(6.00 AUTUMN 1991 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT? . .. RUSSIA'SFEVERBREAK -COLUMBUS WOODROW- EASTERNEUROPE

- Woodrow Wilson A Life for World Peace JAN WILLEM SCHULTE NORDHOLT Translated by Herbert H. Rowen The Woodrow Wilson of this major new biography embodies the French proverb that great qualities and defects are inseparably joined. Internationally known Dutch historian JanWillem Schulte Nordholt writes withdeep understanding and empathy about America's twenty-eighth president (1913-1921),his admin- istration, and his role in world affairs. This biography, as beautifully translated as it is written, restores the figure of Wilson as an incurable dreamer, a poetic idealist whose romantic world viewenshrinedorganic, evolutionary progress. 575 pages, 16 photopa~~hs,$34.95 cloth

to beleaguered nation

In the Name of Democracy U. S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years America at THOMAS CAROTHERS 'The most balanced and sophisticated account Century's End currently available of U.S. policy toward Latin Edited by ALAN WOLFE America in the 1980's, and of the complexities, 'The authors of this collection of firstrate essays tensions and difficulties inherent in making cast a cold and critical eye on the present state democratization a foreign policy objective. . . . of American society, and provide multiple clues A 'must read.'" -Ambassador Viron P.Vakey, to the origins and causes of our current predica- Former Assistant Secretary of State merits."-Lewis Coser. for Inter-American Affairs 567 pages, $29.95 cloth 321 pages, $29.95 cloth

At bookstores or order toll-free 1 -800-822-6657. Visa/MasterCard. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles New York Oxford FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY

AUTUMN 1991 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

COVER STORY THE RISEAND FALL OF THE 21 A MERZCAN ESTABLISHMENT Although the American myth insists upon absolute equality, the United States, like every other nation, has always had a governing class. Be- tween World War II and the late 1960s, America's elite formed an influ- ential, if largely invisible, Establishment that helped make the United States the leader of the Free World. Painting that group at the height of its power, Max Holland profiles the "chairman" of the American Estab- lishment, John J. McCloy. John B. Judis describes the demise of the Establishment and its replacement by a congeries of narrowly self-inter- ested lobbies and factions.

COLUMBUSAND THE LABYRINTHOF HISTORY 66 The approaching Quincentenary of the "discovery" of the New World has already set off heated ideological debates. Science writer John No- ble Wilford sifts through the many versions of Columbus's life and weighs the competing interpretations of his accomplishment.

IDEAS \ R USSZA 'S FEVERBREAK The bungled August coup in the Soviet Union was part of a painful pro- cess of change that James H. Billington describes as a fever break. The patient's prospects? Billington finds hope in Russia's cultural traditions.

REFLECTIONS DEPARTMENTS WOODROW WILSON, 106 From the Center 4 POLITICIAN Robert Dallek recalls the domestic triumphs Periodicals 9 of a president known too exclusively for his hopeful international designs. Current Books 92 Research Reports 138 THE 'OTHER'EUROPE AT 116 CENTURYSEND Commentary 140 Two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his- Cover: John J. McCloy at the helm, flanked, on the left, by torian John Lukacs finds some surprises in Clark Clifford and Dean Acheson, and, on the right, by Rob- Eastern Europe. ert McNamara and Dean Rusk. The artist is Salvador Bru.

USPS 346-670 MA VOL. XV NO. 4

The Wilson Quarterlv (ISSN-0363-3276)is published in January (Winter) Apnl (Spring), July (Summer), and October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson !nfeniational Cower ]or Scholars at 370 L'Enfant Promenade S. W., suite 704. Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions: one year, $24; two years, $43. Outside U.S: one war, $30.50" two years $56. Air mail outside U.S.: one year, $39; 11~0years, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: $7; selected back issue.,: $7, includi~~fpostage and haidlinkoutside U.S. andpossessions, $8. Second-class postage paid af Washin ton D C , and additional 1~1aiIi11go ces. All tu~solicitedma~~i.script.s s110~1ld be occompa~~iedby a self.addressed .sta~~~pede~~t~elope. The views expressed fereh ir; ~otnecessori!~ tlro.se of she iVoodrow Wilson Iuten~ationalCenser for Scholars. Members: Send changes of address arid all .sub.scriplion correspondence wit11 Wilson Quarterly inailin label to Subscnber Service The Wilson Quarterly PO. Box 56161 Boulder Colo. 80322-6161. (Subscriber hot line: 1-800-876-8828.) Posma.ster: enf fall address chan es to he Wilson Quarterly, P.6. Box 56161, Boulder, bolo. 80301. Micro Im copies are available from University A4icrofil~??sI~~ten~atio~~al, 300 ~brtf Zeeb Road, Am Arbor, Mic11iga1148106. ll.SA. 17ewsstand dislrib~ilio?~4 Eastem Neiw Distrib~itors,II~c., 1130 Cleveland Road, Sandusky, Ohio 44870. THE PFIZER HEALTHCARE SERIES

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A message in the interest of better health from A PARTNER IN HEALTHCARE" Editor Jay Tolson Deputy Editor Steven Lagerfeld Editor's Comment Managing Editor: James H. Carman Literary Editor Jefferv Paine ~ssociheEditor Robert K. Landers On the occasion of our 15th anniversary, I would like to Copy Editor Helen Loerke thank you, the WQ's many loyal readers, for your steady sup- Contrib~{tingEditor's Steven Fraser, Max Holland, Elizabeth Irene port and interest. Because of you, the WQ today enjoys one Lagerfeld, Walter Reich; Research- of the wider circulations (80,000) of any quarterly in the Eng- ei s M. Lawless Bean, Joseph D. lish-speaking world. This figure suggests not only that the Heiman, Thomas L Hudson, Karen WQ fills a niche in the literary marketplace but that there are L Iker, Michael S Knvan, Kirby Lunger, Knstina Ross, Adam Shear, still plenty of readers who take ideas seriously. We don't kid Jennifer M. Utrata; Librarian ourselves, of course. We realize that readers like you may ZdenEk V David; Editorial Advi~er~ belong to an endangered species. But as long as you're there, Mary B Bullock, Robert Darnton, you keep us going. And, in fact, you make the whole business Francis M Deng, Denis Donoghue, Nathan Glazer, Michael Haltzel, worth the candle. Harding, Elizabeth Johns, Mi- Appropriately perhaps, this issue adds up to a kind of ZZLacey, John R. Lampe, Jack- "New World Symphony." As well as John Noble Wilford's son Lears, Lawrence W Lichty, meditation on the enigmatic figure of Christopher Columbus Robert Litwak, Frank McConnell, James M Moms, Richard Morse, and the many meanings of his "discovery," we look at the Mancur Olson, Richard Ro futures of Russia and of Eastern Europe, two great new Ruble, Ann Sheffield. S Frederickr worlds of our day. In our cover story, Max Holland and John Starr, Joseph Tulchin; Founding Edi- Judis remind us of how the American Establishment tried to tor Peter Braestrup Publishing Director Warren B. Syer shape a new world order in the aftermath of World War II- Publisl~ei Kathy Read and of the surprising extent to which it succeeded. Finally, Busrnes~Manager Suzanne Turk among the many points made by historian Robert Dallek in Circulation Director Rosalie Bruno his portrait of Woodrow Wilson, one is that U.S. leaders Advertisitzg Director. Sara Lawrence 370 L'Enfant Promenade S. W. might profitably direct some of their new-world ambitions Suite 704 away from the glamor of the world stage toward the more Washington, D.C. 20024 urgent kitchenry of domestic affairs. (202) 287-3000

"This book is important for at least three reasons. First. its author has the good judgment to emphasize the too-often overlooked political dimensions of the nation's recent economic problems. Second. just as others-with their fingers to the political winds-retreat from advocating an industrial policy, Mr. Dietrich argues for such a policy and does so with strong evidence as well as conviction. Third, as CEO of a steel corporation and a recent Ph.D. in political science, he also writes with unique experience and perspective." -Walter LaFeber, Cornell University

"A powerful call for a stronger government role to moder- nize the U.S. economic system. What makes it especially noteworthy is that the call comes from a business executive. When enough other CEOs join Bill Dietrich, we may be on the way to finding our proper place in the world economy." -Robert Heilbroner. New School for Social Research

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PENN STATE PRESS 820 N University Dr University Park, PA 16802 814-865-1327 or the past nine months I have used tion of the platform of the first declared this space to write, briefly, about some Democratic presidential candidate, Paul topics that I perceive as important and in- Tsongas: "We need our resources here at teresting. It seems to me both fitting and home. We have a Herculean task to steady potentially useful to mark the 15th anni- our economic ship of state and get out versary of the WQ's founding by asking its from our crushing national debt. This is readers to tell us what is on their minds the first priority and all other priorities during these truly extraordinary times. come after it." It is not unreasonable that our readers, Similar views have led to urgent and faced by this invitation, should ask what perhaps agonizing reappraisals of their we intend to do with the responses we re- programs by universities, foundations, and ceive. At the very least, I can promise that think-tanks. Nor is the Woodrow Wilson they will all be read by my colleagues and Center immune to this reappraisal-virus. me, that some will be printed in the Com- Having always prided itself on taking long mentary section, and that the more historical views rather than reacting to thoughtful and provocative ones will play each day's headlines, the Center now faces a role in charting the course of the Wood- the challenge of distinguishing between row Wilson Center in the years ahead. transitory, local, or random phenomena While there is much to be said for leav- and evidences of systemic, long-term ing this invitation completely open-ended, change. Although we hear little these days I cannot resist the temptation of adding a of the end of history, it is increasingly diffi- few observations about the situation in cult to ignore the possibility that we may which we all find ourselves these days, a be entering a new historical era. Although situation that will surely shape the re- we tend to think of the secular state and its sponses we receive. Beneath the under- claim of absolute sovereignty as virtually a standably repetitious-and, to given in human affairs, the fact be honest, frequently tedious- is that it came into being only rhetoric about the end of the some three centuries ago. The Cold War, the new world order, new arrangements awaited in and our seemingly endless Europe after 1992, and the simi- agenda of domestic problems, a lar arrangements discussed for few larger themes can be discerned. places as different the West Bank and ~rnon~the more interesting of these to the Soviet Union suggest that the future me is the fact that a large and growing may belong to a quite different political number of specialists in foreign affairs is form-a loose association with divided now urging that we give more thought to sovereignty. Similarly, the gridlock that putting our own house in order. Perhaps paralyzes our own central government in the single most striking instance is the the face of mounting deficits and case of William G. Hyland. If, as many unaddressed social needs may reflect not maintain, the Council on Foreign Rela- just the temporary inability of Republicans tions is still the home of this country's for- to elect a Congress and of Democrats to eign-policy establishment (see cover story, elect a president, but rather a systemic p. 21), then the editor of its journal Foreign weakness in our polity. Again, Desert Affairs may not unreasonably be described Storm notwithstanding, have we entered as its spokesman. In an article last May, an era in which economics, ecology, and Hyland stated our need "to start selectively even culture may have replaced military disengaging abroad to save resources" des- might as the dominant factors in interna- perately needed for domestic purposes. tional relations? More recently, the Washington Post re- Surely these are the sorts of questions ported Hyland as saying,"We built up all we must be asking, but to end where I be- these institutions where I worked-the gan, it is now your turn to enlighten us. Central Intelligence Agency, National Se- curity Council, State Department. Every president has become captured by this. But it's all over." The same Washington -Charles Blitzer Post article quoted the foreign-policy sec- Director 41 WILLIAM ST. * PRINCETON, NJ 08540 * (609) 258-4900 ORDERS: 800-PRS-ISBN (777-4726) OR FROM YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE

WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS Smithsonian Institution Building Washington, D.C. Charles Blitzer, Director Samuel E Wells, Jr., Deputy Director Dean W. Anderson, Deputy Director for Planning and Management BOARD OF TRUSTEES William J. Baroody, Jr., Chairman Dwayne 0. Andreas, Vice Chairman Robert McC. Adams Lamar Alexander J. Burchenal Ault James A. Baker I11 Theodore C. Barreaux James H. Billington Amb. Henry E. Catto Lynne V. Cheney Gertrude Himmelfarb Eli Jacobs John S. Reed William L. Saltonstall Louis W. Sullivan Gov. John H. Sununu Robert H. Tuttle Don W. Wilson

THE WILSON COUNCIL Stanley R. Klion, Chairman Charles E Barber Conrad Cafritz Edward W. Carter Peter B. Clark William T. Coleman, Jr. Kenneth W. Dam Michael DiGiacomo Robert R. Harlin William A. Hewitt James H. Higgins Eric Hotung Donald M. Kendall Christopher Kennan Franklin A. Lindsay Sol M. Linowitz Minoru Makihara Plato Malozemoff Edwin S. Marks C. Peter McColough Martha T. Muse David Packard L. Richardson Preyer Robert L. Raclin Raja W. Sidawi Robert R. Slaughter S. Bruce Smart, Jr.

The Wilson Center has published the Quarterly since 1976. It also publishes Wilson Center Press books, special reports, and a series of "scholars' guides" designed to help researchers find their way through the vast archival riches of the nation's capital. All this is part of the Wilson Center's special mission as the nation's unusual "living memorial" to the 28th president of the United States. Congress established the Center in 1968 as an international institute for advanced study, "symbolizing and strength- ening the fruitful relation between the world of learning and the world of public affairs." The Center opened in 1970 under its own presidentially appointed board of trustees, headed by former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. Chosen in open annual worldwide competitions, some 50 Fellows at the Center carry out advanced research, write books, and join in discussions with other scholars, public officials, journalists, and business and labor leaders. The Center is housed in the original Smithsonian "castle" on the Mall. Financing comes from both private sources and an annual congressional appropriation. THOMAS JEFFERSON: PASSIONATE PILGRIM The Presidency, The Founding of A CENTURY OF FINE PUBLISHING the University, The Private Battle By Alfj. Mapp, ]r. ROBERT M. HUTCHINS A featured alternate Book-of-the- Portrait of an Educator Month-Club selection and an alter- Mary Ann Dzuback nate History Book Club selection Dzuback recounts the years when Hutchins . . .brilliantly revealing and sharply etched." transformed the University of Chicago and set - Virginius Dabney, Pulitzer Prize Winner his stamp indelibly on American higher 6.. .a graceful, admiring assessment. . .- education-by turns inspiring and antagoniz- - KIRKUS REVIEWS ing those around him. "This is an eloquent *T/ionias Jefferson: Passionate Pilgrim. . .a classic addi- and timely analysis of the greatest university tion to. . .Jeffersonian literature. Its language is the president of the twentieth century," master craftsmanship of Alf Mapp, unsurpassed in the literary arts." -Leon Botstein, President, Bard College - Kenneth Thompson, Director of the Miller Center of Illus. S24.95 Public Affairs, University of Virginia, and Editor of "Presidential Portraits" HUTCHINS' UNIVERSITY October 1991 @ 446 pages 0 cloth $24.95 ISBN 0-8191-8053-X A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950 THE CAMBRIDGE SPIES William H. McNeiU The Untold Story of Maclean, McNeill recalls what it was like to be a student Philby, and Burgess in America and teacher at the University of Chicago B!/ Verne IV. Newton in the midst of Hutchins' tumultuous reforms. " . . .interesting and 'Explains better than any other recent study well-researched." the myths and realities behind the renowned - James Bamford educator.. . and the university he ran for Tlic Nral fork Times Boot Reilii'ir more than 20 years."-Publishers Weekly "Newton expertly gauges the damage to the West by "A gripping story elegantly told." this treacherous trio." -Donald N. Levine Illus. S24.95 - Piil~lislirisWeekly 6...the fullest and most perceptive analysis of an REMEMBERING THE important phase of Soviet espionage." UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO - KIRKLIS REVIEWS

Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars June 1991 464 pages * cloth $24.95 @ ISBN 0-8191-8059-9 Edited by Edward Shils EYEWITNESS TO INFAMY Forty-seven lively, often moving essays pay tribute to inspiring teachers at the University of An Oral History of Pearl Harbor Chicago-their personalities and intellectual By Paul ]. Travers passions. In addition to Edward Shils, contribu- iyeipitiiess to Infamy is the first tors include Robert Bork and Leo Rosten as oral history of the story of Pearl well as Nobel Laureates James M. Harbor. With the help of the Buchanan, Pearl Harbor Survivors' Associa- Charles Brenton Huggins, and Paul Samuelson. tion, the VFW, and the American Legion, the author collected over 200 eyewitness accounts of the attack. These narratives portray the human side of battle and span the spectrum of emotions from the heroic to the tragic to the comic.

October 1991 @ 275 pages * cloth S24.95 * ISBN 0-8191-8058-0

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Rights From "George Mason and the Conservation of Liberty" by Brent Tarter, in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (July The Start 1991), Virginia Historical Society, P.O. BOX 73 11, Richmond, Va. 23221-0311.

Two centuries ago, on Dec. 15, 1791, Vir- But it still fell short of his standards. "The ginia became the 1lth and final state to Senate was made more powerful than he ratify the Bill of Rights. Today, Virginia's wished," Tarter says. "The executive de- George Mason (1725-92), the principal au- partment was made more powerful, too. thor of the state's famous Declaration of The judiciary was imprecisely defined with Rights and its Constitution of 1776, is a potentially large (and therefore poten- hailed as one of the fathers of the Bill of tially dangerous) jurisdiction. The treaty- Rights. As a delegate to the Constitutional making and appointive provisions also up- Convention in 1787, he objected to the ab- sence of such a guarantee, and refused to sign the Constitution. Virginia and other states ratified the Constitution only on the understanding that the new Congress would soon correct the defect. In fact, says Tarter, an editor of the Virginia State Li- brary and Archives' Dictionary of Virginia Biography, that flaw was not the only, or even the main, objection this leading Anti- federalist had to the Constitution. On August 31, 1787, almost two full weeks before Mason made his only re- corded suggestion that the federal conven- tion add a bill of rights to the document, he declared (as fellow Virginian James Madison reported) that "he would sooner chop off his right hand than put it to the constitution as it now stands." Mason, like others of his generation, cherished balance in government as a bul- wark against tyranny. The federal Constitu- tion broadly resembled the one he had helped write for Virginia; it had separate executive, legislative, and judicial depart- Virginia's George Mason was a critic of slavery ments, and built-in checks and balances. as well as of the Constitution.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 9 PERIODICALS

set the separation of powers and reduced ing up dust as he went. . . . Mason's disap- the potency of the House of Represen- pointment was bitter, and because of the tatives." This all undermined, in Mason's rigidity of his views and the belligerence of eyes, the rationale of the Virginia Plan that his personality, it had staying power." had been presented to the convention. Even after Madison introduced the Bill That plan had called for a strengthened of Rights in the new U.S. House of Repre- government, but the popularly elected sentatives in July 1789, Mason was not ap- lower house of the legislature was to be peased. He called Madison's action a dominant. "Farce," and said, "Perhaps some Milk & Mason was "well read, intelligent, [and] Water Propositions may be made by Con- discerning," Tarter says, but he also was gress to the State Legislatures. . . but of "very much a loner [and] temperamen- important & substantial Amendments, I tally unsuited to the hurly-burly and com- have not the least Hope." This father of the promises of the political arena." After he Bill of Rights went to his grave three years did not get his way in Philadelphia, "he later without ever having given the Con- took his quill and went home, angrily kick- stitution his blessing.

Voting Booth Blues "Voter Turnout" by Raymond E. Wolfinger and "Electoral Par- ticipation: Summing UP a Decade" bv Carole Jean Uhlaner in society (July-Aug. 1961), ~ut~ers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903. When Americans go to the polls in 1992, This country's real problem, Wolfinger the nation's political pulse-takers are sure says, is that only two-thirds of Americans to search voter-turnout data for clues to are registered. This disappointing figure the health of the body politic. And chances results largely from the fact that the bur- are they will again warn that Americans den of registration is left on the individual have alarming cases of political apathy and voter-a burden compounded by the fact cynicism. Turnout in presidential contests that Americans are frequent movers. (In has been falling for decades, dropping 1980, one-third of all American voters had from 62.8 percent in 1960 to 50.15 percent not lived at the same address for two in 1988. years.) In Europe, by contrast, registration But Wolfinger, a political scientist at is usually automatic. In England, canvass- Berkeley, dismisses such diagnoses as ers even go door-to-door to compile the quackery. Opinion polls show that Ameri- electoral register. Make registration auto- can voters, though supposedly alienated, matic here, Wolfinger suggests, and all the are among the most optimistic in the chatter about apathy and a voter turnout world about their own "political efficacy." "crisis" will cease. Eighty-five percent express pride in their Uhlaner, who teaches at the University political system. In Italy, meanwhile, voter of California at Irvine, is not so optimistic. turnout is an impressive 94 percent, yet She points out that the decline in political only three percent of Italians profess en- participation during the 1980s was un- thusiasm for government Italian-style. even. Among the poorest 16 percent of Part of the confusion about the meaning Americans, for example, turnout fell from of voter turnout, Wolfinger explains, is 46 to 40 percent between 1980 and '88, caused by the fact that the U.S. statistic is but among the wealthiest five percent it computed differently-as the proportion rose from 69 to 77 percent. Among blacks, of the total adult population that casts bal- turnout fell from 50 to 39 percent. Why? lots. Calculated instead as a proportion of Uhlaner believes that the poor and disad- only those registered to vote, as it is in Eu- vantaged were excluded from the nation's rope, the percentage improves to a re- political dialogue during the 1980s. They spectable 84 to 87 percent. had nothing (and nobody) to vote for.

