only in the State Department have career discussion. Indeed, my guess is tliat if Plato public servants generally enjoyed the pres- were writing today, lie would be defending tige and authority needed for them to per- this answerable mandarin class, and not his form tlie tasks Schumpeter had in mind. implausibly omniscient philosopher-kings.

64 WQ SPRING 1994 UESTIONING @EADERSHIP

The Senate (1935) by William Grower

Can Leadership Be Studied?

BY JACOB HEILBRUNN

n 1879 the brilliant young New England ous that party bosses such as Thomas Reed of conservative Henry Cabot Lodge ac- Maine were "no less consequential than the cepted for publication in the International president," expressed a widespread unease Review a rousing essay calling for re- among Americans over corruption in Con- vived presidential leadership. Warning of the gress and political drift. marked and alarming decline in statesman- More than a century later, Thomas slup, the author lamented that "both state and Woodrow Wilson's essay, wluch he expanded national governments are looked upon with into lus best-sellingbook Congressio11al Govern- suspicion, and we hail an adjournment of ment (1885), offers a reminder of the enduring Congress as a temporary immunity from dan- preoccupation of Americans with leadership ger." The essay, which appeared at a time as well as the ambivalence with which they re- when the Washington Post could state as obvi- gard it. The yearning for decisive leaders and

LEADERSHIP 65 tlie apprehension that they might upset the of intellectual snobbery emanating from balance between power and liberty has made DeMott and other foes of leaderslup studies- Americans more adept at demanding leader- even a hint of antidemocratic hauteur. After ship than at embracing it. Indeed, tlie US. all, exposing high scliool and college students Senate's defeat of Wilson's efforts to bring around the nation to ideas about leaderslup, as America into the League of Nations in 1920- well as busing them into Washington to visit the a defeat engineered by tlie same Lodge who State Department,Pentagon, and Congress, is in in 1879 had published Wilson's essay blasting tlie best American egalitarian tradition. What congressional aggrandizement-could scarcely could be niore reflective of tlie American creed provide a more telling illustration of tlie con- tlian tlie conviction tliat almost anybody can straints democratic leaders confront. become~orbe taught to be~aleader? No doubt tlie breezy how-to tips con- oday the renewed shift from iiiter- tained in tracts such as A Passion for Excellence national to domestic concerns lias (1985) and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun heightened tlie sense that we live in (1985) inspire little confidence in tlie relatively an age of pygmy figures liard- youthful field. Still, it is easier to deride tlian pressed to cope witli new events and clial- to decipher tlie study of leaderslup. The recent lenges. Tlie diverse interests at play make de- efflorescence of leadersliip studies, including cisive leadersliip much harder to assert; tlie tlie creation of tlie Kennedy School's Leader- sway of "policy wonks" does not exactly elicit ship Project at Harvard University, tlie Jepson great passions. What is niore, leaderslup itself School of Leadership Studies at tlie University continues to seem inimical to democraticvirtues. of Richmond, and countless other programs So perhaps it should not be altogether and projects tlirougliout tlie nation, lias pro- surprising tliat even tlie mere study of leader- duced its share of monsters, but tlie field lias ship has become the target of various broad- a more robust (and respectable) intellectual sides. Writing in a recent issue of Harper's, history than The One Minute Manager (1982) Benjamin DeMott, a professor of humanities nuglit suggest.Theorists of leaderslup can point at Amherst College, depicts tlie entire enter- witli pride to several solid accomplislu~ients. prise of leadersliip studies as a racket cooked For a start, they have effectively addressed up by academics to swindle American taxpay- the question of leaderslup in public ad11Â¥m"ustra ers and tlie federal government. Recounting tion, business, and the nulitary. The study of re- his service on an academic grant-review panel lations between workers arid employers lias, in in Washington, DeMott tells how lie "was iii- fact, helped to improve those relations. Studies troduced to the leadersliip-studies cult, a no- of "followersliip" and employee "empower- less-perfect specimen of late-20th-century aca- ment" have been very useful to corporations demic avarice and a precise depth gauge of forced to go through radical reorganizations some recent professorial descents into pap, by technological change and financial pres- cant, and jargon." Though most of his essay is sure. Tlie faster that corporate chieftains "flat- a demolition job, DeMott concludes his attack ten management," tlie niore quickly employ- on a somewhat pious note, charging that tlie ees at even tlie lowest levels of management very idea of leadersliip studies carries witli it must learn to "lead themselves. an antirepublican, mugw~~mpishfear of tlie Most important, tlie field has attempted masses tliat dilutes our "democratic essence." to counter what John Gardner, a founding In truth, it is not difficult to detect a whiff chairman of Comnion Cause and a profes- - Jacob Heilbmnn, aformerassistant editorof theNationa1 Interest, is University Fellow in the Centerfor Geriiza~z and European Studies at Georgetown University. He ivrite~frequenfhy for the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and he is now zuorking on a history of the American Establishment.

66 WQ SPRING 1994 sor at Stanford Business School, aptly called America's "anti-leadership vaccine." This vaccine, he charged in a 1965 Carnegie Cor- poration report, not only makes most Americans unreasonably suspicious of all kinds of leaders but "immunizes a high proportion of our most gifted young people against any tendencies toward leadership." Leadership studies provides at least one needed antidote to what Brooks Adams at the turn of the century termed the "degradation of the democratic dogma." The question looming over the field is whether it can fulfill its quest for devising a scientific formula of leadership. Though leadership specialists readily acknowledge their own shortcoinings, their work continues to reflect many of the positivistic assumptions of early social scientists, above all the notion that human behavior and traits can be abstracted, defined, and even quantified. This reification of leadership (to purloin a fancy social-science Max term) may seem hopelessly naive, but the evo- Weber launched the modern study of leadership. lution of the field merits attention. To study the rise of leadership studies is to realize that overly bureaucratic and rationalistic world, its failures, as well as its successes, have ad- what he called the "iron cage" of modernity. vanced our understanding of an important Indeed, it was Weber's fondest hope that such phenomenon. a leader, endowed with extraordinary, even superhuman, qualities, might be able to instill he scientific study of leadership ori- in his followers a sense of mission and moral ginated in the work of one of the purpose that a thoro~~ghlydemystified society founding fathers of sociology, Max no longer provides. Weber (1864-1920). A polymath The notion of charismatic authority was who came to the study of sociology via law, espoused in different form by Weber's con- Weber set the questions of authority, status, temporary, Georg Simmel(1858-19181, a lec- and legitimacy in the context of religion, poli- turer in philosopl~yat the Humboldt Univer- tics, and the military. Devoting great attention sity of Berlin. A pioneer in the study of social to the unresolved tension between leaders and interaction, Sirnrnel postulated the existence of bureaucracies, he grew convinced that an in- a "prestige leader" who commands obedience exorable trend toward rationalization in every by dint of unique personal qualities. Even sphere of society made the role of leaders both more than Weber, Simmel stressed that the more problematic and more important. prestige leader could be understood only in Weber formulated three "ideal-types" of the context of the intimate relationship be- leadership: the rational-legal, the rational-au- tween the leader and follower. Leadership did thoritarian, and the charismatic. The charis- not consist of a body of received wisdom matic leader was the most unusual of the three, handed down from the heights of Mount Sinai and the only one, Weber thought, who might but instead depended on the follower's per- counter the dispiriting effects of life in an ception of his leader. By refusing to appeal to

LEADERSHIP 67 the base instincts that united them and by trans- Ralph Stogdill, a professor of management sa- forming their expectations of leaderslup, said ence and psychology at Oluo State University. Sirnrnel, a leader could create a new kind of re- After examh-itng 120 trait studies, this diligent ality for his followers. social scientist declared that no consistent pat- Though different elements of Weber's tern of traits could be detected among leaders. (and Simmel's) ideas have informed each 'A person does not become a leader by virtue stage of the study of leadership, the one con- of the possession of some combination of stant running through the field's lustory has traits," Stogdill concluded, "but the pattern of been the urge to fashion typologies. Indeed, personal characteristics of the leader must bear the scientific study of leadership itself can be some relevant relationslup to the characteristics, divided into three phases. In the first, from the activities, and goals of the followers." Because turn of the century to World War 11, research- these "trait studies" were unable to quantify leaders set about identifyll~gthe traits of leaders in ership, they seemed to demolish the "Great an attempt to demystify charisma itself. The Man" theory of lustory. Leaders, it turned out, second phase, which lasted from World War were neither more intelligent nor vastly more II until around 1970, focused on the behavior of energetic than the average person. leaders. The third and current phase centers on Even before Stogdill's conclusions were the interaction between leaders and followers. presented, the leadership field had begun to turn from identifying traits to examining the he first phase began promisingly behavior of leaders. An explicitly psychoana- enough. In an effort to identify the lytic approach was advanced by the enor- charismatic traits that leaders pre- mously influential Yale University political sumably possess, researchers such scientist Harold Lasswell. Lasswell did not as Charles M. Cox, a finance professor at wholly abandon the interest in typology. Af- Brigham Young University, carried out a battery ter conducting a series of interviews wit11 lead- of tests designed to measure personality and ing political figures, he concluded that three character. These tests examined qualities such as types existed: the Agitator, the Administrator, the intelligence,physical appearance, dynamism, and the Theorist. But Laswell's main. interest and speaking skills of exceptional leaders. Many was in the psycl~odynamicsof leaderslup. He researchers looked for leaderslup traits among even devised a formula to explain what impelled school children. Not too startlmgly, the studies potential leaders to mount the public stage: revealed that the traits correlating most sig-dfi- p I d I r = PI where p equals private mo- cantly wit11 leaderslup were originality, judg- tives; d equals displacement onto a public object; ment, liveliness, and the desire to excel. T equals rationalization in tenns of public inter- Without question, the most important re- est; and ] equals transfonned into; the result, PI view of the traits field was conducted in 1948 by is the political man. All one can say of tills re-

68 WQ SPRING 1994 markable formula is that the ineffable has never has, in fact, become the Rosetta Stone of recent before been so decisively pinned down. leaderslup studies. Drawing on a wide range Other theorists of leadership, including of historical examples and figures, from Wil- Stogdill, contended that two types of behav- liam Lloyd Garrison to Sir Robert Peel to ior marked successful leaders. One was ori- Franklin Roosevelt, Burns offered an ambi- ented toward the accomplislunent of tasks; the tious meditation on the nature of leadership, other toward good relations with employees. one that returned to Weber's and Simmel's Employees might designate a task-oriented emphasis on the leader-follower nexus. Un- individual as a leader, but they never termed questionably, Burns's most important insight an exclusively employee-oriented one as such. was to draw a distinction between transfonna- Under Stogdill's direction, a number of stud- tional and transactional leadership. Where ies carried out at Ohio State disclosed that the transactional leadership is merely a version of effective leader would not only show consid- managerialism that appeals to the economic eration for his subordinates but also supply self-interest of followers, transformational them with the tools to complete their tasks. leaderslup alters the expectations of followers. Like Simmel and Weber, Burns contends that dentifying two main types of leaderslup leaders can elevate their followers to new lev- behavior, however, was not the same as els of morality and rectitude: "Moral leader- detecting precise patterns of interaction slup emerges from, arid always returns to, the between leader and group. Even if the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations leader behaved in a considerate fashion to- and values of followers." ward his employees, his subordinates might remain dissatisfied with him. And there ap- he current generation of leaderslup peared to be no clear correlation between the theorists has not been slow to at- behavior of the leader and the productivity of tempt to turn Burns's emphasis on lus employees. Stogdill and his associates were the ineffable qualities of leaderslup unable to draw a measurable connection be- into a measurable theory-or even to chal- tween leadership style and performance. The lenge it. Prominent among these challengers behavioral studies demonstrated only that is Bernard Bass, a student of Stogdill's and leadership behavior could profitably be a professor of organizational behavior at the grouped into two broad categories. State University of New York, Binghamton. The third phase of leaderslup studies has The author of numerous books, including attempted to examine those categories more Leadership, Psyclzology and Organizational Be- closely, focusing on what might be called the havior (1960) and Leadership and Performance "transactional" and "transformational" ap- Beyond Expectations (1985), Bass contends proaches. In the early 1970s, Edwin P. Hol- that Burns created a wholly artificial distinc- lander, a professor of psychology at Baruch tion between transactional and transforma- College, employed the term "idiosyncrasy tional leaders. Far from being antithetical, credit" to stand for the freedom that members the two types of leadership can exist in the of a group were granted to act idiosyncrati- same person. Leaders such as Charles de cally. He showed that a seeming paradox ex- Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon isted: Giving followers a measure of au- Jol~nsondisplayed varying degrees of trans- tonomy increased their willingness to respond actional and transformational qualities. By to a leader's directions. the same token, Bass points out, a leader The stress on transformational and trans- may exhibit neither set of qualities. actional styles was crystallized by the distin- In an attempt to refine further the under- guished political scientist, James MacGregor standing of transformational leadership, Burns. Burns's massive study Leadership (1978) Marshall Sashkin, an adjunct professor at

LEADERSHIP 69 George Washington University, has devised a sometimes preferable to forceful visionaries. "Visionary Leadership Theory" to take ac- The energetic Lee Iacocca functioned best count not only of the practices of leaders but wlien lie was leading Clqsler out of financial also of tlie effect of their behavior on the culture disarray. A similar rule obtains in the world of an organization.Saslhi argues tliat followers of politics. Winston Churchill was ejected from are transformed because they internalize tlie office once he liad fulfilled liis mission of wiii- values of tlie organization. The task of tlie leader ning World War 11. Leaders, of course, are is to disseminate tlie organization's principles usually incapable of reconciling tliemselves to and to enunciate the values that animate the or- tlie fact that they can leave an imprint only ganization. The ultimate paradox, Sas1"ikuifinds, wlien a certain constellation of historical forces is tliat tlie effective transformational leader can is present. After a friend commiserated witli employ a managerial approach in order to trans- Cliurcliill and told him liis defeat at tlie polls form his followers. was a blessing in disguise, Cliurchill muttered, "If it is, the disguise is perfect." erhaps the most successful pro- Besides scanting the lustorical dimension, moter of tlie transformational model leadersliip studies neglects tlie variety of are- in the business world is Warren Ben- nas in wliicli different kinds of leaders oper- nis, professor of management at tlie ate. Successful captaincy in business, govern- University of Soutliern California. And not ment, or tlie military does not necessarily only in business: Vice President Albert Gore transfer to other fields~oreven among those has reportedly made Bennis's On Becoming a three. General Ulysses S. Grant made a terrible Leader (1989) recommended reading for liis president. Moreover, thanks to academic ne- advisers. Blunt in manner, Bennis decries glect, we are largely clueless as to what makes "management education" and calls for tlie a strong religious leader, culture leader, retraining of leaders. "Leaders conquer tlie form leader, intellectual leader, sports leader. context. . . while managers surrender to it," One scholar who lias stepped into tlie he says. Even though Bennis's books come breach is Gary Wills, professor of humanities close to tlie homiletic scliool of leadership at Nortliwestern University. In liis forthcom- writing, lie deserves considerable credit for ing book, Certain Tri~i11pets:The Call of Leaders, linking leadership theory to tlie challenge of Wills examines 17 kinds of leaders to show global competitiveness. that a "leader whose qualities do not match Despite its successive adoptions of new those of potential followers is simply irrel- approaches to tlie question of authority, the evant." For each kind of leader, Wills cliooses field of leadersliip studies lias remained an ideal-type and an antitype to bring home hobbled by its epistemological commitments. lus point tliat even an outstanding figure in a The scientific quest for a generic model of lead- certain field is not necessarily a leader. He ership can take one only so far. Employing explains, for example, why the brilliant factor analysis to quantify leadersliip and fo- Viennese pliilosoplier Ludwig Wittgenstein cusing so minutely on the qualities of leader- never became the kind of intellectual leader slup, the field repeatedly loses sight of tlie one that Socrates liad once been. ("Wittgenstein's of the principal reasons for its subject's esseii- theories were largely wrested out of himself in tially unpredictable iiature~tlieenvironment periods of seclusion,or wlde serving in die army, in wluch leaders function. Or, to put it another or in menial jobs. . . . He was a Socrates in intent way, leadership studies lacks an adequate without tlie theory or the methods that lent concern for context, historical or situational. tliemselves to interactions witli others.") It is no mystery tliat different times call for Wills's book is notewortliy precisely because different kinds of leaders. In tlie business of the enipliasis he puts on the ways various world, patient, low-profile managers are fields of human endeavor call forth very differ-

70 WQ SPRING 1994 Varieties of leaderslup: Eleanor Roosevelt excelled as reform lender; Martin Li~tlzerwas a reluctant but pozuerful religions leader; dancer and choreographer Martha Graham stood out as an artistic leader. ent kinds of leaders, an emphasis that the formal power of these institutions should not be de- study of leaderslup would do well to take up. monized, it is worth noting that at least half of the nation's industrial assets belong to 100 hen there is the matter of elites and corporations, 50 foundations control 40 per- leadership. Contrary to DeMottfs cent of foundation assets, and 25 universities charge that leaderslup studies is elit- control two-thirds of all private endowment ist, the field shows inadequate con- funds in lugher education. Fifty-four percent cern for those networks through wluch lead- of corporate leaders and 42 percent of govem- ers rise and operate. ment leaders are graduates of 12 private uni- The power of elites is particularly appar- versities-Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, ent in political arrangements, democratic as Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Northwestern, well as authoritarian, and the United States is Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and no exception. National power continues to Dartmouth. That these institutions have reside in institutions that promote elites- opened their doors to minorities and women New York and Washington law firms, pldan- does not vitiate their importance as creators of thropic foundations, the Ivy League colleges, elites; to the contrary, it vindicates their power. the top media organizations. Though the Again and again, elites in the United States,

LEADERSHIP 71 like the British establishment, liave replen- its explanatory power. The interaction between ished their ranks, and these elites continue to charisma and paranoia, as the MU political sci- set tlie course of tlie nation, for better or worse. entist Lucian Pye has noted, can form one of the Consequently, when things go wrong witli tlie more important characteristics of dictatorial lead- system, tlie problem is not simply the figure ers. The defense of a "homeland" or "party" at tlie top. The quick fix of leadership (nar- against diabolical foes can increase a leader's rowly defined) cannot be dumped into the charismatic appeal. It helps to explain, why stalled engine of government like antifreeze; Stalin's and Mao's murder of 1nillions did notli- tlie deeper problems rest in tlie clash of inter- ing to damageand, indeed, increased-their ests and elites on issues such as health care and mystique at home and abroad. welfare reform. Another question to wliicli leadersliip lie mystery of leadersliip touches on studies could profitably direct more attention some of tlie more vexing philosoplu- is where our leaders are ending up~and,just cal questions about human exist- as important, why tliey end up where tliey do. T ence, which theorists ignore only at As former Harvard president Derek Bok notes the risk of ultimate irrelevance. Is leadership in liis excellent book The Cost of Talent (1993)- simply an act, a self-delusion projected upon wliicli could just as fittingly be titled The Cost followers? Are appearances all? Michael of Leadership-for tlie past 25 years tlie best Deaver, in liis memoir of his White House students liave shunned government service days with Ronald Reagan, offers an anecdote and teaching in favor of law, medicine, and tliat goes to tlie heart of such questions: "One business. Law and business schools boomed day Dick Powell died, and I asked him, 'Was between 1970 and 1990, while only one per- he really as good a guy as I think lie was?' And cent of top students in elite universities opted Reagan said, 'You know, you keep asking me to teach in public scliools. Quite clearly, we get about these actors. There's one thing you've leaders where we put our money, tliougli got to understand, Mike. The camera doesn't money is not the only factor. Prestige counts. lie. Eventually you are what you are.' " And Whatever the incentives, if tliose to enter gov- so Reagan became wliat he was-most au- eminent and education remain grossly dispro- thentic precisely when lie acted out the presi- portionate to tliose offered by tlie corporate dency. "To grasp and hold a vision," observed and legal worlds, our most important public Reagan, "that is the very essence of successful institutions will continue to suffer from lack- leadership~notonly on tlie movie set where luster guidance. Leadership studies might pro- I learned it, but everywhere." vide a valuable service by showing how other No leadership theorist has ever said it societies liave encouraged leaders to seek careers better-and perhaps none ever will. in fields that serve die public interest. To date, tlie study of leadership lias suc- For all its concern witli leaderly qualities, cessfully identified many important traits of the science of leadership lias devoted too little leaders and made valuable contributions to attention to wliat might be called tlie darker our understanding of how leaders and follow- side of the question. Rutlxlessness, mendacity, ers in organizations interact. But to grow as a dishonesty, and cmu"tilig-all are qualities tliat discipline, it will have to cast a wider net. the leadersliip theorists flinch from. A prom- Doing so, it may discover that tlie most impor- ising start would be to return to tlie Weberian tant tlungs about leadersliip lie far beyond the conception of charisma, wluch lias lost none of capabilities of science to analyze.

72 WQ SPRING 1994 CURRENTBOOKS The Comic Face of the Culture War

BEFORE THE SHOOTING BEGINS: Search- works for two reasons. First, unusual for a ing for Democracy in America's Culture War. By sociologist, Hunter let real people speak their James Davison Hunter. Free Press. 320 pp. $22.95 views. Second, listening to what he heard, he refused to condemn conservatives as backward ames Davison Hunter is one of the few bigots. Hunter claimed that there was enough American writers who try to under- moral complexity and ambiguity involved in the stand the culture wars rather than fight culture war to make it, not a contest between them. His previous book, appropriately good and bad, but an even more tragic conflict titled Culture Wars, showed that new fault between two versions of the good. lines had emerged in U.S. society setting citi- Convinced that we must find a way to zen against citizen over questions of identity, have a more civilized national dialogue over sexuality, and private behavior. No longer are our cultural differences, Hunter has now cultural and moral disagreements fought out slufted Iris attention to the question of whether primarily among Protestants, Catholics, and democracy can accommodate both sides in the Jews.Instead, traditionalists of all three religions culture war. In Before the Shooting Begins, he fo- have joined forces against modernists of all three cuses on abortion, which, he argues, "mirrors faiths (as well as those outside all faith traditions). the culture war as a whole." As the March What was once a theological conflict is now cos- 1993 murder of Dr. David Gum outside an mological-and in many ways far more serious. abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, demon- Hunter's book stood out among similar strates, the shooting has already begun. Ameri-

BOOKS 73 cans, bored with free trade and mformation lugl-i- abortion can quickly take on tl-ie tone of the ways, feel strong enough about abortion to kill. comic sexual wars of Aristophanes. But the Yet despite tl-iepassion abortion evokes, it seems comedy bears tl-iougl-itful consideration. For that Americans-and Hunter himself-are un- tl-ie debate over abortion is, at least in part, a sure wl-iat they are fighting about. debate over the remarkable transformation At one level abortion is a matter of "high" tl-iat l-ias taken place since tl-ie 1950s in the way politics, involving fundamental questions Americans think and act about wl-iat they do about tl-ie definition of public and private, lib- in bed, botl-i inside and outside marriage. erty and authority, and the meaning and purpose of life. Even a liberal such as Ronald ecause he treats abortion only in el- Dworkin thinks that the religion clause of tl-ie evated and principled terms, Hunter First Amendment is tl-ie appropriate constitu- B believes tl-iat our national discussion of tional vehicle for deciding wl-iat our national tl-iis issue has become "a language game that approach to abortion should be. At tl-iis prin- l-ias the form of meaningful communication, cipled elevation, abortion presents a tragic but is in fact merely another form of aggres- conflict, like tl-ie Civil War. Each side in the de- sion." We talk past each otl-ier when we dis- bate understands itself, and is understood by its cuss abortion. And tl-ie problem begins witl-i antagonists, as standing for a worldview tl-iat intellectuals, who routinely violate fundamen- caru-iot be compromised. tal democratic principles in the way they bal- All this is understandable. The issues in- ance the competing interests at stake. Both a volved in abortion-whether defined as mat- liberal such as Laurence Tribe of the Harvard ters of faith or matters of personal identity arid Law School and a conservative such as R. C. privacy-are among tl-ie most serious we face. Sproul, an evangelical theologian, are inca- At another level, however, abortion-like pable of recognizing tl-ie legitimacy of their other cultural issues such as l-iomosex~~ality, opponent's position. Hunter argues. Tribe is sexual harassment, unwed motl-ierl-iood,and explicitly anti-democratic. To him, tl-ie whole clddl-ioodsexual abuse~cannotbe discussed purpose of a constitution and a supreme court apart from sex. Americans tend to treat every- is to act as a check on popular positions. thing having to do witl-i sex as the stuff of gos- Sproul, by contrast, sees government as hav- sip, talk shows, soap opera, and confessional ing no otl-ier purpose than to embody God's literature, even tl-iougl-i intimate matters are will-not exactly a formula for pluralism or fully as important in most lives as matters of religious liberty. state. People, after all, are just as much in need Also bearing responsibility are interest of pleasure as they are of principle. But plea- groups on botl-i sides of tl-ie controversy, sure and principle speak in different lan- groups that tend to prefer rhetorical overkill guages. The former involves not the body to persuasion. They manipulate images, politic but tl-ie politics of the body. One arena whether of dead fetuses or bloody coat hang- makes public issues interesting to private in- ers. They haul out poignant examples of abor- dividuals, while the other renders tl-ie lives of tions gone wrong or morning-after regrets. private individuals the subject of public scru- Statistics are routinely colored to support one tiny. A life, it was said in defense of Lorena side or the other. Soundbites and direct mail Bobbitt, is worth more tl-ian a penis. substitute for informed debate. What the pro- tagonists do not say is that they often have an ut in America a penis attracts more me- interest in the outcome, sometimes in tl-ie form dia attention tl-ian nuclear proliferation. of money (abortion, after all, is a business), at Americans cannot get enough of the lu- otl-ier times in the form of an ideological rid. Sometimes conducted in the noble and agenda, and on still otl-ier occasions in the form tragic rhetoric of Antigone, discussions of of preserving gender privilege. (Hunter, like

74 WQ SPRING 1994 Catharine MacKinnon, points out that many they become parties to the debate, not vehicles men tend to favor access to abortion because for bringing the debate under control. it enhances their freedom to act irresponsibly.) Seen from the perspective of high politics, The third problem, as Hunter sees it, is Hunter is correct to stress that our national that the general public is both ~uunformedand debate over abortion fails to reach Sophoclean ambivalent. Forty-three percent of the Ameri- levels. But suppose we look at the abortion can people have no idea what the holding in controversy from the aspect of pleasure as Roe v. Wade actually said, while 80 percent of well as of principle. In its Aristophanean form, Americans were willing to admit that they did abortion is about one question: Should people not know muc11 about recent landmark cases be allowed to sleep around knowing that, if such as Webster v. Reproductive Services. None- birth control fails, they have a fallback option theless, there is a relatively clear distribution to prevent long-term pain from interfering of opinion on abortion: Clumps on either end with short-term pleasure? I believe that a are explicitly pro-choice or pro-life, wlde most rough consensus surrounding an answer ex- people in the middle respond in different ists ~IIthis country. Most people do not believe, ways depending on what questions are asked. in the abstract, that sex should be free of guilt, After a very careful reading of the best but they do believe, in the case of their own polling data available, Hunter concludes that sexual activity, that abortion should be re- the position taken by most Americans on abor- tained as an option-just in case their prin- tion reflects an emotional, rather than. a ratio- ciples do not live up to the practical circum- nal, commitment. In the absence of strong stances in which they find themselves. moral traditions or a deep knowledge of the From this perspective, the very things that law, "all we can do is express our mutually Hunter finds problematic about high politics opposed sense of 'revulsion' to one an- serve the politics of everyday life. Yes, inter- other. . . . People cannot help but respond vis- est groups on both sides of the issue manipu- cerally to the images and rhetoric of the issue." late the truth; they would not be faithful to the ideologically committed who support them inally, Hunter concludes, the institutions with contributions and time if they did any- of civil society-intermediary institu- thing else. But the question is not whether tions between the individual and both sides play fair; the more important ques- state~havefailed to mediate. The news me- tion is whether they influence ordinary people. dia, which are supposed to be neutral, tend to Generally speaking, their influence is rather report the struggle over abortion from the pro- minimal. Despite the determined opposition choice side. Even more egregiously, profes- of the Catholic Church to abortion, many sional associations, such as the American Psy- Catholics have abortions. Despite a 30-year cl~ologicalAssociation, chime in, confusing effort to make abortion available on demand, their expertise with their politics. (In one case most state legislators, clearly responding to described by Hunter, a number of distin- majority sentiment, make abortion difficult to guished historians submitted a brief in Roe v. obtain in some circumstances while making it Wadeto the effect that abortion was not illegal available in others. tl~roughoutmuch of American history and Much the same ambivalence holds for that only in recent times did abortion become a public knowledge on the abortion question.To moral issue, an act of shading the truth that the be sure, most people know less about the de- more scholarly of them subsequently came to tails of the issue than intellectuals, but they are regret.) Similarly, church leaders conflate their surprisingly well informed when such knowl- political commitments with religious ideas. One edge is compared wit11 how much they know simply does not find intermediary associations about minority set-asides or agricultural price playing the role assigned to them by Tocqueville; supports, perhaps because sex is one of the few

BOOKS 75 genuine universals in our otherwise increas- nality, nuance, and respect. They, and not the ingly particularized society. And the fact that interest groups, have an obligation to make people respond emotionally to the issue ought sure that the national debate on abortion is not to cause dismay, given that sex is the most conducted fairly. I am fully persuaded by emotional activity in which people generally Hunter's account of how some intellectuals engage. Some Americans think we should have routinely call for balance in the discussion of less sex and others tl~&we should have more, abortion, only to wind up arguing for one par- representing the two ends of the bell-shaped ticular side. And his treatment of the way pro- curve that Hunter has found. The question for fessionals confuse their political sympathies most people, however, is not whether sex with their professional obligations is chilling; should be prohibited on the one hand or psychologists, lawyers, sociologists, histori- treated casually on the other. Rather, they ans, and medical doctors should not be in the want to decide whether to have sex at a cer- business of claiming, based on their expertise, tain time with a certain person. Ambivalence that only one side in the abortion debate has on abortion may enable them to keep their a position that corresponds with mental options open. health, the Constitution, public order, history, or life itself. ven if we do believe that the question In short, if one approaches abortion from of sexuality should be given a prin- the standpoint of principle, the conflict is se- E cipled rather than a contextual answer, rious indeed. But if one approaches it from the the principled answer that has emerged in tlus standpoint of everyday common sense, we country is not a bad one. Americans are will- may not be facing a new Bosnia. I think it far ing to allow their beliefs on sexuality to be too premature to conclude that our present expressed as part of their larger understand- democratic practices have failed us. Roe v. ings of modernity. Those who want women to Wade was not accepted by most Americans. It work and children to free themselves from was altered by democratic debate without parental controlÃ‘decision that usually imply even the suggestion of men on horseback, and a more active sex lifesupport greater access the resulting compromise remains far from a to abortion. Those who believe in the tradi- total ban 011 abortion. The fact is that most tional family and have a strong sense of reli- Americans have both moral and religious con- gious morality want to see access to abortion victions and a healthy respect for everyday restricted or eliminated.On what better basis pleasures. They therefore want their political can people disagree? There is a great deal to system to issue elevated judgments on abor- be said for a kind of moral pluralism that en- tion but not to allow such judgments to inter- ables people to live in more modern or more fere with their own freedom. traditional communities based upon their fundamental values. In such a pluralism, which emocracy, in short, has produced a re- Hunter endorses, compromise positions may be sponse to the abortion conflict that is discovered. (Hunter offers the example of St. hypocritical, insincere, and contradic- Louis, where the director of Reproductive tory. This naturally upsets those who believe Health Services and the city's leading pro-life in high politics. Hunter, dismayed by the su- attorney fashioned common ground on the perficiality of the debate, would prefer a need both to reduce unwanted pregnancies 'thicker" democracy that would enable sin- and to increase prenatal care.) cere people to express what they really feel As for intellectuals and professional asso- about abortion. His belief in "substantive de- ciations-well, here, Hunter has it just right. mocracy," which implies "an enlarged and Of all the Americans he discusses, the intellec- deepened debate~adebate that is pre-politi- tuals are the ones who ought to aim for ratio- cal in nature" is surely welcome, but it is not

76 WQ SPRING 1994 the last word. More significant is his recogni- real people, we ought to recognize the dangers tion that we need to be more modest about of sincerity and the benefits of hypocrisy. what politics can accomplish. It would do won- When most people believe that abortion is ders for our political life if people looked to gov- wrong but also know that they or their chil- ernment to protect commerce, provide economic dren may have to tlunk about one, what can security, and defend the country, while religious, the political system do but look both ways? educational, and community institutions wor- ried about the search for the good. -Alan Wolfe is University Professor and pro- In any case, if we are to respect both the fessor of sociology and political science at pleasure and the fear that sexuality evokes in Boston University.

