CHARLES BARBER by Antonio Gisbert Photograph: Bonhams, London, UK
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WQ THE AMERICAN QUEST THE WILSON QUARTERLY FOR REDEMPTION SURVEYING THE WORLD OF IDEAS STAR WARS THE ONLINE BATTLE OVER TASTE BOOKS THE SPOOK IN SAIGON SPRING 2013 W THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 SURVEYING THE WORLD OF IDEAS V. 37, NUMBER 2 Q PUBLISHED BY THE WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS COVER STORY FEATURES THE AMERICAN QUEST STAR WARS by TOM VANDERBILT FOR REDEMPTION Online reviews can be useful when From the Oprah Winfrey Network to the White you’re trying to pick a restaurant House, the ritual of forgiveness and starting or movie at the last minute, but do afresh has a mesmerizing effect on Americans. those four stars really mean what you This is the land of self-help and miraculous think they do? political rebirths—and the land where super- sizing a soft drink can take on the dimension of sin. Where does the redemptive urge come from? EDITOR’S COMMENT Where is it taking us? FINDINGS IN ESSENCE Our survey of notable articles from other journals and magazines CURRENT BOOKS Reviews of new and noteworthy nonfiction ABOUT US 1. STILL THE REDEEMER NATION by WILFRED M. McCLAY The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Woodrow Wilson 2. THE END OF SECOND ACTS? International Center for Scholars. by SHADD MARUNA and ABOVE: The Arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers (c. 1864), CHARLES BARBER by Antonio Gisbert Photograph: Bonhams, London, UK 3. FEEL FREE TO HELP YOURSELF ON THE COVER: Seeking redemption by SARAH L. COURTEAU Photograph: Ocean / Corbis EDITOR’S COMMENT STEVE LAGERFELD is the editor of The Wilson REDEEMING AN IDEA Quarterly. Before joining the magazine’s staff in the American exceptionalism is the subject 1980s, he worked at The that won’t go away. This once obscure Public Interest and the Insti- academic concept became a political tute for Educational Affairs. His articles and reviews have football in the last presidential election, appeared in The Atlantic, used in so many ways and for so many Harper’s, The New Republic, purposes that it quickly lost much of its The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. meaning. I didn’t imagine that it would be our real subject when Shadd Maruna and Charles Barber proposed the article we’ve already heard too much) and plead on criminal rehabilitation that appears for forgiveness and redemption. in this issue. But after deploring our Barber and Maruna point toward the national policy of warehousing con- origins of this strange ritual and other victed criminals, Maruna and Barber manifestations of the redemptive idea, show that convicts (and others) who but Wilfred McClay takes us there, to embrace a “script” of personal redemp- America’s Puritan roots and the secular tion have a good chance of turning their creed that emerged from them. What lives around. That led us to think more makes this idea of redemption so par- broadly about the role of redemption in ticularly American is the way in which American life, our deeply rooted belief we have infused it into our public life that we can, or must, take what is bad and linked it to individual freedom. and remake it into something good. America gives its citizens the liberty to The redemptive idea is constantly create and re-create their lives—indeed, playing out in our lives, whether in the it almost demands they do so. And it quasi-religion of self-help or in politics holds up that redemptive promise as an high and low. You can see it in the pa- ideal to the world. rade of political leaders, celebrities, and That is the core of the exceptionalist professional athletes treading the well- idea—that America has a unique role worn aisle to the podium and talk-show in the world as a beacon of democracy couch to confess their sins (even though and redeemer of the promise of human THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 EDITOR’S COMMENT freedom. That is also what makes this developed by European intellectuals idea so controversial. In 2000, the WQ trying to understand why the United published a long article by Seymour States never developed a strong social- Martin Lipset, one of the great social ist movement and most recently being scientists of the 20th century, called manifested, more or less as farce, as a “Still the Exceptional Nation?” Yes, was campaign issue in the last presidential Lipset’s answer, though he rightly noted election, when Barack Obama felt com- that there are many ways in which the pelled to insist that, yes, he really does United States falls short of its ideals. believe in American exceptionalism. By No other WQ article has elicited so then, it was impossible to know what many proposed rebuttals from academic anybody was really talking about. In this writers, their level of venom showing issue, our authors help to restore some how politically charged the subject had meaning to the idea of American excep- already become. tionalism, and point us toward fulfilling The idea of American exceptionalism some of its promise as well. has a long lineage, beginning as a concept — Steve Lagerfeld THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 FINDINGS BRIEF NOTES OF INTEREST ON ALL TOPICS 1. 