WQ AUTUMN 199 1 PERIODICALS

But this argument is partly contradicted credits aggressive registration drives. By by Uhlaner's own report of a dramatic in- these measures, Mexican-Americans now crease in registration (from 39 to 59 per- participate in politics more actively than cent) and voter turnout (from 28 to 59 per- blacks do. More than ever, blacks seem a cent) among Mexican-Americans. Uhlaner constituency in search of a party.

"The Fight to Know" by Peter Montgomery and Peter Overby, Keeping Secrets in Common Cause Magazine (July-Aug. 1991), 2030 M St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. vacy rights, and some internal government Johnson and strengthened after the Water- documents. The Reagan administration gate scandal, the Freedom of Information extended the cloak of "national security" Act (FOIA) turned 25 this summer. In re- to cover information on trade and virtually cent years, however, contend Montgom- all aspects of international activity, ~oni- ery, associate editor of Common Cause gomery and Overby say. A 1982 executive Magazine, and Overby, a staff writer, the order told officials to classify documents executive branch and federal courts have whenever in doubt. The courts have not expanded the law's exemptions and given been much help. A federal court, for exam- "the bureaucratic impulse for secre- ple, ruled FBI criminal history records cy. . . freer rein." "categorically" exempt. In 1987, for example, the Reagan admin- Surprisingly, most FOIA requests do not istration asked Congress to exempt the Na- come from journalists. They accounted for tional Aeronautics and Space Administra- only six percent of the 40,500 requests at tion (NASA) from the law, claiming that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Japanese scientists were using it to obtain last year. Most of the rest, the authors note, valuable information about U.S. space came from FDA-regulated firms seeking shuttle technology. That simply was not "to untangle the sometimes Byzantine reg- true, the authors say, and a NASA official ulatory process-and to dig up informa- later admitted as much. The administra- tion. . . on their competitors." tion "concocted the story," they assert, to In an effort to find out how well the law keep the public from learning about deci- is working, Common Cause Magazine last sions that led to the 1986 Challenger explo- spring filed FOIA requests with 21 federal sion. Requests made under FOIA later agencies, asking for recent logs of FOIA helped "demolish NASA's deceptions." requests and the agency responses. The The FOIA exempts certain kinds of in- full answer is still a mystery: Only four of formation from public scrutiny, including the agencies met the statutory 10-day dead- national-security and law-enforcement se- line for replying, and two months after the crets, sensitive financial and business data, requests were filed, seven agencies still information protected by individuals' pri- had not responded.

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

"What is the National Interest?" by Alan Tonelson, in The Atlan- America First? tic (July 1991), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 021 16. America's victories in the Cold War and irrelevant to the lives of most Americans, the Persian Gulf War-and its internation- asserts Tonelson, research director of the alist foreign policy in general-are largely Economic Strategy Institute. Far from go-

WQ AUTUMN 1991 11 PERIODICALS

ing off now in search of President George should not be "a vehicle for spreading Bush's New World Order, he argues, the American values, for building national United States should abandon internation- character, for expressing any individual's alism and start thinking in terms of or group's emotional, philosophical, or po- "purely national interests." litical preferences, or for carrying out U.S. foreign policy since World War 11, any. . . overseas missions that, however in Tonelson's view, has had the utopian appealing, bear only marginally on pro- purpose of transforming the world "into a tecting and enriching the nation." Such nlace where the forces that drive nations marginal missions include: "promoting to clash in the first place no longer exist." peace, stability, democracy, and develop- Internationalism, he says, has encouraged ment around the world; protecting human Americans "to think more about the possi- rights; establishing international law; ble world of tomorrow than about the real building collective security; exercising world of today." All questions of the risks something called leadership; creating a and costs of foreign entanglements have new world order; [and] competing glob- been avoided. he claims. and the nation's ally with the Soviets (or whomever) for economic and social problems have been power and influence." badly neglected. America's security, he says, should be Under the policy that he champions, the "decouoled" from that of its allies, and United States would seek to secure and "the automatic nuclear risks built into the protect its "truly vital" interests, such as alliances" should be eliminated. All U.S.

physical survival and the maintenance of nuclear forces in Eurooe.1, and most con- its democratic institutions. But all other ventional forces, should be unilaterally major foreign-policy objectives would be withdrawn. "Strategic and economic dis- subjected to the test of whether the bene- engagement from the Third World, which fits outweighed the costs and risks. Thus, has already begun, should be allowed to "the lack of democracy, development, and continue unimpeded." social justice in Central America-how- All this does not add up to isolationism,

ever unfortunate for oeoolea who have to Tonelson insists. ~oreignintervention live there-has never appreciably affected would not be ruled out on principle. U.S. fortunes." The United States should "[The] only rule of thumb would be 'what- no longer try to reform these countries, ever works' to oreserve or enhance Ameri- on el son argues. Its sole interest is to keep ca's security and prosperity and-pro- hostile foreign powers out, and it should vided that Americans are willing to pay the do this with force, if necessary. bills-what the country collectively wishes U.S. foreign policy, Tonelson says, to define as its psychological well-being."

"Nuisance of Decision: Jupiter Missiles and the Cuban Missile .J~%'S Missiles Crisis" by Philip Nash, in The Journal of Strategic Studies (Mar. 1991), Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., Gainsborough House, Gainsbor- ough Road, London El 1 1RS, England. When President John F. Kennedy in Octo- the obsolete Jupiter missiles removed ber 1962 made the stunning announce- from Turkey months before, only to dis- ment that the Soviet Union was placing cover during the crisis that the federal bu- nuclear missiles in Cuba, he left out one reaucracy had not carried out his order. uncomfortable fact: The United States had But Nash, an Ohio University historian, nuclear missiles in Turkey, close to the So- says that there is no hard evidence that viet Union. Others soon pointed out the Kennedy had explicitly ordered the Jupi- parallel, and it complicated U.S. efforts to ters removed. resolve the crisis. Standard histories have Kennedy indeed had been concerned it that a blameless Kennedy had ordered about the missiles in Turkey, and with

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good reason, the historian notes: "They there, Kennedy's national security adviser, were . . . provocative, vulnerable, and McGeorge Bundy, asked the Defense De- practically useless." The original decision partment what could be done about get- to deploy the missiles had been made in ting the Jupiters out. Contrary to some 1957, after the launching of the Soviet claims, this was not an "order" to remove Sputnik aroused Europe's fears about the the missiles. Nash savs. Kennedy's subordi- depth of US. commitment to its defense. nates all along seem to have understood But the Jupiters were not actually de- "that they were being instructed to consult ployed until after Kennedy took office in the Turks regarding removal, and not be- 196 1. While he was inclined to cancel de- ing ordered to remove the missiles." ployment, his advisers feared that after the During the Cuban missile crisis, Ken- tense June summit meeting with Soviet nedy and his advisers "consistently Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna strained" in public to dismiss the analogy such a move might be interpreted as a sign between the Jupiters and the Soviet mis- of weakness. Also, Ankara strongly op- siles in Cuba. In the end, the Soviets with- posed cancellation. "[Tjhere is no reason drew their missiles after receivineu secret to doubt that deployment went ahead with assurances that the Jupiters would be re- Kennedy's approval," Nash says. moved within five months. The last Jupiter On Aug. 23, 1962, after the Soviet mili- in Turkey was dismantled in April 1963; tary build-up in Cuba had begun, but be- the official stow. that there had been no d, fore the Soviet missiles were discovered trade, lasted much longer.

ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS

"Global Work Force 2000: The New World Labor Market" by The Global William B. Johnston, in Harvard Business Review (Mar.-Apr. Job Market 1991), Boston, Mass, 02163. Labor has long been considered the least percent, and in Germany the work force mobile factor in production. But thanks to will actually shrink. a global mismatch between labor supply Although the industrialized nations still and demand, the movement of workers educate higher proportions of their youths, across national borders is going to acceler- the developing countries have been pro- ate dramatically in the future. So predicts ducing a fast-increasing share of the Johnston, a Senior Research Fellow at the world's high-school and college graduates. Hudson Institute and author of the widely Their share of college students, for exam- cited 1987 report, Workforce 2000. ple, jumped from 23 percent in 1970 to 49 While the focus of attention in the percent in 1985 and is expected to reach United States and other industrialized na- 60 percent by the year 2000. tions has been on looming labor shortages, During the 1990s, Johnston says, "work- the world's work force has been growing ers who have acquired skills in school will rapidly. Between 1985 and the year 2000, be extremely valuable in the world labor Johnston says, an increase of 600 million markets. And if job opportunities are lack- workers is projected, with 95 percent of ing in their native lands, better jobs will them in the developing countries. In Paki- probably be only a plane ride away." stan and Mexico, for example, the work 'Although most governments in indus- force is expected to grow by about three trial nations will resist these movements of percent a year, while in the United States people for social and political reasons," and Canada the rate will be closer to one Johnston says, "employers in the devel- percent. In Japan, growth will be only 0.5 oped world are likely to find ways around

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government barriers." Even unskilled jobs cans to the United States-to take jobs na- "may become more internationalized in tives did not want. Among the industri- the 1990s," he says. During the 1970s and alized nations, only Japan, with "its '80s, large numbers of relatively low- commitment to preserving its racial ho- skilled workers immigrated-Turks to mogeneity," is likely to reject increased West Germany, Algerians to France, Mexi- immigration.

Spreading "American Family Fortunes as Economic Deadweight" by Sid- ney L. Carroll, in Challenge (May-June 1991), 80 Business Park The Wealth Dr., Arrnonk, N.Y. 10504. A mere one percent of all Americans own visers, and accountants. nearly one-third of the nation's wealth- That, Carroll believes, is good neither $3.7 trillion in 1986. Roughly one-half of for the U.S. economy nor even for manv of their considerable fortunes were inherited. the heirs, who remain dependen< A And much of that inherited wealth is not change in the tax system, he says, could fix put to imaginative use. On the contrary, the problem. asserts Carroll, an economist at the Uni- Under existing laws, enacted in 1912, versity of Tennessee, Knoxville, massive wealth is subject to an estate tax. When an inherited fortunes are typically locked individual dies, the estate's worth in excess away in estate trusts, which are cautiously of $600.000 is subiect to taxation and the managed in accordance with the wishes of wealth is then transferred. This allows the the dead by banks, attorneys, financial ad- rich to pass on large fortunes relatively in- tact. Carroll proposes substituting a new tax on individual inheritors. The first $1 million received would be tax-free. But be- quests above that would be taxed on a slid- ing scale, with everything over $4 million completely taxed away. The rich therefore would tend to spread their assets around-in fact. an estate of anv size could be distributed entirely tax-free, so long as no single bequest was too large. Wealth could be spread among many heirs. And control of the assets would pass "not to a trust, not to a bank, but to a per- son." Many of the heirs would be young and more inclined than their elders to be "creative risk-takers." Not all the funds would be put to good use, of course, but the overall effect. Can-oil maintains. would Some heirs to great wealth are unable to free greatly benefit the economy-and'the in- themselves from their "welfare" dependency. heritors themselves.