Tattered Velvet

EXIT INTO HISTORY: A Journey Through of dialogue, subjectivity, and human au- the New Eastern Europe. By Eva Hoffli~a~~. tonomy. "Civil society" was the code word for Viking. 410 pp. $23 this antipolitical politics, and Vhclav Havel, THE BIRTH OF FREEDOM: Shaping Lives with his celebration of individual rights, its and Societies in the New Eastern Europe. By cluef spokesperson. Andrezu Nagorski. Simon & Sclz~ister.319 pp. $23 Then, as a few wise prophets had pre- THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN: dicted, the past came back with a vengeance. The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Nationalist passions threatened to destroy the Europe. By Gale Stokes. Ox/o~dUniv. Press. 319 fragile new political democracies, velvet revo- pp. $25 lutions were followed by velvet divorces, and the region appeared in less rosy colors. Tran- nce upon a time, and not a sition ailments, including skyrocketing unem- long time ago it was, Eastern Europe ployment and social inequalities, soon led to 0was an almost forgotten place, a great gray swath of territory in the external empire of the Soviet Union. Periodic explosions of discontent were followed by no less periodic repressions and freezes. Then, during the miraculous year 1989, it became a magical territory where hope was rediscovered and the impossible became real. Commu- nism was dismantled, and the nations of Eastern and Central Europe entered a new era. To many in the region and in the West, it appeared as though a new genre of politics was being tested, one based on the values

BOOKS 77 widespread nostalgia for an authoritarian or- exhaustion of communism's utopian appeals. der. Idealism was replaced by pragmatism, True, the loss of elite self-confidence was sig- disenchantment spread, Machiavellian in- nificant, but the genuine force that brought trigues and arrangements flourished. Mean- down communism was the collective aware- while, the communists themselves have ness among the powerless, and primarily staged a strong comeback. Last summer, the among critical intellectuals, of the possible al- communists, having renamed themselves the ternative. Indeed, it was the human dimen- Democratic Left Alliance, took 20 percent of sion, Hegel's "negative conscience," that the seats of the Sejin, the Polish parliament. slowly but irresistibly chipped away at the Similar prospects loom large in Hungary's established order. And it is this human dimen- fortl~comingelections. sion that is so essential to the making of the new societies. an it be that the Adam Michniks I11 fact, the most perplexing issues con- and the VAclav Havels were wrong? fronting postcoin~nunisminvolve the inargin- Does anything remain of the great alization of the former dissidents and the vin- promises of antipolitics?Will Eastern Europe dictiveness of those who did not engage in be able to escape its current predicament and resistance during the decades of communism construct workable liberal institutions and but who now posture as apostles of purity and procedures? intransigence. A whole political set seems to The questions are disturbing not only behave left the political scene. Their successors cause they bear on Eastern Europe's iminedi- are primarily the former inhabitants of what ate future but also because they touch on the used to be called the "gray arean-the realm larger issue of the universal validity of liberal between the communist institutions and the democracy and the very possibility of seaini~g dissident counterculture. Although Have1 is pluralist governments in countries that have little still president of the Czech Republic, for ex- democratic "usable past." While they do not ample, his position is largely ceremonial, his address such questions directly, three recently influence 011 political decisions minimal. published books shed valuable light on the un- Fonner dissidents are seen as losers, quixotic folding story of civic self-reclamation. characters, dreamers little in touch with the hard In The Walls Came Tumbling Dow, Rice realities of postcoin~nurdsm.At worst, they are University l~istorianGale Stokes offers a attacked as leftists, troublemakers, moralistic needed preamble to the current predicament. preachers. Given tlus turn of events, one wishes His book is an authoritative if somewhat all the more that Stokes's lustory of the prelude workmanly survey of the dynamics of the to 1989 provided a closer look at the dissidents Soviet bloc after 1968. In Stokes's telling, the and the occupants of the gray area-at both Soviets' prompt suppression of the Czech re- their values and their ways of operating. formist experiment concluded a chapter in the history of Eastern Europe: the story of the ef- n The Birth of Freedom, Andrew Nagorski, fort to change things from above. Following Newstueek's correspondent for Central ELI- the debacle of 1968, change was to come from Iropean affairs, brings us closer to this kind outside the party, from the restored civic as- of investigation. Interviewing various inem- sociations, or what Czech philosopl~erVAclav bers of the new political class, he shows us a Benda called a "parallel polis." group whose ambition is to sever all links to While Stokes describes this grassroots the past, especially to the dissidents. Czech activism and unofficial civic ferment skillfully, prime minister V6clav Klaus, a strong propo- he seems to hold to the questionable and nent of liberal economics, never formally somewhat contradictory notion that the revo- joined the dissident circles during the cornmu- lutions of 1989 were the effect of the gradual nist era. Today, he explains to Nagorski, with

78 WQ SPRING 1994 so much practical work to be done, experience learned so well the dangers of too much for- as a dissident should not be considered a profes- getting." sional qualification. There is, of course, a genuine need to set- Nagorski lets us hear from the dissidents tle accounts with the past. But as Hungary's as well. Father Vhclav Maly, a former Czech president ~rphdGoncz has pointed out, this dissident now completely devoted to his should take place in the form of historical priestly duties, is more cynical about the after- analysis and public discussion, rather than math of 1989. Because many people had col- through exceptional and always dangerous laborated with the communists in some way, forms of "corrective justice." Otherwise, de- Maly relates, the dissidents annoyingly per- coinin~mizationserves all too easily as a vin- sonify whatever guilt they have: "It's a covert dictive battle cry for conservatives of old and pleasure to push them out of politics." new stripes, populists obsessed with the pu- Had Nagorski included Romania in his rity of the nation, and nationalists caught up research, he would have discovered the same in paranoid fantasies of foreign conspiracies. pattern. At first, the few dissidents who chal- The new elites have to choose, Nagorski says, lenged the Ceausescu despotism were between governing and settling personal praised; then, after the new regime was in- scores. The ghosts of the past will not vanish stalled in December 1989, they were until lucidly scrutinized; the surprising return marginalized and slandered. Similarly, dissi- of the former communists in Poland may of- dents in the former East Germany, primarily fer the best motivation. intellectuals, have become the targets of vicious attacks from people who never lifted a he other serious challenge to pluralism finger to oppose the old regime. involves the rise of the new ethnocen- At the same time, ironically, there has tric movements. This trend is not only been tremendous social pressure to identify the unenviable hallmark of the southeastern and bring to justice those responsible for years part of the region, the Balkans. It also stalks of repression.The ambiguities of "de-coimnu- the streets (more quietly, to be sure) of Cen- nization" are extensively analyzed not only by tral Europe. Boulevards have been named Nagorski but also by Eva Hoffman in Exit into after former war criminals, former fascist History. Both focus 011 the same story of a dictators have received official reburials, and Czech dissident who was accused of cooperat- Gypsies, Jews, and liberals are again being ing informally with the secret police, and who as scapegoated for past and present troubles. a result saw his political career destroyed by in- Nagorski examines the case of the Hungar- nuendo and uncoiifmned allegations. ian populist writer and politician Istvhn Vexing questions abound. For example, Csurka, whose extreme xenophobic views should the secret-police archives be allowed to are served up as anticomm~~nistbroadsides. govern the lives of individuals decades after What Csurka abhors are liberal values, plu- the collapse of communism? Add to this the ralism, Western-style institutions-all of obvious fact that many of the documents in which he lumps together as elements of a these archives can be manufactured or doc- "Judeo-Bolshevik plot." Although Hun- tored. Add further that a reference to a certain gary's ruling Democratic Forum forced him name of an individual may simply indicate the out, Csurka has a growing following. Nev- date he or she was interrogated-hardly an act ertheless, just as in Russia, these ethnocen- of collaboration. Being so obsessed with their tric movements-with their salvationist wounds, Eastern Europeans may be unable to rhetoric and their deinonization of foreign- balance retribution with forgiveness. As ers, minorities, and the "corrupt Westr'-are Hoffman puts it, they "may be finding the h- not likely to attract more than a strong ini- its of too much remembering after having nority in Eastern and Central Europe.

BOOKS 79 In general, while the threats to democracy dissidents simply could not cope with the are unmistakably present and the new, post- burden of bureaucratic tasks. Others could 1989 politics has turned out to be less exhila- not tolerate the discipline and hierarchy irn- rating-and certainly less pure-than we exposed by party politics. In a way, it is nor- pected, one should not overreact and see these mal that the countries of Eastern Europe are countries as sliding into new forms of now governed by political figures skeptical authoritarianism. The old regime, with its des- of romantic abstractions. As Czech political potic structure of repression and ideological philosopher Martin Palou5 recently told me, pretense, is over. There are numerous encour- it may well be that a "third generation" will aging achievements, most especially the dis- soon come to the political fore, one that will appearance of fear, the greatest force behind reconcile the moral zeal of the first and the submissiveness and passivity. Liberal values pragmatism of the second. have set roots in the region, political parties have developed, and the separation of pow- n short, the troubles of the current period, ers is more than a constitutional stipulation. including all the outbursts of rancor and The media have feverishly expanded, enjoy- Ienvy, should not lead to a revision of all ing the discovery of unhindered freedom of earlier assumptions about the Velvet Revolu- expression and opinion. And such segments tion. The point is most poignantly spelled out of "civil society" as independent unions, hu- by Nagorski: "Those opposition movements man rights organizations, and associations triumphed because of what was to rank as tlus committed to opposing bigotry and racism century's major creative intellectual achieve- have helped keep alive the ideas and spirit of ments: the development of a nonviolent strat- the dissident groups of the past. egy, an entire pl~ilosopl~yof resistance, that undermined the seemingly invincible military ronically, one of the greatest hopes for the and political might of the Soviet empire." ultimate success of democracy in these Civil society was indeed an intellectual countries may come from the most un- project based on the values of tolerance, trust, likely of sources: the metamorphosis of the old and individual freedom. Its objective was to communist no~~ze~z/claturasinto the new busi- create social energies, to inspire social activ- ness elites. Nagorski focuses on the case of ism, to stir people up and turn them from sub- Ireneusz ~ekula,a former Polish minister, in- jects of the state into citizens of a true repub- deed a chief economic planner, now turned lic. That these republics are less noble and suc- into a successful business executive represent- cessful than many would have wished is being a Polish-Japanese company. The same yond doubt. But that does not alter the funda- story could be documented ad nauseam in all mental fact that the revolutions were made in the former communist states. To most people, the name of generously defined liberal values seeing the former political rulers institutional- and not on behalf of nationalism or any other ize their economic privileges is outrageous. form of populism. But as they grow rich and benefit from the new order, such new entrepreneurs turn hostile to -Vladi~~zir Tis~~~a~zeami,associate professor of any return of the past. Cynical as they are, they politics at the University of Maryland and have already linked their fate to the existence a former Wilson Center Research Scholar, is of a market economy. author most recently of Reinventing Poli- As for the dissolution of the dissident cul- tics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to ture, the fact remains that some of the former Have1 (Free Press, 1992).

80 WQ SPRING 1994 though he was entirely serious about his politics and founded and edited for its five-year life in A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION: the 1940s an influential journal of the noncom- The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. By munist Left that was even called Politics, Michael Wreszin. Basic Books. 590 pp. $30 Macdonald was not a profound or original political thinker. By the 1950s he abandoned poli- Dwight Macdonald was probably contrary in tics altogether and moved to the New Yorker, his cradle. Of principled opposition, intellectual where lus criticisms of America were framed by independence, and educated crankiness he went glittering commercial endorsements of the very on to make a life's work. Born in Manhattan to way of life he censured. And it is as a cultural upper-middle-class parents in 1906 and edu- critic, a Savonarola against masscult, midcult, cated at scl~oolsappropriate to his class, and kitsch, that he is best remembered. The Macdonald became one of the more conspicuous merging of lug11 and low culture, the homogeni- political, social, and cultural critics in America, zation, the leveling of all values, standards, and and frequently of America, from the 1930s until distinctions struck him as another form of totali- his death in 1982. In this first biography, Wreszin tarianism. guides the reader along the dizzying course of He chose his targets well. The permissiveness Macdonald's shifting political of Webster's Third NmInterna- enthusiasms: the flirtation with tional Dictionary was an abdica- communism, the embrace of tion of responsibilityby an edu- Trotskyite socialism, the unre- cated elite and encouraged an mitting anti-Stalinism, the en- ignorance of tradition; it mir- during opposition to totalitari- rored "a plebeian attitude to- anism and nationalism and the ward language." The "revised state, the pacifism, the ill-con- standard version" of the Bible cealed impatience with the gave up the grandeur of the masses, the deep cultural con- King James version and substi- servatism. Perhaps it's no surprise that, by the tuted a blandness all 60symptomatic of American end of his life, Macdonald had become a radical cultural hfe at midcentury. Macdonald compared even a Republican could love. the revisers' work to the bombing of Dresden. After graduating from Yale University in the Style was everything to him: An idea did not late 1920s, Macdonald worked for Henry Luce's exist apart from the words used to express it. Fortune, using the capitalist forum to write sym- The possibility that the Bible-a book of faith, pathetically of communists. During the 1920s after all-might be comprehended more easily and 1930s he believed that liberal democracy in in its plain new dress by millions of people would the Western world was finished, a casualty of the not have occurred to him, and might have been rid- World War. Dictatorship was no alternative culed if it had. In fact, a good deal seems not to have (though he did retain some reluctant admiration occurred to him, wluc11 is why he frequently ap- for the dictators of the time).That left Macdonald pears naive and a bit ridiculous, in his personal seeking some third way between contending life no less than in his politics. By the 1960s and forces, as he was often, to do in life, like Moses 1970s, Macdonald was smoking pot and protest- negotiating the Red Sea. ing against Vietnam and fellow-traveling with But he was rarely as successful as Moses. He the youth movement, his belly hanging bare over opposed World War 11, for example-both sides his belt and a cocktail serving as compass. were brutal and reprehensible-and argued for Wreszin's biography takes Macdonald from a pacifist middle course. But as evidence of the cradle to grave and moves him dutifully tluough Holocaust began to emerge, he had no choice but all the crowds and controversies between. But to cast a cooler eye on Germany than he was Macdonald may be a 300-page subject trapped naturally disposed to do. in a 500-page book. The length would be forgiv- Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, able if Wreszin wrote with Macdonald's own

BOOKS 81 ~niscl~ievo~~snessand wit. ("The Ford Founda- fluence of sometime-revolutionary and future tion is a large body of money surrounded by a royalist Georges Sorel. Under his direction, it lot of people who want some.") Perhaps only an became an antipolitical movement that called for autobiography would have done the man justice. direct action by workers, demonized capitalists If he had lived to read this book, he would no (but not capitalism), and championed moral re- doubt have been flattered by all the attention, well generation rather than economic transformation deserved after all. And then, honest Dwight to the as the avatar of revolution. Sorel imagined that end, he would have turned on it with his rapier. workers would be moved to violence not by a sensible platform of reform but by a cluliastic call to arms, with apocalypse to follow~orwhat he THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY. By called the General Strike. Zeeu Sternhell with Mario Szmjder and Main Ashen. How did syndicalism's passionate advocacy Trans. by David Maisel. Princeton. 338 pp. $29.95 of class warfare turn into a desire for war between nations? How did a putatively leftist de- Fascism has never received the respect it desire to transform a whole society for the sake of serves-or so Sternhell has spent nearly two social justice evolve into a national socialist decades arguing. A professor of political science manifesto for autl~oritariansocial engineering? at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he maintains Sternhell argues that such tendencies lay barely that fascism is neither a bizarre by-product of dormant within Sorel's own theories. The Gen- World War I nor a tl~o~~ghtlessMiddle-European eral Strike blurs easily into national mobilization detour into authoritarianism. Rather, it is a full- for war, while an acceptance of capitalism's in- fledged ideology in its own right. Formed by the evitability lends itself to quietism on questions confluence of the 19th century's two major ide- of class and the economy. ologies, socialism and nationalism, fascism must But Italy in the teens was also characterized be analyzed with all the analytical rigor applied by fiscal insolvency and jingoistic chauvinism, to its major rivals, liberalism and communism. which produced a renewed faith in such sources Moreover, Sternhell sees in the cultural milieu of communal authority as the army and the of fin-de-siecle Europe~itsnihilism, its disgust church. Sternhell provides a strikingly simple with the universals of Enlightenment thinking, quacks-like-a fascist test: Those leftist intellectu- its festering national and racial cl~a~~vinism-a als who abandoned Marxist calls for economic seedbed for the political ideals that were even- transformation and spoke of "moral elevation," tually to make ex-socialists such as Benito 'etlucal transformation," and the purging of "para- Mussolini into dictators. sites" instead of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie Sternhell's previous book, Neither Right nor were, or were on the way to becoming, fascists. Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1986),generated a This book is so densely documented that storm of controversy and brought on one suc- patches of comparatively thin analysis stand out. cessful libel suit, primarily because Sternhell It is quite strange, for example (though many suggested that French intellectual life in the critics will say it is not strange at all), that in mak- 1920s and '30s was rife with fascism. His new ing his case for the intellectual complexity and co- book has already provoked a similar contro- herence of fascist ideology Stemhell should have versy in Italy, although this time his analysis is so meticulously documented its leftist origins focused on the movement he believes initiated while leaving so murky its rightist wellsprings. the final descent into fascism-syndicalism. If He remains conspic~~o~~slysilent about the socialism is fascism's godmother on the Left and Catholic corporatism and old-guard Italian con- nationalism its godmother on the Right, syndi- servatism that did so much to put fascism into calism is its disreputable father, of troublesome power and that, as Sternhell rather grudgingly origins and questionable intentions. admits, "finally produced a regime from which Launched in the 1890s in France as a trade- all elements of socialist origin were banished." unionist ideology not too different from Marx- Still, The Birth of Fascist Ideology adds up to ism, syndicalism rapidly mutated under the in- compelling intellectual history. Stemhell forces us

82 WQ SPRING 1994 to acknowledge tliat it is not "age-old hatreds" but new combinations of political theory and lustorical contingency that we need to fear. After all, in 1912 Mussolini was a vaguely leftist editor of Utopia. By 1934 he was congratulating luinself on having "buried tlie putrid corpse of liberty."

Arts & Letters

THE BAUHAUS: Masters and Students by Themselves. Ed. by Frank W~ifford.Overlook. 328 vp. $85

InFrom Baiihnus to Our House (1981),Tom Wolfe wittily argued that Bauhaus architects-figures such as Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rolie, who gathered and taught at the influential Ger- man design scliool between the wars-were narrow-minded soldiers of socialism who created unadorned, ugly buildings that sacrificed tlie aesthetic and practical desires of the individual JU Li for an ideological ideal. "Every child," Wolfe AUGUST charged, "[now] goes to school in a building tliat SEPTEMBER looks like a duplicating-machine replacement- parts wliolesale distribution wareliouse." "a preference for the creative," Gropius consciously Wolfe's sarcastic indictment of the Bauliaus lias brought together people with different arid conflict- now become part of tlie conventional wisdom ing views. about the German design scliool. But tlie history One of those people was Hannes Meyer, a and influence of the Bauliaus are a bit more com- Marxist who believed aesthetics should play no plicated, as this first high-quality, full-scale art role in design. Gropius chose him in 1926 to head book on tlie scliool reveals. tlie newly formed arcliitecture department and Whitford, an art historian, lias culled first- then to succeed him as director two years later, person accounts from art critics, journalists, and but Meyer's attempts to steer the Bauliaus to- politicians of the day, as well as from the Bau- ward communist purity repeatedly fell flat. His liauslers themselves, and supplemented the followers were few, and he met formidable re- usual reproductions of paintings and product sistance from independent-minded artists such designs with such original documents as notes, as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In 1930, sketches, postcards, and book jackets. Although one Mies van der Rolie replaced Meyer and tossed of the aims of the school was to create economically tlie party line out. Unfortunately, tlie school, efficientliousing for workers, the book shows that which had moved from Weimar to Dessau and tlie Bauliaus was anything but a source of dogina- ultimately to Berlin to flee Nazi repression, was tisin, political or otherwise. Founded by Walter finally shut down three years later. Gropius in Weimar, tlie scliool was devoted to While the Baulia~~slerswere trying to unite uniting all of the arts under arcliitecture, which form with function, their guiding principles, as Gropius considered the supreme art, and to en- this book makes clear, were always aesthetic hancing quality of life through design tliat was ones-line, balance, and beauty. Indeed, the Bau- both economical and artistically sensitive. Re- liaus was responsible for some of the more cel- maining true to his original manifesto, wliich ebrated buildings of this century, including called for "the avoidance of all prescription" and Gropius's Bauhaus scliool building in Dessau,

BOOKS 83 with its spectacular expanse of exterior glass undervalue some of the simpler (but no less wrapped elegantly around the workshop wing. important) pleasures of art, including sentiment And the Bauhaus's influence in the United States and story, a bias that in turn has contributed to the has been on balance positive, bringing a clean, margmalization of serious literature to tlus day. streamlined look not only to architecture (see, for Yet it is hard not to feel, even on this strictly example, the indisputably gracious Mies Lake literary point, that Carey presses too far in one Shore apartments in Chicago),but also to graph- direction, never acknowledging the possibility ics, furniture, and consumer products. Most of of a more generously motivated concern. the ugly "modem" buildings that Wolfe (rightly) Weren't modern intellectuals right to be op- denounces were designed not by Gropius, Mies, posed to the oversimplifying and sensationaliz- or their students but by architects who clumsily ing tendencies of a modern popular culture that appropriated the deceptively simple look of began to emerge at the turn of the century? modern architecture and have now given it a Carey, a professor of literature at Oxford Univer- bad name. sity, plays too easily the fnend of populism when he discounts the virtues of difficulty. He would seemingly reduce art to entertainment. And do- THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MASSES: ing so, he ends up indulging in a form of counter- Pride and Prejudice among the Literary snobbery, as when he asserts that a person like Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. By John Carey. Sf. Leopold Bloom would never read the novel in Martin's Press. 256 pp. $19.95 which he figures so centrally, James Joyce's Ulysses, because more than any other 20th-cen- That turn-of-the-century literati were by and large tury novel, "it is for intellectuals only." hostile toward the masses hardly comes as news. But art-important as it is-is not all that is Every British literature survey adverts to the aris- at stake here. Carey sees literary values shaping tocratic elitism and snobbery of W. B. Yeats, Ezra political and social attitudes. And, again, there Pound, and other masters of modernism. It comes is great virtue in his driving home just how ugly as no greater revelation that the intellectuals' notion and inexcusable many of the opinions of literary of the "n~asses"was largely a convenient fiction, intellectuals were. Too often these have been spun from such demographic facts as the popula- lightly passed over, but Carey shouts where oth- tion explosion (wluch in Europe was marked by a ers have whispered. We learn of the extent of jump from 180 n-ulhon to 460 million people be- H. G. Wells's obsession with eugenics and his tween 1800 and 19141, rapid suburbanization, and horror of undesirable types and races. We hear the growth of the clerkly trades. of George Gissing's vitriolic contempt for de- What distinguishes Carey's examination of mocracy and his yearning for a Nietzschean su- all this is what he makes of it: very much, one perman. We are treated to the full blast of might say in his favor; too much, one might ob- Wyndham Lewis's fulminations against subur- ject. Consider, for example, the modernist cult of ban man and his ghastly paeans to Nazi storm difficulty,the urge to make the art object as com- troopers. ("The Anglo-Saxon would feel reas- plex and demanding as possible. Carey at- sured at once in the presence of these straight- tributes this occultism entirely to the literary forward young pillars of the law.") And Carey artist's contempt for the vulgar, uneducated rightly derides Ezra Pound's excuse for his anti- tastes of the common man, and Carey is not al- Semitism-"a suburban prejudiceu-as obscur- together wrong. Many of the archmodernists ing the true high-culture origins of his attitude. held that only the priestly few should have ac- But Carey insists upon a simple determinism cess to Art; after all, Art was intended to sepa- where a more nuanced analysis is called for. rate the human wheat from the (barely) human Modernist, elitist notions could as easily be used chaff.T. S. Eliot's decree that poets "must be dif- to attack Nazism as to underwrite it, and they ficult" was widely understood and approved by were. It is more than an oversight not to mention those whom Coleridge had dubbed the clerisy. that Gissing's beloved Nietzsche specifically Such willful obscurantism led the modernists to loathed everything about anti-Semitism, includ-

84 WQ SPRING 1994 ing the race-thinking behind it. Much similar field (1714Ã‘70)whose wildly successful revival denial of the complex play of ideas makes it meetings in America and in England "turned a possible for Carey to reach his banner-headline portion of the Protestant Christian ministry conclusion: "The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that away from intellectual preparation and instruc- it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but tion toward emotional exhorting," according to one firmly rooted in European intellectual ortho- Moore. Before long it was an accepted principle in doxy." To which one can respond only with the many holy quarters that ministers should borrow Scotch verdict: Not proved. methods from the theater to stir up audience enthusiasm. By the 1830s, Walt Whitrnan could call churches "the most important of our amuse- Philosophy & Religion ments." The pattern was repeated over and over. No SELLING GOD: American Religion in the sooner did clergymen denounce the dime novel Marketplace of Culture. By R. Laurence Moore. or television than some enterprising colleague Oxford. 336 pp. $25 was picking up a pen or daubing on makeup for the cameras. Americans worship both the Almighty Dollar Moore strives mightily to appreciate some of and, if opinion surveys are to be believed, the the benefits of this "commercialized religion, Almighty far more fervently than do the citizens observing, for example, that the notion of faith as of any other Western country. Such dual loyalty something to be sold rather than imposed pro- seems less incongruous if one considers that one motes religious toleration. But of course it is more of the sources of America's religious vitality is interesting to ask what it has all cost. He discerns a the absence of an established church. Churches general thinxTU1g of religion: Spread everywhere in have been forced (or allowed) to compete for American culture, from self-help manuals to Chris- souls, much as McDonald's and Burger King vie tian rap music, it seems to be nowhere. for hungry mouths. Moore, a Come11 University Surprisingly,Moore has relatively little to say historian, might say that the link between fast about today's televangelists, seeming to regard food and religion is more than a useful analogy. them as regrettable but inevitable products of a Much that we mistake for the secularization of world where denominations must compete. It American society, he believes, "has to do not would have been interesting to get some idea of with the disappearance of religion but its how "consumer satisfaction" with religion has commodification." changed over the past two centuries of "commod- Since the late 18th century, when the new di- ification," not to mention how the competition for versions offered by the nation's growing com- new sods has affected non-Protestant sects. mercial culture-theater, cheap novels, and the Moore reserves most of his criticism for the like-began to threaten religious authority, mainline Protestant churches that embraced the church leaders have borrowed commercial Social Gospel in the late 19th century-the very methods to spread the Word. One of the first to denominations that most disdained commercial discover the magic of the marketplace was the methods. He argues that the Social Gospel was Calvinistic Methodist preacher George White- nevertheless the last word in "commod-

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BOOKS 85 ification," a complete theological capitulation to opher's insights to issues ranging from nuclear the era's emerging consumerist ethos. Ministers warfare to the use of cosmetics by scl1oolteac11- such as Harry Emerson Fosdick eagerly applied ers, and did so with a literary skill that leaves the latest business principles to the management most other writers green with envy. Even his of churches and the advancement of Progressive technical philosophy is full of vivid touches. social reform. Ultimately, mainline Protestants Moorehead, a British journalist, wisely skirts the were left "with the reputation that they had no faith impossible task of explaining the foundations of stronger than what lay in the collection plate." mathematics. Instead, she sticks to what drove Only in his last two pages does Moore reveal Russell to study such things-a longing for the lus ultimate criticism. A commercialized church, timeless and absolute truth about the world, he warns, cannot alert Americans to the dangers which he thought lay in logic. She also explains of needless consumerism-the real meaning of how he abandoned his first and highest love. Adam and Eve's story, he says-and to the result- Ludwig Wittgenstein, his one-time protege, per- ing environmental apocalypse he foresees. If that suaded him that logic was no more than a mat- is so, it would take another book to prove it. ter of human convention; after civilized Europe plunged into World War I, Russell lowered lus sights and looked to politics, education, social re- BERTRAND RUSSELL: A Life. By Caroline form, and more enlightened attitudes toward sex Moorehead. Viking. 596 pp. $30 and marriage as the route to human happiness. Russell's cl~ildl~oodwas a gloomy one. His In 1961, an 89-year- radical parents died when he was a small child, old Bertrand Russell and he was brought up by his elderly grand- , was sent to jail for mother and assorted governesses. Lady Russell tried to keep Bertie pure. She failed. He met and after many battles married Alys Pearsall Smith-like his fourth and last wife, a daughter merit. He had been of Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr. This all fueled the object of contro- his later passion for sexual enlightenment. Para- versy before. In 1940, doxically, Lady Ottoline Morrell, who became the New York court his mistress in 1910 and effected his liberation, that overturned his did not much care for sex with Bertie; it was his appointment to City mind she fell in love with. College denounced He was amazingly clever and loved Cam- his logic lectures as bridge, but he could never be confined to the lecherous, libidi- academy. He ran for Parliament in 1907 as a nous, lustful, vener- women's suffrage candidate, fighting for a seat ous, erotomaniac, he could not win in order to stick up for an un- aphrodisiac, irreverent, and narrow-nunded. No popular cause. In 1916 he threw away his Cam- easy man to live with, he married four times, bridge career to campaign against the war. Trin- often wreaking emotional havoc on his wives ity College dismissed him from his lectureship, and children. and in 1918 he was jailed for insulting an ally. Bertrand Russell was also a Nobel Prize-win- (He said the U.S. Army would stay on in Europe ning philosopher who wrote 83 books, includ- after the war to shoot striking workers.) ing Pnnapia Mnthematica (1910), and set the In the 1920s and '30s he wrote important es- shape of pl~ilosopl~yin the English-speaking says on socialism, the fate of the Soviet Union, world. Though the contrast was rather extreme, appeasement, and the nature of power, but emo- both Russells were Russell. tional discord bulked larger. In 1921 he married As Moorehead relates in her engaging biog- Dora Black, had two children, and opened a raphy, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) did not school-Beacon Hill. Its finances demanded con- know how to be dull. He brought a philos- stant lecture tours in the United States and short

86 WQ SPRING 1994 articles for the Hearst newspapers ("Going to tlie of blaspliemy trials, political persecutions, and Cinema," "Sliould Pliilosopliers Smoke Ci- otlier related oddities, the charge-no matter gars?," "Wlio May Wear Lipstick?"). Tlie mar- who brings it-tends to blur witli astonishing riage broke up in tlie early 1930s. He then mar- speed into related offenses and semioffenses ried Peter Spence, a woman 30 years younger sucli as heresy, impiety, sacrilege, apostasy, tlian he. She left him in 1949. Finally, in 1952 lie idolatry, and, as tlie early Catholic Cliurcli de- married Edit11 Finch and experienced 17years of scribed the Arian heresy, "pestilential error." quiet bliss: an interestingbut not edifying record. Levy's story wends its way from the original, Mooreliead only occasionally raises an eyebrow strict Judaic definition of blaspliemy as "reviling at the discrepancy between Russell's mastery of God by name" (wliicli, the Name being un- logic and his weak grasp of the realities of otlier known and unpronounceable, presented insu- people's lives. perable difficulties of prosecution) tlirougli the The post-1945 Russell is the one Americans uncontrollable political bloating of the concept remember. This Russell fought for the Nuclear in early Christianity up tlirougli the age of reli- Test Ban Treaty, wrote to John Foster Dulles and gious wars and the later struggles to distinguish Nikita Khruslicliev to demand nuclear disarma- between blaspliemy and obscenity in English ment, lectured John Kennedy on Cuba, and led common law. The excitement mounts with the a last, bitter campaign against the Vietnam War. great 19th-century blaspliemy trials that ad- Mooreliead is pained by tlie way Russell was vanced freedom of tlie press in England, includ- taken over by Ralph Sclioennian during this fi- ing those tliat made a martyr of the printer Ri- nal crusade. Schoenman was a left-wing gradu- chard Carlile, jailed for distributing Thomas ate student at tlie London Scliool of Economics Paine's Age of Reason. These trials in turn led to who came to see Russell in 1960; lie stayed to tea, sucli legal landmarks as tlie Trinity Act of 1813, then to manage Russell's affairs for the next eight wliicli decriminalized questioning tlie doctrine years. He destroyed innumerable old friend- of tlie Trinity. ships, wasted large amounts of money, liam- Levy's own views about tlie boundaries of pered every good cause witli wliicli lie was in- blasphemy are obvious from tlie book's dust volved, and made Russell look ridiculous. jacket, which shows tlie notorious "Piss Christ" Mooreliead shares tlie universal relief tliat al- photograph by Andr6s Serrano in giant closeup. most tlie last thing Russell did was break witli Levy thus implicitly rejects tlie view, an impor- Sclioenman and write a memorandum explain- tant one in tlie recent art wars, tliat tlie context ing why. Can we decently say tliat a rip-roaring in wliicli such an image is shown or tlie use to atheist like Russell redeemed himself? We can wluch it is put has no effect on wlietlier it is offen- certainly rejoice tliat lie died as clear-headed as sive. Exactly how the author, a professor emeritus he had lived. of history at Claremont Graduate Scliool, arrives at his conclusion tliat tlie charge of blaspliemy is meaningless in a secular society remains murky. BLASPHEMY: Verbal Offense Against the But there's so much material here that die argument Sacred, From Moses to Salnian Ruslidie. By can be treated as secondary, especially since if s Leonard W. Levy. Knopf. 688 pp. $35 clear tliat, on this subject at least, people are more interested in ammunition tlian in new ideas. Tlie question of blasphemy-what it is, what harm it does, wlietlier it can even be a crime in a secular or pluralistic society-calls forth strong Contemporary Affairs yet foggy views from across tlie political spectrum. Unlike obscenity, it doesn't belong to tliat THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE category of things you know when you see; the SPEECH AND IT'S A GOOD THING, TOO. many authorities, religious and otherwise, who By Stanley Fish. Oxford Univ. Press. 332 pp. $25 liave tried to construe it as sucli liave only added to the confusion. As Levy shows in his history While tlie current impulse in tlie so-called