4. News for Newsreels Pass the Tea and Chivalry Time marches on the Third Reich Intimacy unripened “We feel that Hitler is too important... Born in 1810, the pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller broke one glass ceiling ... 5. Supreme Discomfort Robed road show In the early years of the Republic, few officials logged as many miles as Supreme Court justices. Federal law... 2. Quiet Niche 6. Garden ornaments for hire Fountainhead of Need For upper-crust Britons of the 18th... The deserving poor In 1926, less than a year after arriving in the United States from her native... 3. Proxy War on Terror Fence sitters and peacemakers Is Al Qaeda winning the online battle... THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 FINDINGS NEWS FOR as Thomas Doherty explains in Hollywood NEWSREELS and Hitler, 1933–1939 (Columbia Univ. Press), newsreels were a different story. Time marches on the Third Reich To Hollywood executives, movies “We feel that Hitler is too important a were all about escapism. Audiences figure to be ignored,” Roy E. Larsen, wanted programs of lighthearted enter- vice president of Time Inc., said in 1935. tainment: perhaps a Mickey Mouse car- The point would seem incontrovertible. toon, a Clark Gable feature, and a news- By then, Hitler had flouted the Treaty of reel about Canada’s Dionne quintuplets. Versailles, pulled out of the League of (According to Doherty, a professor of Nations, and banned all political parties American studies at Brandeis University, except the Nazis. American newspapers newsreels devoted more screen time to were chock-a-block with Nazi news. But the adorable quints than to the Spanish TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES The March of Time series “revolutionized” the newsreel when it debuted in 1935 but died 16 years later. The last newsreel companies folded in the 1960s. THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 FINDINGS Civil War.) The movie studios them- of the most important branches of the selves put out the twice-weekly news- industry—the newsreel.” reels, which typically zipped through a Nazis might be verboten in other clutch of upbeat stories in 10 minutes. newsreels, but not in The March of Those stories might range from the Time. A 1935 segment titled “Bercht- inconsequential to the insipid, but pro- esgaden, Bavaria!” opens with a solitary ducers didn’t care. “The newsreel is not Hitler, sitting and then pacing in near a purveyor of news,” declared the trade darkness, illuminated only by a mod- journal Motion Picture Herald. est fireplace. Narrator Westbrook Van Newsreel items about Hitler evidently Voorhis asserts that in just two years’ soured moviegoers’ mood, sometimes to time, this “lone, strange man . has the point where they would breach the lost for his country what Germany had peace. When the Führer appeared on nearly regained—the world’s sympa- screen, Nazi sympathizers might cheer thy.” The shadowy Führer was actually and yell “Heil!” Shouting matches and an American actor, in keeping with a even fistfights broke out. To avoid strife, common newsreel practice of reenacting Variety reported in 1933, “newsreel edi- or simply inventing scenes. Later shots tors are all dodging Hitler close-ups.” show Nazi parades, munitions factories, Then, in 1935, Time Inc. launched and Hitler—this time the real one—ful- what it called “a new kind of pictorial minating before an enormous crowd. journalism,” a monthly newsreel called In 1938, one edition of The March of The March of Time. The company was Time, “Inside Nazi Germany,” was de- wagering that the conventional wisdom voted solely to the Nazi threat. In the was wrong: Moviegoers were eager to 18-minute film, Van Voorhis declares be informed as well as entertained. Ex- that Hitler’s “fanatic little propaganda hibitors were skittish, but The March of minister,” Joseph Goebbels, has created Time won over audiences and critics. “a nation with one mind, one will, and Variety praised “its outspokenness, its one objective: expansion.” The film talks fearlessness, its production qualities, and bluntly of the Nazis’ “persecution of the its desire to remain impartial.” (In truth, Jews,” shows (and translates) “Jews Keep impartiality was a sometime thing.) The Out” signs, and reports that city parks Time Inc. series received a special Oscar have “special yellow benches . labeled in 1937 “for having revolutionized one ‘For Jews.’” THE WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2013 FINDINGS “Inside Nazi Germany” also contends Competitors took note. “Newsreels nev- that Nazism represents a growing men- er abandoned the fashion parades, dumb ace in the United States, showing foot- yuks, and sports highlights,” Doherty age of “Führer” Fritz Kuhn, leader of writes, “but the ratio of fluff to substance the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, began to tilt toward weightier topics.” “who claims to have enrolled 200,000 Perhaps The March of Time holds a U.S.