Taps For "Can Business Beat Bureaucracy?" by Charles Heckscher, in The American Prospect (Spring 1991), P.O. Box 7645, Prince- Bureaucracy? ton, N.J. 08543-7645, Pop social critics love to decry the soul- Heckscher, a Harvard Business School deadening effects of working for large, bu- professor, even some buttoned-down cor- reaucratic organizations. Now, notes porate CEOs have joined in.

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Large firms have been encouraging "in- porations, such as IBM, have long empha- volvement" of blue-collar workers that sized the importance of shared values. goes beyond the popular Quality of Work These firms show concern for their em- Life programs of the 1980s, which brought ployees' welfare, and employees respond workers together in quality circles to talk with a voluntary commitment to the good about their work and recommend im- of the whole corporate community. But provements. Now, a few companies are this kind of paternalism-in which hierar- setting up "autonomous teams" of work- chy remains important-has its draw- ers that control scheduling, discipline, and backs, Heckscher says. An "excessive in- other managerial functions. Equally sig- wardness" may develop, with the result nificant changes have been taking place in that qualified outsiders are kept out and the work of middle managers, Heckscher insiders become too cautious and rigid. says. In "the golden age of bureaucracy," Free-Market Corporation. "Pay for indi- when groups were deemed ill-suited to the vidual performance, the promotion of in- making of decisions, committees and task ternal competition, [and] the conversion forces were relatively rare; now, such of departments into profit centers. . . are team-oriented groups are common. all examples of this movement" to make The shift away from hierarchy is not just the corporation itself a market. General a fad, Heckscher believes. "Bureaucracy is Electric's Jack Welch, a fervent apostle, ill-suited to the demands of advanced mar- declared loyalty no virtue in his company. kets for innovation and quality," he as- But, as many investment-banking and serts. But its demise is hardly assured. He high-tech firms have found out, a compa- outlines four alternative models for the fu- ny's rejection of loyalty encourages tal- ture corporation: ented employees to jump not only to other Purified Bureaucracy. "In the old-line posts within the firm but to other firms. companies-the General Motors, the 0 Cooperative Association. The corpora- AT&Ts, the Dow Chemicals-leaders fre- tion stresses "teamwork" and the use of quently talk of 'empowerment' and 'auton- task forces and committees, with decisions omy.' . . . [They want to return] to individ- at all levels made by consensus. One me- uals the 'power' to perform the roles that dium-sized manufacturing firm Heckscher have been established for them, allowing studied uses teams for virtually all deci- them to use their knowledge to carry out sions. The "human benefits of such an ap- the tasks defined by their superiors. This proach are obvious," but Heckscher con- [is] a return to true bureaucracy." cedes, it still "does not work very well on a Community with Shared Values. Xe- large scale." rox tried to create "a culture of quality" "In the modern economy," he con- during the 1980s with a massive education cludes, "bureaucracy no longer enjoys a campaign. (A 92-page book on developing massive advantage. . . over more open and corporate quality was put out and dis- participatory alternatives." Nevertheless, cussed throughout the firm.) Other cor- he admits, "bureaucracy is not yet dead."

SOCIETY

"Improving Our Criminal Justice System" by Charles Maech- HOW TO Get ling, Jr., in The Brookings Review (Summer 1991), 1775 Mass. More Justice Ave. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036. "The American criminal justice system is to clogged prisons and court calendars, breaking down," claims Charles Maech- and to the fact that it can take years to put ling, Jr., an international lawyer. He points a rapist behind bars or to execute a mur-

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derer. Much of what's wrong, he says, is ony case, an examining magistrate con- rooted in the courts' adversarial nature, ducts a detailed inquiry, questioning wit- which necessitates "a bristling array of nessfes, scrutinizing physical evidence, and constitutional safeguards and procedural weighing information from other sources. rules" to protect the accused. Maechling All relevant information about the case argues for radical reform: taking a leaf and people involved goes into the record. from the so-called inquisitorial criminal- Only after the magistrate has built up a co- justice process used everywhere in Europe herent case, and resolved any ambiguities except Great Britain and Ireland. or uncertainties, does he decide whether The European approach relies on "ob- to bring a suspect to trial. jective methods of inquiry rather If the case reaches a courtroom, the than . . . pit-bull confrontations," says prima facie case against the accused is Maechling, who, as a visiting Fellow at strong. But the defendant has the opportu- Wolfson College, Cambridge University, in nity to prove his innocence or, more 1985-87, led a study of the subject. After likely, show extenuating circumstances. police make an initial investigation of a fel- He has the right to counsel and can refuse

The Transformation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Acknowledging the seriousness of Martin those early months of the Montgomery strug- Luther King, Jr.'s recently revealed plagia- gle was, in some very significant ways, a dis- rism in his doctoral dissertation at Boston tinctively different young man from the one University, King biographer David J. Garrow who had pieced together "A Comparison of offers in the Journal of American Historythe Conceptions of God in the Thinking of (June 1991) this interpretation: Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wiemanl'in the winter of 1954-1 955 . . . . [It] forces us to address a central question: Perhaps even more than has previously Was the [Martin Luther King, JrJ of Crozer been appreciated, King's acquisition of that [Theological Seminary] and [Boston Univer- fundamental sense of mission, calling, and sity] actually a rather immature and insecure obligation that came to him in Montgomery young man? Was he a talented young transformed him into someone whose newly preacher with no particular aptitude for enriched self-understanding gave to his fu- scholarly creativity, a man who was some- ture life an integrity, a dedication, and a what out of his element as a student yet who sense of purpose reaching well beyond him- quickly began to mature and grow into him- self that simply had not been present in his self once he put graduate school. . . firmly be- life, and in his academic studies, up until that hind him after returning south to pastor time. We need to ponder whether acquiring Montgomery's Dexter such a sense of mis- Avenue Baptist sion can funda- Church? The project mentally transform a findings should person's life and cause us to think whether the tough- again about how minded integrity, fundamentally trans- and the courage, that forming an experi- [King] demonstrated ence the early lead- so repeatedly and so ership of the [I9561 often in the years af- Montgomery bus boy- ter 1956 was not cott was for King, something he and whether the brought to the black Martin Luther King freedom struggle, but who was molded rather something he and reshaped by King speaks during Montgomery bus boycott. gained from. . . it.

AUTUMN 1991 16 PERIODICALS

to answer questions, although the jury, un- nesses for the court, rather than for the de- like a U.S. panel, may draw a negative in- fense or prosecution, and "chosen and ference. The defense counsel may cross- screened for competence and objectivity." examine witnesses and make legal And most of the questioning should be arguments, but "cannot disrupt the pro- done by the judge, with the lawyers only ceedings with delaying tactics and frivo- afterward allowed to make a limited cross- lous objections on points of procedure." examination. Drawing on the European approach, Finally, Maechling says, appeals in crim- Maechling recommends reversing the Su- inal cases on minor procedural or tech- preme Court rulings that make evidence nical grounds should not be allowed. Ap- obtained in violation of the Fourth Amend- peals instead should be limited, as in ment's prohibition against unreasonable England, to a review of the whole record searches and seizures inadmissible in of the case, except where there is "some court. He would also eliminate the rule gross irregularity at the trial" or new evi- against admission of hearsay evidence, dence. Nothing in the Constitution forbids which is just "the kind of information gov- doing this, he says, and the U.S. Supreme ernments and ordinary people use daily to Court, in a decision last April, "has already make decisions." Furthermore, he says, all gone part of the way," by limiting capital- witnesses in a criminal trial should be wit- punishment appeals.

"The Great Sharecropper Success Story" by David Whitman, in Blacks Who The Public Interest (Summer 1991), 11 12 16th St. N.W., Ste. Made It 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.

In his best-selling book, The Promised and '75 found that after a short period of Land (1991), Nicholas Lemann contends adjustment, the black men from the South that today's urban black underclass and typically flourished in their new environ- many of its well-known ills have some de- ment. The blacks who ended un noor. on cades-old roots in black sharecropper soci- welfare, or in broken families in northern ety in the rural South. That society, cities, the studies repeatedly showed, Lemann writes, was "the national center" "tend[ed] to be natives of the region, not of illegitimate births and female-headed southern migrants." families; it had a very high rate of violent Given their background, what accounts crime; and it had special problems with for the sharecroppers' success? Whitman sexually transmitted diseases and sub- says that they had some important virtues, stance abuse. Five million southern blacks particularly "a strong work ethic" and "lit- migrated to the urban North between 1940 tle familiarity with welfare." And contrary and '70, he says, and they brought this dis- to Lemann's claim about sharecrovner so- mal heritage with them. ciety being the national center of illegiti- Lemann's sharecropper thesis is not macy, Whitman says, "black women in the really new, says Whitman, a senior editor rural South were more likelv to be married at U.S. News & World Report. It was in than were urban black women living in vogue during the 1950s and latter half of the South or North from at least 19 10 to the '60s. Fortune, for instance, published a 1960." In 1940, for example, 73 percent of lengthy story then on the "Southern Roots black women in the rural South lived in of Urban Crisis." By the early 1970s, how- intact families, compared with only 58 per- ever, the thesis had been discredited by cent in the North. Census Bureau and other studies indicat- "[By] concentrating so heavily on the ing that the migrants were relatively suc- urban woes of displaced tenant fanners," cessful in the urban North. About a dozen Whitman writes, "Lemann diminishes the major studies completed between 1965 migrant success story that lies at the core