BOOKS 87 "canon wars" may be toward conciliation, signed to continue along in them as best they there's little likelihood that Fish will have a seat can. "Focus cannot be expanded," he argues, "it at the peace table if multiculturalists and tradi- can only be adjusted." Therefore, Fish loathes tionalists bury their differences and shake hands any abstract concept-"fairness," "merit," "neu- on the White House lawn. Fish, a professor of trality''-that promises to free us from our per- literature and law at Duke University, is an id- spectives and guide us toward transcendent iosyncratic and infuriating army of one. Wel- truth or open-minded flexibility. It is always, in coming the charge that he is a "contemporary his view, a false promise. sophist," he does battle with all sides while coyly As a conscientious gadfly, Fish deflates other refusing to stake out an agenda of his own. His people's ideals with impressive panache. But he battle cry is "Hearkening to me will lead to noth- has hardly disposed of those ideals for good. Fish ing. Hearkening to me, from my point of view, is barely pauses to consider, for instance, the pos- supposed to lead to nothing." sible hazards of speech codes and other restric- Fish's latest collection is a smorgasbord of tions on free speech. It's easy to suspect that his law, literature, and campus politics. Last year the cautious support of such policies is based less on author traveled the country with the right-wing a conviction that they are sound than on his ir- polemicist Dines11 D'Souza, and several of the ritation with their opponents. essays printed here are culled from their acrimo- Although Fish advises all thinkers to forsake nious exchanges. In them, Fish argues that much 'theory" and dwell in the "local," it is plain that of the debate about political correctness has he is most comfortable operating on a theoreti- taken place under false pretenses. Conservative cal level. He is more aroused by the fact that all critics of campus radicalism have disguised their our perspectives are partial than he is by the own partisan ends by appealing to "neutral" content of any particular perspective. Like his standards of high-mindedness, tolerance, and fellow pragmatist Richard Rorty, who gestures "common ground." They have exaggerated the toward the end of plxilosopl~yand the beginlung spread of the multicultural curriculum and mis- of an age of free-floating conversation without stated their reasons for opposing it. And they ever quite getting around to joining that conver- have disingenuously opposed the "politicization sation himself, Fish apparently would prefer to of the humanities" while tl~emselvesoccupying travel busily across several disciplines than find positions of considerable power and prestige. a local habitation of his own. This champion of Fish casts similar aspersions upon the aca- the situated self proudly keeps himself afloat. demic Left. While he agrees with New Histori- cists and other practitioners of advanced literary criticism who declare that everything is "l~istori- Science & Technology cal" or "political," he denounces their efforts to judge the worthiness of critical enterprises by the SILENT TRAVELERS: Germs, Genes and the degree to which they are historical or political. Immigrant Menace. By Alan Kraut. To those critics who assume that the study of a HarperCollins. 352 pp. $25 poem's political implications is more properly "historical" than the study of its aesthetic prin- Americans of the late ciples, Fish replies that aesthetics is itself a 1Gstori- 19th century were cal tradition, and one that weighed heavily on po- ambivalent about im- ets in the past. These scholars' political aspirations, migration. Because in short, are both self-contradictory and naive: the nation's booming 'Those who conflate and confuse literary and po- industrial economy litical work end up doing neither well.'' created a need for la- Although Fish's targets are scattered, his borers, popular opin- work clings to a central notion: that human be- ion grudgingly toler- ings cannot get any kind of critical distance from ated the admittance their activities. Instead, they are simply con- of foreigners. At the

88 WQ SPRING 1994 same time, as Kraut, an American University forced lawmakers to pass legislation protecting historian, shows, Americans' xenophobic ten- the health of all U.S. workers. dencies (never too deeply buried) were stirred The story that Kraut tells is not completely up by contemporary beliefs about the origins of behind us. The government's classification of disease. According to the dominant theory of the Haitians during the 1980s as a high-risk category late 19th century, infections and epidemics were because of AIDS and more recent worries about caused by decaying organic matter that pro- foreigners infected with tuberculosis show that vided a hospitable environment for disease- some things remain the same. causing "contagia." By popular logic, the damp, filthy tenements where immigrants lived offered a perfect environment for the contagia to flour- UNCOMMON SENSE: The Heretical Nature ish. Branding immigrants agents of disease, of Science. By Alan Cromer. Oxford. 240 pp. $23 Americans cried out for measures to protect the public health. The primary stumbling block to scientific States responded with various quarantinemea- progress, says Cromer, has always been the hu- sures, wluch further stigmatized newcomers as a man mind: It cannot naturally perform feats of menace to the national welfare. By the 1890s, logical thought. This explains the persistence of American concern over disease-canyu~gforeigners belief in animism, spiritualism, and UFOs, and had reached such a pitch that Congress passed an also why, in Cromer's experience, American act requiring immigrants to have physical exarni- college students "don't have the critical thinking nations before departing from their native countries skills needed to distinguish the fanciful claims and after arriving in the United States. Those who of astrology from the extraordinary claims of failed were barred from entry. astronomy." The collision of cultures only began at Ellis According to Croiner, a professor of physics Island, where an authority-cowed immigrant at Northeastern University, the unnaturalness of could be rejected as a mental defective for dis- logical thought also explains why science has not playing anxiety in front of the uniformed Pub- experienced a steady progression from the dis- lic Health Service physicians. Misunderstand- covery of fire to the unlocking of the atom. In- ings and distrust continued thereafter. American stead, it has followed the bumpy course de- health professionals and reformers tried to scribed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Sci- preach the gospel of sanitation to immigrants etzfific Revolutions (1962): "a succession of tradi- living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. tion-bound periods punctuated by non-cumula- But many foreigners chafed at the exhortations tive breaks." The ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, of intrusive Americans asking them to abandon and Isaac Newton displaced existing notions their traditions. Preferring to rely on amulets and precisely because such thinkers came up with herbal remedies to cure disease, many immi- revolutionary ways of viewing the universe. grants distrusted hospitals ("a place you go to Cromer says that the reason science first ap- die") and organized American medicine in gen- peared in ancient Greece, and that so many ad- eral ("cold and impersonal"). vances occurred during the Renaissance, was Yet, as Kraut relates, the history of immigra- that people at both times developed the unusual tion and public health has some bright spots. The ability to break through "the barrier of swell of immigration from the 1880s to the 1920s egocentricism" that characterizes most human brought improvements in health care for all thought. Greek culture, with its emphasis on Americans. Hospital construction boomed. The assembly and a "maritime economy that pre- institution of the "school nurse" came as a boon vented isolation and parochialism," gave the to all children who were not receiving proper Greeks an opportunity to test new ideas and dis- medical attention at home. Yearly physical and card ones that were useless. Renaissance think- eye examinations for schoolchildren became ers, rediscovering Greek ideas through medi- mandatory. And, finally, the infusion of foreign- eval texts, adopted Greek-style methods of learn- ers into the labor force, often in dangerous jobs, ing and thus were able to lay the groundwork for

BOOKS 89 their own scientific discoveries. is quickly dispelled. His "astonishing hy- Why is scientific thinking so difficult? Cromer pothesis" is simply that what we call self, accepts the view of Swiss psycl~ologistJean consciousness, the psyche, the ego, or the Piaget that only people who advance through soul can be explored by ordinary scientific the four developmental stages-sensorimotor, means-through brain anatomy, nerve preoperational, concrete operational, and formal morphology, and the physiology of nerve operational-are equipped to handle the com- function. It is "astonishing," Crick main- plexities of physics or advanced mathematics. In tains, because so few psycl~ologists,neu- an ideal progression, an individual will have rologists, or neurobiologists have at- reached the formal operational level-capable of tempted to study consciousness by scien- solving several problems simultaneously,able to tific means, and because the history of re- theorize, and so forth-by adolescence. ligion, pl~ilosophy,and popular belief has Unfortunately, as Piaget himself noted, the long separated mind from body in a com- only way for people to advance from one stage fortable dualism. to the next is through the "accumulation of rel- Crick, who with James Watson discovered evant experiencesu-learning the ins and outs of the structure of DNA in 1953, is not deterred word problems, for instance, or understanding by the huge gaps in our knowledge. He wants the basis of mathematical proofs. By almost any scientists to penetrate the black box we call the measure, current American educational meth- mind by considering hereditary pathologies, ods are not providing these experiences. strokes, brain injuries, single-nerve stimula- Cromer's suggestions for countering this defi- tions, histological analysis of the cortical and ciency-compressing public education after thalamic regions of the visual system, and es- grade seven into an intensive, two-year "acad- pecially experiments using primates and other emy'' that would develop reasoning skills, and mammals. How do the neurons in different then, after further optional study, admitting the regions of the brain transmit information to most promising students into college at age 16- each other? How is the information stored and are provocative, if full of practical pitfalls. processed so that we can construct a symbol In the course of Uncommon Sense, Cromer of the external reality that we then recognize demolishes many popular science myths, in- as our reality? Focusing on visual perception, cluding the notion that extraterrestrials will visit Crick shows that the final representation of or attempt to contact Earthlings, or that human- how we see the world is the product of much kind, given the known laws of physics, will ever "unconscious" analysis. develop the capability for interstellar travel. (A Crick's rallying cry for psycl~ologists,neu- moment of silence, please, for the Trekkies in our rologists, neurobiologists, and molecular bi- audience.) Real science, Cromer concludes, will ologists to turn serious attention to the "search likely find its new frontiers much closer to home: for the soul" is much like Erwin Schrodinger's "It is from the fields of molecular biology, brain attempt to bring physicists to genetics in his research, and computer technology that the ep- influential Wiaf Is Life? (1946). While the sci- ochal discoveries of tomorrow will come." entific benefits of this enterprise are indisput- able, the further demystification of such quali- tative experiences as awe and love does THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: The produce twinges of regret. As Crick Scientific Search for the Soul. By Francis Crick. writes, " 'You,' your joys and your sor- Scribner's. 336 pp. $25 rows, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the be- The title is teasing. Has Francis Crick havior of a vast assembly of nerve cells found religion in his old age? The thought and their associated molecules."

90 WQ SPRING 1994 rush

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40 West 20th St, N Y, NY 10011-4211 Call toll-free 800-872-7423 MasterCardIVISA accepted Prices subject to change POETRY JOHN CROWE RANSOM

Selected and Introduced by Anthony Hecht

ny conventionallist of the great modernist poets would begin with Eliot and Pound, Rilke, Valery, and Rirnbaud. These were not the only important poets of their era, possibly not even the greatest. One thinks of such others as Stevens, Frost, Montale, and Yeats. ButA the ones designated as are credited with changing our whole modernist mode of feeling, the voice and vocation of poetry itself. It is therefore surprising to recall that in 1926 two by no means negligible poets and com- mentators placed John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) firmly in the ranks of the modernists. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in their still-valuable Mod- ernist Poetry, say of Ransom's work that it is of a kind which, "because it is too good, has been brushed aside as a literary novelty." Graves and Riding are no mere crackpots; their book was the inspiration, according to I. A. Richards, of that touchstone of modern criticism, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The poetry-reading public of today is not inclined to bracket Ransom with the modernists, despite some eloquent defenses of his work by the likes of Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Geoffrey Hill; and Ransom's work has engendered no such devoted examination as has attended the poetry of Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, or Williams. Indeed, Ransom's poems are still read with a shocking carelessness even by those who purport to admire them. Take, for example, this observation from the headnote to Ransom's poems in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Rich- ard Ellmann and Robert OfClair: "His poem 'Philomela' describes how, pernoctating' once with Oxford students in Bagley Wood, he heard a nightingale's song and was unimpressed." (So greatly do I revere the critical acumen of the late Mr. Ellmann that I have laid the blame for this comment, whether fairly or not, at the door of his colleague.) This has about it, in my view, the same flavor of blissful incomprehension reported by Mat- thew Arnold in his essay "Science and Literature": "I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning, 'Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?' turned this line into 'Can you not wait upon

the lunatic?' " Ransom was a Rhodes Scholar, and by "pernoctating" (passing the night) he means only, and with becoming modesty, that his Oxford sojourn was briefer than that of others. The poem, as a thoughtful perusal ought to make clear, is not about the experience of hearing a nightingale in Ox- ford but about the radical break of American culture from its classical par- entage, of which the nightingale myth, represented by Philomela and de-

92 WQ SPRING 1994 rived from Ovid, is a lovely but antique and conventionalized representa- tive. Ransom is asserting that the old European tricks won't serve us anymore; in this he is adopting a stance we recognize in the work of Williams and Pound-and indeed of Eliot himself, who wrote of "the change of Philomel" as a "withered stump of time." When Ransom writes of Philomela's "fairy numbers" he means to recall Keats, and to imply that we can no longer get away with those Romantic stage props or that Keatsean mellifluousness. When he writes of her "fabulous provinces" he means that, for better or worse, the world we now live in has pretty well banished the "fabulous." Stevens was destined to take up the same theme. Ransom is sometimes called an ironist, and compared to Hardy. The characterization is fractionally useful: Ransom admired Hardy, and edited his Selected Poems. Both, moreover, employed pronounced archaisms and an- tiquated diction. Hardy did so out of love for modes of rural English speech that were disappearing in the course of his very long life. But Ransom does so for quite other reasons. His poems very often present painful anachro- nisms that endure beyond the hope of resolution: codes of outdated morality applied almost laughably to a modern or heedless world; lovers torn by ail equation of desire and ethics so perfectly balanced that they are like the proverbial donkey simultaneously attracted by two bales of hay, identical in their diametrically opposed distance from him and attraction to him, so that unable to choose, he dies of starvation midway between them. The effect is both ludicrous and pathetic, and it is this special emotional cocktail of contradictory ingredients, powerful and paradoxical, that forbids a simple response to many of Ransom's poems, that continues to puzzle and to charm, and that firmly distinguishes him from Hardy.

poem such as "Captain Carpenter" is predicated on the notion that the ideals of courtesy, chivalry, and gentlemanliness can never survive against the barbarity they are pledged to oppose, since survival would entail abandoning those very ideals and adopting the brutal ways of the enemy. And into this world of irreconcil- able paradoxes are always born the innocent, children and lovers, to whom the paradoxes are more bewildering than even to us, the poet's worldly and knowing readers. Ransom is telling us that, for all our worldliness and his, we were once as ill-equipped to cope with the world's welter of contradic- tions as the innocent; that in fact our worldliness is largely a matter of self- delusion; and when the heart of the matter is truly seen, we are as nonplussed as the veriest child. "Nonplussed" is a condition (if not a word) that Ransom is particularly gifted at eliciting in his readers, as well as de- scribing in his poems. "Brown study" is a phrase he made powerful use of. What distinguishes his poems is a mixture of elegance and bluntness, a deep respect for innocence and the codes forged to protect it, along with a refusal to give way to any romantic or archaic delusions. It is always and discon- certingly, dramatically, dialectically, a bifocal poetry.

POETRY 93 Philomela

Procne, Pl~ilomela,and Ityl~~s, Your names are liq~~id!your improbable tale Is recited in the classic ~Iuinbersof t11e nigl~ti~~~le. All, but our ~~uinbersare not felicito~is, It goes not liquidly for us.

Percl~ed011 a Roman ilex, and duly apostropl~ized, The ~Iigl~ti~~galedescanted LIII~OOvid; She 11as even appeared to the Teutons, the swilled and gravid; At Fontaii~ebleauit may be the bird was gallicized; Never was she baptized.

To England came Pl~iloi~~elawit11 her pain! Fleeing the hawk her husband; querulous ghost, She wanders wllen 11e sits 11eavy 011 his roost, Utters herself in t11e original again, The untra~~slatablerefrain.

Not to these shores she came! this other Tl~race, Environ barbarous to t11e royal Attic: How could 11er delicate dirge run democratic, Delivered in a cloudless boundless public place To an inordinate race?

I pernoctated wit11 the Oxford stude~~tsonce, And in the q~iadra~~gles,in the cloisters, 011 t11e Cl~er, Precocio~islyki~ocked at antique doors ajar, Fat~iouslyto~~ched the hems of the l~ieropl~ants, Sick of my dissonance.

I went out to Bagley Wood, I climbed t11e l~ill; Even the ~IIOOII 11ad slanted off ~IIa twinkling, I heard the sepulcl~ralowl and a few bells tinkling, Tl~erewas no more villai~~ousday to ~~nfulfil, The di~~tur~~itywas still.

Up from the darkest wood where Pl~iloinelasat, Her fairy 11~1111bersiss~~ed. W11at then ailed me? My ears are called capacio~~sb~~t they failed me, Her classics registered a little flat! I rose, and vei~omouslyspat.

Pl~iloi~~ela,Pl~ilomela, lover of song, I a111 in despair if we may make LIS wortl~y, A bantering breed sopl~isticaland swartl~y; Unto more beautiful, persistently more young, Thy fab~110~1sprovi~~ces belong.

94 WQ SPRING 1994 Piazza Piece

-1 am a gentlelnan in a d~~stcoattrying To nmke you hear. Your ears are soft and small And listen to a11 old Inan not at all, They want t11e young men's whispering and sigl~ing. BLI~see the roses 011 your trellis dying And hear the spectral singi~~gof the moon; For I must have my lovely lady soon, I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.

-1 am a lady young in beauty waiting Until my tr~~elovecomes, and tlxen we kiss. But what grey man among the vines is this Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream? Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream! I am a lady young in bea~~tywaiting.

Vision by Sweetwater

Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over To Sweetwater, said my ALIII~;and t11at was why It was like a dream of ladies sweeping by T11e willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass, and the river.

RO~~II'Ssisters and my Aunt's lily daugl~ter Laughed a11d talked, and tinkled ligllt as wrens If there were a little colony all 11e11s To go walking by the steep turn of Sweetwater.

Let t11em alone, dear ALIII~,just for one ~nin~~te Till I go fisl~ingin the dark of my mind: Where 11ave I seen before, against the wi~~d, These brigl~tvirgins, robed and bare of bollnet,

Flowing wit11 music of their strange quick tongue And adve~~turi~~gwit11 delicate paces by the stream,- Myself a cl~ild,old s~~dde~~lyat the scream From one of the white tl~roatswl~icl~ it hid among?

POETRY 95 Janet Waking

Beautifully Janet slept Till it was deeply morning. S11e woke then And thought about her dainty-feathered henl To see 110w it had kept.

One kiss she gave her mother. Only a small one gave she to 11er daddy Who would have kissed each curl of 11is shining baby; No kss at all for her brother.

"Old Chuckyl old Cl~ucky!"she cried, Running across the world upon the grass To Clmcky's 11ouse~and listening. But alas, Her Chucky had died.

It was a transmogrifying bee Came droning down on Chucky's old bald head And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled, But IIOW exceedingly

And purply did t11e knot Swell with the venom and communicate Its rigor! Now t11e poor comb stood up straight But C11~1ckydid not.

So there was Janet Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen (Translated far beyond the da~~ghtersof men) To rise and walk upon it.

And weeping fast as she had breath Janet i~nploredus, "Wake her from her sleep!" And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

96 WQ SPRING 1994 Captain Carpenter

Captain Carpenter rose up in llis prin~e "To any adversary it is fame put on 16s pistols and went riding out If 11e risk to be wounded by ~nytongue But 11ad got wellnigl~nowl~ere at that time Or burnt in two beneath my red l~eart'sflame Till 11e fell in wit11 ladies in a rout. Such are tlle perils l1e is cast anlong.

It was a pretty lady and all 11er train "But if 11e can 11e 11as a pretty clloice That played wit11 Ili~nso sweetly but before From an anatomy wit11 little to lose An 110ur slle'd taken a sword wit11 all 11er lnain Wlletller lle cut my tongue and take iny voice And twined 11im of 11is nose for evermore. Or wlletller it be my round red heart 11e cl~oose."

Captain Carpenter ~nountedup one day It was t11e neatest knave that ever was seen And rode straiglltway into a stranger rope Stepping in perfume from llis lady's bower T11at looked ui~cl~ristianbut be t11at as inay Wllo at this word put in 11is merry mien T11e Captain did not wait upon prologue. And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

But drew upon him out of 11is great lleart I would not knock old fellows in t11e dust The other swung against llinl wit11 a club But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back And cracked 11is two legs at the sl~il~nypart His weapons were the old heart in his bust And let 11in1 roll and stick like any tub. And a blade s1100k between rotten teet11 alack.

Captai~~Carpenter rode i11any a time T11e rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew 11is mind Fro111 inale and female 11e took sundry 11arn-s He wished to get llis tropl~yand depart He nlet the wife of Satan clying "1'111 Wit11 gentle apology and touch refined The she-wolf bids you s11all bear no more arms." He pierced him and produced the Captain's heart.

Tlleir strokes and counters wllistled in tlle wind God's mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now I wish 11e 11ad delivered half 11is blows I thougl~tlliin Sirs an honest gentleman But where she s110~11dllave made off like a hind Citizen 11~~bandsoldier and scholar enow T11e bitch bit off 11is arms at t11e elbows. Let jangling kites eat of 11im if tlley call.

And Captain Carpenter wit11 his ears But God's deep curses follow after those To a black devil t11at used 11in1 in this wise That shore 11iin of 11is goodly nose and ears 0 Jesus ere 11is tl~reescoreand ten years His legs and strong arnls at t11e two elbows Anotller 11ad plucked out his sweet blue eyes. And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

Captain Carpenter got up on 16s roan T11e curse of hell upon the sleek upstart And sallied from the gate in 11ell's despite Tllat got the Captain finally on 11is back I lleard luln asking in tlle griin~nesttone And took t11e red red vitals of 11is 11eart If any eneiny yet there was to figl~t? And made t11e kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

All poems are reprod~~cedfro111 Sclccfcd Pociiis byJ011irCrorue Rni~soiii(Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)and are reprinted by per11iissio11of tl~epublisl~er."PIii10111ela" a11d "Captail1 Carpe~~ter"are copyriglit @ 1924 by Alfred A. Ki~opf,11ic.; renewed 1952 by Jo1111 Crowe Ra~~so~n."Piazza Piece," "Visio~~by Sweetwater," and "Janet Waking" are copyright@ 1927by Alfred A. Knopf, Ii~c.;rei~ewed 1955 by John Crowe R~IISOI>I.

POETRY 97 Years Ago. . .

MICHAEL C. C. ADAMS Was it really - such a "good war'"? It was, if popular 111emoryis to be trusted. We knew what we were fighting for. The war was good for the econonly. It was liberati~~gfor wornen. A~~lerica~lswere united. Soldiers were proud. But Michael Ada~nsargues that nostalgia has created 21 rnisleadi~~g1eg;lcy. World War 11 was everything tllat war is: viole~~t,u~icertain, costly, and i111arena for the best-md the worst-of 11~1111anbehavior. Tltc, AIII~J.~~~MOIII~WI: Srci111c,y1. K~trIi~v,Scvicz.s Edir111. $12.95 paperback The First Strange Place Race UIK/ Sex i17 World Weir I1 Ha~~iii BETH BAILEY AND DAVID FARBER

Hawaii was the "first strange6. lace" for close to a 1i1illi011 soldiers, sailors. md 111arines 011 tlieir wa to tile 110rrol~sof war in the Pa- cific. But Hawaii was also the first strange place on a journey toward the new A111erican society that would begin to emerge in the postwar era-;I liigl~ly nob bile and volatile society of 111ixed ~icial ;111d cultural i~~flue~lces. S 14.95 paperback THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Hampden Station, Balti~l~ore.Maryla~~d 2 121 1 To order, call I-800-537-54x7 BY NELSON W. ALDRICH,JR.

Egon Scliiele's 1914 Man and Woman (Liebespar)

Wmtstrikes some as an absurd tempest in a teapot is to others a crucial battle in the gender wars. Neither side gets the larger point of the date-rape controversy, says Nelson Aldrich.

ate rape, whirlpooling, lcziltw-rape is personal. Legally, it may be true that rape is in Bosnia, the Spur Posse in South- rape, and that "date" is a needless qualifier of ern California, the Manassas penis a simple, brutal crime. Trouble is, it may cutter-sexual horror stories qualify me. The topic reminds me of squalid shuddered through the media last year, each scuffles in dimly lit rooms, of desperate moves paroxysm more horrible than the last. in the back seats of cars. Legal rape is for the The erotic mayhem got so bad it even sus- poor, the crazy, the unlucky. Date rape, I have tained an intelligent conversation for a few to say, may, at least in its broader connota- months. That's my subject-the talk, espe- tions, be for me. cially the talk about date rape and what to do The other reason for my fascination may about it. It has fascinated me. One reason, alas, have more general implications. Talk of date

DATE RAPE 99 rape is appallingly destructive for everyone, sex!" says I. And in the end (if there ever is an even for those who merely talk about it. Any- end), since no one in Humpty-Dumpty land one peering into the thick cloud of charges and really is Master, all conflicts are settled by denials can see the corpses. Hope and love force~physicalforce, or, as we say, the forces died on that date, some sort of hope, any- of law and order. way-and some sort of love. The truth was Humpty-Dumpty land has been on the another casualty. With charges of date rape, map since long before Lewis Casroll. Pick your often, one doesn't even have the consolation own Fall-with Heraclitus, Montaigne, Locke, of knowing that "someone here is lying." whenever. And one can get fetched up in that Maybe neither of them has been lying. country in the course of almost any sort of That's the worst of the destruction, isn't it? conversation. Political journalists, for example, To language, to our faith that an apparently spend most of their days there, dizzied and common language can create common under- dizzying, as they put competitive spins on the standings. Join an argument about date rape, spins of spin masters. This is dismaying and within minutes we are spinning around in enough: A pall of mistrust falls between our- a maelstrom of multiple perspectives. Round selves and our democracy, our self-govern- and round we go, down and down, until at ment. But imagine what it must be like to get last we all go gurgling out into Huinpty- into a word fight over . . . well, let's call it an Dumpty land: "intercourse event." Such fights can have consequences for the body. A raped body feels "When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty different from a body that has enjoyed a truly said in a rather scornful tone, "it means erotic moment. A rapist's body (or a "date just what I choose it to mean, neither rapist's") feels different in jail than it does at more nor less." large. ''The question is," said Alice, That was the sort of fight, and the stakes, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." that were at issue last fall, for example, when The question is," said Humpty- two undergraduates submitted their contest Dumpty, "which is to be Master-that's for mastery over an intercourse event to the all.'' arbitration of a court. The trial happened to be in London, but it might have been anywhere Huinpty-Duinpty land is where events in the English-speaking world. She said she'd like date rape may happen, or not happen, been raped. He said he'd been seduced, and simply because someone's word, or spin on a was now the victim of the woman's "self-re- word, masters all competing words, or spins. pugnance after the fact." His word was de- This land is our land. It's where we come out clared Master, it turned out, but as always in after our multiple perspectives are so thor- the woozy world of Humpty-Duinpty, it had oughly separated-each from others, each been a near thing. from itself over tiine-that all reality is sud- Nor was the contest over. Isabel Hilton, a denly up for cognitive grabs. In Hun~pty- columnist for London's Independent, confi- Dumpty land every fourth word looks like it's dently opined after the trial that wild bids for suspended between sarcastic quotation mastery such as this woman's are "an abuse marks. The simple zuasness of things is lost in of the power that many generations of femi- a dustup of desperately performative utter- nists fought for-the power to make their word ances. "Let there have been date rape!" says count and to be taken seriously" (italicsmine). you; "Let there have been some good clean But Hilton is naive. Do courts have the final

Nelson W, Aldrich, Jr. is a New York writer and the author, most recently, of Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class (Vintage). Copyright @ 1994 by Nelson W. Aldrich,}r.

100 WQ SPRING 1994 word on other words? Can anyone but God, political, specifically feminist effect. A by saying the word, make it so? buzzword here is "problematize," as in, "Why But this is the horror: that meaning for the are these women problematizing romance?" body should ever be contingent on the uses But of course the Romantics want to be and abuses of power, yours, mine, and the next Master, too, though they seem scarcely aware guy's, all mixing it up in a battle for mastery. of it. They want to be masters of the debate, to Yet so it seems. stop the spinning. It threatens something valuable to them, some broad understanding of any people find the prospect of "life," the common language that underwrites endless semantic warfare ex- a pleasing, morale-sustaining arrangement of tremely disagreeable. I know I (moral) relationships and possibilities. do, which is why I am sympa- Nietzsche called such an arrangement a "11o- thetic to the largest and loudest group in the rizon," declaring that everyone must either date-rape debate, the people who say they draw one around himself, or "restrict [his] can't understand what all the fuss is about. I vision to the limits of a horizon drawn by an- can tell one of them by the first words out of other." We like to call such things a "culture." his or her mouth. "When I was dating. . . ," Culture is a key concept in this debate. they begin, and invariably go on to claim that Romantics want one that exerts more or less they always knew how to get what they de- preemptive control over our words and deeds. sired (or to avoid what they did not) without You can tell, listening to them, that what they feeling bad about it, or being thought bad, or have in mind is what we used to call a "sec- being punished as bad, or actually being bad. ond nature," a sort of quasireflex that mediates The women I've heard on this topic say between our primal nature, where all our lusts they knew how to behave on dates because and terrors and rages roil around, and the dry someone taught them: say, how to drink with- repressive artifacts of society, where our re- out getting (too) drunk. Their mothers told wards and punishments come from. In a cul- them what sort of boys to avoid. Their girl- ture like that, laid down deep, knowledge of friends explained how to put off the really how to behave on dates, and elsewhere, ap- heavy breathers without enraging them. One pears to those who have it as simple realism, would think, listening to these women, that basic common sense. they'd grown up in the oral traditions of a tribe. The men knew how to date omantics believe they have it, or, because . . . well, they just knew. As a friend more accurately, that they are had of mine put it, "I was always easily discour- by it. The Romantic notion of cul- aged, is all." ture almost always betrays a long- Gnostics of the dating game are Roman- ing for that prelapsarian state where moral tics, direct descendants of the divine Jean- choices (if choices they are) seem somehow to Jacques, nostalgists (as he was) of the uncon- have merely happened, to have come about scious conscience. They may also be romantic, without the slightest sense of personal agency. lovers of romance, though this is uncertain. Thus, in the Romantic view, dating is always But they are certainly naive, like Isabel Hilton. being anthropologized ("a ritual"), or Their tone is usually complacent at first, even aestheticized ("a dance"), or otherwise jollied bored. But as soon as they find themselves into some morally reassuring condition ("a gurgling into Humpty-Dumpty land, they game") in which everyone knows the become petulant, frightened, furious. Accusa- "moves," the "signals," the "score." tions follow, notably against the people who Who can't sympathize with that? I can. set off the date-rape alarm. Romantics insist What is supremely annoying about the date- that these people are lying, twisting words for rape debate is that it's making everyone hor-

DATE RAPE 101 ribly mistrustful and self-conscious about ful beneficiary of liberal revolutions, the something that ought to proceed easily and American Revolution in particular. And what naturally. "How absurd!" we say, about the happened in that revolution, among other dating rules in force at Antioc11 College. "You things, was a semantic struggle over "the can't legislate courting behavior!" Rules for the King" in which we liberals gained the mastery. management of sexual desire ought to be, as The King," once a deep-cultural instruction it were, inherited. They should do their thing of obligation and deference, was henceforth to as a trust fund does its thing, releasing their be understood as a tyrannical claim on our instructions directly into the nerves and fibers deference and obedience. This justified the of the body, like dividends into the bank ac- overthrow of the institution behind the word. count, without the distressing necessity, as one American men today live on the spoils of that might say, of "working at it." glorious triumph, and it seems to me that I speak as a man, but there are Romantic feminists want only to push it to its logical women who are quite as annoyed by the date- conclusion. As they see it, patriarchy lay at the rape alarmists as the men are. "What's the bottom of the King, the Church, the Great problem?" they ask. "Why can't they handle Chain of Being, and God the Father. Patriar- these pys?" One heard this refrain often dur- chy is the root system of a once-vast tree. The ing the Hill-Thomas hearings, when southern tree has been felled, by the American and women, black and white, were reported to be other revolutions, but the roots still send up scorning their beleaguered "sister." "What is noxious shoots (such as rape) to pollute the the matter with that woman," they'd say, "to good clean air of freedom and equality. This let a man treat her so bad?" Camille Paglia, is feminism's self-appointed task: to whack catching the refrain, has made a media career away at these last extrusions of a deep, under- out of sneering at abuse-sensitive feminists. To lying cultureto cover it in darkness, so that Paglia, they are a bunch of complainers who it will die. can't seem to seize the full possibilities of their Romantics of the dating game can't be liberation: that they, too, as naturally as any expected to applaud this task, but they can man, can yearn for an intercourse event. hardly protest it either, having profited so handsomely from its first cuts. The only thing he notion of deep culture serves Ro- they can do is ask the feminists the same ques- mantics well. Too well, say the femi- tion that was always asked of their predeces- nists, the second-loudest partici- sors in the liberal revolution: What happens pants in the date-rape debate. To when you've won? And if patriarchy is the them, it seems obvious that the culture that last, deepest culture of them all, what on earth these latter-day Romantics want to defend is will take its place as a deep, preemptive con- "patriarchy." Cut through the persiflage, ferni- trol on our desires, as our new moral habit? nists say, and what you find is the very source And if nothing should take its place, how shall of date rape, men's domination of women. we ever be good7 Date rape occurs because the deep-cultural Feminists seem not overly responsive to structures of patriarchy-a "second nature" if these questions. They appear much too busy there ever was one, founded on the "natural" with the more joyful part of their task, the lib- physical power of men-cannot accommo- erating whacking part. Beyond that, they are date the right of women to say no. usually content with the immemorial reply of Forgive me if I seem Clintonesque here, previous liberal warriors. Deep dead cultures not to say wimpish, but I find that I am as sym- will simply have to be replaced by education. pathetic to the feminist drive to destroy patri- In the date-rape instance, this means, presum- archy as I am to the Romantic desire to restore ably, the marvelous educative powers of prin- "ritual." I am a liberal, that is to say, a grate- ciple-No Fornication without Representa-

102 WQ SPRING 1994 THE ANT10CH COLLEGE SEXUAL OFFENSE POLICY

1. For the purpose of this policy, "consent" shall be defined as follows: the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual contact or conduct.

2. If sexual contact andlor conduct is not mutually and simultaneously initiated, then the person who initiates sexual contactlconduct is responsible for getting the verbal consent of the other individual(s) involved.

3. Obtaining consent is an on-going process in any sexual interaction. Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contactlconduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it. Asking "Do you want to have sex with me?" is not enough.. The request for consent must be specific to each act.

4. The person with whom saual contadconduct is initiated is responsible to express verbally andlor physically herlhis willingness or lack ofwillingness when reasonably possible.

5, If someone has initially consented but then stops consenting during a sexual interaction, shelhe should communicate withdrawal verbally and/or through physical resistance. The other individd(s) must stop immediately.

6. To knowingly take advantage of someone who is under the influence of alcohol, drugs and/or prescribed medication is not acceptable behavior in the Antioch community.

A section of Anfiocli College's 1993 "sexual violence and safety" policy. tion! Failing that, feminists will demand con- Antioch-like contracts, and the police, to as- tracts, like Antioc11's. Failing those, they will sure smooth dating. Like Romantics, they be- call, as exasperated liberals always do, for lieve it will take a culture. Daters need a cul- lashings of laws and punisl~ments. ture to preserve the romance of dating, of Somehow the liberal response doesn't course, but even more urgently they need one seem to satisfy anymore, not as it used to. It to save civil society from increasing violence. especially doesn't satisfy those, such as Or rather, to save us from two great evils that Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and others, who lead to violence. are often called communitarians. Communitarians have a strong voice in the ne evil was flagged first by Jean- date-rape debate, and in some of them, the Jacqueshimself: the hypocrisy, the softer ones, it throbs equally with Romance falsity, that comes with studied and alarm. Like the feminists, if far less entl~u- behavior. To that one might add the0 gaucherie. If "education" is all that stands siastically, the communitarians acknowledge that daters should treat each other as equals, between us and moral chaos, then good behav- lest there be 110 self-respect and mutual respect ior is all a matter of study. It doesn't matter 011 dates. For, without those, dating will al- what sort of study, whether one gets it in ways be prone to corruption, unhappiness, school, or from how-to books, or at the feet of and lousy sex. preachers, gurus, or fee-for-service therapists, Like Romantics, however, communitar- or from any of the tl~ousandsof moral curricu- ians believe that it will take more than freedom la that modern society has generated to help and equality, more even, than education, us control our desires. It might even come

DATE RAPE 103 fromt11e always-11a11dy "discipline of t11e inar- of the givenness of things; continuity between ketplace." As soon as we depend on "study" t11e generations; and, derived from these or "work," we find ourselves on the slippery goodsf a common, dependable language of slope from frustration to rage, thence to the speed1and gesture, and a "l~orizon"to embrace divine afflatus of that lifts LIS highl lug11, lugh and contain a renewed order of self-govemei~t. above all conflictl mistmst, restraint! a~~dlets us saemout at last the most bhsuobscenity of s it happens, I have some personal rejection. experience of these benefits of And that evil leads straigl~tto the other: "cominunity." I grew up in as re- a society that has to whip itself into obedience alistic a copy of a village culture as wit11 lawsl rules, and regulations! all backed up you'll find in America. Not among the Amis11 by the police, the courts, and the prisons. The or the Hassidi~n;nor in an assi~nilation-resis- penduluin of American violence swings like tant glletto, immigrant or drug-infested.These that-back and forth between a~~tinomianec- places are arguably not in Americaf or not yet. stasy and Arminian wrath. I was raised in patrician Bostonf wit11 its bleak virtues of tl~riftiness,trustwortl~iness, grim o s~~rprisethere, say the commm- fortitude! and moral candor; its cursus l~oizoriii~z itarians. America! more t11an any of boarding scl~ool~outdoor disciplinel and other modern societyl has ne- Harvard; and its endless, ~nanifoldrepres- glected its communities. It is only sions-sexual repressio~~not least anlong "community," they say, that can provide us tl~ein.This culture was laid down deep in mel with both a Ro~nantic'snotion of culture and or was supposed to have been! and to a quite a fe~ninist'snotion of equality. More accu- specific purpose-t11e breeding of an all rately, a strong, pervasive, andl yesl mildly 'round boy, who would become a prudent, repressive sense of co~nmunityis what is gentle~nanly,civic-minded inan! a sort of Re- needed. It takes a wl~olevillage, goes a favor- naissance trustee. ite comn~u~~itarianproverb, to raise a child. But the culture, deep as it was, was not Cultures do not insinuate tl~e~nselves,by deep enougl~.It did not take. Nor did it take il~en~selves,into the ~nainspringsof people's wit11 my cl~ildl~oodfriends. It couldn't 11ave: bel~avior~as many Romantics seem to believe. The Fall 11ad occurred. Even in Boston, there They are cultivated, and constantly rein- is no inl~eritedculture; it must be cl~osen, forced, by the example, the pressure, the ap- worked for, studied. proval, and if need be the condemi~ation~of This was the great flaw in Katie Roipl~e's members of a comn~unity.To imagine that famous Nezu YOTICTiiizes Mngnzi~earticle of last "culture" could be a11 agent of self-govenunent summer, w11ic11 brougl~tthe date-rape debate witl~outco~nm~~nity, as Ro~nantics often do, is 1101ne to her parents' generation. Roipl~eis an to imagine that Ralph Lauren breeds ladies apostle of a ratl~erPagliesque sort of Roman- and gentlelnen. This is not just ro~nantic;it is ticisn~in dating. "No problem" is her view of l~opelesslyromantic. date rape: How can it be rape if I'III loving it? Against the feminist-liberals, on the other (No, I am unfair. Her view is more like, "I may l~and,conun~~nitarians take a decidedly skep- not be loving it, but it's not rape, eitl~er.")Still, tical view of freedom. Liberation is okay, ap- she does try to account for the date rapes-in parently: freeing us from the oppression of 11er view! the very few date rapes-that do ineq~~ality,Liberty is more d~~bious.But "com- happen. And her answer is: cross-c~~lt~~ral munity" subdues liberty, almost witllout our dating on today's multicultural campuses. In knowing it. It does this by replacing liberty my terms this translates as: If I'd only stuck to wit11 the great 11uma11 goods that liberation ladyhke Bostonia~sin my dating career, I codd has uprooted: a sense of place, of belonging, never even imagine, as I can now imagine d too

104 WQ SPRING 1994 wellf that I had ever committed date rape. and poverty, surviving 011 fatalism, faithf But Roipl~ehas made a truly nasty prob- and the remissive powers of alco1101. Today lem for herself heref and it's a problem I everyonef including our cl~ildre~~,especially d011't see commu~~itariansfinessing, either. our children, is promised the freedom, the For if it's true that our erotic mayhem, such opportui~ity,the possibility of wantii~gal- as it may be, is a ConsequelIce of crossed most everything there is to want-and the cult~~ralsig1Ialsf the11 a11 we have to do to fix possibility of getting what 11e or she wants. matters is a little cultural clea~~si~~g.Schools, (Not wanting, in fact, is a form of ii~visibil- sii~glesbars, ~~eigl~borl~oods,municipal ity, a kind of death.) This acl~ieve~ne~~tis the swi~nn~i~~gpools, cruise shipsf wherever glorio~~sreward of our long, bloody struggle people meet to date and mate (and possibly for freedom and equality against kings, to rape), need o111y be segregated by village i~obles,priests, and (soon now) patriarcl~s. c~~lture,that is, by the variety of second-na- It's as if a11 those old oligopolists had been ture nurture they received at birth, merely dispossessed of their estates, wit11 the privi- because of their birth, and a11 will be well. leges auctioned off to the richest bidders This is da~~gero~~srubbish. Cultural (richest in talents, luck, and money)f and clea~~sii~gmay cut down rape witl~~cultures, their hopes and dreams given freely to ev- ass~~rningthere is such a thing, but at the cost eryone else. In America, where the franchise of increasing it along their (always expandingf of desire has spread wider and gone deeper always violent) frontiers. Moreover, Nazis, than a~~ywl~ereelse in the world, this inag- fascistsf and Greater Serbians have all tried nificent process is called the p~~rsuitof hap- this sort of hygiene, and none has managed to piness. re~naii~clean for long. But 110 culture, not even BOS~OII'S,can Beyond the rubbish, tl1oug11, I want to ask possibly withstand the te~nptatioi~sof de- Roipl~ewhat cultures she has in mindf in this mocratized desire. First, the fra~~cl~isesends New World, that are so determinative of male everything spin~~i~~g.It may be a11 accident dating behavior that the word "IIO" actually that the "Rasl~o~no~~effect," everybody's gets translated as "yes." favorite de~~o~ni~~atorof the vertigo of multiple perspectives, refers to a movie about a o me, the ROIII~II~~C-co~nmu~utarianrape. But a drama of desire it had to be, of theory of cultured behavior is just one kind or anotl~er.Desire is what pumps a~~otl~ertwitch of tribal nostalgia. Hu~npty-D~~mptyup. "C~~lture"serves these people as Second, the free-market system corn- does the cl~auviius~nof a typically mixed-et11- bines wit11 the fra~~cl~iseto abstract c~~ltures i~icAinericai~ who, of all the leaves in his ge- and com~~~unitiesfrom their settings-to netic salad, cl~oosesto claim t11e one called co~nn~odify,package, and send them to lnar- "Ger~nai~."Such ploys are j~~stsome of the des- ket. (Watch: 111 a ge~~eratio~~or so, solneone perate ways we have of coping with, by some- is sure to be selling us 011 the beauties of the how deliiniting, the single greatest constitu- Patriarcl~allifestyle.) All the so-called cul- tive acl~ieven~e~~tof lnoderi~ societiesf cer- tures available in the modern world-the taiidy of An~ericai~society-o~~r democratiza- "culture" (wl~icl~is also the "co~n~nu~~ity," tion of the fral~cl~iseof desire. A11ybody has mind ~OLI)of your busi~~ess,your favorite the right to want a~~ytl~i~~g,even to be any- sport, your neigl~borhood,your social classf tl~ii~g. your region, your neurosisf your religionf It's easy to forget that not long ago a full your taste in food and drinkf your therapyf range of desires was possible only for the your profession, and on and 011-all the de- privilegedf by birth or traditional office. sire-co~~troldevices ~na~~ufacturedby a de- Everyol~eelse was embedded in ig~~ora~~cesire-driven polity are all siinply elective cur-

DATE RAPE 105 riculal more or less costly, more or less ex- upon it, is that there is not nowl nor ought changeable, more or less tl~orougl~.But alll lest there ever to be, any controls on our possibili- desire be l~edgedabout, perfectly shallow. ties, our desires, at all. Some co~nmunitaria~~sseem to recognize l~erefore~pace Katie Roipl~e,it is not the l~opelessnessof their cause. Like Cl~arles commt~~~itiesof colnmon culture Taylor, they pray that we may somehow seel t11at intradate and make love, or and cl~oose,the wisdom of embedding our- interdate and rape, on campuses selves in some sort of co~nmunity~of restrict- these days; it is individual closets of cultures. ing ourselves witl~insome Nietzscl~ianhori- They may be a bit jumbledl these closets, zon of the possible. But to judge by the activi- Ralp11 Lauren suits 011 the l~ai~gers,grunge ties of some of their agents-for example, the o~~tfitson the floor. BLI~the luds can't be ex- American Association for Rg11ts & Responsi- pected to have their own personal style right bilities-the only way Inany conununitaria~~s off the dime, can they? Not any more t11an can tl~ii~kof to accomplish this feat is to 11eip adults can be expected to keep a lifestyle for "comm~~nities"lash the miscreants in their the lengt11 of a life. The moder11 principle ap- midst wit11 new lawsl more police, and l~arsl~er plies to young and old: Mix and match your pu~~isl~ments.Any old liberal could have own cultures! Be your own Humpty-Dumpty! t11ougl1t of that. BLI~tl~ougl~t, tool that it will Select, don't settle. never do the trick. Fi~~ally,to finis11 off any lingering fantasy we may 11ave about cultivating deep culh~res, o wonder date rape managed to tl~ere'sthe only commonl truly pervasive cul- get a good conversatio~~going. ture we llave, the consulner c~~lh~re.Its Idol, T11e date is the perfect synec- as Auden called it, is possibility. The cultural doclxe for our modern predica- l~orizo~~sof comm~~~~itarian nostalgia exerted ment. We are always out 011 dates of some sort desire-co~~trolby letting poverty, fatalism, re- or ot11es-, petting and being petted, breatl~i~~g ligion edit (out, for the most part) possibility. 11eavily~tumesce~~t, possessed by the passion There were some things you just did not want to possess-solnetl~ing. Eve11 objects of desire or do; they were utterly ~~~Ii~nagi~~able.(subject to fear) have this experiei~ce.But at the Humpty-Dumpty sat on his wall. Moreover, same time, in the s11adow of this heady these pre- and proscriptio~~sdid seem inher- arousall the tl~ougl~toccurs that we ca11't get ited, "nah~ral"as egg and sperm and "blood" all we want all the time. There are too few re- are natural. However, as an added assurance sources, too many desires, too many objects of of good behavior, the moral culture was desire, too many ways of getting w11at we passed along with an equally "~Iatural"inl~er- desire. Not to mention too many other desirers! ited status-as Slave, say, or Father, or First- each with multiple needsl wants, yeamh~gsof Born Son, or Woman. Without a hereditary- their own, and multiple perspectives to go wit11 status l~ierarcl~y,in fact, no comm~~nitycul- them. It's enoug11 to drive one mad. ture of the sort longed for by co~mnunitariai~s Wl~ereupo~~we sense the mela~~cl~oly has ever existed. Nor, thanks to our demo- sumlnons to self-gover~~~nent.The t11ing is cratic access to the sense of possibility, will it melancholy in just about every way. It means ever exist again. choosing, w11icI1 eliminates possibilities and Tl~us,in the actual world, it is impossibil- reminds LIS that no one is chosen, that notl~ing ity that is unimaginable-for everyone. Wit11 is given. It ineans talung responsibilitylthereby the glory of liberation now hard-wired to the inhibiting desire and inviting blame. It means ~l~~iversalityof the consumer "culturel" the calculation, plans, cost-benefit analyses, all of most compelling i~~structionof modern life, whc11 promote self-conscio~~s~~ess,prepare for and of the whole worldwide economy built embarrassme~~t,and stifle romance. Above all,

106 WQ SPRING 1994 self-gover~~me~~tis terribly difficult, and not tian mostly, but also classical. Among my sort just because of the possibilities and tempta- of Bostonians, for example, the secret appetite tions of desire. For the fact is that all the King's suppressant (and capital preservative) was horses of "co~nmunity~"and all the King's Stoicism. Today it seems to me that there are men of "culture," cannot disguise the fact that Inore asceticisms on the morality market than we govern ourselves alonel and that we have ever before: Buddl~ism,New Ageismsf espe- to cl~ooseour own stars to guide us. It's only cially varieties based on Native American w11e11 we fail to do so that we find we have practices, radical e~~vironmentalis~n~and so company-t11e policel for example. on. More to t11e point of date rape, a vast net- Other help is available. SeE-government work of quasicommunities, ad hoc villagesl is depressing, but not i~npossible.As Philip has grown up around t11e possibihty of impos- Rieff reminded us 30 years ago in Tlze Triii~?zpIz sibility and the folly of insatiable desire. This of tlze Tlzerape~itic,all the while that "cultures" is the 12-Step movement set in motion by Al- were being rendered elective, and their "com- col~olicsAnonymous, but now establislled ~n~u~ities"wit11 tl~eln,portable culture substi- among "commu~~ities"of incontinents of ev- tutes were being prepared in the co~~sulting ery conceivable description-including t11e rooms of psycl~otl~erapists.Of course it's a lustful, the panicky, and the enraged. higl~lyconte~~tious questio~~ in Humpty- Dumpty land how l~elpfulfee-for-service ut of course none of these curricula tl~erapymay be to self-government. Many will make much headway against Romantics loathe it as another plague of self- pleonexia so long as the market- co~~sciousness,another bligl~t011 romance. place keeps up its relentless arousal Many comnunitaria~~scomplai~~ that without of desire.-lames adi is on knew this in the family, ~~eigl~borl~ood,and peer group to re- 1790s, as did William James in the 1890s. inforce t11e tl~erapizedbehavior, the help will Jimmy Carter knew it, too, when he echoed come to 11aug11t. And ~nanyfeminists col~sider James's call for the moral equivalent of war to most scl~oolsof therapy just so many shoots ground a new asceticism for the 1970s. Poor of the old patriarchal root system, to be Carter. But now the rage for more, more, more slashed and buried. No one claims that it will is bumping up against a tiny but hdly mobi- do a~~ytl~ingfor the loi~eli~~essof the task. lized political oppositio~~,as well as some bm- But even here help may be 011 the way. tal denials of desire in the enviro~~me~~t.If it People 11ave been "problematizi~~g"the fran- weren't for injustice, the sicke~~ing(and wid- chise of desire and the worsl~ipof possibility ening) gap between t11e desire possibilities of for a very long time. And again and again the rich and the poor, one might even suggest they've concluded that what's needed is to that the ascetic curriculun~looks like a good reverse the whole ecoi~o~nicethos that under- long-term investment. There are no grounds writes the fra~~cl~iseand the idolatry. This for optimism, as Christopl~erLasc11 pointed lneans turni~~gupside down solne of our most out recently, but we can always hope. cl~erisl~edval~~es-"eco~~o~nic growtl~," "ino- Meanwhile, as we await the future of as- bility" (always upward of co~~rse),the whole ceticism, two things will change. The conver- ideological apparatus that Plato co~~de~n~~edsation about date rape will move 011 to other as "pleo~~exia~"more-more-ism, the fatal dis- frightful subjects, and fewer and fewer inter- ease of de~nocracy. course events will be performatively declared The question is, how? There's been a sur- "date rapes" by feminist-alarmist Humpty- prising u~~a~~i~nityabo~~tthis. Ge~~erationafter Dumpties. T11e reason is not that these events ge~~erationof worriers abo~~tbehavior have hit will become universally COIIS~IISLI~~,still less up011 the same old counteretl~os-asceticis~n. that we'll all wrap o~~rselvesin 11orizo11s of It has been propounded in 1na11y forms, Chris- factitious culture communities and date only

DATE RAPE 107 within them. The reason is thatl long before There are any number of groups dedicated to society becomes just or we become ascetics! t11e prom~~lgationof a stable, inerrant lan- the feminist revolution will succeed and patri- guage, and to a "natural," u~~equivocalmoral arcl~ywill die. law. These groups differ in t11e warrant they After t11at it seems likely that the worst believe tl~ey'vefound for these certainties: the fears of the Romantics will come true. Mis- Bible, t11e Koran, the Roman Catl~olicdoctrine trust and self-mistrust s110~11dbecome even of natural law, the tribe! t11e "original ii~tent" more com~noi~placetl~an they 11ave beenl of t11e Founders of t11e Republic, God's Wordl spreading deeper and deeper into all social your genes, and so on. They vary, too! in their relations and all activities-scl~ooling, poli- attitude toward t11e free market and its ii~de- tics! art, tl~erapies.Wit11 this! love sl~ould fatigable spirit of consumerism. But they do become even less "natural," even more of a not vary in their l~ostilityto liberty! to possi- studied acl~ieveme~~t,than it already is. Per- bility, to democratic desire, and to individual l~aps,then, we will finally accept what we self-government. hear so often, but don't want to believe: t11at love is "l~ardwork." 16s is a lugh price to pay, it seem to a Self-government, ineai~while,will be as conversationalistlike me, merely for a 11ard as it always was! even with a prolifera- little se~nai~ticsecurity. Moreover! it tion of rules and contracts. And its failures, seem extremely Welythat merely like rape, will be w11at they've always been in by subjecting 1Gmself to one Humpty-knpty, liberal reghnes-ever more l~arsldy,ever more enclosing llimself witl~inthe wall of his hori- ineffectually punisl~edcrimes. If you have zon1 that anyone can put him back together seen Antiocl~,you have seen the future of again. And even if one could, what of the H- America. And (up to a point) it works. Ds on the other side? What of the H-Ds inside If this so~~ndsdisagreeable, as it surely one's own head? We know now that the fat does already to many millio~~sof people, boys are l~ere!there, everywl~ere.And as we'll sometlxing can be done about it wit11011t wait- never be able to forget itl we will never be to- ing for t11e doubtful triumpl~of asceticisin. gether again, either.

108 WQ SPRING 1994 BY JAMES COMO

Thirty years after his death, C. S. Lewis remains a Celebrity Author: the complacent professor who churned out zui~zsomechildrens fiction and quotable religious apologetics. That image, confirmed by the recent celluloid treatment, Shadowlands, trivializes the weight and worth of Lewis's achievement, as zuell as the struggle behind it.

t was the practice of Clive Staples Lewis, everything he read. Of course, this declaration wlule at Magdalen College, Oxford, dur- would be met with incredulity and demands that ing the 1940s, to have friends, students, he put up or shut up. And so he would solicit a and colleagues to dinner parties. Amid series of numbers from the most skeptical guest, much drinking and even more revelry, Lewis wluch he then would apply to a bookcase, a shelf would sometimes perform an astonishing parlor within that case, and a book upon that shelf. The trick. Upon being told how terrible it was to re- guest would then fetch the specified volume member nothing, he would reply that it was (which could be in any one of several languages), worse to forget notl~~g,as was the case with open to a page of his own choosing, read aloud

C. S. LEWIS 109 from tliat page, and stop where lie pleased. States and in England. Lewis would then quote tlie rest of tliat page For all his popularity-or, more likely, from memory. Like some supremely gifted per- because of it-Lewis lias been vastly underes- former-a DiMaggio, or a Spencer Tracy-lie timated. One reason for this may be tliat lie made it all look easy. produced no Grand Theories or intricate In its astonishing ease, this feat of memory metliodologies. He never wrote wliat is for- is emblematic of tlie facility tliat many people mally known as systematic theology. In fact, liave come to associate witli Lewis's life, work, lie claimed to be no theologian at all, and lie ex- and even liis religious convictions. Precisely plicitly disavowed-indeed, shuddered at-the because of this facility, lie has come to be seen notion tliat lus tliouglit might be construed as as a trivializing Pollyanna, tremendously gift- "original." Far more significant, though, was his ed but of little ultimate consequence as a writer rhetorical opportunism. No venue was too and thinker. The lut movie Shadozvlaizds (about modest, no reader too unlearned, no idea too Lewis's late marriage to Joy Davidman Gresli- unremarkable to be spared liis gifts, if tliose am) seems to liave perfectly captured tills celeb- gifts, however deployed, might profit tlie rity image by presenting lxi111 as a sort of "human reader. Ironically, though this desire and abil- tea cozy," as one reviewer aptly put it. ity to be accessible and adaptive, almost to the point of humility, was integral to Lewis's ge- o be sure, as icon and plirase- nius, it is also wliat has so often elicited charges maker Lewis lias had considerable of triviality and sliallowness. appeal. He lias been cited by cliurcli- This scholar, storyteller, and pliilosoplier men of the utmost authority (John deserves a more discerning appraisal. His in- Paul I1 and Billy Graham) and by powerful po- tellectual output, to begin witli, was huge and litical leaders (Ronald Reagan, Margaret various-so much so tliat it beggars tlie capac- Thatcher, and George Bush, who borrowed "a ity of most readers. In addition to liis books, thousand points of light" directly from The lie saw to print more than 200 sliort pieces and Magician's Nephew). Writers from liiglibrow nearly 80 poems, excluding tliose in the cycle critic Wayne Booth to children's author Spirits in Bondage (1919).His essays range from Madeleine L'Engle imitate him. Others use his critical, historical, and theoretical to religious, motifs in their work (the notion of "longing" pliilosophical, and cultural. Devoted readers appears in Walker Percy's The Second Coming) of liis Narnia clironicles for children may not or make allusions to him (Robertson Davies in liave read, or even know of, The Screwtape Let- The Manticore, Tom Wolfe ill Bonfire of the Vmi- ters (1942), surely Lewis's second best-known ties). Most of liis 50-odd books have been con- work and tlie one tliat earned him a place on tinuously in print since first publication, the tlie cover of Time in 1947. Lewis tlie scholar is Narnia series alone selling in tlie millions-per- likely unknown to tlie readers of liis Ransom year range in several different languages trilogy of space fantasies. Those who know worldwide. A patently uneven industry of Mere Clzristia~~it?/(1952), based on the wartime anecdotal memoirs, biographies (three in tlie BBC radio talks that made his voice the second last seven years, tlie best being Jack: C.S. Lewis most recognized in Britain (after Ch~~rcliill's), and His Times, by George Sayer, who knew probably will not liave read either the subtle Lewis well), and especially commentary con- Problem of Pain (1940) or the sliort analytical es- tinues to flourish. And a number of societies says and the sermons. Still fewer will liave devoted to tlie study of liis life and tlie appre- read Lewis's lyrical poetry. And almost no one ciation of his work thrive both in tlie United is aware of his long narrative poems.

James Coino teaches rlietoric and public communicatioi~at York College (CUNY),and edited C.S. Lewis at tlie Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences (1979). Copyright 01994 by James Como.

110 WQ SPRING 1994 As it is known conventionally, Lewis's publication of still other books and Joy's biography seems simple enough. He was born death in 1960, and now virtually alone wit11 in Belfast in 1898; his mother, Flora, died his beloved older brother and dearest friend, nearly 10 years later. When he was not yet 19 Warren ("Warnie"), he began a slow physi- he arrived at University College, Oxford, flu- cal decline. Even so, he completed five more ent in Greek, Latin, and French, only to find books during this period, including the su- himself ill the trenches of World War I soon premely readable Experiment in Criticism and thereafter. In 1919, wounded but not disabled A Grief Observed (both 1961).In 1963 ill health (he would carry shrapnel in his chest all his forced his retirement; his death on Novem- life), and having distinguished himself by ber 22 of that year went virtually unnoticed capturing a few dozen German soldiers, he re- throughout most of the world, at least.unti1 turned to the university and took a rare triple the shock of John F. Kennedy's assassination first in classics, pl~ilosopl~y,and English litera- subsided. ture. He won a permanent fellowship at Now, for all its striking achievements Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925, by and some unlikely spikes, this life is not which time he had been, in his complicated-nothing to justify the curious words, "a blaspheming atheist" for observation of the pl~ilosopl~erOwen nearly 15 years. Although his jour- Barfield, Lewis's lifelong friend, solicitor, ney toward conversion began in and eventual trustee, that Lewis had yet these years, it did not gain momen- another genius beside the intellectual and turn until the death of his father, the imaginative ones. According to Albert, in 1929. But even then, this Barfield, in the 1930s Lewis began dem- "most reluctant convert in En- onstrating "a genius of the will," a gland" became simply a be- genius crucial to a religious con- liever in God. Two years later version that required an abso- he became a Christian, and re- lute denial of the self. Such mained a professing Anglican for the rest of his hfe. Lewis in 1919, when For the next 15 years Lewis a student at Oxford would be more active as author (18 books) and speaker-from broadcasting over the BBC to pre- siding at the Oxford Socratic Club (which he helped to found) to giving talks at bases all around England for the Royal Air Force-than at any other period in his life. His many great friendships, above all those nurtured within the small circle known as the Inklings, flourished, as did his worldwide reputation and burdensome correspondence (2,000 letters per week at its crest). In a denial in the case of Lew 1952, he met and would later court and would be especially difficult in light of his in- marry Joy Davidman. In the meantime clination toward self-indulgence. "What I Lewis moved to Magdalene College, Cam- think is true," Barfield wrote in the intro- bridge, as its first professor of Medieval and duction to Light on C.S. Lewis (1965), "is that Renaissance English Literature. After the at a certain stage in his life [Lewis] deliber-

C. S. LEWIS 111 ately ceased to take any interest in himself tainly included a sexual dimension. (This was except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking neither tlie first nor final incidence of Lewis's his moral finals." This stage also marks the curious sexual interests. As an adolescent writ- beginning of wliat must be called his public ing about women, he signed some letters ministry, for within a year of his conversion 'T1iilomastix"-"lover of tlie switch." During lie would publish liis first Christian work, his university days lie read much Freud and The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), an allegorical Havelock Ellis; later lie would dream of seduc- autobiography so severe and unsparing in tive "brown girls1'-a purely symbolic, not its assault on 20th-century idols that he racial, coloration-and finally allow that lie would later regret its "uncharitable temper." had greatly underestimated the ease of over- Only a second, and closer, look at his early life coming the sin of lust.) Tliis unusual house- can suggest what lie converted from. hold would end only witli the death of Mrs. Moore at age 78, wlien Lewis himself was 52. lora Lewis, a loyal communicant in During this long menage, Lewis eagerly tlie Church of Ireland, must have undertook an endless round of menial cliores, been a remarkable woman. She wit- which warranted Mrs. Moore's observation nessed what miglit have been a tliat lie was as good "as having an extra ser- miracle at age 12 wlien, while visiting a Cat11o- vant." Christopher Derrick, a pupil of Lewis's lic church in Florence, she saw the eyes of a and a plulosoplier and Catholic apologist in his waxen female saint slowly open and gaze at own right, has remarked on this episode and her; later she earned a bachelor of arts from on Lewis's later marriage tliat they represent Queen's College, Belfast, in mathematics and in his friend a sort of self-indenturing to cer- logic. (Her son, incidentally, would prove tain women. Lewis's great friend J. R. R. mathematically useless, failing a simple alge- Tolkien, as well as his brother and fatlier, took bra test required for entrance to Oxford; only Derrick's notion a step further and argued that because lie had volunteered for service in the Lewis was unable to resist anyoiie~especially war was tlie requirement waived and Lewis a woman-in need. (During his life, he gave admitted.) In Surprised by Joy (1955), his spiri- two-thirds of his income to charity.) tual autobiography, Lewis described his mother's indulgent ways and likened her death erl~apsthe conversion was "no sud- in lis 10th year to a continent's sinking into the den plunge into a new life," as his sea. Alienation from lus fatlier, a solicitor, fol- brother Warren described it, "but lowed, and Lewis lost lis Christian faith. rather a slow steady convalescence The university years that followed repre- from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long- sented a great gap in wliat was the published standing," a sort of neurotic atheism. Lewis autobiographical record. But Lewis's recently miglit have admitted as much. But he would issued diary, All My Road Before Me (1991), have insisted tliat both simple maturation (as shows a young man out of sync, working to Barfield claimed) and convalescence helped hold a house yet too young and immature to occasion tlie self-abnegation that was tlie key head it, or even to know what he had gotten to liis conversion.Thus, for example, he could into. Tliis strange set of affairs resulted from marry an obnoxious American divorcee witli- sometliing tliat few people knew anything out regard to the loss of offended friends, and about: The house was presided over by tlie lie could achieve great commercial success as mother of Lewis's slain army buddy, Paddy a Christian apologist with no concern for the Moore. Married but separated, Janie King academic ostracism that inevitably followed. Moore was an attractive 45-year-old woman The point is that Lewis chose to surrender to wlien Lewis took up witli her in 1919, wlien he all tlie self-sacrificingand unself-regarding iro- was 20. hi its early stages their liaison almost cer- nies of Christian belief, no matter the conse-

112 WQ SPRING 1994 quences to liis self or tlie dues he liad to pay. or to study an author's life in order to understand He did not even believe in the rewards of an his book; to do either is to abort the strictly liter- afterlife when he first became a Christian; it ary experience, wlucli is wliat we are after in the was not until his fifties that he finally believed first place. He described the medieval founda- liis own sins were forgiven. With tliis willful tions of romantic love and charted its literary ge- disregard for-and crucial inattention to- nealogy, breathing life into a calcified notion of himself, lie could seem to tliose around him a allegory. He defined Paradise Lost for a genera- curious mix of enthusiastic affection and quite tion, debunking die Satan-as-hero error along the sheer reticence, wlde all along lie was spiritually way. ("From hero to general, from general to "regressing," becoming tlie innocent "little child politician, from politician to secret service agent, that Jesus counsels 16followers to be. then to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bath- As for the charge of "wish fulfillment" room windows, and thence to a toad, and finally traditionally leveled against Christianity and to a snake.") He revised our understanding of against Lewis in particular: If, to paraphrase English literature in the 16th century, believably Lewis, liis purpose liad been to fulfill wishes claiming tliat there was no Renaissance in En- or to live as Pollyanna, even a dull man could gland and tliat, if there was, it did not matter. He have thought up something easier than Cliris- explained the medieval worldview, so tliat we tianity. And, I would add, Lewis could have can never again consider tliose ancestors as es- contrived a far more convenient life. Pain and pecially ignorant, superstitious,or irrational. He grief, like disbelief and doubt, were old ac- described precisely those dozen or so concepts quaintances. In writing about the diabolical ("wit," "free," and "simple," among others) that Screwtape he said as much: so ensnare us when we take them for granted, especially when reading old books. And, by the Some have paid me an undeserved com- pure force of lus enthusiasm, lie got more un- pliment by supposing that my Letters likely people to read more old books than ever were the ripe fruit of many years' study before. He taught us (in An Experiment in Criti- in moral and ascetic theology. They for- cism, much before its time in 1961 and now too got that there is an equally reliable, unassuming for our Age of Methodology) wliat though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. "My heartu-I we do, should do, and must not do when we need no other's-"shewet11 me the wick- read. Finally, lie "rehabilitated dozens of au- edness of the ungodly." thors and shot out of the air as many literary fal- lacies as there are critical schools. And all of it is His best genius used liis pain, grief, doubt, resplendently, improbably readable. In An Ex- and sin, demonstrating not some shallow perineiit i11 Criticism lie wrote: facility but a triumph of charity. And the fact tliat lie~notthe scavenged, half-understood, Literary experience heals the wound, misrepresented celebrity-could make it look without undermining the privilege, of in- easy allows it to seem possible for tlie rest of us. dividuality. There are mass emotions hi his famous 1954 inaugural lecture at Cam- which heal the wound; but they under- bridge, Lewis called himself "Old Western mine the privilege. In them our separate Man"~onewho could read old texts as a native selves are pooled and we sink back into and see newer ones from tlie vantage of a long sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and perspective. His learning and critical skills were yet remain myself. Like the night sky in so prodigious tliat, in tliis case I think, facility the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, must be conceded. Consider this mere inventory: but it is still I who see. Here, as in wor- He introduced the phrase "personal heresy" into ship, in love, in moral action, and in our critical lexicon, arguing that we are wrong to knowing, I transcend myself; and am read a book in order to find out about its author, never more myself than when I do.