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Health Care Conundrums A Survey of Recent Articles All the attending doctors agree that the pa- On close scrutiny, however, such tient is in serious condition and badly in claims-and national health insurance- need of treatment. As of yet, however, they lose their appeal, writes Harvard Business have been unable to agree on just what it School Professor Regina E. Herzlinger in should be; certainly, past therapies have not the Atlantic (Aug. 1991). "The absurdity of worked. And so the patient-the U.S. health- casting the federal government as an effi- care system itself-just keeps getting sicker. ciency expert-or 50 state governments, as The cost of health care, which more than many proponents advocate, in an analogy to doubled between 1980 and '90-from the Canadian system of administration by 1'0 16 per capita to $2,425-continues to province-is illustrated by this question: If soar. The number of Americans under 65 the cost of health care can be controlled without any medical insurance at all stands through centralized purchasing of a stand- at 37 million. The two problems, notes the ard product, why not lower the costs of Brookings Institution's Henry J. Aaron in other necessities, such as food and housing, the Brookings Review (Summer 1991), are in the same way?" Canada's system is not related, and any effort to solve just one is without problems: High-tech medical equip- likely to aggravate the other. "Extending in- ment, such as CAT scanners and radiation- surance and assuring adequate coverage therapy units, is in short supply, and there is would push up already onerous costs. Con- some grumbling about long waits for certain trolling costs would lead to measures that services, including potentially life-saving curtailed insurance and thereby added to heart surgery. In one notorious case, re- the ranks of the uninsured." ported by the Canadian newsweekly The best solution, according to many lib- Maclean's (Feb. 13, 1989), a 63-year-old erals, is national health insurance on the Ca- man's vitally needed coronary-bypass opera- nadian model. While this would mean hun- tion was postponed 11 times before it was dreds of billions of dollars of new finally performed in a Toronto hospital; the government spending, Senator Robert man died eight days later. "I don't believe Kerrey (D.-Neb.) argues in the American there's any miracle up there," Tufts Medical Prospect (Summer 1991), that expense School Professor William B. Schwartz told "would simply replace what most businesses Patrick G. Marshall of Congressional Quay- and individuals already spend for health terly's Editorial Research Reports (Nov. 23, care." Eventually, he says, universal health 1990). The Canadian system is popular north insurance would be cheaper. "The current of the border, but might be less so here. system's hidden costs of massive adminis- Whereas Canadians generally "don't mind trative waste, uncompensated care, and queuing up," Dr. James S. Todd, chief exec- cost-shifting would shrink or disappear." utive officer of the American Medical Associ-

of the black odyssey." The upward climb success stories. . . . Not all the migrants of black migrants since 1940, Whitman ended up in the promised land, but most says, is actually "one of the nation's great did leave Hades behind."

Learning From "How Do They Do It?" by Charles Moskos, in The New Republic (Aug. 5, 1991), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. The Army

The U.S. Army is not a racial utopia, but it the attention of the military police. has made great progress in race relations Moskos, a Northwestern University sociol- since the 1970s. In Operation Desert ogist, contends that the Army has much to Storm, not a single racial incident oc- teach civilian society. curred that was severe enough to come to First of all, he says, the Army simply

WQ AUTUMN 1991 18 PERIODICALS

ance would. What, then, is to be done? Michael Kinsley of the liberal New Republic (July 29, 1991) dusts off a two-year-old report from the con- servative Heritage Foundation. Surprisingly, he praises it as "the simplest, most promis- tax increase it would entail ing, and, in important ways, most progres- sive idea for health care reform." Heritage's proposal: Eliminate American workers' $48 billion tax exemption for em- ployer-provided health insurance, but offset it by offering a tax credit for insurance pur- 1991) that a growing chased directly by workers. The credit would be "refundable" for lower-income families (i.e. if a family's income tax liability was less than the credit, the family would get loyers would be re- a check from the government), and Medic- aid would continue to be available for the jobless poor. All workers would be required by law to buy adequate insurance to cover major ("catastrophic") family medical bills. ) in Massachusetts, Obliged to purchase their own insurance, has been proposed by a national Heritage argued, Americans would become more sensitive to its cost-and more in- clined to avoid unnecessary or overpriced medical services. Ideally, the Heritage re- port said, consumers should buy routine medical care out-of-pocket and use health insurance only to cover "very expensive and overcoming it by setting up regional unpredictable illnesses." This would make ies under state governments that health insurance more like auto insurance, negotiate prices and costs with hospi- and, according to Heritage, considerably cut the cost of health-insurance policies. "If you're looking for universal health care protection and at least a shot at cost control, the Heritage plan looks pretty anies into "useless, expensive appen- good," writes Kinsley. "If you're looking for d hence would "arouse [their] an excuse to expand the government, look as much as national health insur- elsewhere." does not tolerate any display of racial prej- courses "did make whites more attuned to udice. Officers or noncommissioned offi- black feelings." cers (NCOs) whose supervisors do not rate The Army also gives black soldiers who them as supportive of equal opportunity need it "an academic boost not often avail- advance no further in their military ca- able in civilian employment." Under a pro- reers. Some officers and NCOs may harbor gram begun in 1976, students, mainly racist sentiments. but thev almost never black,. -so to school four hours everv morn- express them openly. he Army sent "a ing, for two to six weeks of remedial edu- strong signal" in the late 1970s, by devot- cation in reading, writing, or mathematics. ing 12-14 hours of basic training to Potential sergeants among them particu- courses in race relations, Moskos says. Al- larly benefit. Doing well in the program, though many white soldiers resented the Moskos says, "is definitely not seen as 'act- courses, regarding them as exercises in ing white.' It is considered a realistic in- "white guilt," studies showed that the vestment in one's future career."

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In promotions, the Army uses "goals" writing and communication skills neces- but not "quotas." The stated aim is "to sary for promotion to staff jobs." Promo- achieve a percentage of minori- tions to colonel and above, however, show ty... selection not less than the selection little racial disparity. rate for all officers being considered." Usu- Unlike black civilian leaders, says ally the goals are met. But if they cannot ~oskos,black officers and NCOs refuse to be without violations of standards, "the rely on racial politics and reject "the ideol- chips fall where they may," Moskos writes. ogy of victimhood." They instead embrace For example, the number of blacks pro- a sort of "bootstrap conservatism." Young- moted from captain to major is usually be- er black officers are advised by their se- low the goal. This probably is due, he says, niors that while they will encounter to the fact "that about half of all black offi- 'plenty of bumps on the road," as a black cers are products of historically black col- general put it, they must surmount them, leges, where [many] do not acquire the for the benefit of those who follow.

PRESS & TELEVISI

Naming the Victim "Media Goes Wilding in Palm Beach" by Katha Pollitt, in The Nation (June 24, 1991), 72 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011. After Senator Edward M. Kennedy's Pollitt, a contributing editor of the Na- nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was ac- tion, dismisses such journalistic rationales cused of raping a Palm Beach woman last as self-serving and invalid. "There is no March, the news media's longstanding good reason to publish the names of rape practice of preserving the anonymity of complainants without their consent, and rape victims was broken by two major in- many compelling reasons not to." stitutions-first, NBC News, then the New It is not as if the Palm Beach woman's York Times. "Who she is is material in charge is being made anonymously, Pollitt this . . . ," claimed NBC News chief Mi- points out. Her name is (or will be) known chael Gartner. "You try to give viewers as to all who need to know: Smith and his many facts as you can and let them make attorney, the judge, and the jury. If the up their minds." case goes to trial, "she will have to appear publicly in court, confront the defendant, give testi- mony and be cross-exam- -.* I -- f~l~c?ftui;Vr~rIkwkGinir~<--- ined." But there is no need -- 1 4, -- '"Â¥ -< I for her to be identified and "tried" in the news media too, Pollitt maintains. 'Frank'f Love- Child 32Vee!-Gldrst-~!j'A.' - Nor do the media have any duty to "tell all" they know. The media frequently hold back information, Pollitt notes, on grounds of 'taste" or the "national in- terest." In fact, says Pollitt, when it serves their own purposes, the news media favor anonymity, not only The decision of New York Times editors to name the woman in for their cherished sources the Palm Beach rape case drew criticism from other journalists. but for some rape victims. Periodicals continues on page 123 WQ AUTUMN 1991 the postwar governing cla is chronicles the Establishment's demise and its replacement by a group of more self-interested "movers and shakers.''

WQ A UTUMN 1991 2,1 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

by Max Holland

n August 1964, presidential adviser sought to communicate with the "very first McGeorge Bundy wrote Lyndon team." As W. Averell Harriman recounted Johnson a spare but revealing in a 1973 memo for his files, memorandum. The Republicans had just nominated Barry Goldwa- I called Jack McCloy . . . to tell him that I thought the New York Republican estab- ter in San Francisco, rejecting if lishment should review the seriousness of not humiliating the Rockefeller-led, inter- the White House situation and take some nationalist wing of the party. Bundy sensed action. They had a responsibility to get the a President to clean up and put in some golden opportunity for LBJ to court the honorable people that would help to re- "very first team of businessmen, bankers, et establish the credibility and confidence in al." orphaned politically by Goldwater. And the White House. . . . the key to these people, claimed Bundy, He asked me who I had in mind as the New York establishment and I said that I was a Wall Street lawyer, banker, and diplo- was too much removed from the scene to mat named John J. McCloy: give him names. If Tom Dewey were alive he would be the one to talk to and the He is for us, but he is under very heavy responsible heads of the banks that were pressure from Eisenhower and others to greatly concerned by the economic insta- keep quiet. I have told him that this is no bility and the international lack of confi- posture for a man trained by Stimson . . . . dence in the dollar. I said unfortunately [McCloy] belongs to the class of people Nelson Rockefeller is too competitive who take their orders from Presidents and with Nixon to take any leadership. He sug- nobody else. gested Herbert Brownell, whom I en- My suggestion is that you dorsed. should. . . ask him down for a frankly po- litical discussion next week.. . . I think As journalist Richard Rovere observed with McCloy on your side, a remarkable bunch of people can be gathered; this is in a famous 1961 essay, members of the something he does extremely well. American Establishment routinely deny that it exists, preferring to maintain that Nine years later, in the middle of the they are merely good citizens exercising Watergate scandal, McCloy again came to their individual rights and responsibilities. mind when another leading Democrat This unofficial policy of self-denial makes

WQ AUTUMN 1991 22 In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson consults some of the Establishment's "Wise Men." McCloy is third from left; Allen Duties sits at the far end of the table.

these candid memos all the more impres- tigation by the House Un-American Activi- sive. The authors are impeccable sources; ties Committee were it still in existence. Bundy even indiscreetly entitled his memo On those occasions when it is noticed, "Backing from the Establishment." the American Establishment is usually ac- The notion of an American Establish- corded inordinate power and foresight, ment, or, more generally, of a governing most often by polemicists at the extreme elite in America, is accepted by some schol- ends of the political spectrum, where con- ars, primarily sociologists and anthropolo- spiracy theories abound. Considering the gists who have studied inequality and strati- Establishment's significance, though, there fication in various societies. But the is a dearth of serious research and writing concept has not won full acceptance in about its composition, culture, and con- other disciplines or by the American pub- tributions. One British historian, borrowing lic. Inequality is as dear to the status-con- from Sherlock Holmes, has likened the scious American heart as liberty itself, Wil- situation to the dog that did not bark in the liam Dean Howells once noted, but night: The American Establishment is made America self-consciously celebrates egali- all the more conspicuous by the absence of tarian man. "Elite" is practically a fighting literature about it. word. No one seriously asserts that power After a belated discovery in the mid- and authority are evenly distributed in 1950s, and some hot pursuit and scathing America, but the notion of anything akin to treatment in the 1960s and '70s, the Estab- a privileged, self-perpetuating Establish- lishment and the role of elites are once ment-an elite that governs, and therefore again being more or less ignored. Follow- classes that are governed-sounds pro- ing the American debacle in Vietnam, it foundly out of key, so counter to American was widely suggested that the Establish- myth that it would seem worthy of an inves- ment, then badly fractured, should never