C. S. LEWIS 113 an attempt to "see light." Theseand other fictional works have us encoun- ter God as we do in reality. Or, as Lewis put it, "God is everywhere but is everywhere incognito." The most striking manifestation of Lewis's obliqueness is his use of a first-person narrator-a queen, no less-in the masterpiece Till We Have Faces (1956). A retelling (or rather a setting right) of the Cupid and Psyche myth, it is an ostensibly simple study of a brilliant, re- sentful, and belligerent mind as it comes to confront its own self- serving, bigoted, militantly anti- Divine delusions. The book's themes and motifs are pure Lewis-the poison of possessive love, the dangers of an inflated and unrestrained self, the concrete immanence of the supernatural, among others. The flavor, however, is new in Lewis: The purpose is broadly moral but not explicitly didactic, the structure (especially its concentrically arranged time I12 1947 C.S. Lewis made the cover of Time magazine, largely as frames) is far more intricate than a result of the exorbitant success of The Screwtape Letters. that of anything else he wrote, and the psycl~olog~of the protagonist This same commitment to making his is not only uncharacteristically ugly but am- ideas accessible motivated the direction taken biguous, too. Queen Orual is in despair, by his storytelling career. "Any amount of does not know it, but is on the brink of find- Christianity can now be smuggled in under the ing it out. In the end, it is she who will be guise of fiction," wrote Lewis to his friend Sis- found out, along with the rest of us for ter Penelope. All of Lewis's fictions are alle- whom she is a surrogate. gorical or "indirect communications," (as Saren Kierkegaard would have called them): ven in his children's books, Lewis The Great Divorce (1946), about a bus trip to was able to adumbrate the most com- heaven from what is either hell or purgatory; plicated Christian themes and make The Screiutape Letters, a correspondence from them appealing to his reader. Con- Uncle Screwtape, a chief devil, to his nephew, sider Lewis's most remarkable speech, from Wormwood, an apprentice at work on an The Silver Chair (1953), a Narnia book. earthly "patient"; Tlie Pilgrim's Regress, the tale Puddleglum the Marshwiggle has accompa- of John the Pilgrim's perilous search for the nied two children on a search for a lost prince "landlord and his return home; even Ills early who has been held captive by the Queen of short story, "The Man Born Blind," about a Underland. The four are finally free, thanks to man whose sight is restored but who dies in Puddleglum's heroic action, though still deep

114 WQ SPRING 1994 in the queen's cave, when she comes upon C1uvalry"~couldnot only shed light upon, but them and begins casting a spell to convince virtually settle, any number of current debates. them that there are no real trees and stars, nor He would make short work, for example, of an even a real Aslan, the great lion who sang Nan-da oxymoron such as "the politics of meaning." into creation. At the point of psychological and But like Aslan, Lewis was not tame. There spiritual collapse, Puddlegl~unspeaks: are in his work improbable opinions that surprise even his most devoted readers: that Suppose we have only dreamed, or made young lovers should live together without up, all those things-trees and grass and marriage if the alternative is infidelity; that sun and moon and stars and Aslan him- obscenity and antisodomy laws are useless at self. Suppose we have. Then all I can say best; that a truly Christian economic order is that, in that case, the made-up things would have more than a small bit of socialism seem a good deal more important than in it; that Darwin is useful even if he mistook the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a a metaphor that was already in the air (Keats kingdom of yours is the only world. used a version of evolution in Hyperion); and Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. that Freud has much to teach us (though a good And that's a funny thing, when you deal less than he thought).No one has offered a come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But more astute, trenchant, or profoundly Christian four babies playing a game can make a critique of the impact of European civilization play-world which licks your real world upon the New World than Lewis: hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Asian's side even The English . . . conceived [colonization] if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm go- chiefly as a social sewage system, a vent ing to live as like a Narnian as I can even for 'needy' people who now trouble the if there isn't any Narnia. comn~onwealthand are daily consumed with the gallows. . . . Nor was the failure [of ~nglishexploration] relieved by any There is a textbook here on the Christian high ideal motives. Missionary designs notion of faith (as well as on a number of other are sometimes paraded in the prospectus more esoteric concepts).Trusting in what you of a new venture: but the actual record of once knew to be true, what your reason and early Protestantism in this field seems to even senses showed you to be true, is crucial be 'blank as deathf. when that reason and those senses are clouded-by passion, or by the dismal spell In an essay entitled "Religion and Rock- cast, say, by the loss of a spouse-crucial if we etry" he expands upon the theme, claiming are to live as God intended. Lewis realized, as that "the missionary's holy desire to save souls Paul Holmer put it in C.S.Lewis: The Shape of has not always been kept quite distinct from His Faith and Thought (1976), that how we live the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as "determines what [we] love and finally even he calls it) 'civilize' the (as he calls them) 'na- know . . . [a] frame of life and mind within tives.' " And in "The Seeing Eye" he contem- which some things become accessible to us." plates the possibility of humanity meeting an Lewis's polemical genius worked as un- alien rational species: relentingly as, but even more single-mindedly than, the scholar and the storyteller to make a I observe how the wlute man has hitherto great variety of ideas comprehensibleto the gem treated the black, and how, even among era1 reader. Moreover, his essays-from "The civilized men, the stronger have treated the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" to weaker. . . . I do not doubt that the same "Dangers of National Repentance" to "The story will be repeated. We shall enslave, Poison of Subjectivism" to "The Necessity of deceive, exploit, or exterminate.

C. S. LEWIS 115 After his conversion, Lewis explicitly I have wanted to . . . expel that quite un- committed his will and his rhetorical genius to christian worship of the human indi- his apologetic vocation. In "Christian vidual as such which is so rampant. . . . Apologetics" he defined the scope of that task: I mean the pestilent notion . . . that each "Modern man is to a pagan what a divorcee is of us starts with a treasure called Personality' . . . and that to expand and to a virgin"; that is, "we live in a post-Christian express this . . . is the main end of life. world": "A century ago our task was to edify those who had been brought up in the Faith: our present task is chiefly to convert and in- This theme of self-centeredness, its dan- struct infidels. Great Britain is as much a part gers and (of course) its antidotes, lies at the of the mission field as China." Among our center of Lewis's philosophy of human nature. contemporary biases is the tendency to re- One of his works that is better known than verse the ancient attitude and to approach read is The Abolition of Man (1943), ostensibly God as the accused; "if God should have a "Reflections on Education with Special Refer- reasonable defense. . . . the trial may even end ence to the Teaching of English in the Upper in God's acquittal. But the important thing is Forms of Schools," or so its subtitle would that Man is on the Bench and God is in the have us think. In fact it is a diagnosis and a Dock." In the final analysis, says Lewis, prophecy: When subjectivism is rampantly "Christianity is a statement which, if false, is triumphant and natural law has been, not re- of no importance, and, if true, of infinite im- futed, but "seen through," we begin to "inno- portance." vate,"first on nature (Lewis was environmen- The territory that most engaged Lewis tally alert long before the cant began), then on was the concept of personhood. "You can't animals (he was also a vehement anti-vivisec- study people," he said, "you can only get to tionist), and finally on our favorite subject, the know them." Personality and our view of it Self, which we will "condition" unto extinc- was of particular concern. Recall for a moment tion. Any eugenicist or "harvester" of human Barfield's observation that Lewis willed his fetal tissue should take note, if not of this book own self-disregard, and then consider this then of its horrifyingfictional correlative, That declaration of purpose: Hideous Strmgth: A Modem Fain/ Tale for Grown- Ups (1946),thelast book of the space fantasy trilogy. In it Lewis both raises to glorious heights and lowers to terrify- ing depths the idea of geniuses as tutelary spirits, especially the particular "genius" of our century, a totalitarian death wish. Not shy about depicting evil or its motive, he would have agreed with Edmund Crispin's detective Gervase Fen, who remarked, "I always think that psychology is wrong in imagining that when it has analyzed evil it has somehow disposed of it." But Lezuis and Joy Dauidii~anGresham at a ruin in Kmiros, Rhodes, in 1960. he nowhere uses upon his

116 WQ SPRING 1994 reader the stick of eternal punishment in any naked webbed foot he stamped on the fire that way remotely resembling the enervating 11or- is part of the witch's verbal spell. Lewis said ror of, say, Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-cen- he never understood a doctrine less than when tury New England philosopher and divine, he was just done defending it. whose "Angry God" has his arrows of vengeance poised at our hearts, ready to be made uc11 humility seems ironic coming "drunk wit11 our blood for nothing more than from "a genius of the will," much "His mere pleasure." Instead, Lewis tells us (in the same way his obsession wit11 ac- 163 1941 essay 'The Weight of Glory") that "all cessibility seems ironic. But the humil- the leaves of the New Testament are rustling ity, the will, and the accessibility are all of a wit11 the rumor" that we will not always be on piece. Lewis's will was the instrument of his the wrong side of the door. "Some day, God Christian conversion, which occasioned the willing, we shall get in." Lewis thought that denial of self. Only then could Lewis be at the nothing could be more pleasurable than salva- disposal of those for whom-owing to his tion. The final page of Lewis's final book, Let- great intellectual, imaginative, and literary ters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), con- gifts-he could do great good. Thus his as- tains a typically delectable image of just that: tounding ability to bring Christianity to so many, precisely what invites the dismissive Then the new earth and sky, the same yet charge of superficiality, is actually the product not the same as these, will rise in us as we of one of the more complex emotional and have risen in Christ. And once again, af- intellectual processes. What he said about his ter who knows what aeons of silence and beloved Edmund Spenser and The Faerie the dark, the birds will sing and the wa- Qiieene can be applied to the scholar, story- ters flow, and lights and shadows move across the hill, and the faces of our teller, and philosopher-apologist: friends laugh upon us with amazed rec- ogi~ition. His work is one, like a growing thing, a tree . . . with branches reaching to heaven "Joy," he says, "is the serious business of and roots to hell. . . . And between these heaven." But Lewis understood the limits of two extremes comes all the multiplicity volubility and of argument, the dangers of of human life. . . . To read him is to grow verbal facility and intellectual smugness. I be- in mental health. lieve they frightened him. In The Great Divorce (1946), the only passenger on the bus to His former pupil Peter Bayley was among heaven who stays all the way to the end is the the few to attend his funeral. He has since man who does not utter great rhetorical pro- written that "there was one candle on the cof- nouncements. At the end of Till WeHave Faces fin as it was carried out into the churchyard. the queen writes, in what is her lucid and con- It seemed not only appropriate but almost a vincing complaint, "Only words, words; to be symbol of the man and his integrity and his led out to battle wit11 other words." And in Tlze absoluteness and his faith that the flame Silver Chair, Puddleglum's great affirmation burned so steadily, even in the open air, and follows upon his determining action: With his seemed so bright, even in the bright sun."

C. S. LEWIS 117 WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS

FELLOWSHIPS IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1995-96 Located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the Center awards approximately 35 residential fellowships each year for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences. Men and women from any country and from a wide variety of back- grounds(including government, the corporate world, the professions, and academe) may apply. Applicants must hold a doctorate or have equivalent professional accomplishments. Fellows are provided offices, access to the Library of Congress, com- p~itersor manuscript typing services, and research assistants. The Center publishes selected works written at the Center through the Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Fellowships are normally for an academic year. In determining stipends, the Center follows the principle of no gain/no loss in terms of a Fellow's previous year's salary. However, in no case can the Center's stipend exceed S59,000. Travel expenses for Fellows and their immediate dependents are provided. The application deadline is October 1, 1994. For application materials write to: Fellowships Office, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., SI MRC 022, Washington, DC 20560. Tel: (202) 357-2841

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The Perils of Humanitarian Intervention A Survey of Recent Articles

resident George Bush won wide ap- tant secretary of state, strongly resisted UN at- plause when, with United Nations ap- tempts to go beyond that limited mission. But the proval, he sent 28,000 US. soldiers to Clinton administration took office less than two avert mass starvation in Somalia late in 1992. months later with different ideas. It pushed the Then, last October, after a firefight in the Somali UN Security Council to commit itself in March capital of Mogadishu left 18 Americans dead 1993 to what U.S. ambassador Madeleine K. (and 14 others fatally wounded), President Bill Albright approvingly described as "an unprec- Clinton retreated from his own more ambitious edented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the nation-building plans for Somalia. The United restoration of an entire country." Not only this States, he announced, would get out of Somalia effort at nation building but also the apparent completely by March 31,1994. shift toward UN-led multilateralism eventually be- Something, it seemed, had gone very wrong came an issue, with many insisting that the United with this exercise in humanitarian interven- States should not be led by the United Nations. tion-but what was it? Some analysts, such as When the United States handed responsibil- John R. Bolton, writing in Foreign Affairs (Jan.- ity back to the UN peace-keeping force in May Feb. 1994), contend that Clinton erred in expand- 1993, most American soldiers went home, but ing the original, limited mission. Others, such as not all: about 4,500 troops were left behind. Just David Frornkin, writing in the New York Times weeks later, forces believed to be under the com- Magazine (Feb. 27,1994), argue that Bush failed mand of General Mohammed Farah Aidid at- to face "the question of what would happen tacked UN soldiers, killing at least 23 Pakistani when the troops were withdrawn: would not the peace keepers. The Security Council authorized warlords go back to warlording and the Soma- Aidid's arrest, and U.S. combat forces returned lis back to starving?" Perhaps the real mistake to Somalia to strike at positions believed held by was in thinking that the venture would be a Aidid's followers. Nation building, it seemed, straightforward and simple matter, carrying was now going to be attempted under combat with it no risks, no deepening obligations. The 1992 U.S. and UN decision to send troops to Somalia to clear the relief channels blocked by POLITICS & GOVERNMENT Somali gangs and to get food to the starving FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE 122 Somalis was "almost unprecedented," notes 121 I Guenter Lewy, a University of Massachusetts ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS 125 political scientist, in Orbis (Fall 1993). "Not since the 1840s, when Britain, France, and the United SOCIETY 129 States dispatched cruisers to the west coast of PRESS & MEDIA 131 Africa in order to limit down slave ships, had the world seen a major military operation devoid of RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 132 any strategic or economic benefit." SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY 134 The Bush administration expected that once the mission was accomplished, in three or four & ENVIRONMENT months, responsibility would be handed back to ARTS & LETTERS 137 1 the UN peace-keeping force and the United States would get out. The Bush administration, OTHER NATIONS 140 notes John Bolton, who served in it as an assis-

PERIODICALS 119 conditions, at least in Mogadishu. But "the plight of the Iraqi Kurds [after the Not everyone thought that mission mis- Persian Gulf War], the vicious fighting and guided, even after the deaths of tlie U.S. soldiers sieges in the former Yugoslavia, and the starva- in October. The Economist (Oct. 9,1993) urged tlie tion in Somalia"-which all resulted in UN in- United States to stay the course: "Outside a small tervention-were hardly tlie only situations to area of Mogadishu, famine and anarchy have shock "the conscience of mankind in recent been defeated. . . . If some dozens of peace keep- decades, Adam Roberts, a professor of interna- ers-not all American-have been killed to tional relations at Oxford University, points out make this possible, they did not die in vain. But in Harvard International Reviezu (Fall 1993). "Tlie if the UN operation were to collapse, the whole fact that mass slaughter in Cambodia, shootings disaster could start again." in Beijing, ruthless dictatorship in Myanmar It was unrealistic for Bush to liave thought [Burma], or catastrophe in Sudan did not lead to "tliat a narrowly circumscribed effort-exclud- humanitarian interventions suggests that some ing such essential tasks as disarmament, help in other factors are involved." These enabling con- reconstituting a civil society, and assistance for ditions include extensive TV coverage and the reconstruction-would be fruitful in restoring absence of "dissent among powers or massive hope in this hapless country," Thomas G. Weiss, military opposition." of Brown University's Institute for International Where intervention is prompted by the dis- Studies, writes in the Washiizgton Quarterly (Winter integration of a state or by a governn~ent'sevil 1994).He believes tliat "international intervention actions (as opposed to a natural disaster, for ex- in such civil wars as Somalia and the former Yu- ample), Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann points out goslavia should be timely and robust or slimed in Harvard International Reviezu, it can become ex- altogether." Weiss himself leans toward an active tremely difficult to remedy tlie calamity without policy. A more cautious note is sounded by David addressing tlie causes tliat produced it. Other- Fromkin, in the Nezu York Times Mapzine: "If the wise, those intervening "may well be doomed to issue is not important enough to be worth tlie playing Sisyplius." But an effort to go to tlie root lives of United States service personnel, we should of tlie problem could risk, as in Somalia, "add- not be sending in die armed forces." ing to violence and creating victims of its own." General Aidid taught America a painful but useful lesson, argues A. J. Bacevicli, of the For- ven in successful humanitarian interven- eign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins tion by tlie United States, warns Fareed University's School of Advanced International E Zakaria, managing editor of Foreign Af- Studies. "Tlie lost battle for Mogadisliu," lie fairs, there is a serious danger. Writing in Com- writes in Commentary (Dec. 1993), "has shattered mentary (Dec. 19931, lie argues that tlie case tlie dangerous illusion that the American mili- against "substantial intervention" in places such tary prowess displayed in tlie desert [during tlie as Somalia is not tliat intervention will always Persian Gulf War] foretold an era of war witli- fail or will not do good, but rather that America out the shedding of American or civilian blood, slio~I not squander its power. Tlie stable Cold an era hi wlucli Amencan military might would War order is now coming apart. "It will take guarantee political order. Americans liave learned every effort of the United States to arrest this again . . . tliat to resort to anns is a proposition descent and secure the central achievements of fraught with uncertainty." the last 45 years-peace and prosperity in East ''Even though it is true tliat America alone can- Asia and Europe and an absence of serious ri- not solve all of tlie world's problems, there are valry among tlie great powers of tlie world. . . . many things Americans can do," Guenter Lewy If Washington gets so distracted by Africa, tlie argues.While there is a need "to make realistic cal- Caribbean, and tlie Balkans that it loses tlie abil- dilations of costs and benefits, including estimates ity to focus tlie bulk of its energies on Europe and of tlie probability of success," lie believes that hu- East Asia, tlie resulting strains in global politics manitarian intervention is justified when "the con- and economics could make what is happening science of the civilized world is shocked. in Somalia look like a picnic."

120 WQ SPRING 1994 -- POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

FDR's Secret Ally "President Hoover's Efforts on Behalf of FDR's 1932 Nomination" by William G. Tliiemann, in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Winter 1994), 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y.10021. Herbert Hoover is usually remembered as the hapless victim of the Great Depression and, in the 1932 election, of the ebullient Franklin D. Roosevelt. History is always more complicated than such simple imagery suggests, and now Thie- maim, a graduate student in history at Miami Uiu- versity, Ohio, adds an interesting detail to the Hoover-FDR tableau. It seems that the Republi- can president may have given FDR some help in securing the 1932 Democratic nomination. Hoover, according to the unpublished diaries Thanks a million? of his press secretary, Theodore Joslin, thought that Roosevelt would be the easiest foe to beat. ceived similar advice from businessman Joseph Like many others at the time, the incumbent P. Kennedy.) Mayer believed that he had suc- president viewed FDR as an opportunist and ceeded and wired back to the White House that intellectual lightweight. Hoover also believed "Hearst would cut loose in the morning." that the liberal two-term governor of New York In Chicago, after three ballots in the early- would alienate conservative Democrats in the morning hours of July 1, it appeared that eastern states and thus tip the balance to lum. (As Roosevelt, possessing a majority but not the it turned out, all six states FDR lost were in the needed two-thirds of the votes, had been East, but he still carried New York, New Jersey, stopped. At 9:15 A.M., the delegates staggered and Massachusetts, not to mention the rest of the back to their hotel rooms. That same morning, country.) When, in June 1932, Joslin said he Hearst's Chicago Record-American printed a thought Roosevelt would be nominated at the damning editorial about Baker, and during the Democratic convention in Chicago later that day, Thiemann writes, Hearst communicated month, Hoover responded: "I hope you are with Garner about releasing the Texas delega- right . . . but I think you are wrong. I hate to think tion. The California delegation switched to it, but I believe they will nominate Newton Roosevelt, and Garner (who became the vice- Baker," an internationalist who had been Presi- presidential nominee) and his Texas delegation dent Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war and went along. Roosevelt won the nomination. had fought hard for the League of Nations. When Hoover got word that the deal had After the convention got under way, Hoover gone through, Joslin was later told, he "smiled and Joslin, doubting that Roosevelt would be more broadly than he had in months." able to prevail unassisted, set out to derail Baker. They fixed on a scheme to exploit the fact that press lord William Randolph Hearst, who con- What's Bothering trolled the crucial California delegation, was an isolationist who detested Baker. Hearst was White Voters backing Texan John Nance Garner, speaker of "Issue Evolution Reconsidered: Racial Attitudes and the US. House of Representatives, whose Partisanship in the U.S. Electorate" by Alan I. chances of emerging as the nominee were slim. Abramowitz, in American Journal of Political Science (Feb. 19941, Journals Dept., Univ. of Texas Press, 2100 Comal, At Joslin's suggestion, Hoover dispatched movie Austin, Texas 78722-2550. mogul Louis B. Mayer, who was close to Hearst, to warn Hearst that if he wanted to stop Baker, Where have all the white voters gone? many he "better get busy." (Hearst apparently re- Democratic Party leaders wondered during the

PERIODICALS 121 1980s. Between 1980 and '88, the proportion of crats. Overall, the difference between white Re- the electorate identifying with the Democrats fell publicans and white Democrats on racial issues from 41 percent to 36 percent. Racial politics was averaged only eight percentage points. That the main reason, according to a widely accepted compares with an average difference of 20 points theory advanced by political scientists Edward on social-welfare issues (e.g., health insurance, G. Carmines and James A. Stimson. After a close taxes versus services), and an average difference look at American National Election Studies for of 13 points on national-security issues. 1980 and 1988, Abramowitz, a political scientist Did racial attitudes have an indirect im- at Emory University, sees other causes. pact, by influencing attitudes toward social- Abramowitz agrees that the 1964 presiden- welfare programs? In Chain Reaction (19911, tial election was a watershed, as Carmines and Thomas Byrne Edsall, a Washington Post re- Stimson argue. President Lyndon B. Johnson, porter, and his wife Mary D. Edsall, a writer, champion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, argue that white disillusionment with the wel- trounced conservative Republican Senator fare state reflected a growing perception that Barry M. Goldwater, who had opposed it. government welfare programs disproportion- Democratic leaders and activists then moved ately aided blacks. Abramowitz, however, says sharply to the left on racial issues, while their that a sophisticated statistical analysis shows GOP counterparts moved sharply to the right. only a "rather modest" connection between But that, Abramowitz points out, does not racial attitudes and social-welfare ones. Any necessarily mean that voters were choosing indirect effect on party identification would parties on the basis of their racial attitudes, or have been extremely weak. that the subsequent "white flight" from the White defections during the '80s, he con- Democrats was racially motivated. cludes, cannot simply be blamed, as many The survey data for 1988, he writes, show that Democrats would have it, on the GOP's will- among white voters, partisan differences over ingness to play the race card. Democrats, racial issues were "very limited." On most race- Abramowitz argues, must face facts: The related questions, large majorities of Republi- Democratic belief in an expanding welfare cans and Democrats favored the "conservative" state no longer goes down well with a lot of position. For example, 91 percent of white Re- white voters. Bill Clinton, running as "a new publicans opposed racial preferences in hiring kind of Democrat" opposed to his party's tra- and promotion-but so did 82 percent of white ditional "tax and spend" policies, seemed to rec- Democrats. Similarly, 76 percent of white Re- ognize that. But his victory, Abramowitz says, publicans opposed the use of racial quotas by was far from a guarantee that the Democrats' colleges-but so did 66 percent of white Demo- identity problems are over.

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

Containing China, product, and a big chunk of America's foreign trade. During the Cold War, Washington's Politely strategy toward the region, stretching from "Wealth, Power, and Instability: East Asia and the Japan to Burma, was determined mainly by the United States after the Cold War" by Richard K. Betts, requirements of America's global struggle in International Seciirit?/ (Winter 1993-94), Center for Science and International Affairs,Harvard Univ., 79 with the Soviet Union. Now, the policymakers John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138. have no automatic answers, notes Betts, a Co- lumbia University political scientist. Is China's East Asia claims about one-third of the world's prosperity in America's national interest? population, a growing share of its economic What about a rearmed Japan?

122 WQ SPRING 1994 Analysts can draw on two main intellectual Fighting the Last War traditions: conservative "realism," which "Down the Hatch" by Eliot A. Cohen, in The New stresses tlie pursuit of national interests and a Republic (Mar. 7,1994), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, balance of power, and Wilsonian liberalism, D.C. 20036. which emphasizes tlie spread of liberal political values. During the Cold War, Americans often hi tlie difficult effort to chart a course in the post- did not have to choose, Betts points out: "Tlie Cold War world, tlie Clinton administration's communist threat, like the fascist threat before 1993 "bottom-up review" of defense policy is a it, combined military power with anti-liberal ide- major policy statement. Unfortunately, argues ology, allowing conservative realism's focus on Colien, director of the strategic studies program at might and liberal idealism's focus on riglit to Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced In- converge in a militant policy." ternational Studies, it does not supply tlie radical Take tlie question of whether the United rethinking of U.S. military needs tliat is needed. States sliould want China to prosper. "For liber- Mincing no words, lie calls tlie report "timid," als," Betts writes, "the answer is yes, since a quar- "conservative," and "possibly dangerous." ter of tlie world's people would be relieved from Tlie review is unrealistic on several levels, poverty and because economic growth should make democratization more likely, which in turn should prevent war between Beijing and Losing the Peace? other democracies. For realists, however, tlie answer should be no, since a rich China would Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Re- overturn any balance of power." public, in Foreign Affairs (Mar.-Apr. 1994): Liberal and realist prescriptions are similarly at odds on Japanese military power. For liberals, If we in [the] 'ipostco~~zttz~~~zist"countries call a stronger Japan would be at worst harmless, for a new order, if zue appeal to the West not since Japan is a democracy and a long-standing to close itself off to us, and ifzue demand a radi- ally of tlie United States. For realists, however, cal reevaluafio~zof the new situation, then this a Japan armed with military power cominensu- is not because we are cot icerized about our own rate with its economic power, "unless it is security and stability, and not only because we pinned down by a powerful common enemy, is feel that the security of the West itself is at a potential threat. It would be the strongest mili- stake. The reason is far deeper than that. We tary power in Asia, and the second-ranking one are concerned about the destiny of the values in tlie world." Tlie fact tliat Japan is democratic and principles that communism denied,and in is no guarantee of peace. Indeed, some observ- whose name we resisted communism and ul- ers doubt tliat Japan really is or will remain a de- timately brought it dozutz. . . . mocracy in Western terms. Naturally,all of us continue to pay lip ser- Betts (who leans toward the realist perspec- vice to democracy, human rights, the order of tive) believes tliat Cliina is "tlie state most nature and responsibility for the world, but ap- likely over time to disturb equilibrium in the pmently only insofar as it does not require any region-and the world." Even by conservative sacrifice. By that, I do not mean, of course, estimates, he notes, Cliina is not far from be- merely sacrifice in the form of fallen soldiers. coming an economic superpower. With just "a The West has made,& continues to make, such bit of bad luck," Betts warns, China's eco- sacrifices. . . .Ilzave in inilzd, ra tlzer, sacrifice in a nomic development could make the old Soviet less conspicuous but infinitely broader sense, that military threat seem almost modest. In any is, a ivilli~zgnessto sacrificefor the common inter- case, in dealing with a prosperous China, tlie est something of one's own particular interests, only alternatives for tlie United States "will be including even thequest for larger and larger do- to accept Chinese hegemony in the region or mestic production and consumption. to balance Chinese power" with what he calls "polite containment."

PERIODICALS 123 according to Cohen. Its distinguishing premise Bosnia," that it "will find itself weighing an in- is tliat the United States should be prepared to tervention to reverse a fait accompli, to prevent fight two major regional wars almost simulta- a disaster, or to excise a menace." That would neously-for example, a Korean war and a con- require a very different force structure. And flict with a rearmed Iraq. But a replay of the Per- there are more subtle military matters to ponder, sian Gulf War is unlikely. In fact, Cohen ob- Colien argues. Between the world wars, the U.S. serves, if Saddam Hussein's defeat "taught military, operating at a relaxed pace that encour- America's foes anything, it was that they should aged reflection, managed to produce "a genera- not replicate tlie Iraqi strategy. Massed tank tion of leaders who had thought deeply and armies are not the way to take over small coun- imaginativelyabout their profession." They proved tries that happen to be American allies-far bet- invaluable when war came again. Now tliat the ter to launch ambiguous takeovers behind tlie Cold War is over, America needs to figure out how smoke screen of liberation movements or uncon- to breed a similar generation of military leaders. trolled dissident groups or native putsch-makers." Even more fatal to tlie review's blueprint, Cohen says, tlie U.S. military, for at least five to Iraqgate 10 years, will be incapable of carrying out tlie plan. "American airlift and sealift simply could Unraveled not move the bottom-up review force to two si- 'The Myth of Iraqgate" by Kenneth I. Juster, in Foreign multaneous wars, nor could the United States Policy (Spring 1994), 2400 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. shuttle forces from a war in one corner of the 20037-1 153. globe to a war in another without pause for re- fitting, retraining, or rest." In addition, Colien New York Times columnist William Safire and argues, the blueprint forceabout the minimum other members of the press have written, exten- size necessary to sustain, even in theory, the two- sively about what they call "Iraqgate." The gist war strategy, and little smaller than the force of their attack is that prior to the Persian Gulf planned by the Bush administration-"is just War, the Bush administration perverted U.S. ag- plain unaffordable." With 10 active army and ricultural-assistance programs to provide loans three marine divisions, 12 aircraft carriers, and to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who then used the 13 active air force wings, the force looks form- money to buy weapons. Various charges of dable. But its size will come at the cost of defer- wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise, have been ring replacement of helicopters, tanks, and other made by the news media, among them tliat tlie equipment; after 10 to 15 years, "a massive junking CIA helped get money to Iraqi arms agents, that of obsolescent gear" would be necessary. tlie U.S. government itself shipped arms to Iraq, As if all tlus were not enough, Cohen discerns and that the Bush administration tried to cover "a deeper malady" in American strategy: It fails up alleged misconduct. to face up to the fact that sooner or later tlie After more than four years of hearings and United States will confront "upheavals overseas investigations by various executive branch, con- that cannot be accommodated or negotiated gressional, and judicial bodies, the charges of away," such as a takeover of Egypt by Islamic wrongdoing remain unproven, notes Juster, a fundamentalists. It also fails to look beyond the lawyer who served in the State Department dur- next five or 10 years, to "a world in which China ing the Bush administration (and says he had no becomes an assertive Asian power, perhaps pro- involvement in U.S. policy toward Iraq before voking a Japanese nuclear response, or a world the invasion of Kuwait). What is more, lie con- in which nuclear weapons are riot merely devel- tends, the press, which is largely responsible for oped but occasionally used." creating the widespread impression that some- The Pentagon planners, wedded to Cold War tiling deserving the name "Iraqgate" happened, thinking, assumed that the United States would has repeatedly misrepresented crucial facts regard- always fight defensive wars. But it is just as ing the workings of the agricultural-assistance pro- likely, Cohen says, "as in the Gulf or now in gram and what Iraq did under tlie program.

124 WQ SPRING 1994 U.S.News & World Report (Oct. 26,1992), in a typical media account, declared tliat the Busli administration "continued to provide billions of dollars in loans to Saddam Hussein after [Iraq's] war witli Iran ended in 1988. Despite evidence tliat Iraqi agents were stealing some of tlie American loan money and using it to buy and build biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, the Busli administration increased die amount of die loans." Then, in August 1990, Iraqinvaded Kuwait. One problem with this account is tliat the U.S. government never loaned Iraq any money. What really happened, according to Juster, is tliat in 1989, in the belief "that tlie evolution of normal Pre-Gulf War efforts to improve relations with Iraq relations with Iraq was in America's interest," later seemed incredible-even criminal-to some. the Busli administration decided to keep making Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) credit happened only in the early years, during the guarantees available for export sales of farm Iran-Iraq war. Then Iraq had to begin repaying products to Iraq (as the United States had done American banks. In fact, during fiscal 1990 (up during tlie 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war). The CCC until tlie invasion of Kuwait), Iraq paid out $455 credit guarantees were not loans but a form of million more in hard currency under tlie CCC insurance that greased the wheels of commerce. program than it received in new credit. Iraq met They were issued to U.S. exporters selling all its scheduled payments until sanctions were wheat, rice, or other farm products to Iraq. In imposed after tlie invasion of Kuwait. Iraq then essence, the guarantees allowed U.S. banks to owed about $1.9 billion under tlie CCC pro- pay the exporters for the farm products and then gram-and it still owes that amount to tlie U.S. extend credit to Iraq for the purchases, wit11 Wash- government or U.S. banks. All but $392 million ington agreeing to pay the banks if Iraq defaulted. of the total represents loans piled up before The decision to make the credit guarantees George Bush assumed tlie presidency. available may liave been unwise, Juster ob- The pre-Gulf War policy toward Iraq could serves, but a lack of wisdom is not the same as have been the subject of a serious debate, Juster criminal wrongdoing. The guarantees, lie ac- notes. Unfortunately, lie says, the effort by tlie knowledges, did free Iraqi funds tliat could have news media and others "to criminalize foreign been used for arms purcliases. However, be- policy differences" prevented such a debate cause of tlie three-year payment schedule, that from taking place.

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

The Blessings tury, periodic battles over bankruptcy legislation were waged witli great passion. They pitted Of Bankruptcy Jeffersonians against Federalists, fanners against merchants, and southern and western interests 'The Freedom to Fail" by Jonathan Foreman, in Aiidncity against tlie Northeast. But out of the conflicts has (Winter 1994), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y.10011. come sometliing distinctly American, argues Since colonial days, the clash of creditors and Foreman, a New York lawyer. Bankruptcy laws debtors has left many marks on American his- in other nations usually liave been designed only tory, particularly in hard times. Until this cen- to protect creditors, lie says, but in the United States

PERIODICALS 125 such laws have often shielded debtors, too. 1800, Congress enacted a bankruptcy law allow- The harsh bankruptcy law of 18th-century ing foreclosure but not imprisonment. Backed by England permitted creditors not only to seize Federalists, along with urban and commercial a debtor's assets but to have him put in prison. interests, the measure was opposed by In colonial America, most loans were unse- southerners and farmers. "Is commerce so much cured, which made it hard to proceed against the basis of the existence of the United States as a debtor's property. Imprisonment was thus to call for a bankrupt law?" asked Thomas the creditor's ultimate weapon-though it was Jefferson. He and his followers won the law's rarely used. repeal in 1803. Armed uprisings against courts and creditors New bankruptcy laws were enacted in 1841 in the troubled 1780s, including Shays's Rebel- and 1867. Each was subsequently repealed. The lion in 1786, led to the bankruptcy and contracts economic upheavals of the 1890s revived inter- clauses of the Constitution, which give Congress est in such laws. Despite the opposition of farm- sole power to enact bankruptcy laws. That ers, who strongly objected to letting creditors power lay dormant until the panics of 1792 and foreclose against debtors without their consent, '97, brought on by waves of speculation. Some Congress passed the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. It prominent Americans were among the debtors. allowed both voluntary and involuntary bank- Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, ruptcies, but barred creditors from forcing farm- went to jail in Philadelphia for three years. In ers into involuntary bankruptcy.

Mugged by Reality

Renowned liberal George McGovem, a former senator from South Dakota and the 1972 Demo- cratic presidential nominee, bought the Stratford Inn, in Connecticut, in 1988. During the next few years (before he finally gave up), he writes in Inc. (Dec. 19931, he learned a lot about business that he wishes he had known before.

I learned first of all that over the past 20 years ii~a~zagemei~fburdens we 11ave been imposing on America has become the most litigious society inU.S.business. As an innkeeper, I wanted excellent the zuorld. . . . As the owner of the St ratford Inn, safegi~ardsagainst a fire. But Iwas startled to be told I was on the receiving end of a couple of laiu- thatour two-storystructure, whichhadlaqesliding suits. . . . I11 one case, a ma11 left our lounge late doors openingfr'om every guest room to all-concrete one night and headed for his car, which was parlred decks, required US to meet fire regulations more ap- in our parking lot. He got into a fight along tkyoyinteto the Waldorf-Astoria. . . . way,and later sued f11e hotel for not providing I'm for protecting the health and well-beii~gof more security in the parlcizzg area. both workers and consumers. I'm for a clean en- 011another occasion, a person leaving our res- vironment and economic justice. But I'm con- t~z~rmtand lounge lost his footing and fell, alleg- vinced we can pursue those worthy goals and still ediy suffering a costly i~~j~~ry.He promptly sued cut down vastly 011 the incredible paverworlr, the us for damages. Both of the suits mere subse- complicated faxforms, the number of mitzute regti- qziently dismissed, but not without a first-rate Ie- lotions, and the seemingly endless reporting re- gal defense that did not come cheaply. . . . q1/ireii7etitsflzaf afflict American business. Many The second lesson I learned by ozuning the bz{si~~esses,especially small indepet~dei~tssuch as StratfordInn is that legislatorsaizdgroei~nmentrep- the SfraffordInn,simply can't pass costs on to their lators must more carefully consider theeconomic and customers and remain competitive or profitable.

126 WQ SPRING 1994 That law, modified many times, survived popularity much. Why, then, do many Ameri- until the 1970s. The enormous Penn Central cans get upset about CEOs' high pay? bankruptcy-which involved liabilities of $3.3 The answer, says Blair, a researcher at the billion and took a decade to sort out-brought Brookings Institution, lies in the fact that the home the fact that the bankruptcy law was not same economic forces that pushed executive pay designed for an age of big business. The case to astronomical heights during the 1980s often saw, among other things, "the absurd spectacle were simultaneously making the jobs of many of a single [court-appointed] lawyer attempting ordinary Americans less secure. Indeed, many to run a huge company." executives earned their big rewards by closing In 1978, Congress adopted a new Bank- down factories and offices and slicing payrolls. ruptcy Code. Instead of just turning bankrupt Before the mid-'8Os, Blair notes, extremely operations over to outside trustees, it gives high pay for executives was rare. During the 30 managers who want to remain in charge the fat years after World War 11, U.S. corporations, benefit of the doubt. It has critics on both Left especially in manufacturing, generated enor- and Right. The former argue, ironically, that mous surpluses, allowing most large firms to sat- the law is too permissive, allowing executives isfy investors, workers, and managers. Salaries to remain in control of companies they have of executives generally varied with the size of the run into the ground. Some conservatives company, wlule bonuses depended on how fast would like to see bankrupt firms quickly liq- it was growing. uidated so that their assets can be efficiently By the early 1980s, returns to capital, already redistributed by the market. Foreman thinks on a downward trend, reached a postwar low, the new law has got it about right. Why lose while real interest rates soared. Stock prices lan- "the synergy of a working business" in a liq- guished, encouraging corporate raiders and hos- uidation? Abuses, he insists, are rare. Thanks tile takeovers. They also encouraged a move- to the code, he notes, the Federated chain of ment to tie executive compensation more closely department stores, Continental Airlines, and to the returns achieved for stockl~olders.Stock Macy's are all still in business, with employ- options, which could yield enormous payoffs if ees still on the job. stock prices rose, soon became a big part of executive pay packages. Improved stock performance was often How CEOs achieved, Blair writes, through "corporate re- structuring that resulted in layoffs, cutbacks, and Got Theirs tremendous pressures on rank-and-file workers and mid-level managers." This began in smaller "CEO Pay: Why Such a Contentious Issue?" by Margaret M. Blair, in Brooki~igsReview (Winter 1994), firms during the early 1980s, and is still working 1775 Mass. Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. its way through the economy, wit11 major layoffs and cutbacks having taken place even at such Since 1987, according to annual Business Week giants as IBM, General Motors, and Sears. surveys of about 250 companies, there have been Of course, many of the highest-paid execu- 277 cases in which a corporate executive made tives in the past few years have been at growing more than $5 million in a given year, and 77 in firms such as Hospital Corporation of America, wluch an executive made more than $10 million. Toys 'R Us, and Walt Disney. Nevertheless, says For 13 lucky executives, total compensation in Blair, "there are plenty of companies like Mar- 1992 topped $20 million. Three took home more tin Marietta, General Dynamics, General Electric, than $60 million. Popular resentment is such that RJR Nabisco, Time Warner, ITT, and Unisys, all last year Congress provided tax penalties under of whose CEOs made the list of the 15 highest certain circumstances for firms that pay execu- paid executives in years when their companies tives more than $1 million. The multilmillon-dol- were undergoing significant downsizing." And lar salaries of ballplayers, entertainers, and TV that has made the CEOs' jackpot hard for many anchorpeople do not seem to diminish their to stomach.

PERIODICALS 127 Created in 1913 with the hope that it would The Sam Also Rises be insulated from politics, the Fed is in reality suffused with it. Few decisions can be made on Temporarily down on their luck, the Japa- technical grounds alone. "Monetary policy is nese are, for the moment at least, looking filled with large uncertainties, squishy facts, and at American industry with renewed re- unpleasant trade-offs between competing spect, T. R. Reid reports from Japan in the goals." And contrary to myth, Greider says, the Washington Post (Feb. 10,1994). Fed is not above "politics" in the generic sense of the term. It is not that bankers and bondhold- ers have "captured" the Fed, he believes, but rather that the institution "is preoccupied with a narrow version of econonuc reality while other d ideas and fashions competing versions are excluded from the inside spread the length of debate." While bankers "are consulted regularly the land in the blinkof and intimately . . . labor unions and fanners,home an eye, the only re- builders and independent oil dnUers are not." 11zai11i;lg dispute Greider favors proposed legislation that about the widely re- would require publication of a full transcript of ported American re- the deliberations of the Federal Open Market vival is what to call it. Committee, the Fed's top policy-making body, In a 16-part,front-page series on America's a few months after its meetings. Fed Chairman "high-tech comeback," the Yomiuri Alan Greenspan and the Fed's governors maintain Slumbum, Japan's biggest newspaper, chose that releasing anything more than a brief outline of the title "America's Neiu Tide." An influential a meeting's minutes might cause damaging h-ian- political newsletter refers to "TlzehJewAineri- cia1 speculation. But Greider argues that the mea- can Might." sure would encourage the Fed to consider more But the most popular new term seems to be viewpoints. It would also foster coordinated policy "Rising Sam". . . . making. While the Fed controls money and credit policy, Congress and the White House control fiscal policy (spending and taxation), and the two sometimes work against each other. In 1981, for example, the Reagan tax cuts and Sharing the Secrets defense buildup were powerful economic stiinu- lants. "But the Federal Reserve was simulta- "Why Alan Greenspan Should Show You His Hand" neously embarked on the opposite course: sup- by William Greider, in Tlie Washington Monthly (Dec. pressing economic growth with extraordinarily 1993), 1611 Conn. Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. high interest rates in order to squeeze out price inflation. . . . The car with two drivers wound up The Federal Reserve Systen1's "power over the in a ditch-first a deep recession, then an awe- daily lives of ordinary Americans-not to inen- some accumulation of debt." tion the largest enterprises of commerce and fi- After the 1981-82recession, Greider says, the nance-is at least as great as the president's or Fed privately resolved to continue to check the Congress's and, in most instances, more irnrne- stimulus of the Reagan program so as to prevent diate," writes Greider, national affairs columnist inflation from recurring. It held interest rates for Rolling Stone and author of a 1987 book, Se- very high throughout the rest of the decade, and crets of the Temple, about the agency. The Fed's that, he contends, "dramatically worsened" the decisions affect inflation, interest rates 011 inort- savings-and-loan crisis; sent the dollar's value gages and other loans, and economic growth. soaring against foreign currencies and so made Yet, Greider complains, the Fed's decision- the U.S. trade deficit musl~room;triggered the making is kept secret from the public. collapse of Third World debt in August 1982;

128 WQ SPRING 1994 and caused the farm crisis of the mid '80s. Nei- is unconscionable, Greider concludes, that ther farmers nor other debtors were given fair Americans and their elected representatives are warning of what the government was doing. It kept in the dark about matters of such magnitude.

SOCIETY

Leaving Home true for whites: Native-born white men earned less ($14,371)in 1979 than white immigrants did And Doing Well ($15,421).A widely accepted explanation of that finding, she points out, is "that immigrants are "Black Immigrants in the United States: A Comparison with Native Blacks and Other Immigrants" by Kristin a self-selected group-differing from other F. Butcher, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Jan. members of the population in their motivation, 1994), Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y. 14853-3901. ability, or attitudes toward risk." The same, she suggests, may be true for blacks. The distinction Do the "cultural traditions" of American-born between those who dare to venture into strange blacks impede their economic progress? Promi- territory and those who stay at home may be nent economist Thomas Sowell-pointing to the "more fundamental than any inherent distinc- higher earnings of West Indian immigrants in tion between U.S.- and foreign-bornblack men." the United States-has argued that they do. Butcher, an economist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, has a different explanation. Big City Analyzing 1980 census data, she finds that West Indian immigrant men did indeed have 'Fate of a World Citv" bv Nathan Glazer, in Citv Journal (Autumn 1993),52 Vanderbilt AV~.,New York, higher average earnings. Jamaicans, for ex- N.Y. 10017. ample, earned an average of $10,115 while native-born black men earned $9,063. The differ- With its awesome skyscrapers, great bridges, ence in employment rates was also significant: huge railroad terminals, and vast subway sys- 87 percent of the Jamaicans had jobs, compared tem, New York City was long the very symbol with 79 percent of the native black men. The two of the modern city. Today, the city leaves a dif- groups differed in other, arguably pertinent ferent impression. Harvard University sociolo- ways, as well. Sixty-two percent of the Jamaicans gist Glazer argues that it is suffering from "a were married, compared with only 51 percent of massive change" during the 1960s in the direc- the native-born black men. tion of city government. However, Butcher says, there is a subset of Spending by the city (in constant dollars) the native-born that compares quite well with the tripled during the 15 years after 1960, while New Jamaicans, and that is native-born black men York's population fell. Checked for a time by the who have moved away from the state in which fiscal crisis of 1975, outlays began rising again in they were born. Such migrants (57 percent of 1983. By the end of the decade, city government whom were married) earned an average of by itself consumed nearly 20 percent of "local $10,710 in 1979, nearly $600 more than the Jamai- value added" (a measure of the size of the local cans did and much more than the $7,896 that the economy). 'stay-at-home" native black men did. Eighty- New York, writes Glazer, has been pouring two percent of the migrants were employed, money into tllings a city simply cannot do well: "re- compared with 87 percent of the Jamaicans and distributingincome on a large scale and solving the 77 percent of the "stay-at-home" American black social and personal problems of people who, for men. whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive What's true for blacks, Butcher notes, is also behavior-resisting school, taking to drugs and

PERIODICALS 129 crime, indulging in self-gratificationat the expense Even conservative Charles Murray, in writ- of their children, their fail-dhes, their neighbors.'' ing Losing Ground, his controversial 1984 book ' 'Redistribution,' " Glazer notes, "suggests about the impact of the social welfare policies of handouts to the poor, and indeed some redis- the '60s, recognized the argument's force. He tributive expenditures consist of cash payments did not argue (despite the popular perception of to the poor. But far more go for salaries to those Losing Ground) that welfare caused more illegiti- who serve the poor. Redistribution meant a huge mate births. The evidence, he thought, could not increase in the number of city employees and in sustain that thesis. But, he now says, "I was their influence over city decisions." wrong." Doubling or tripling outlays in these areas The "error," says Murray, a Fellow at the seems to yield "no particular improvement," American Enterprise Institute, was in the choice Glazer says. "On the other hand, a sharp reduc- of a population pool to use as a standard: single tion in expenditure does not seem to hurt," judg- black women. The problem is that, thanks to ing by the experience of Massacl~usettstoday- changing social mores and other factors, this or even New York in 1975. group itself underwent a radical change. Be- Meanwhile, the city government has tween 1965 and 1970, the percentage of black "stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a women ages 1544 who were married pluin- city can do." These include "keeping its streets meted from 64 to 55-"an incredible change in and bridges in repair, building new facilities to such a basic social behavior during such a short accommodate new needs and a shifting popula- period of time." During the 1970s and '80s, the tion, picking up the garbage, and policing the marriage rate continued to fall, hitting a low of public environment." Ultimately, it is individual 34 percent in 1989. businesses and people that make a world-class The pool of unmarried black women was thus city, and a city that does not tend to such things being flooded-and the new additions evidently does not attract them. Other cities have made did not have the same propensity to have babies many of New York's mistakes, but its competi- out of wedlock. Hence, the incidence of illegiti- tors for world-class status manage to get the mate births per 1,000 single black women fell. basics done. New York needs to build mass-tran- But that was a statistical mirage caused by the sit links to its airports, open new highways, and transformation of the base group. The incidence pick up the trash. New York, Glazer insists, is of illegitimacy among all black women-a far not a helpless victim of forces beyond its control. more stable baserose sharply. The number of It holds its future in its own hands. illegitimate babies born annually in the black population nearly doubled between 1967 and 1990. "It increased most radically," Murray says, The Illegitimacy Error "from 1967 to 1971, tracking (with a two-year time lag) the most rapid rise in welfare benefits." ''Does Welfare Bring More Babies?" by Charles That, he notes, does not "prove" that the wel- Murray, in The American Enterprise (Jan.-Feb. 1994), 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. fare benefits promoted illegitimacy. However, he says, the message is plain: "At the same time Does welfare encourage single women to have that powerful social and economic forces were babies? That has been one of the thorniest ques- pushing down the incidence of black children tions in the nation's welfare debate. Researchers born to married couples, the incidence of black who think that it does can point to the rising children born to unmarried women increased, percentage of black babies born out of wedlock eventually surpassing the rate for married since the 1960s. But they have had to face up to couples. Something was making that particular the conflicting fact that the birth rate among behavior swim against a very strong tide, and, single black women dropped significantly dur- to say the least, the growth of welfare is a sus- ing the '60s. If welfare was such a powerful pro- pect with the means and the opportunity." moter of illegitimacy, why was the percentage of With black illegitimacy now at 68 percent and single black women having babies shrinking? wlute illegitimacy-22 percent in 1991-moving

130 WQ SPRING 1994 into "the same dangerous range" that prompted that "the institutions necessary to sustain a free alarms to be sounded in the mid-1960s about the society" are threatened. For that reason, he says, breakdown of the black family, Murray believes "I want to end welfare."

PRESS & MEDIA

Throwing Bombs claimed, for example, that steroid abuse was encouraged by Holtz and is widespread at Notre "Tarnished Pen" by Paul Sheehan, in Fortes Mediacritic Dame. In fact, Sheehan says, Notre Dame has (No. 2,19941, P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921. "the most rigorous screening program in the The University of Notre Dame and its football nation," and since 1985, when it began, only five coach, Lou Holtz, took a severe pounding last out of more than 400 players have tested posi- year in the best-selling Under the Tarnished Dome: tive; since 1990, none have. How Notre Dame Betrayed Its Ideals for Football Despite such grievous flaws, Under the Tar- Glory. The authors, journalists Don Yaeger and nished Dome was published by Simon & Schuster Douglas Looney, portrayed Holtz as a repulsive, (after having been turned down by its original hypocritical, mentally unstable bully, and his publisher, HarperCollins), serialized in such players as an ugly crew of violent, stupid, drug- newspapers as the Detroit News and the New abusing jocks. Television news shows and big- York Post, and its charges uncritically taken up city newspapers brayed the bad news. Sheehan, on ABC's "Nightline." In the first month after chief U.S. correspondent for the Australian Con- publication, the New York Times "ran no fewer solidated Press magazine group, contends that they are the ones who ought to worry about being tarnished. More than 300 students have played for Notre Dame during Holtz's tenure. Yaeger, a former newspaper reporter, and Looney, a Sports Illustrated veteran, listed 108 of them as sources, Sheellan observes, but more than half that number appeared only briefly or not at all in the text. "The book turns out to have been built on quotes from two dozen players, most of whom were either thrown out of the university, suspended from the team, dropped out, failed out, transferred, were placed on probation, or never played for Holtz," he says. Opposing views were not offered. The views of the 20 team captains during the Holtz era, for example, were not presented. Rick Mirer, the school's all-time passing leader, told the Los Angeles Times that Yaeger and Looney "looked for people who had a reason to be angry about whatever happened in their career there." The book is "a horrible misrepresentation of the university," Mirer said, and "the rap" against Holtz is "just not fair." Did tzuo journalist-authors who refused to play by the Key allegations in the book are at odds with rulesgive Notre Dameand its coach Lou Holtz (shown the facts, Sheehan maintains. The authors here in the midst of a game) an undeserved black eye?

PERIODICALS 131 than six negative reports on Notre Dame, five of nications, Incorporated, has promised) and all them quoting the book," Sheehan says. Even the video is digitized and carried on hundreds of chan- sports pages, it seems, are not immune to the nels, then "encoding and tracking all the ads be- press's "deep structural bias in favor of discord, comes a snap," Schrage says. A sophisticated sys- and its weakness for the disenchanted." tern "would be tecluucally capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads." For an extra $5 or $10 a month, a viewer's local cable company might be wilhi1g to cut out all the Ad Trek: ads. Or viewers could arrange to get only the types of ads they want, and screen out the rest. The Next Generation The implicit "deal" that mass media advertis- "Is Advertising Finally Dead?" by Michael Scl~rage, ers have always made with viewers or readers- with Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, and Robert D. Take our ads and zue'll pay for the TV or radio pro- Shapiro, in Wired (Feb. 1994),544 Second St., San grams, or heavily subsidize the newspapers or i~zaga- Francisco, Calif. 94119-9866. zines-"is likely to become decidedly explicit" in These days, we always seem to be poised on the the new Interactive Age, claim Peppers and brink of an utterly new era in which life will be Rogers, co-authors of The One-to-One Future: very, very different. The latest new age on the Building Relationships One Customer at a Time. horizon, according to Schrage, a columnist for When they turn on their television, viewers will Adweek magazine, and his fellow seers, is the get such offers as 'Watch this two-minute video "Interactive Ageu-and in this brave new realm, on the new Ford Taurus, and we'll pay for the advertising and the relationship between adver- pay-per-view movie of your choice," or "An- tisers and potential consumers is going to swer this brief survey from Kellogg and we'll be . . . very, very different. pay for the next three episodes of 'Murphy "Yesterday, we changed the channel; today Brown.' " The very character of these ads will be we hit the remote; tomorrow, we'll reprogram different, Schrage speculates: "Advertisements our agents/filters," Schrage proclaims. "We'll will feel and play like visual conversations, interact with advertising where once we only video games, and simulations." watched; we'll seek out advertising where once In tlus interactive future, Peppers and Rogers we avoided it. Advertising will not go away; it believe, a significant shift in power will have will be rejuvenated." taken place: "The consumer will be the one in the When "smart" cable converter boxes sit atop driver's seat, and the advertiser will be thumb- TVs everywhere (as JohnMalone, of Tele-Conunu- ing a ride."

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

The Importance rate of church attendance helps (along with other survey data) to make the United States "God's Of Seeming Pious country" in the eyes of some sociologists and 'What the Polls Don't Show: A Closer Look at U.S. historians. Hadaway, of the United Church Cliurcl~Attendance" by C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Board for Homeland Ministries, Marler, of Sam- Marler, and Mark Chaves, in American Sociological Review (Dec. 1993), Dept. of Sociology, Univ. of ford University, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Arizona, Tucson, Ariz. 85721. Chaves, of the University of Notre Dame, believe that a lot of Americans are fibbing. Survey after survey since World War I1 has They examine actual church attendance yielded the same finding: Roughly 40 percent of among Protestants in Ohio's rural Ashtabula Americans go to church every week. This high County, and among Catholics in 18 dioceses else-

132 WQ SPRING 1994 where in the nation, including two of the larg- Although he favored absolute liberty of dis- est, the archdioceses of New York and Clucago. cussion, Mill had no doubt that truth exists and According to a 1991 Gallup poll of adult can be known. That was the point of discussion. Americans, 45 percent of Protestants and 51 per- But his doctrine lends itself to relativism, cent of Catholics said they had gone to church Himmelfarb points out. "Mill himself meant the preceding week. The authors' own survey of only to say that society cannot presume to decide Ashtabula County residents found that only 36 between truth and falsity, or even to lend its sup- percent of Protestants claimed to have attended port to truth once that has been determined. But services. But head counts at the churches indi- a later generation, deprived of the authority of cated that only 20 percent of the county's Prot- society and impressed by the latitude and toler- estants took part in services in an average week. ance given to error, can so relativize and The result was similar in the 18 Catholic dio- 'problematize' truth as to deny the very idea of ceses, where the authors found that, overall, on it." Thus, postmodernists today are skeptical the basis of actual counts, only 28 percent of all even of contingent, partial, incremental truths. parishioners went to weekly mass. Even that fig- Similarly, in moral affairs, Mill himself was ure, for various reasons, is probably too high. not a relativist; he believed in the intrinsic supe- The authors conclude that Protestant and riority of chastity to promiscuity, sobriety to Catholic church attendance is roughly one-half drunkenness, decency to indecency, altruism to the levels reported by Gallup. That suggests that self-interest. But he also believed, Himmelfarb total church attendance in the nation is only 20- says, that "morality is dependent upon a maxi- 25 percent. Without allowing for differences be- mum amount of individuality." There should be tween reported and actual attendance in other no legal or social sanctions to promote morality countries (which appear to be much smaller), or discourage immorality. He knew how that puts Americans on a par, more or less, difficult the "acquisition of virtue" is, with Austrahans, Canadians, Belgians, and but he simply took for granted, the Dutch. American "exceptionalism" in Himmelfarb says, "a civilization that this case may come down to an exceptional would continue to impose upon indi- belief that it is important to appear pious even viduals the 'eminently artificial dis- if one is not. cipline' that was the moral corrective to human nature." Yet Mill and most liberals The TWO Mr. Mills since have proscribed social sanctions along with legal "Liberty: 'One Very Simple Principle' " by Gertrude ones, "stigmatizing both as Himnielfarb, in The American Scholar (Fall 1993), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. instruments of 'social army.' In doing so, they In John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty (18591, he unwittingly invite a asserted that "the sole end for which mankind worse tyranny, for are warranted, individually or collectively, in legislation is then interfering with the liberty of action of any of called upon to do their number, is self-protection."Liberalism has what society might come a long way since then, but in Mill's "one otherwise have done very simple principle" (as he called it) can be less obtrusively and found the roots of many of its problems today, contends Himmelfarb, the noted historian. "On Liberty was radical enough in its own time," she writes, "but it is, in a sense, still more In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill radical in ours, because it seems to validate con- (shown in an 1873 caricature) "set temporary ideas about liberty wluch go well be- the terms of the debate for our time," yond those that Mill intended." contends Gertrude Himmelfarb.

PERIODICALS 133 more benignly." environment but not of tlie culture, to prevent ra- In liberalism today, there is a disjunction be- cial segregation but not moral degradation?" tween the moral and economic domains, the liis- Mill himself, Himmelfarb writes, "did not torian says. Mill's dictum tliat "trade is a social intend to advocate so complete a double stan- act" is carried to an extreme. Government regu- dard, let alone so radical an inversion of values. lation has been extended from business and He put a higher value and priority on moral commerce to so-called "social" issues, such as ra- goods tlian on material ones." In On Liberty, un- cial integration, sexual equality, and fortunately, he unwittingly left the opposite im- multicultural education. This "social paternal- pression. Liberals today, Hirnrnelfarb concludes, ism" is combined with "moral individualism," need to go back to the "otl~er"Mill and to the lib- Himmelfarb says, in a way that suggests a eral tradition of Montesquieu, Madison, and double standard. 'Why is it proper for the gov- Tocqueville. Absolute liberty, like absolute ernment to prohibit insalubrious foods but not power, tends to corrupt absolutely-and, in- sadistic movies, to control tlie pollution of tlie deed, is "a grave peril to liberalism itself."