WQ AUTUMN 1991 23 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

again be entrusted with the conduct of U.S. more intelligible. To follow this principle foreign policy, where since World War I1 it with respect to the American Establish- had been most visible and active. In a fam- ment leads inexorably to one of its most ous declaration before Jimmy Carter's in- significant parts, the same lawyer, banker, auguration, the Georgian's close adviser, and diplomat whom Bundy advised Lyndon Hamilton Jordan, announced, "If you find Johnson to cultivate in August 1964, and a Cy Vance as Secretary of State, and Zbig- whom Averell Harriman called in 1973 dur- niew Brzezinski as head of National Secu- ing the Watergate crisis. John McCloy's life rity, then I would say we failed. . . . The gov- is a classic guide to the American Establish- ernment is going to be run by people you ment of the 20th century. His origins in never heard of." After Carter's defeat in Philadelphia, his ethnic background, and 1980 by yet another self-proclaimed out- even his lifespan all coincide with, and sider, Brzezinski himself declared the thereby illuminate, the trajectory of the Establishment all but dead, and successive 20th-century Establishment. pundits have tended to agree. But these re- The creation of a national Establish- ports, as Mark Twain might put it, have ment, or what sociologist E. Digby Baltzell been exaggerated. After all, today's execu- called a "primary group of prestige and tive branch features blue-bloods George power," was a social consequence of indus- Bush (Phillips Academy, Yale), James trialization, of business and then political Baker (Princeton, corporate law), and activities that were by the 1880s fast grow- Nicholas Brady (Wall Street's Dillon, Read). ing beyond traditional city boundaries. As a If the position of these men does not prove preindustrial ethos based on family ties and the staying power of the Establishment's on landed and inherited wealth melted Republican strain, it at least illustrates the away, new social formations arose to bind continuing influence of individual White together the industrial-era upper class on a Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites in national scale and to provide a semblance America. of tradition while absorbing and regulating A society without a class structure, and new money. In the eastern financial centers therefore a governing elite, has never been of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and constructed and may be a hopelessly uto- Cleveland rose the citadels-the banks, pian ideal, to judge from recent communist corporations, law firms, and investment regimes. The more interesting question is, houses-that set the rules. The boarding Who comprises society's governing elite schools, Ivy League colleges, fraternities, and what does it do? For if stratification is and metropolitan men's clubs became the inescapable, it follows that a society will training grounds of upper-class society. And largely reflect the goals and beliefs of elites each of these institutions figured promi- from its most powerful class. nently in the life of John McCloy. The American upper class would not hen exploring a complex sub- have produced an Establishment by mid- ject, the philosopher Descartes century, however, if it had been content to once advised, divide it into as pursue its interests and defend its privileges many parts as possible; when each part is from the privacy of its board rooms, law more easily conceived, the whole becomes offices, and men's clubs. A governing elite Max Holland, a fanner Wilson Center Fellow, is writing a biography of John J. McCloy, to be pub- lished by Charles Scribner's Sons. He is the author of When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America (1989). Copyright @ 1991 by Max Holland.

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issues from an upper class that knows its McCloy's life exemplifies the Establish- interests and perpetuates its power in the ment down to the characteristic fact that he world of affairs, whether on Wall Street, was generally unknown to the public yet Main Street, or in Washington. And an out- celebrated by his peers. When he died at standing characteristic of the American up- the age of 93 in 1989, his memorial service per class during the 20th century was its in New York attracted a secretary of state active participation in civic life, its willing- representing the president of the United ness to wield public power, and its seem- States, a past president, a former West Ger- ingly disinterested ethic of public service. man chancellor, and dozens of nationally National leadership, particularly in the do- prominent citizens, including Cyrus Vance, main of foreign policy as the United States Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and grew into a world power after 1941, came Paul Volcker. disproportionately from elites, or upper- Notwithstanding these elite tributes, class individuals who stood at the top of John McCloy would have been the first to their occupation or profession. Few other assert his modest origins, the fact that he members of the governing elite devoted so was a "poor Irish boy from Philadelphia," large a part of their lives to public service born on the wrong side of the tracks. In as McCloy, and few other lives included, ac- 196 1, with tongue in cheek, journalist Rich- tually or symbolically, so many of the pri- ard Rovere dubbed McCloy "chairman" of vate institutions through which Establish- the Establishment. Thereafter McCloy was ment power was wielded: the leading annoyed to find that people assumed that banks, corporations, associations, universi- he was born with a silver spoon in his ties, foundations, and think tanks. mouth. Usually noted for his rock-like equa- There were other men who played simi- nimity, McCloy would object, almost to the lar roles. The names W. Averell Harriman point of becoming emotional, whenever he and Robert Lovett come readily to mind. heard loose talk about an Establishment Yet no career rivaled, in longevity and vari- and his role in it. ety, the life's work of John McCloy, nor rep- In truth, though, he was not greatly licated so nearly the forms and functions of bothered by the homage to his power and the Establishment, its strengths and weak- influence. His modest, self-effacing style nesses, and its characteristic values of in- barely concealed a man who was keenly dustry, success, and civic-mindedness. Mc- aware of his own importance, a man whose Cloy's was a record of unmatched service exceptional career made him a "mix of hu- to Democratic and Republican presidents mility and vanity," as his younger law part- alike over four decades, complemented by ner (and fellow Establishmentarian) Elliot paid and unpaid labors for the most potent Richardson once put it. What genuinely private institutions in America. Whether his rankled McCloy was the corresponding but role was decisive or advisory, opposed to false notion that he was to the manner Establishment wisdom or more often defin- born. His position in life had not been fore- ing it, McCloy's ubiquitous presence ordained but hard-earned. stitches together fundamental strands of To ignore this upward mobility is to mis- American history. Most prominently, the understand McCloy's life, and, by exten- length and breadth of his activities very sion, the nature of power and the Establish- nearly chronicle the key issues during ment in America. Far more than its British America's rise from prewar provincialism cousin, on which it was loosely patterned, to postwar internationalism. the American Establishment during Mc-

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McCLOY, JOHN SNYDER 814 N. 20th Street, Philadelphia, Penna. The Peddie Institute was the (" Jack".) Alpha Phi, Musical Clubs first rung on McCloy's lad- (3). der. At left, his yearbook en- try in 1911. For unknown reasons, he later changed his middle name to Jay.

#'Sojourtg but 01, su wise!'' 'Jack" has consi~lerable talent, is somewhat of a scliolar, is pretty good at athletics, but, sad to relate, lie is afflicted with an all too prevalent Peddie infirmity-girl-. To elicit further information with regard to this fair I'liihuielphian request "Jack" to tell you the story of his lamented Frat. pin,

Cloy's lifetime was open to those with the housewife from Lancaster County. Admira- wrong family pedigree, within certain ra- tion of the "right people," and the notion cial and ethnic bounds. Indeed, its singular that one could endeavor to become one of characteristic was its relative permeability, them, were drummed into McCloy from his its willingness to absorb those who were earliest years. The McCloys believed firmly willing to adhere to certain values and un- in the Victorian virtues of thrift, duty, mo- spoken codes, and to protect certain vested rality, struggle, and self-improvement, and interests. To maintain stability, there had to they viewed the upper class as the foremost be room for men of talent to move up, and upholders of these ideals. To be sure, Mc- the genius of the American Establishment, Cloy's parents, John and Anna, could not if not America itself, lay in its openness to have imagined their son's rise to the peak people like John McCloy. of a national Establishment. Their hopes were considerably more modest, extending e was born in 1895, the second only to the urban upper class that existed in son of a slender, bookish, Scots- Philadelphia during the 1890s. Probably no Irish actuarial clerk and a robust one admired "proper" Philadelphia more and hard-working Pennsylvania Dutch than John and Anna McCloy. Certainly no

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Climbing higher: captain of the ten- nis team at Amherst about 1915; training for World War I.

parents predicated their children's lives necessarily in that order. While other great upon its existence with more calculation. American cities were experiencing munici- By the 1890s, Quakers no longer domi- pal growth and strife, Philadelphia main- nated the city founded by William Penn. tained a British air of placidity, respectabil- With just over one million inhabitants, ity, and self-satisfaction. Philadelphia now belonged to the so-called The reverse side of this satisfaction and "Old Immigrants," descendants of Protes- aplomb, however, was an almost stultifying tant, northern Europeans who arrived after complacency, snobbery, and enervation. 1682. Above all, though, Philadelphia owed Under the veneer lay distinctions of class its character to the English. Prior to the and background that were easily the most American Revolution, Philadelphia had rigid and self-conscious in America. Just as been the second largest city in the British surely as the confluence of the Delaware empire, and more than a century later it and Schuylkill Rivers defined Philadel- still resembled the England idealized by phia's natural boundaries, so the tracks of British Tories, down to its flatness, its gnm the Pennsylvania Railroad delineated its so- industrialism, and an upper class that cher- cial and class divisions. To fail to travel ished country manor values and itself, not daily on the railroad's Main Line, or to live