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

Perilous Pond Scum attributed to the poisons," Carmicliael notes. "But runoff from detergents and fertilizers is al- "The Toxins of Cyanobacteria" by Wayne W. tering tlie chemistry of many municipal water Carmichael, in Scientific American (Jan. 1994), 415 supplies and swimming areas, increasing the Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017-1111. concentration of nitrogen and pliospl~orus. These nutrients promote reproduction by dan- To scientists, the blue-green microorganisms are gerous cyanobacteria." Water-treatment pro- known as cyanobacteria; non-scientists more cesses only partially filter out tlie microbes. often call them by a different name: pond scum. Some evidence, Carmicliael says, suggests By any name, tlie many forms of cyanobacteria that certain of the toxins may contribute to the tliat are toxic may be posing an increasing 11az- development of cancer. He and other researcli- ard to humans, warns Cannicliael, a professor of ers are carrying out a long-term study in areas aquatic biology and toxicology at Wriglit State of China where, tliey suspect, extremely high University, in Dayton, Ohio. rates of liver cancer may be linked to The deadly pond scum was discovered in cyanobacterial toxins in tlie drinking water. 1878 by an Australian investigator, George Cyanobacteria are not all bad, Carinicl~ael Francis. Scientists liave since confirmed that points out. They have provided scientists with some cyanobacteria are indeed poisonous and insights into the origins of life. The microbes have caused mass deaths of animals. In tlie existed more tlian three billion years ago; be- nudwestern United States, for instance, migrat- cause they were the first organisms able to ing ducks and geese have perished by the tliou- convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, tliey "un- sands after consuming water contaminated by doubtedly played a major part in the oxygen- toxic cyanobacteria. ation of the air." Also, researchers think tliat Scientists so far liave found two basic types the toxins and their derivatives may yield of toxic cyanobacteria. Nenrotoxins attack the medicines to treat Alzlieimer's disease and nervous system and, by inducing paralysis of tlie other disorders. respiratory muscles, often cause death within Some cyanobacteria-from the genus minutes. Hepatofoxins damage the liver and can Spirf~li~~a-areeven sold as a sort of health food. cause deatli within a few hours or days. Spirulim itself is not harmful, but tlie practice "No confirmed human deatli has yet been worries Carmicliael. There are no regulations

134 WQ SPRING 1994 requiring that the products be monitored for contamination by toxic cyanobacteria. Also, Have a Rice Day Spindi~ia'spopularity has led to the marketing of other types of cyanobacteria, Anabaei~a and In American Historical Review (Oct. 1993), Aphanizotneizon, which have highly poisonous Peter A. Coclanis of the University of strains. Without "sophisticated biochemical North Carolina at Chapel Hill ponders the tests," he warns, "the safety of these items is meaning of rice. questionable." Rice (Oryza sativa) has sh& the lives of relatively fezu Westerners over fiine. It has Trading Organs doiiziizated the lives of fewer still. Wlzile the For Dollars? cereal has been known in the West sinceantiq- uity, its production and consi~iizptionfor the "Indecent Proposals?" by Margaret Davidson, in Tlie most part have been of only minor importa~zce, New Physician (Oct. 1993),American Medical Student occurring at the margin of Western foodzuays. Assn., 1890 Preston White Dr., Reston, Va. 22091. That we speak of breadzoi~znersrather than riceiuir1izers and pray for our daily bread rather Each year, kidneys, hearts, livers, and other or- than our daily rice fells us something about the gans are transplanted from some 4,500 brain- hold of bread-priiilarily zulzeat bread-on the dead or otherwise deceased individuals into Western world. In the East, where the rice critically ill patients. But that leaves more than plant originated, things are far different; . . . 2,500 patients each year who die because they in that part of the zuorld, rice is indeed king. never receive transplants. Should families of That the Iizdiaiz word for rice, dl~anya,means potential organ donors be offered cash in order "sustainer of the human race," that the name to boost the number of donations? An increas- of the Buddha's father, Suddlzodana, the sisth- ing minority of specialists and patients say yes, centi~ty-~.~.king of Nepal, literally means according to Davidson, a freelance writer. "pure rice," and that the idiomatic expression "We're killing too many people who don't "Have you eaten your rice today?" was a po- have to die," asserts Auburn University econo- lifeway of saying hello in traditional Chinese mist Andrew Barnett. "There are a lot of people society only begins to convey the place of rice who would be willing to have their organs har- in the East. vested if there were a profit motive involved and if they were asked." He favors a full-fledged market approach: Spot markets would provide for paying the families of donors; futures markets would pay potential donors for the right to vey found that 78 percent of neurosurgeons and remove organs after they die. 79 percent of critical-care nurses were opposed. But most advocates of compensation-wluch Foes of compensation fear that physicians might is now illegal-have something much less radi- not do their utmost to save lives if they knew that cal in mind, Davidson says. Dr. Thomas Peters, the family would get some form of payment if director of the Jacksonville (Florida) Transplant the patient died. They also worry that a market Center, for example, thinks that lump-sum death system would favor wealthy transplant patients. benefit payments of $1,000 to the family might One way that organ donations might be in- be appropriate. Dr. Stephen Jensik, a transplant creased without providing financial compensa- surgeon at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. tion, Davidson points out, would be if more Luke's Hospital, favors paying $2,000 to the physicians were simply to ask families of poten- donor's family to help defray funeral expenses. tial donors about it. A survey of neurosurgeons Most medical and other specialists in fields indicated that many now do not regard that as related to transplantation are against offering their responsibility or are reluctant to place an any financial compensation, however. One sur- additional burden on grieving families.

PERIODICALS 135 Headline Science or a private foundation, next year's money de- pends on this year's discoveries." When there are ' 'Perky Cheerleaders' " by JohnCrewdson, in Niemnn no important discoveries, "non-discoveries and Reports (Winter 1993),Nieman Foundation, Harvard Univ., One Francis Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138. marginal discoveries and problematic discoveries are spiffed up and published in iournals like In 1989 the Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute Science and Nature, which [distribute]them to the reported in Science magazine that multiple scle- mass media as energetically as any big-city tab- rosis might be caused by an AIDS-like virus. loids competing for circulation." News media across the country pickedup story.Neit11er 7,000 Scientists Cheer Fusion-inJar Experimenter

Science report nor the news sto- . p--- rieS it mentioned that By MALCOLM w, BnowNE I the electronic mteractions 01 enure form of hydrogen fusion as a commer- inspired Ma,tbm*ymT,- atomsad mohls. cial source ol power, some scientists esse~~tiallythe same "findi~~g"J;~~~~;~&~~&~~;~& ,,,~~i~~~i~~~~~~&f~he~: E,%k$;toZE 1?2% 2; 1s a~ University ;fsoi.hm ton in cent~ries~~dbefo~~al~ed had announced four years chemistsperlment rnatLtda as said he had&XW a&"nu. England, slanled sclentlsts their Tilt symposium today at the Amer. =tear fusion in a simple initlal public report which was made Chemical Society was UnPrec* ear'er in jOurllal at a news conference at the University dented, both in site and in the haste In Nn- ce:ut while most of the z,entlsts at, of "[ah, wb~~r.pons heads the whichitwasp~~,accoding~Dr. Ek%i2 caliis, pmsknt Of the Or- ture, and that other laboratories ~;$;~a~~;~l~~;~f;~f; ~%,'~~~~~~x~~~~~~ had tl~row~~cold water ~~$$s$~~b$h~~~~~~,:! $%, aa~?&$?~~~~l czi2 e$%?%:t%% :Lit?' Stanley pons the few physklst;expen through heavy water (water in which ists rather than scientists from hydrogen Is replaced b Us heavy 150- Other discipline were gettingcr On it (just as was to happen 1" f~sionwdauended the meeting appeared to be skeptical. p ope, deuterium) set off hydrogen fu. what might be a monumental cry.BU~ one or the five wnetist the recycled Scieizce finding). eJ~;~~;~~;$~~f~heJ~;~~s~~~~~~~~w~atoms am When Wistar a few years later ~~~$!$a~$~~~~~~l~$'~~~~t~~~~~~iu~~~~&': %*%$ :c 2% and physicists that may lake years of gen atoms to produce helium and error- '"'istsex~"mfusionv expenmentation toresolve. Nuciarfu. mous amounts 01 energy, FUS~nor. announced that it had linked 'O$~~$n~ sion is ordinarily studied by physicists, rp-" 'curs only at lemy chronic fatigue syndrome to a11 ;~;$:~;~~;~gg;~;~-tva~ing those , AIDS-like virus, once again its "breaktl~rougl~"was widely re- Reported scientific breakthroughs don't alzuays live up to their billing. ported-and the subsequent debunking of it by the Centers for Disease Control Eager for stories, the science writers go along. was widely ignored. The public is ill served by In the Wistar case, Crewdson says, not only was such superficial reporting, says Crewdson, a the institute's history of dubious discoveries ig- senior writer for the Chicap Tribune. He con- nored, but reporters "failed to notice that the tends that science writers all too frequently serve institute's increasingly desperate publicity grabs as mindless cheerleaders for the scientists they paralleled both its worsening financial straits cover. and the . . . struggle of its septuagenarian direc- Like other journalists, science writers gener- tor to keep his job." ally prefer stories that are simple and dramatic. The old view of scientists as disinterested, Because scientific subjects are so often extremely almost godlike creatures simply won't stand up, complicated and technical, science writers are Crewdson says. Science writers need to learn a more dependent than other reporters on the basic journalistic lesson: "If your mother says she people they cover to tell them what the story is. loves you, check it out." Some researchers are only too happy to give them a "story." In addition, Crewdson writes, "Science writers may be the last innocents. Technological Retreat Among journalists they are certainly the last op- timists." When a scientist says that lle has dis- "Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording" by Mark Clark, in Technology and covered big/ science writers usu- Cl,/fllrc(July ^3), w,of Cl>icago Press, Journals ally are eager to believe him. Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago," Ill. 60637. 1n the brave new world of Big Science, researchers are highly dependent on favorable The advance of technology may seem inexo- publicity, Crewdson observes, and some have rable, but there is no guarantee that consumers become shrewd manipulators of the Fourth Es- will quickly reap the benefits. Sometimes, as tate. "Whether it comes from the federal treasury with magnetic recording during the 1930~~the

136 WQ SPRING 1994 fruits of innovation are deliberately withheld. conversations were permitted, customers In 1930, after outside firms tried to interest it would be less willing to use the phone system. in some form of telephone-answering device, A slip of the tongue recorded during a business American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) negotiation, for example, could be fatal to a deal. had its research arm, the now-renowned Bell Also, some AT&T executives estimated that up Telephone Laboratories, take up the question of to one-third of all phone calls involved matters magnetic recording. Physicist Clarence Hickman of an illegal or immoral nature. Even the possi- and his colleagues made remarkable progress. bility that recording devices were being used, By 1934, writes Clark, who has a doctorate in the one manager said, "would change the whole history of technology from the University of nature of telephone conversations and would in Delaware, "magnetic recording had become a our opinion render the telephone much less sat- practical method for sound reproduction, one isfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases which had a number of potential commercial in which it is employed." applications." A prototype telephone-answering Surprisingly, according to Clark, the manag- machine built that year, although large and com- ers "paid far more attention to the question of plicated, "met all reasonable engineering re- trust and image" than to potential profits. That quirements for performance," Clark says. Simi- was a reflection of the public-relations prob- lar equipment was used successfully in field lems AT&T was having as a result of New Deal tests. Yet AT&T did not offer an answering ma- antitrust investigations. clune to its customers until the early 1950s-and Having failed to exploit the tecl~nological prohibited the connection of recorders to public lead it had developed, AT&T lost it after 1940. phone lines until 1948, when consumer pressure When the Bell system finally began offering an- became too great to resist. swering machines to its customers in 1951, they Why the delays? Upper-level executives at were built not by AT&T but by an outside con- AT&T, Clark says, feared that if recordings of tractor.

- ARTS & LETTERS

The Prize for Irrelevance ing he was to receive the award in 1923 was "How much?") Yet on the whole, argues Wine- "The Nobel Prize for Literature" by Renee Winegarten, garten, an essayist and literary critic, the award's in The American Scholar (Winter 1994), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009. meaning for literature or writers is greatly overblown. And rarely does the prize go to a strug- Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, Graham gling writer, enabling him or her to do more Greene, Henry James, James Joyce, Federico work. George Bernard Shaw (the 1925 winner) Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, said the Nobel Prize was "a life belt thrown to a and Leo Tolstoy-all were great writers, yet all swimmer who has already reached the shore." were passed over for the Nobel Prize for Litera- "The great merit of the Nobel Prize for Litera- ture. Those honored instead include such now ture," Winegarten says, "is that it is international largely forgotten writers as French poet Sully in scopeÃ‘eve if internationalism . . . is a cul- Prudhomme (1901) and American novelist Pearl tural virtue, not strictly a literary one." While the S. Buck (1938). prize is "honorably universal, embracing writ- Of course, worthy writers, from T. S. Eliot ers from India (Rabindranath Tagore [1913]), (1948) and William Faulkner (1949) to Czeslaw Japan (Yasunari Kawabata [1968]), Nigeria Milosz (1980) and Joseph Brodsky (19871, have (Wole Soyinka [19861), the Caribbean (Derek won the Nobel jackpot-now wort11 $12,500. Walcott [19921), the citations monotonously dis- (William Butler Yeats's first question upon learn- cuss literature in terms of ethnic identity and

PERIODICALS 137 A Realist's Progress

From the start of her career 111 the early 1970s, Cat/ier;i~eMurphylias been hailed as a brilliant representational painter, an heir of Edward Hopper, notes critic Gerrit Henry 111 Art in America (Jan. 1994). "Shewaspra~sedfor heraerial views from the zuindow of her Hoboken apartment looking toward the Empire State Building, or her tree-sIiaded,W-lazu~zedtreatments oflierdiildhood 110112e 112 thezuoods of Lexington, Mass., all painstakingly painted fro112 life." But, as Garden Hose in Melting Snow (1988), right, slzozus, Murphy has ptogressively come to grips with aspects of 2Oflz-century modernist abstraction. From a few feet away, Garden Hose in Melting Snow looks exactly like z~hatits title says it is But from 10 feet away, Henry observes, "it looks likea fieldofpristine white strewn l1g?7tlyzuithpencil markings, zuitli loopy bright-green calligraphy at center." Murphy herself comments: "It's about a line 011 a piece of paper. The snow is the paper, the line is the garden hose." "She is ~LIZILSII~~among today's realist painters," Henry says, "for she accepts the challenge of iiico~potatingabstraction within-not imposing it 011 top of-convincing naturalist imagery." nationality." Latin American writers, for ex- a French writer said the choice by itself justified the ample, are generally praised for writing about existence of the Nobel Prize. their native region, not for literary virtues independent of nationality. Indeed, contrary to popular perceptions, the The Age of Corruption prize was not intended to be awarded purely on the basis of literary merit. Alfred Nobel (1833- "Edith Wliarton's Abuser" by Kenneth S. Lynn, in The American Spectator (Dec. 1993), 2020 N. 14th St., Ste. 750, 961, the Swedish inventor and frustrated writer Arlington, Va. 22216. who endowed the prize, declared in his will that it should go to the author of "the most outstand- R. W. B. Lewis's Edith Wharton: A Biography ing work of an idealistic tendency." It has often (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft gone to writers who have exposed injustice, such Prize and is the work upon which other com- as Britain's John Galsworthy, who won in 1932 mentators on the author of Ethan Frame (1911), on the strength of works such as The Silver Box The Age of Innocence (1920), and other famous (1906), a play about the law's unequal treatment novels now rely. Lynn, a literary biographer and of rich and poor, or to spokesmen for the under- erstwhile professor, charges that the Yale Uni- dog, such as John Steinbeck, author of Of Mice versity professor's work is a scandal-ridden and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), with errors and "profoundly corrupt." who won inl962. Thanks to Lewis, Lynn contends, today's crit- For all its limitations, the Nobel Prize unde- ics and scholars who write about Edith Wharton niably has its great moments. When Soviet dis- (1862-1937) "are working out of the following sident Alexander Solzhenitsynwas selected in 1970, assumptions: Borne down by her society, her

138 WQ SPRING 1994 mother, and her husband, Wharton collapsed. The other researcher, Pitlick, pointed out that Victimization, however, laid the groundwork a crucial "breakdown" Lewis claims Wharton for rebellion and rebirth. Gallantly, she fought had in the summer of 1894Ã‘supposedl precipi- back. She resumed writing. She had an affair tated by her marital unhappiness, her absorption with [a journalist named Morton Fullerton]. She of society's, and her mother's, "distrust" of any- shucked off her husband. And early and late she one who took writing seriously, and her loss of produced brave, wonderful books. In fine, she self-confidence in her early stories-never took triumphed." place. Lewis took at face value the excuse of ill- This "Wharton myth," Lynn argues, is a prod- ness that Wharton gave her publisher for failing uct of "the fantasies of [Lewis's] ideologically to produce a promised volume of stories. He driven mind, wherein victimization equates with ignored the letters she wrote to others showing virtue and a wealthy, socially privileged her to be "an ebullient woman going back and mother . . . is bound to be a moral monster." forth to Europe." The facts, Lynn writes, did not In his relatively skimpy treatment of fit the "Lewis-confected Wharton myth." Wharton's childhood development (she is 40 years old by page 105 of the 532-page text), Lewis manufactures psychodramas "out of A Grimm Dahl swift manipulations of scanty facts, omissions of lengthier contradictory facts, pumped-up 'The Grimmest Tales" by Christopher Hitchens, in Vanity Fnir (Jan. 1994), 350 Madison Ave., New York, rhetoric, and bluff," Lynn asserts. For example, N.Y. 10017. Lewis strongly implies that what Wharton described as a "choking agony of terror" she suf- Critics make two complaints about The Witches, fered in childhood "was rooted in the traumatic The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), and Roald Dahl's scoldings, humiliations, and other abuses visited other popular books for children. First, that the upon her by a Gothic ogress of a mother." He books, as one irate mother from Iowa charged, ignores, Lynn points out, 'Wharton's touching are too sophisticated and do not teach moral expression of gratitude to her mother and father values. She cited passages in which a witch plot- for helping her through her agony," which is ted to kill children, there was a reference to "dog contained in. an unpublished autobiographical droppings," and people's "bottoms" were fragment. skewered. Second, critics charge that Dahl (1916- Lynn cites criticism of the Wharton biogra- 90) was an anti-Semite and a racist, and that he phy made in the (London) Times Literary Supple- treated his wife badly. Hitchens, a journalist, con- ment by two former research assistants, Marion tends that the critics just don't grasp the powerful Mainwaring and Mary Pitlick, whom Lewis appeal of "a good yucky tale." warmly praised in the book as "sometlung closer To the Iowa mother, Hitchens says: "The to collaborators" than assistants. "He lavishly word is out about bottoms and dog doo-doo, and praised my research," Mainwaring said, "but while you may want less of it, the kids are unani- distorted or neglected much of the material I mous. They want more. They also wish for more gave him. One result is that other writers have and better revolting rhymes, sinister animals, been propagating his errors." For example, and episodes where fat children get theirs." Mainwaring found out a great deal about Whar- One explanation of adults' dislike of Dahl's ton's affair with Fullerton, but was not able to work is jealousy, Hitchens asserts. The writer's find out much, not even her first name, about a formula, as he himself said, consisted of "con- woman named Mirecourt, who allegedly black- spiring with children against adults." He was not mailed Fullerton. In a letter to Lewis, Main- merely a pied piper but "a genuine subversive," waring speculated that Mirecourt might have Hitchens writes. "In his world, kids are fit to been a joumahst, "a kind of French Henrietta Stack- rule. They understand cruelty and unfairness pole," alluding to a reporter in Henry James's Por- and, I'm very sorry to say, are capable of relish- trait of a Lady. In Lewis's book, the Mirecourt ing it. They also have a rather raunchy idea of woman appears as "Henrietta Mirecourt." what's funny."

PERIODICALS 139 Hitchens quotes the late child psycl~ologist As for the politically correct critics who Bruno Bettelheim "There is a widespread refusal wring their hands over the author's repellent to let children know that the source of much that private attitudes and vices-now 011 display in goes wrong in life is due to our very own na- Jeremy Treglown's Roald Dalil: A Life (1994)- tures-the propensity of all men for acting ag- Hitchens says they miss the point. There is little gressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and doubt that Dahl was a pretty awful human be- anxiety. Instead, we want our children to believe ing. Only some cauldron of vileness bubbling that, inherently, all men are good. But children away within 11i1n could have enabled him, in his know that they are not always good; and often, even books, to keep "children enthralled and agree- when they are, they would prefer not to be." ably disgusted and pleasurably afraid."

OTHER NATIONS

Germany's Painful Transition A Survey of Recent Articles

he collapse of the Berlin Wall in Novem- experience, and assertiveness." Three-fourths of ber 1989 suddenly made German unifi- the nearly 80 million people of Germany live in T cation a live issue, and West German the old Lander in the West, and an even larger chancellor Helmut Kold embraced it as lus own. proportion of the gross national product is cre- With firm and crucial support from the United ated there. States, Kohl skillfully brought about the The East Gennan economy-supposedly the Vereinigung (unification) the next October. But in strongest in Eastern Europe-turned out to be in that election year of 1990, he "did not say that the disastrous shape, historian Gordon A. Craig, pat11 to unity would be expensive, arduous, and author of The Germans (1982), observes in the long," Heinrich August Winkler, a historian at Nezu York Review of Books (Jan. 13, 1994). "Be- Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, notes in an ex- cause of neglect and unrealistic planning, all ceptionally rich issue of Daedalus (Winter 1994) major East German industries-steel, machine devoted to Germany. Instead, Kohl assured East tools, chemicals, and synthetics, manufacture of Germans that the new Lander (states) would be cars and trucks, housing construction, and tex- transformed within a few years into "flourishing tiles-were far below Western standards and landscapes." That has not happened. With Ger- hence difficult to make competitive." Within many now in the middle of a serious recession, three years after unification, three million jobs it is apparent not only that real unity is going to were lost in eastern Germany. Mass poverty was require many years of sacrifice and patience but avoided only by vast infusions of aid from the also that Germans are having to rethink what it West-160 billion deutschemarks, or $27 billion, means to be German. from the Fund of German Unity, up to tlus year. Although the Berlin Wall is no more, it con- In March 1993, the Bz~izdestag(parliament) ap- tinues, in a sense, to exist, Columbia University proved a Solida~Â¥yak(solidarity pact) providing historian Fritz Stern writes in Foreign Affairs for new taxes to underwrite more aid for the new (Sept.-Oct. 1993): "On some deep psycl~ological Lander; about one trillion deutsche marks will be level the unified Germany is more divided than transferred over the next decade. before; the physical wall has been internalized. No matter how impressive such amounts Where once had been the untroubled hope that may look, Ludger Kulu~hardt,a political scien- at some future date the division of the country, tist at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, unnaturally maintained, would be healed, there points out in Daedalus, "Germans are psycho- are now painful inequalities of power, wealth, logically and culturally not brought together" by

140 WQ SPRING 1994 them. "The climate has become rougher, in the frey Gedmin makes much the same point about West no less than in the East." Many westerners Germany's decline, noting that Germans have blame eastern Germany for their problems. They "the longest vacations and the shortest work have long since forgotten, Ludger Kuhnhardt weeks, the earliest retirement age, and the old- maintains, that "their economy has enjoyed a net est students" in the industrialized world. Even profit from the opening of the East. Few are pre- Kold has said that Germany can no longer afford pared to accept that the economic recession and to be a "collective amusement park." the unavoidable crisis of adjustment of the social state that existed before 1989 were in fact slowed udger Kuhnhardt believes that after Ger- down by unification." many regains its economic footing, Germany's attractiveness to industry was North-South divisions may overshadow declining long before unification, explain Tho- t-West schism. For centuries, the North- mas Kielinger, editor in chief of the German east and East were Protestant, Slavic-oriented, weekly Rheinischer Merknr, and Max Otte, direc- and dominated by large landowners, while the tor, U.S. Eastern Region, of Kienbaum & Part- westward-looking Catholic Northwest and ners, a German management consulting firm, in West enjoyed more prosperity. Already, Foreign Policy (Summer 1993):"A combination of Kuhnhardt reports, the southern Lander of the high taxes, heavy regulation, and high labor former East Germany, Thuringia and Saxony, costs has prompted more and more German are enjoying a speedier economic and techno- companies to look for production facilities logical renewal than northern Germany. abroad. . . . In the past, large German corpora- As if the economy and unification were not tions had countered economic crises with capi- sufficient, there are other weighty problems tal investment and increased productivity. Now, confronting the country. In the past, German more and more of the largest corpo- prosperity made the country "a magnet for im- - rations are beginning to export migrants," notes Stephan Eisel, director of the Political Academy of Germany's Konrad- In the American Enter- Adenauer-Foundation, in Daedalus. The prise (Jan.-Feb. 1994), Jef- opening of Germany's eastern borders also played an important role. In 1990, 193,000 people from Eastern Europe and elsewhere sought political asylum; in 1991, 256,000; in 1992, 400,000. In addition, ethnic Germans from Poland, Roma- nia, and the former Soviet Union were arriving at the rate of 200,000- 300,000 a year. While some of the immigrants were genuine refugees- Germany has taken in eight times as many people fleeing from the war in the former Yugoslavia as all other countries combined-most were seeking economic betterment. To reduce their number, Germany's political parties last spring agreed on a constitutional amendment to limit abuse of the asylum laws. The legislators hoped to quell rising xe- nophobia. A wave of violence against Turks and other foreigners began in 1990. Only about one-quarter of the suspected perpetrators belong to extreme right-wing groups, Eisel notes; nearly

PERIODICALS 141 three-quarters are youths under 20. Jane Kramer, unpopular groups such as Turks and gypsies, in a vivid and incisive Nezu Yorker (June 14,1993) who are the terrorists' chief victims." report on the violence, writes that there are about 6,000 "right extremist" skinheads in Germany, he German government repeatedly in- of whom about 3,500 live in what used to be East sists that "the Federal Republic is not a Germany. The government holds them respon- T country of immigration." hi reality, how- sible for 3,000 brutal attacks-lately, about five ever, between 1945and 1990 nearly 15million East a day. Forty percent of the attacks have taken Germans, etluuc Germans, and political refugees place in the new Lander, whose people, before the immigrated to West Germany and became citizens, fall of the Wall, had never really known any for- according to University of Osnabfick professor eigners. Klaus J. Bade, writing in Daedalus. These new citi- Chancellor Kohl's response to the new vio- zens, together with 4.8 million Turks and other lence has been very low-key. His associates say resident foreigners, amounted to one-third of that that is deliberate, Stephen Kinzer, chief of West Germany's inhabitants in 1990. the Nezu York Times bureau in Berlin, reports The traditional German idea of nation, based in the Atlantic Moi~t?-~Iy(Feb. 1994). "He is on descent, is enshrined in the Grundgesetz (Ba- acutely aware of the growing potential of far- sic Law, or constitution) and is used to deny right political parties, they say, and he wants naturalization to foreigners who have lived in to make sure that conservative voters do not Germany for decades and to their children who abandon his Christian Democratic Union in were born there. This must change, observers favor of those parties." Nineteen separate elec- such as Heinrich Winkler believe. "The new tions are taking place this year for local offices, formation of the German nation can only suc- the Liinder parliaments, the Bundestag, and the ceed,"he writes, "if it coincides with a Western- European Parliament. (The chancellor is ization of the German understanding of nation. elected by the Bundestag.) To hold conservative In the future, the term 'German' will have to be voters, Kohl "is taking a strong law-and-order defined not only by descent, but also by the will stance and refusing to identify himself with to belong to the German nation."

Revisiting the tained. Weathersby, a historian at Florida State University, contends that a document recently Korean War unearthed in the Soviet archives shows what 'New Findings on the Korean War" by Kathryn really happened. Weathersby, in Cold War International History Project The document, "On the Korean. War, 1950-53, Bulletin (Fall 1993), Woodrow Wilson Center, 1000 Jefferson Dr. S.W., Washington, D.C. 20560. and the Armistice Negotiations," was prepared in 1966 by Soviet Foreign Ministry staff, appar- On June 25,1950, North Korean troops crossed ently to provide background information to So- the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, viet officials who were then considering Soviet starting the Korean War. While most scholars aid to the Viet Cong in their war with South Viet- have said that it was absurd to think that nam and the United States. The report, which North Korea leader Kim I1 Sung could have cites diplomatic telegrams in the Soviet Foreign gone ahead without Stalin's approval and aid, Ministry archive, proves that the June invasion some revisionists, such as Bruce Cuinings, au- was not a defensive response to provocation by thor of The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. I1 the South, writes Weathersby. Moreover, "Stalin (19901, have argued otherwise. Indeed, approved the North Korean [invasion] plan, Cumings contends that the invasion may have provided sufficient arms and equipment . . . and been provoked by South Korea, just as North sent Soviet military advisers to North Korea to Korea and the Soviet Union always main- assist in planning the campaign."

142 WQ SPRING 1994 However, Weathersby adds, the Soviet docu- its," writes Paternostro, a freelance journalist. ment also shows that the assumption-made by Although no longer centralized, as under President Harry Truman's administration and Noriega, the drug trade still flourishes, and of- by many scholars-that the initiative for the at- ficial corruption remains a problem. A Pana- tack came from Stalin is false. "This was Kim I1 manian legislator was arrested in Tampa, Sling's war; he gained Stalin's reluctant approval Florida, last October and charged with con- only after persistent appeals (48 telegrams!)." spiring to smuggle 150 kilos of cocaine into the The question of who called for war is crucial, United States. Javier Cherigo, deputy director in Weathersby's view. By the spring of 1950, she of Panama's restructured and demilitarized says, "the Truman administration had con- intelligence police, says his 800-man force on cluded that South Korea was not of sufficient the drug beat spends most of its time investi- strategic importance to the United States to jus- gating drug trafficking on the streets of tify military intervention to prevent a North Panama, where rival Colombian and Panama- Korean takeover of South Korea. However, for nian drug gangs battle one another. Police cor- the Soviet Union to attempt to gain control over ruption, Chkrigo says, is his biggest problem. South Korea was a different matter entirely." In addition to Panama's 3,500 lawyers, The Soviet document, Weathersby says, sug- "who for less than $1,000 can form and regis- gests (but does not state) "that Stalin supported ter a company on paper in less than 24 hours," Kim's plan only because he calculated that it Paternostro notes, the country has "104 banks, would not involve military conflict with the an iron-clad secrecy law, and no restriction on United States." Other docun~entsin Soviet ar- the amount of cash entering the country." In chives, as well as memoirs recently published other words, Panama has all the classic ingre- in Russia, she says, "indicate that Stalin was dients for money laundering on a grand scale. surprised and alarmed by the U.S. intervention. In 1992 alone, total banking center deposits in- He evidently blamed Kim for having badly creased from almost $2 billion to $19 billion. misjudged the situation." Lawlessness has bred more than 100 pri- But Washington, too, misjudged the situa- vate-security companies since 1989. Many or- tion, Weathersby thinks: "The nearly unanimous dinary Panamanians pack guns. Now, many opinion within the Truman administration was fear that the political campaigns leading up to that [the invasion] was a Soviet probe; if the what some describe as Panama's first free elec- United States did not resist this act of aggression, tions this May could be marked by bloodshed. the Soviet Union would move next into West Guillermo Endara, who was sworn in as presi- Germany, or perhaps Iran." In reality, Wea- dent at the time of the U.S. invasion, is not thersby believes, the North Korean attack on running. Of those who are, Ernesto Perez South Korea was not intended as "a test of Balladares, the candidate of the Revolutionary American resolve." Democratic Party, which was the political arm of Noriega's regime, appears to be leading. The turnover of the Panama Canal to Panama Remember Panama? in 2000, in accordance with the 1977 treaty negotiated with the United States, is not a hot election "Panama: Casablanca without Heroes" by Silvana issue this year. Unemployment seems to be Paternostro, in World Policy Journal (Winter 1993-94), World Policy Inst., New School for Social Research, 65 Panamanians' biggest concern. But many Pana- Fifth Ave., Ste. 413, New York, N.Y.10003. manians, Paternostro says, are no longer enthusiastic about the prospect of control over the More than three years after the United States canal. The U.S. Department of Defense employs invaded Panama with 24,000 troops, toppled about 5,400 Panamanians and pumps more than General Manuel Antonio Noriega's military re- $250 million into Panama's economy each year. gime, and brought Noriega to Florida to stand Some Panamanians have proposed that their trial on drug trafficking charges, the country, no government renegotiate. "You can't eat sover- longer in the spotlight, "has reverted to old hab- eignty," one observed.

PERIODICALS 143 RESEARCHREPORTS Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions "Does Head Start Make a Difference?" National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1050 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.59 pp. $5 Authors: Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas

ead Start, launched in take a broader measure of Head test scores of black children. 1964 as part of Presi- Start's effect-on success in Similarly, Head Start reduced dent Lyndon B. John- school, on various comprehen- thelikelihood that a white or His- son's "War on Poverty," is one of sion tests, and on health. They panic child would have to repeat the few federal welfareprograms found, surprisingly, that Head a grade in school by more than 30 that enjoysbroad publicsupport. Start does make a difference but percent, but it had no effect on Today, some 622,000 poor chil- that its effects vary by race. the failure rate of black children. dren ages three to five-about 28 Using data from the National Head Start did have impor- percent of all those eligibleare Longitudinal Survey's Child- tant health benefits for black enrolled in the $2.2 billion pro- Mother file, Currie and Thomas children. Participants got gram, which aims to improve the compared children who partici- measles shots earlier and grew learning ability, social skills, and pated in Head Start with their sib- taller than their siblings. health of youngsters. lings who did not. White children The racial differences are Past studies suggest that who took part in Head Start did something of a mystery. They Head Start produces significant better on tests of mathematics "cannot be entirely explained by early gains in IQ, which are then and vocabulary comprehension the fact tl1atsomegroupsaremore lost over time. By the third grade, than did their siblings. Hispanic disadvantaged than others," the children who once were enrolled childrenoutperformed theirstay- authors say. There are more than in. Head Start perform no better at-home siblings on reading and 1,300 local Head Start programs. 011 IQ tests than those who were vocabulary tests. Significantly, Perhaps, Currie and Thomasspec- not. Currie, of the National Bu- the benefits persisted after the ulate, those serving black children reau of Economic Research, and children reached age eight. But put less emphasis than the others Thomas, of Yale University's Eco- Currie and Thomas found that do on academic achievement, and nomic Growth Center, sought to Head Start had 110 impact on the more &np11asis on health.

"Rethinking Russia's National Interests." Center for Strategic- and International Studies, 1800 K St. N.W., Ste. 400, Washington, D.C. 20006. 116 pp. $14.95 Editor: Steplien Sestamuich

ike theUnitedStates,Rus- says agreed that the most impor- problem. That is a huge emo- sia has long thought it tant task is for Moscow to devise tional adjustment." has a special mission in a realistic, nonimperial approach The United States, with its the world. Under the tsars, to the "near abroadu-the other peculiar experience in the West- "MotherRussia" was persistently 14 newly independent states ern Hemisphere, observes Vladi- expansionist. The Soviet Union formed from theoldSoviet Union. mir P. Lukin, Russia's ambassa- aimed at social utopia and world "For Russia," observes former dor to the United States, should revolution. If Russia and its lead- secretary of state Henry Kiss- be able to understand that the ers today do not abandon this inger, "those lands that had al- ' 'near abroad' is a zone of fun- sense of mission and start think- ways been considered part of damentally important inter- ing in terms of national interests, Russia, indeed from w11ich Rus- ests and a natural sphere of peace on Russia's periphery is sia originated, like Ukraine, are Russia's influence." extremely unlikely. The 11 con- now foreign, countries, and they Some 25 million ethnic Rus- tributors to this collection of es- deal with Moscow as a security sians live outside the Russian

144 WQ SPRING 1994 Federation. Russia is entitled to titularly in the Baltics-Russian low at the Carnegie Endowment expect that their human and civil populations are seen as fifth col- for International Peace, the Rus- rights will be upheld, Lukin as- umns representing Russian im- sians so far "have talked more serts. "Russia is also justified in perial interests. Threats from about lossand about mission than expecting its neighbors to pre- Moscow on this score are likely about those interests. The nostal- vent threats to Russia from aris- to increase rather than decrease gia for the [Soviet Union] that is ing on their territory as a result of that suspicion." Fukuyama be- growing in Russia, the fear that the the activities of third countries." lieves that the West should back successorstateswilleitl~ercollapse Such concerns are legitimate, inclusive citizenship laws in the into violence that could spread to agrees Francis Fukuyama, a con- 14countriestoallay Russian fears. Russia or become places d'armes sultant at the RAND Corpora- 'The effect of such outside pres- for countries hostile to Russia, tion, but must be seen in light of sure on small countries like Esto- the sense that all current prob- Russia's "long history as an im- nia from a Europe they are eager lems are traceable to the collapse perial and authoritarian to enter would be enormous." of the old system rather than to power. . . . Although there have Despite Russia's legitimate the features of that system-all been and will be many instances economic, political, and security these things are giving an ever of genuine persecution of Rus- interests in the other successor bigger audience to those who sians abroad, in other cases-par- states, says Paul A. Goble, a Fel- want to talk in terms of mission."

"Statistics for the 21st Century." Dun & Bradstreet Corp., Economic Analysis Dept., P.O. Box 3938, New York, N.Y. 10163-3938.266 pp. $14.95 Authors: Joseph W. Duncan and Andrew C. Gross

he pundits have stars in ance of tradeshould always equal not.) On a conceptual level, one their eyes over informa- zero. It never works out that must ask if a U.S. automaker's tion: the information su- way. In 1990, the discrepancy purchaseof, say, a steering wheel perhighway, the information was $112 billion. from its subsidiary in Canada revolution, the information Why do such errors occur? really is an "import." Similar economy. Few have noticed that Partly because it is costly and complications surround exports. the prized con~modityitself, in- technically difficult to keep tabs Revising trade data to exclude formation, is often of dubious on thegoods, services,andmoney such transactions would give quality. that cross borders. Bigger prob- Americans a drastically differ- It has not escaped Duncan, a lems have been created by rapid ent-and in many ways more vice president of Dun & Brad- economic change. For example, accuratepicture of the nation's street, and Gross, a business pro- the growth of multinational cor- economic strengths and weak- fessor at Cleveland State Univer- porations means that much "for- nesses, Duncan and Gross say. In sity. Flawed economic and social eign" trade now occurs between 1987, t11eofficialU.S. tradedeficit statistics, they warn, are giving affiliated companies. In 1991,46 was a staggering $148 billion. If highly inaccurate portraits of the percent of all U.S. imports were one uses their "supplemental" world. International Monetary accounted for by U.S. firms buy- accounting, however, that deficit Fund statistics, for example, show ingfrom their ownaffiliates over- drops to $68 billion. that world trade jumped by 14.3 seas or by foreign affiliates in The two researchers concede percent in 1990. But the trade America buying from their par- that there are good arguments data reported by individual coun- ent companies abroad. On a for going slow in the revision of tries do not add up: Since one practical level, the question is statistics. But reform, already un- country'sexports are othercoun- whether such purchasers are der way in a number of areas, is tries' imports, the world's bal- paying market prices. (Probably imperative.

RESEARCH REPORTS 145 We welcome timely letters from readers, especially tliuse who wish to amplify or correct information published in the Quarterly and/or react to the views expressed in our essays. The writer's telephone number and address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

Closely Watched Trains The Lost Promise of the American Railroad" competently examines the decline of the Aineri- It's wonderful to read an essay that gets the facts can passenger train. One red herring, though, straight. Mark Reutter, in "The Lost Promise of the was the lengthy but engrossing treatment of the American Railroad" [ WQ, Winter '941, has done a Burlington Railroad's Pioneer Zephyr of the 1930s. masterful ,iob of reviewing" the maior events in the The story of Ralph and Edward Budd's joint annals of American railway passenger service. venture into streamlined trains-a significant I am especially pleased that he showed that chapter in U.S. railroad history-bears retelling. total ossification did not prevail in the industry However, the reader risks getting the erroneous during the post-World War I era. With imagina- impression that the streamliner story has some tion and optimism, Reutter shows, Ralph Budd led direct correlation to the decline of the passenger his Burlington Railroad and the nation into the train. promising world of diesel-powered, high-speed Thirteen pages into the article, Reutter gets to passenger trains. Reutter was right to compare the the heart of the matter: "After World War 11, tremendous public excitementabout Budd's Zephy r government became the railroads' biggest and the M-10001, the Union Pacific's first stream- competitor . . . (as) federal expenditures forair- liner, with recent interest in Aintrak's demonstra- ports and highways rocketed to dizzyingheights, tion of foreign-made X2000 and ICE trains. driven by the politics of the Cold War and the The point that Reutter made so well is that the pork barrel." That is the essence of the article. great advances in intercity passenger technology Reutter adds: "The public promotion of roads no longer come from American concerns but from and runways, with government construction, abroad. The reason is clear, and one that most maintenance, government policing, people either never knew or have forgotten. The and government signaling, made it easy for railroad industry was wholly overregulated until truckers and airlines and bus companies-not to passage of the Staggers Act in 1980. The problems speak of motorists-to compete with railroads were numerous, and included more than rate and that built and n~aintained[and paid taxes on] servicecontrols.They involved archaic works rules their ow11 rights of way." Precisely. (there were actually "excess-crew" rather than Public policy and public investment, more "full-crew" laws), unreasonable taxation, and gov- than any other factors, dictate the role played by ernment support for competing modes of trans- any form of transportation, including passenger portation. A more balanced playing field ought to trains. make it possible for the United States to emerge as A comment on Reutter's Amtrak sidebar: a leader in railway tecl~nology.There are encour- Amtrak's purported lack of "enthusiasm for aging signs. The popularity of the X2000 and ICE starting other high-speed corridors" outside the equipment indicates that more Americans realize Northeast has notl~ingto do with commitment. the need for better intercity transport. The fact, too, It has to do with capital money, travel markets, that the nation has reinvented the trolley, now and operational controlof the railroad. Theowner called "light rail," is a powerful reminder that and operator of the Northeast Corridor between good things can run 011 steel rails. New York and Boston, Amtrak is in the midst of One can hope, then, the 21st century will give a major high-speed rail initiative which will credence to what some thought to be the silly, even bring ~~O-MPHoperation before the turn of the pathetic, slogan Amtrak used shortly after its cre- century. New-generation equipment used in the ation in 1971: "TRACKS ARE BACK!" Northeast-where populationdensity and travel H.Roger Grant patterns have already helped make "Metroliner"

Editor, Railroad History a housel~oldword-eventually will be applied.. Depf. of History to other corridors. Uniu. of Akron The same public policy favoring government Akron, Ohio highway and airway investment that Reutter

146 WQ SPRING 1994 carefully chronicles as a reason for the decline of system that survived until 1962.Congress, which the passenger train still prevails in the United then governed the District directly, mandated States. Until a steady source of capital similar to the end of the streetcars on the grounds that they existing highway and airway trust funds is avail- were too "old fashioned" for the nation's capital, able to Amtrak, progress must be incremental. even though many were modern PCC cars. If we Thomas M. Downs, President had converted the streetcar system gradually National Railroad Passenger Corporation into a subway instead of building Metro from Washington, D.C. scratch we would have saved billions of dollars and had superior service. Paul M.Weyrich, Publisher Reutter's article illustrates the high price we The New Electric Railway Journal sometimes pay when governments interfere in Washington, D.C. the natural development of an industry. Just as B&O president Howard E. Simpson predicted, the InterstateHighway Actof 1956was thedeath MarkReutter'simpressivehistory left out little. He warrant for the ~inericanpassenger train. says railroads competed "foolisl~lyamong them- Interestingly, a similar thing happened to selves." Tlus occurred throughout the century another sort of railway: the electric railways, (except during World War I). Before air travel interurbans, and streetcar systems that provided became prevalent, however, such behavior was a much of our local mobility. Many eastern and rational response to the tendency of corporate midwestern cities, and some in other uarts of the moguls to ship their freight on the railroad they country as well, were once connected by electric traveled themselves. Inother words, with thesame interurbanlines. Locally, the excellent high-speed company controlling tracks, passenger trains, and Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis line of- freight trains, what wasbest for the railroad andits fered frequent service among those cities. Most corporate identity was not always best for passen- of the interurbans disappeared during the 1930s, ger train efficiency. and government played a central role in doing One by-product of the post-World War I resto- them in. From their beginning, mostly in the ration of duplicative passenger trains and facilities 1890s, many of the inte~urban~om~aiiiessold was a series of fare increases, badly hurting busi- electric power to the communities they served. ness during a period when millions first gained By the 1930s, the power business had come in access to affordable automobile travel. many cases to dwarf the transportation busi- Amtrak, however, deserved more favorable ness, keeping the latter afloat financially. But the treatment from Reutter. I11 the face of a decade of Roosevelt adn~inistrationissued a "trust-bust- White Housel1ostility,An1traki~~aii~tainedits over- ing" ruling which required that the two busi- all market share as the market grew. In absolute nesses be separated. The companies naturally terms, travel on Amtrak rose48 percent-from 4.2 chose to keep the more profitable business, and billion passenger-miles in the 1982fiscal year to 6.2 the interurban lines were abandoned. billion in fiscal 1993. Growth was greater outside Similarly, government played an active role the Northeast Corridor (55 percent) than inside it in many cities in destroying local streetcar sys- (34percent),admittedly because Amtrak has raised terns. Like the passenger train, the streetcar beii- faresmore aggressively in the Corridor. And when efited greatly from the "streamliner" era of the coinparedwith thefastest trainsof the 1940s,Amtrak 1930s. The famous PCC car, a highly advanced, long-distance trains indeed are slower, but they fast, sinooth-riding marvel of 1930s technology, usually serve more stations and passengers. had given streetcars a new lease 011 life. But Finally, far from displaying "little enthusiasm streetcar companies, mostly privately owned, for starting other high-speed corridors," Amtrak had to maintain their own tracks and often parts testifies in favor of such workand promotes it with of the streets where the tracks ran. Buses got free the states. In April 1994, the Spanish Talgo starts a use of the public highways. Seldom were mu- six-month sea&-Portland demonstration, capi- nicipal authorities helpful in equalizing the dif- talizing on enthusiasm sparked by recent Aintrak- ference; to the contrary, they were often eager to instigated toursof theUnited Statesby theGerman push the trollies into oblivion. ICE and Swedish X2000 trains. Wasl~ington,D.C., is a sad example. D.C. We would see faster progressif Congress would Transit provided a well-run, modern streetcar allow states to spend federal highway funds 011

COMMENTARY 147 intercity passenger rail. Such a provision passed is hardly fair to compare it with trains operating the Senate in 1991 but fell victim to j~~risdictional under normal traffic restrictions on a single track conflicts in the House. railroad. Hundreds of trains would occupy this Ross Capon, Executive Director track, going in both directions. Hence there were National Association of Railroad Passengers constant delays as the major and minor trains see- Washington, D.C. sawed around each other. If the signals are set on green, no stops are required and all other trains are ordered into a side track. Is it any wonder that the Tosteal a phrase from theb~~sinessl~istorianAlfred Zephyr's time was about half that of a regular train? Chandler, Mark Reutter showed how momentous Later in tl~earticle,mentionismadeof other fast transformations in an economy and society are not streamliners, suchas the Twentieth Century Limited the inevitable result of natural market forces but and the Broadway Limited-both were indeed very are shaped by the "visible hand" of deliberate luxurious extra-fare trains, and yet both 'rere uolicvL J decisions and choices. If the "consumer" steam powered until the late 1940s.The Brondz~1ay's ultimately chose the car or the plane over rail challenging schedule of 16 hours (New York to passenger service after World War 11, it was only Chicago) was maintained on a daily basis by steam because government policymakers, in conjunction locomotives produced in the 1920s. with the private advocates of air and highway Diesels surely had an advantage when it came transport, consciously and deliberately rewrote to thelengthof runs-they werecompeting largely the rules of the transportation market, thereby wit11 an aged steam fleet and so should have done making the consumer choice of cars and planes a better. Some modern steam locomotives, how- foregone conclusion. ever, performed rather well in this area-the Santa I commend you for publishing an article that Fe's 4-8-4's made continuous runs of 1,791 miles shines light on the past and, almost in spite of the and the New York Central's Hudson class ran 928 follies that it chronicles, raises at least some hope miles Harmon to Chicago. These were everyday for the future. I suspect that Reutter's piece will performances-not publicity stunts. And so the soon be added to the reading lists of university chuffing steamers, for all of their apparent short- courses on both transportation history and public comings, remained in favor for nearly a quarter policymaking. Let'shopeourcurrent policymakers century after the introduction of the diesel-electric also learn something from it. simply because they proved themselves a reliable David Porreca form of motive power. Surely they had many Champaign, Ill. failings, but a lack of dependability and speed was not among them. It might also be noted that the Zephyr, for all of its The author is surely correct in his thesis that diesel- flash and sparkle, was a very undersize train that electric locomotives had many advantages over could hardly handle a full-size assignment, espe- steamlocomotives. ~etsteam~owerwas~otl~o~e-cially on long runs. Passengers, at least first-class lessly inefficient or ineffective as a mover of pas- passengers, would demand sleeping accommoda- sengers and freight. As late as 1946, steam hauled tions. The Zephyr had none~onlycoach and parlor 88.1 uercent of the U.S. freight" traffic and 78.2 seating. Its capacity was about equal toasinglecoach. percent of the passenger traffic and performed 69.1 So for heavily traveled runs where 10and 12car trains percent of switching service. During World War I1 were thenorm, t11elittleZephyr could not do the job- it was steam, not diesels, that moved the record unless it was multiplied 10 times over, which would traffic. In 1943, for example, there were 39,725 cancel any of its cost advantages. steam locomotives, 868 electric units, and 2,125 ]oh H White diesels in service on U.S. railroads. It might also be Senioi Historian Ernei ifus noted that most of the diesels were switchers and so Division of Transportation were confined to performing yard work. It wasn't Siiiithsoman Institufion until t11e middle 1950s that diesel became the dominant form of locomotion on American railways. I am certain the press releases of the Chicago, I enjoyed Mark Reutter's essay, but there is one Burlington & Quincy Railroad would have us point that I dispute. Paraphrasing Railway Age believe that the Zephyr was the fastest train in the magazine, he writes, "Had Hitler . . . not sacri- world. But its recordrun was a staged event and it ficed Germany's fine rail network to his

148 WQ SPRING 1994 autobahns, . . . the state of the world might have dard of excellence in lone" distance train travel that been different." reflected American technology, corporate rivalry, While I believe that even the best railway sys- company advertising, and most important, per- tem imaginable could not have saved Germany sonal pride for the people who made good on this from ultimate defeat, my understanding is that it corporate promise. was not so much the "sacrifice" of railway to A 50-hour California schedule would be an autobahn which contributed to Germany's defeat indication to generations of Santa Fe employees as it was the poor allocation of the then existing andofficers that theapocalypse was imininent,not German (and occupied) railways. Tl~roughout just that service had deteriorated a bit. much of the war, the Reichsbahn (German railroad George Tiller authority) was strongly devoted to the transporta- Chapel Hill, N.C. tion of civilians to slave labor and extermination camps, even at a time when there was a critical shortage of trains to supply the needs of the Ger- Mark Reutter makes a somewhat disparaging ref- man armed forces. Had it not been so subordinate erence to the "friends" of Amtrak, and refers to to the wishes of the SS, and to the implementation them as "nostalgia buffs who seem satisfied to of the Final Solution, the Reicl~sbal~ncould con- 11aveAmtrakoperatetrains like those they knew as ceivably have contributed more to the German children." fighting effort, which was-faced by the immense Our response is to ask, as Mr. Reutter seems to industrial and military might of the Allies- be asking, if it is nostalgic to desire good service- doomed from the outset. i.e. comfort, speed, courtesy, and reliability-while Daniel B. Baskin traveling? And is it necessarily bad to want what is Shorewood, Wisc. known to be possible based on previous experience? It is easy to hurl barbs at Amtrak. It is, after all, a ward of government, made so by government Mark Reutter has written a great article. However, ineptitude. But with the resources it has, Amtrak I take issue with the reference on page 15 to has been able to demonstrate the public will re- "recessed fluorescent lighting" on the 1934 Zephyr. spond to investment in a program of improved It is my understanding that true fluorescent light- and expanded rail passenger service. ing was not available until several years later. My Daniel B. Lozlegrei;, Director Official Guidebook to the 1934 Chicago World's Region XI1 Fair has references to gaseous lighting. Neon was National Association of Railroad Passe~zgers red gaseous lighting. Other gasses and colored Sacramento, Calif. glass made other colors. But I doubt that the 1934 Zephyr had any gaseous lighting. The Guidebook also states that "All lighting is indirect" in reference Mark Rentter replies: Readers have pointed out two to the lighting on the 1934 Zephyr. Indirect, but still errors. J. D. Rowel1 is right. TlieoriginalZephyr had incandescent, lighting was all the rage in the early tubular recessed lighting, not fluorescent lighting. 1930s. No doubt that is what the 1934 Zephyr had. George Tiller correctly notes that Aintrak's South- 7. D. Rowell west Chief requires a bit more than 41 hours to Sacramento, Calif. travel between Chicago and Los Angeles. How- ever my main point stands: The streamliners of nearly 60 yearsago were faster. Mark Reutter overstates the speed differences be- John White protests that the Zephyr's record- tween Amtrak trains and thoseof thestreamlinerera. setting run was a staged event, but the famous The crack Santa Fe trains of that earlier era were steam sneed records were also set under con- scheduled to break the 40-hour barrier between Clu- trolled conditions. Moreover, I never assert that cago and Los Angeles and did so regularly, day after diesels outnumbered steam locomotives before day, for decades. World War 11, only that their superiority was The current Amtrak train that is most similar is evident. By 1939, the 10 fastest scheduled trains in the Sotlfl~zuestChief. Traveling west from Chicago, the world were hauled by American diesel loco- it reaches its destination in 41 hours, 10 minutes- motives. Steam was helped by a government ban a far cry from the 50 hours Reutter cited. on the construction of passenger diesel locoino- Forty hours to California represented a stan- tives and restrictions o11 freight diesels during

COMMENTARY 149 World War 11. The United States produced its last thies." No one wants to see a bloodbath occur in commercial steam locomotive in 1949. post-Castro Cuba; however, a Cuba without Castro but with Castro's revolutionary policies at tlie core of government is not acceptable. Missing Integrity Castro is bad and so are tlie policies that he espoused. Robert Erwin's breezy trip through modern social A~naiiryPiedra history ["Lifestyle," WQ, Winter194]wasprovoca- Boulder, Colo. tive, teaching us a more precise context for the word lifestyle. As lie shows, when we leaned on it as an organizing principle for contemporary Battering TV society, it proved a weak reed. In the end, he reminds us that "a culture should provide us Television continues to be the "battered child of points of reference in a whirling world." But he tlie intelligentsia. Attacks from all sides imply, sees nothing sterner to take lifestyle's place in even "prove" how terrible television is. For ex- the offing. Perhaps he's not looked far enough. ample, it is implied in the letter from Stanford W. In his review I was struck that the idea of Briggs [WQ, Winter '94, p. 1541 that William Integrity was left out. I'm confident that in the Bennett's data are approved by liberals and con- past this would have been named more often servatives alike. The data may be accurate, but the than Respectability as filling such a place not conclusions drawn are flawed. Low SAT scores, only in culture but in the individual life. children on welfare, teen suicides, and the violent Integrity requires that we be whole and pre- crime rate cannot be blamed on TV alone. dictable. It rests upon a pyramidal foundation, Constant repetition of the charges against tele- with Honesty at the base, Consistency next, and vision eventually makes the charges credible, even Discipline at the top. This is not elitist. I called when there is little proof. History will better judge our washerwoman "Mrs. Willis" not because this magical medium. Remember, printing was she wanted respectability, but because we knew once called "an instrument of the devil" too. her as a person of integrity. Chicken Little continues to attack tlie medium C. M.Berry as tlie root cause of evil in our nation when, in Atlanta, Ga. actuality, it is within ourselves. Jack Lantry Pam, Wash. Mercenaries or Patriots?

In tlie Periodical Observer [WQ, Winter '941 there A Secular Definition is a review of Tad Szulc's article, "Waiting for the Blowout-Hurricane Fidel," which originally ap- According to Diana Eck ("hi the Name of Religions," peared in The Washington Spectator. WQ, Autumn '93), pluralists define secularism as How dare Mr. Szulc call "mercenaries" those "tlie separation of government from tlie domination Cubans who left tlie island because thev were of a single religion." Please refer her to the dictionary unwilling to compromise their political pliiloso- definition: "secular spirit or tendency, especially a phy or have their children's hearts and minds system of political or social philosophy that rejects all drained by a ruthless Marxist dictatorship? How fonns of religious faith" (Random House, 1988). dare he call "mercenaries" those who have fought When I, a Jew active in interfaith dialogue, rifle in hand against that Communist dictator- speak to churclies, I affirm that Christians and ship? Jews, by exploring together their common lieri- How can you be a mercenary when you fight tage and differences, can better appreciate their for your country? How can you be a mercenary common interest as religious people to withstand when you don't fight for money or for a foreign the inroads of secularism. power? The real distinctions today are not between Mr. Szulc obviously has not been hurt by members of different faith communities, but be- Castro the way the whole of Cuba has been. tween those wliose lives are shaped by religious I think Mr. Szulc is subtly trying to create a values and those (the secular majority) wliose golden parachute for Castro out of "old sympa- aren't. I am a pluralist-respecting others and

150 WQ SPRING 1994 their ways to God, and insisting that others respect Credits: Cover, Scala/Art Resource, N.Y., original at me and my way to God-but not a secularist. Museo Arclieologico Nazioiiale, Naples, Italy; pp. 8-9, 1. C. Rothbeq Courtesy of FrankM. Snowden, Jr., originally from Villa Madison, Va. Giulia Museum, Rome. Photo: courtesy Sopriiitendenza alle Antichiti dell'Etruria Meridionale, Rome; p. 11, The Walls (1955) by Hughie Lee-Smith, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Private collection; p. 13, Collection Caylus, The Forest for the Trees Bibliotli6q~ieNationale, Paris, photo courtesy of Frank M. Snowden, Jr.; p. 16, Frontispiece, Citiy of God (1522) by St. Augustine, reprinted by permission of the British Dr. John B. Reubens's attack on my research as Library, London; pp. 23,86, The Bettmaiin Archive, New reported in the Periodical Observer [ WQ,Summer York; p. 25, Reprinted by permission of the British Li- brary; p. 27, Drawing by Knut Ekwall from Leipzig '93, p. 1431 is off the mark. If anything, the results Illiistrirte Zeit~oig,reprinted from Wwer and His World of my research were understated in the review. byCharlesOsboriie,Copyright@1977Tliaines&Hudsoii, Whether Dr. Reubens wishes toacknowledgeit Ltd., London; p. 32, Bal Nigre by Paul Colin, Collection Negrophilia Amsterdam; p. 34, Copyright @ Bruce or not, the number of trees in America's forests- Davidson/Magnum Photos, Inc., New York; p. 36, some 230 billion-is greater than at any point in Hedricli-Blessing photograph courtesy Chicago Histori- this century. This represents more than "seedlings cal Society; p. 38, Photo by Robert Twonibly; pp. 40-41, and saplings." The standing volume of trees has Photos from Tlie Frmk Lloyd Wright Coinpanioii by Wil- liam Allin Storrer, copyright@1993; p. 43, FromPicturing increased by more than 20 percent over the past Wriglit (1994) by Pedro Guerrero, Pomegranate Books, four decades and timber growth per acre has risen photo by Pedro Guerrero; p. 44, Copyright @ 1958, Tlie nearly 70 percent over that same period. Dr. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; p. 46, The Verdict of the People, "Stump Speaking" (1854-55) by George Caleb Reubens is correct to be concerned about "our Bingliam, National Museum of American History, Wasli- public timberlands"; most federal lands are in poor ington, D.C.; p. 48, Copyright @ 1984, Locher, Chicago shape. This simply makes the robustness of their Tribune, Tribune Media Syndicate, Chicago; p. 51, Cour- tesy of Keith Melder, Political History Department, Na- private counterparts that much more impressive. tional Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; I cannot help it if Dr. Reubens wishes to label pp. 53,121,131, AP/Wide World Photos, New York; pp. my organization "suspect," but for the record, the 55,67,68,133, The Granger Collection, New York; p. 61 (left), title pageof the firstedition of NiccoIoMacliiavelli's Competitive Enterprise Institute is an indepen- 11 Principe (1532), Rome, Antonio Blado, The Granger dent organization and none of my research on this Collection; (inset), Tlie Granger Collection; (right), Por- issue was funded by the timber industry. (Though trait ofCesnre Borgia, Academia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy, courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, New York; p. 63, Portrait Iam sureour development office would be pleased of Sir T. S. Raffles (1817)by G. F. Joseph, National Portrait to accept donations.) Gallery, London; p. 65, The Senate (1935) by William Jonathnii H. Adier Gropper,TheMuseum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Assoc. Dir. of Environmental Studies A. Conger Goodyear; p. 71 (top left, right), AP/Wide World Photos; (bottomleft)TlieGrangerCollection; p. 73 Competitive Enterprise Institute (left),Courtesy ofHunianLifeInternational,Gaitliersburg, Washington, D.C. Maryland, used by pern~ission;(right), Courtesy of Na- tional AbortionRights ActionLeague; p. 77,CopyrightO Peterson, The Sun, Vancouver, Canada, reprinted by perniission of Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate; p. 81, Reprinted from A Rebel Defense of Tradition (1994) by Corrections Michael Wreszin, photo by Mariette Pathy Allen, reprinted by permission of Basic Books; p. 83, Herbert Bayer, postcard for 1923 exhibition, reprinted with per- In the second stanza of Peter Huchel's "Aristeas I" mission of Overlook Press; p. 85, Doonesbury copyright ["Poetry," WQ,Winter '941, the word "branches" @ 1993 G. B. Trudeau, reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate, all rights reserved; p. 88,UPI/ was substituted for "bird." The correct stanza Bettniann; p. 99, Liebespanr by Egoii Scliiele, courtesy of should read: Sot1ieby's;p. 109,Johns. Murray/Timemagazine;p. 111, Reprinted with permission of The Marion E. Wade Cen- ter, Wheaton, Illinois; p. 114, Copyright@ 1947Time Iiic., The bird flew, reprinted by perniissio1i;p. 116,Photoby RogerLancelyii its wingbeat hard against the gray light Green, reprinted with permission of Richard Lancelyn of the alders, Green; p. 125, Toles copyright @ 1992 The Buffalo News, the milky skin of the steppe. reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate, all rights reserved; p. 128, Courtesy of Nikkei Business; p. 136, Copyright @ 1989 by The New York Times Com- Oil page 110 of the same issue, Robert Erwin's pany, reprinted by permission; p. 138, Garden Hose in book should have been titled The Great Language Meltiiig Sirnu by Catherine Murphy, Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York; p. 141, The Economist, cartoon by Kal, Panic and Other Essays in Cultural History. London, copyright @ Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate. We regret the errors.

COMMENTARY 151 uring those hours of nocturnal sleep- ties" that superhighways now offer their some- lessness through which we are all what dazed and exhausted travelers. fated to pass, a word or phrase will This having been said, I must add that I a111 not sometimes pop into mind and rudely an electronic Luddite-yet. I cheerfully enjoy the refuse to depart. One phrase that has lately been benefits of innumerable machines and tecl1nolo- overstaying its welcome with me is "information gies tliat I don't begin to understand; I am pleased superhighway," a decidedly busy pair of words to that the Center's radio program, Dialogue, is now have buzzing about one's tl~ougl~tsin the early- available to users of Internet; I am even a member, morning hours. albeit not a very useful one, of the board of an To make clear my perturbation, some confes- organization devoted to making the texts of im- sions are necessary. The first is that I do not fully portant works in the humanities available on com- understand what the much-discussed informa- puters. Nevertheless, I am inclined to paraphrase tion superhighway is, or is meant to be. the title of E. M. Forster's famous essay on deinoc- From the phrase itself, and from what I have racy and propose only two cheers for theinforma- heard and read, I have constructed for myself a tion superhighway. rather generalnotion, which may be roughly accu- One does not need to be a Marxist to believe rate or may be somewhat overblown. I imagine a that tecl1nologies have a dynamicof their own, and vast system containing virtually all information that what can be done technologically will be done. about everything, a system that will give users Nothing I have heard recently has startled me more access to this information with relatively inexpen- than the fact that one can go to the local electronics sive hardware and software, and will also permit storeandfor$l,000purcl~asemorecomputingpower them to "converse" with each other more or less than NASA used to run the first spacecraft it sent to universally around theglobe.Not only themoon. Surelyno teclu1ologicalrevo- bibliographical information and indi- lution in human history (or prehistory) ces of various kinds will be available progressed at this kudzu-likepace. Thus (literally) at one's fingertips, but also it is not the teclu~ologywe now possess texts, visual images, sound recordings, that bothers me, but rather the prospect and motion pictures. A traveler 011 the of the technology that may with aston- superhighway, if that is the correct isl~ingspeed possess us. term, will thus havealmost instantaneous access to My final confession, then, is that I do not look facts, to books, to lectures, to operatic perfor- forward to curling up beside my PC and related mances, and even to the opinions of other travel- gadgets to "read" a book, "hear" a concert, or ers-all in the comfort of his or her home. This is a 'enjoy" a new production of an opera; I fear the day heady prospect indeed. when I will no longer be able to browse at random in But, to come to my second confession, it is not a bookshop or the stacksof alibrary;Iamappalledby a prospect that I contemplate with unmixed emo- the prospect of millions of people spending their lives tions. Using the metaphor on which the phrase is in isolation while somehow believing that they are in based, I must say that I still feel considerable touch with the whole world. nostalgia for the roads and parkways that have Warnings about the disappearance of com- been made more or less obsolete by our great munity and laments about too much information national system of automotive superhighways. and too little knowledge (let alone wisdom) may While there is 110 question about which is the more be overwrougl~t,but they still inspire me with efficient way of driving from Point A to Point B- moments of foreboding. I cannot help recalling the barring accidents, road repairs, and badly de- response of Henry David Tl~oreauwhen he was signed interchanges-I miss the towns and vil- told that the invention of the telegraph had made lages through which the old roads took us, the it possible for people in Massachusetts to coininu- countryside we could admire at a leisurely pace, nicate instantaneously with people in Texas: What and the restaurants and inns (and even filling if they have nothing to say to each other? stations)tliat preceded the franticand unwelcoming Charles Blifzer fast-food factoriesthat seem to be the only "aineni- Director

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