WQ AUTUMN 1 27 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

and, somewhat farther beyond, Baptists. While they were not to be confused with those of English-Episcopal stock, these In mock academic style, journalist Rich- Scots, Scots-Irish, and Welsh emigrants ard Rovere limned the Establishment in were a decided cut above those other for- an essay reprinted in The American mer British subjects, the Irish Catholics. Establishment and Other Reports, Opin- ions, and Speculations (1 962). The McCloys' Presbyterianism was the twin social deficit to their row house well Summing up the situation at the present north of the railroad tracks. Yet by the early moment, it can, I think, be said that the 20th century, because of the changing char- Establishment maintains effective control over the Executive and Judicial branches acter of immigration to Philadelphia, it was of government; that it dominates most of becoming easier in some ways to enter American education and intellectual life; Philadelphia's upper class. Northern Euro- that it has very nearly unchallenged peans were still part of that immigrant mix, power in deciding what is and what is not respectable opinion in this country. Its but an increasingly smaller ingredient, sup- authority is enormous in organized reli- planted by the immigrants who came from gion (Roman Catholics and fundamental- southern and eastern Europe. There was ist Protestants to one side), in science, talk about "how the Jew and the alien are and, indeed, in all the learned professions except medicine. It is absolutely unri- forcing their way in," and the urban Estab- valed in the great new world created by lishment was growing more inclusive, so the philanthropic foundations-a fact long as aspirants were white, Anglo-Saxon, which goes most of the way toward ex- and Protestant. plaining why so little is known about the Establishment and its workings. Not one thin dime of Rockefeller, Carnegie, or he surest way into the upper class, Ford money has been spent to further the McCloys rightly thought, was Establishment studies. . . . education. John McCloy senior had The Establishment is not monolithic in structure or inflexible in doctrine. dropped out of high school, perhaps be- There is an Establishment "line," but ad- cause of a heart murmur that plagued him herence is compulsory only on certain much of his life. Yet despite his lack of for- central issues, such as foreign aid. On mal schooling, he had a passion for Latin economic affairs, for example, several views are tolerated. The accepted range and Greek, to the extent that he seemingly is from about as far left as, say, Walter believed in the original meaning of the Reuther to about as far right as, say, word barbarian: one who does not speak Dwight Eisenhower. A man cannot be for Greek. Knowledge of the classics was also less welfarism than Eisenhower, and to be farther left than Reuther is considered inseparable from the one profession that bad taste. the McCloys, along with proper Philadel- phia, held in highest regard: the law. Dec- ades later, "Philadelphia lawyer" would be north of the tracks, immediately revealed a term of opprobrium, connoting a shrewd, one's inferior social and economic stand- unscrupulous operator skilled in the ing. The most common denominator of the manipulation of technicalities. But in turn- local Establishment was membership in the of-the-century Philadelphia, because of fa- Episcopal Church, the American offshoot of vorable associations stretching back to the the Church of England. Just outside the American Revolution, the profession and charmed circle stood the "lower" Protes- the phrase had only the loftiest connota- tants, namely Presbyterians, Methodists, tions. The law was also one of the surest

WQ AUTUMN 1991 28 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

paths by which a man without capital could Groton opened its doors in 1884, for exam- attain wealth. ple, Choate in 1896. The sons of old wealth In 1899, the McCloys' eldest son Wil- and the scions of the new industrial rich liam died of a fever at age seven, and two needed proper rearing, and this in large years later John McCloy senior died of measure meant association with the right heart failure. He was only 39. Family lore people. Bulwarks against the growing het- has it that on his deathbed McCloy ex- erogeneity of public schools, private tracted a pledge from Anna: She would schools groomed their students for success "make sure Johnny learns Greek." From and power. And like their British counter- that simple vow, Anna McCloy would con- parts, the American schools instilled in struct a whole new life for herself and her young men an admiration for fair play, a sole remaining child. Anna became the healthy desire to win, and a respect for dominant influence in his life, insisting on power. If a boy were too sensitive, boarding certain values and inculcating definite be- school could be unforgiving. But it could liefs. What might have been an overbearing also instill self-control, discipline, and a presence was leavened, though, by her un- flagging confidence in her son's capacities. Freud once observed that "A man who has OUTSIDE LOOKING IN been the indisputable favorite of his mother Rovere insisted that his essay was a spoof, keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, but William F. Buckley, then editor of Na- that confidence of success that often in- tional Review and an angry outsider, duces real success." Those words were failed to see the humor. Rovere's joke, he wrote in a review, depended on "a sort of made to describe John McCloy. nervous apprehension of the correctness Anna McCloy became a hairdresser, ris- of the essential insight." ing each morning at six to travel to Ritten- house Square or out the Main Line to "do It tends to be true in England that the Establishment prevails. It is less true in heads" while her two sisters minded young the United States: for the Establishment John. Her work gave her access to the up- here is not so much of the governing per class and unusually intimate exposure class, as of the class that governs the gov- to its mores, prejudices, and customs. ernors. The English Establishment medi- ates the popular political will through Among the last was private schooling. In perdurable English institutions. The addition to its avowed purpose of providing American Establishment seeks to set the a superior education, private schooling bounds of permissible opinion. And on served a social and psychological function. this, it speaks ex cathedra. It would not hesitate to decertify Mr. Rovere. But he The elite school, as much as the family, was gives no indication of waywardness. . . . an important agency for transmitting the [I]n England, the Establishment is values and manners of the upper class. It conceded to concern itself with what is also served to regulate the admission of clearly the national consensus. In Amer- ica, by contrast, there is a deep division new wealth and talent. between the views of the putative Estab- A dramatic rise in private academies in lishment and those whose interests it the late 19th century indicates that, just as seeks to forward. For in this country the American economy was becoming truly there are two consensuses, that of the people (broadly speaking) and that of the national and industrialized, the urban up- intellectuals (narrowly speaking). These per classes of Philadelphia, Boston, New differences the Establishment is not eager York, and other eastern centers were band- to stress. ing together to form a national elite.

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sense of assurance, all deemed essential to education was the status of being an "Am- a first-class temperament. herst man." To become one was to earn a In 1907, Anna McCloy enrolled her son badge of class identity, to go out into the in the Peddie Institute, where, parents were world linked with all other Amherst men, assured, "Christian influences prevail and an equal in rank to graduates of other se- the development of character is placed lect colleges. McCloy's fraternity, Beta above all other considerations." The Bap- Theta Pi, was not as high-toned as some, tist-founded academy in New Jersey was a but, as was true at the Ivy League schools, poor cousin to the more exclusive New fraternities (and clubs) dominated the so- England boarding schools, but like them it cial and political life at Amherst and prom- emphasized sports as a means of building ised a network of social and professional character. Anna McCloy's parting words to contacts that could prove useful years after her son as she left him at school for his first graduation. If nothing else, they taught term were, "Be a Presbyterian and don't let their members the bearing and fine man- those Baptists convert you." The injunction ners of gentlemen; for being part of the up- was more cultural than ecclesiastical, for per class meant being recognizable in lan- the McCloys were never deeply religious. guage and dress as well as in religion. Perhaps the cardinal lesson young Mc- The rare non-WASP who aspired to pen- Cloy learned at Peddie came from his par- etrate the upper class did so only by endur- ticipation in sports. He was not fleet of foot, ing a "brutal bargain," obliterating all man- but his coach would always insist, as Mc- ifestations of his own ethnicity and Cloy later recalled, that he "get in there and becoming a facsimile WASP. McCloy, of run with the swift. Run with the swift. Ev- course, did not have to discard any funda- ery now and then you might come in sec- mental identity. His sole handicap was be- ond." At first he was reluctant to compete ing a "scholarship boy," and even his lei- against his betters. Then he made an impor- sure pursuits during adolescence and into tant discovery: What he lacked in speed, he adulthood were aimed at overcoming it. more than made up for in endurance. Anna McCloy remained single-minded in Prep school was only the first of a num- that goal, even during summer vacations. ber of institutions that regulated the up- At her urging, he would knock on the doors ward mobility of young men like John Mc- of the great estates along the coast of Cloy into the national upper class. Peddie Maine, seeking a job as a tutor to young was followed by a select private college, boys. Years later he would recall the "day Amherst, arguably the one institution that she made me work up the nerve to ring the figured longest and largest in McCloy's life. doorbell at Seal Harbor, where the Rocke- (He would later chair its board of trustees feller estate was.. . . I got turned down, but for many years.) McCloy excelled in history, I did teach them a little sailing." His English, and physical education, and strug- mother also encouraged him to cultivate gled with mathematics and public speak- the diversions enjoyed by the upper class, ing. No one was awed by his brilliance, but namely hunting, fishing, and a recent im- he was a dogged student. Ever the thorough port from England, lawn tennis. Tennis was pupil, he even staged his own "reading de- fast becoming the preferred sport of the An- bates" by simultaneously reading three or glophile upper class, for in its dress and four books with different slants on the same conventions it epitomized the notion of subject. "gentlemen at play." A good tennis game Almost as important as the Amherst was yet another way to emulate and thus

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meet the right people. Jack developed one. his days at Amherst, when the campus was After graduating from Amherst in 19 16, split between "pacifists" and "militarists." he went to Harvard Law, which, then as McCloy was instructed in an ideology that now, set a standard for legal education in saw the Civil War as the crucible of Ameri- America (although then virtually anyone can civilization. Now that Manifest Destiny with a college degree and the price of tu- on the continent was fulfilled, this ideology ition could attend). McCloy worked hard held, it was America's inexorable and but again did not particularly distinguish proper duty to break decisively with himself. Years later, he would jokingly George Washington's policy of noninvolve- chide his former Harvard professor, Su- ment in European quarrels and act like a preme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, for world power. Gradually it would assume not assigning him a seat in the front row, Britain's role, emerging as the world's where Frankfurter always put his brightest creditor while preventing the domination (and favorite) students. of continental Europe by any one power. In As surely as a Harvard degree created the 20th century, that meant America useful associations and opened important would share British discomfort about rising doors, a Harvard legal education molded German power. minds. "Law," said Edmund Burke, At Amherst, McCloy, always eager to test "sharpens a man's mind by narrowing it," a himself, had been one of the school's first truth that Burke was not alone in recogniz- "Plattsburghers," spending his summer va- ing. Observers have long noted the pecu- cations at the military training camps in liarly large role lawyers play in the upper Plattsburgh, New York, organized and reaches of American society. If asked funded by elite WASP businessmen and where the American aristocracy was lo- lawyers like Grenville Clark. Once America cated, wrote Tocqueville, "I have no hesita- entered the conflict on April 6, 1917, Mc- tion in answering that. . . it is to be found at Cloy promptly left Harvard to volunteer. the bar or the bench." Lawyers developed Several weeks into officer training at Fort an "instinctive regard for the regular con- Ethan Allen, he caught the eye of a general nection of ideas," which tended to make officer, Guy Preston, a cavalryman who had them informed, detached, conservative, fought at the Battle of Wounded Knee. and trusted. Or as Jean Monnet, another Preston selected McCloy as a staff aide after French observer, later remarked about that he saw him dismount from a horse. "I characteristically American profession, could see blood all over his pants," Preston lawyers submerged ideology and concen- later recalled. "I said to myself, any man trated on process, making them peculiarly who could keep riding with that much pain able to understand unprecedented situa- must be a damn good officer." tions and to devise practical ways for re- The Great War was a formative experi- solving the ambiguities of human life and ence for him, as it was for his generation human institutions. and entire nations. Although he did not par- ticipate in combat-or perhaps because- cCloy's years at Harvard (1916- McCloy left the Army free of cynicism or 1917 and 1919-1921) were inter- dread, and his convictions about America's rupted by active duty as an artil- international role, and the need to check lery captain in France during World War I. German ambition, remained intact. The McCloy had acquired a Bull Moose day after Armistice was declared on No- Rooseveltian world-view, probably during vember 11, 1918, he wrote to his mother:

WQ AUTUMN 1991 3 1 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

I did not play the part I worked for in the side of the tracks. Pepper advised the 26- great act. My, how I was keyed up to it. No officercould have taken his men 'over the year-old McCloy to head north, to an ag- top' with any greater dash than I was pre- gressive legal community less concerned pared to do. It is very queer but I feel aw- about keeping up appearances and more fully desolate. The war is a thing that will be talked of and dreamed of for the dura- appreciative of hard work. That night Mc- tion of time and I did not get in it. A great Cloy took a train to New York, the national many of my friends were killed, a greater center of talent and money-power. number are wounded, and still a greater number were actively engaged in it. I was There he joined Cadwalader, Wicker- a soldier before any of them. . . . sham & Taft, a staunchly Republican firm My, how bitter the French are to the with a long roster of wealthy clients who Germans. . . . It is a bitter shame that the people of Germany are not to see their needed counsel on their trusts and estates. towns sacked and their fields laid waste as But Cadwalader's nepotism was too redo- the French have. People of Ger- lent of the Philadelphia that McCloy had many. . . don't realize yet what war is, and left behind. Through Donald Swatland, a until they do there will be no peace in Eu- ropa. fellow student at Harvard Law School, Mc- Cloy transferred to the Wall Street firm of These attitudes became increasingly un- Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 1924. Cravath popular and almost disreputable in the was also a Republican firm, but there its years following the Great War. The awful resemblance to stodgier Cadwalader toll of industrialized warfare, the great pow- ended. Cravath was to the practice of cor- ers' failure to pacify Europe at Versailles, porate law what Amherst and Harvard and later charges of war-profiteering by were to education and what tennis was to American industry (including charges that sport. The "Cravath system" was the proto- the war was fought on behalf of Wall Street type for management of a contemporary interests) disillusioned the American pub- law firm, and Cravath's casework put it at lic. The nation assumed a churlish isola- the cutting edge of corporation law tionism, turning self-indulgent and specula- throughout the 1920s and '30s. Cravath tive. It took another generation, and weighed lineage, personality, and ability another war, before isolationism could be when hiring new lawyers, but merit driven decisively from popular opinion, counted more than blood ties. A Cravath and indeed from elite opinion. partner was just as likely to have graduated While serving with the forces occupying from the University of Michigan Law Germany, McCloy briefly considered a mili- School as from Harvard. tary career. Finally, though, he decided to Cravath also epitomized the interna- return to Harvard Law. Upon graduation in tional orientation of the corporate legal June 1921, he went to see George Wharton elite, a key element in the nascent Estab- Pepper, an acquaintance of his mother lishment that was emerging even as Amer- through her work as a hairdresser, and the ica was becoming an international power. living embodiment of the Philadelphia Law- Paul Cravath himself was a founding mem- yer, circa 192 1. Presenting his credentials, ber of the Council on Foreign Relations, McCloy asked Pepper to which firms he which had its genesis in the early 1920s, should apply. The patrician candidly sug- just as public opinion over America's first gested that for all his accomplishments Mc- great European foray was souring. The law- Cloy would never become a partner in a yers, bankers, academics, and businessmen blue-chip Philadelphia firm. He was, after who founded the Council admitted to no all, still a "scholarship boy" from the wrong ideology, but all shared the conviction that

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the United States inevitably had to play a list of metropolitan men's clubs in the major role in world affairs. 1920s and '30s: Anglers' (forever the Cravath men were noted for their long Rooseveltian outdoorsman, he was a life- working hours, and McCloy, unmarried, long fly-fisherman), Bond, Grolier, Recess, with only his mother to support, favored by University, and Wall Street. His social repu- a sturdy constitution, and mature beyond tation was rivaled only by the esteem in his years owing to his wartime service, la- which he was held at work, for, as Robert bored harder than most. His working life Swaine wrote, "no Cravath partner. . . had was dominated by complicated railroad re- greater personal popularity than McCloy." organization cases. (On one occasion in In 1930, a year after he became a full 1926, he became, for partner at Cravath, he one day, the nation's married Ellen Zins- youngest railroad ser, the daughter of a president, his photo- socially prominent graph splashed German-American in- across newspapers dustrialist in New around the country.) York City. Their Many of McCloy's lei- union merited the sure hours were couple's immediate spent playing tennis entry in New York's at the Heights Casino Social Register. Ellen in Brooklyn, which McCloy was a socially he joined in the same adept wife who bore year as a young in- for her husband a son vestment banker, and a daughter. James Forrestal. As Nearly two decades Anna McCloy had after the marriage, hoped, the game when McCloy be- eased her son's entry came the American into the right social representative in oc- circles, particularly cupied Germany, as he became known Ellen's social skills as one of the out- and fluent German standing amateur ten- The young New York corporate lawyer with were instrumental to nis players in New his new wife Ellen in Paris, around 1930. McCloy's effort to York. For the sake of forge a new alliance his prowess on the court, McCloy was between victor and vanquished. sought by influential men he otherwise The same year he was married McCloy might not have met, leaders of the bar such was sent to Paris to run Cravath's European as George Roberts, a name partner in the office, promptly becoming involved in a prestigious law firm of Winthrop, Stimson, case that would vault him beyond the So- and prominent businessmen such as Julian cial Register and into the pages of Who's Myrick, head of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Asso- Who,the register of elite, individual accom- ciation and chairman of the Mutual Life In- plishment. The case involved Bethlehem surance Company. McCloy's social connec- Steel's claim that in 1916, before America tions multiplied as he joined a lengthening entered World War I, German agents had

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sabotaged its munitions factory on Black tary of state and nephew of another, Dulles Tom Island in New York Harbor. McCloy, advocated the cause of the "have-not" na- on behalf of the American claimants, would tions of Germany and Japan. pursue the case for nine years, long after McCloy personified the tendency that the Nazis took power and everyone in the would prevail within elite ranks. Brimming legal community, including some of his with confidence in America, these interna- partners, thought he was flogging a dead tionalists held that the "Fortress America" horse. In the summer of 1938 he worked advocated by isolationists was naive. North virtually day and night preparing briefs for America might seem impregnable to at- the case. And in the unlikely year of 1939 tack, but the aggressive fascist powers still he won a $20 million judgment by default. threatened U.S. interests. Fascism not only On the eve of another European war, he contradicted the American aim of an open had fortuitously established himself as an world economy but also threatened politi- expert on German sabotage. cal and economic freedom at home, since America would likely become a garrison he Black Tom case made McCloy's state if the dictatorships went undefeated. reputation at a time when opinion Two months after Hitler's 1939 invasion on the most important question of of Poland, McCloy was elected to member- the day was deeply divided. International- ship in the Council on Foreign Relations, ism, which meant intervention in Europe, the incubator of internationalist views on was not the consensus view; nor were its U.S. foreign policy. Soon he was just as ac- advocates close to being the driving force tive in William Allen White's Committee to behind American foreign policy. A substan- Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and tial portion of the upper class scorned "that he was working with Grenville Clark to man" in the White House as a virtual trai- spread military training in the schools, 20 tor to his class. (McCloy's own law firm years after Plattsburgh. Hamilton Fish Arm- fought the New Deal tooth-and-nail in the strong, editor of Foreign Affairs, pegged him courts throughout the 1930s.) Not only did as one of the more talented, up-and-coming FDR accuse the WASP-dominated upper men of his generation. His reputation class of grossly selfish mismanagement of soared. Gregarious but not insincere, Mc- the economy but he had also forged a po- Cloy had acquired the upper-class air of au- litical coalition critically dependent upon thority. He had the ease with himself that religious and ethnic minorities. He then often comes with athletic success, and his opened up government to people without self-confidence communicated itself effort- the right names and right origins, including lessly. His remarkable energy gave him Catholics, Jews, and others who were rou- presence, even though he was short and tinely excluded from the best universities, compact. A later law partner remarked, "I law firms, and corporations despite their never met a man who was as comfortable talent. In league with reform-minded Prot- in his own skin as McCloy." He could be estants, these newcomers were challenging simultaneously unyielding and disarming, a the maldistribution of wealth in America. rare quality that won over many old lions Upper-class and elite anxiety was height- of the Establishment. ened by developments abroad. Many feared In late 1940, a new, hawkish secretary of the international Left more than fascism, war named Henry Stimson asked McCloy most prominently, the Wall Street lawyer to come down to Washington as a consul- John Foster Dulles. Grandson of one secre- tant on German sabotage. The response of

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elites to the call to public life at the time may have ex- ceeded even those during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The war, and Ameri- ca's emergence as a global power, marked a watershed in the relationship between national elites and Washing- ton. It crystallized the emer- gence of a national Estab- lishment united in its devotion to managing the United States' global power. The most prominent symbol of this of course^ was At Potsdm in the summer of 1945, Assistant Secretary of War Henry Stimson himself, McCloy (center) reviewed American troops with his mentor, Secre- born two years after the end tary of War Henry L. Stimson, and General George S. Patton. of the Civil War, a Wall Street lawyer, and a former secretary of rogate son to the aging Stimson. As Stim- state and secretary of war under two differ- son's chief troubleshooter, he drew on the ent Republican presidents, including FDR's skills he had honed as a corporate lawyer. unpopular predecessor, Herbert Hoover. With his prodigious energy he helped to se- An army of younger men with credentials cure passage of the Lend-Lease Act, orga- similar to McCloy's came to Washington. A nize the "arsenal of democracy," choose Cravath man (A1 McCormack) directed America's field commanders, and build the Army intelligence, another Cravath man Pentagon. McCloy also was at the forefront (Benjamin Shute) was responsible for dis- of major domestic issues, including the in- tribution of the Magic and Ultra intercepts, ternment of Japanese-Americans and the and a third Cravath man (Donald Swatland) early stages of the integration of U.S. armed procured all the airplanes for the Army Air forces. By late 1943, once Allied victory had Forces. The entire civilian leadership of the become mostly a matter of time, his atten- War Department would consist of WASP tion shifted to high strategy and to politico- men trained as corporate lawyers, namely military decisions that would have ramifica- Stimson, Robert Patterson, Harvey Bundy, tions for decades. He was intimately Robert Lovett, and John McCloy. When involved in the response (or lack thereof) personal contacts did not yield the right of the Allies to reports of Nazi concentra- man for a job, there was always the Council tion camps, helped draft postwar occupa- on Foreign Relations. McCloy, who in the tion plans for countries from Italy to Korea, early days served as a personnel chief for torpedoed the Morgenthau Plan to limit Stimson, later recalled that "Whenever we German industry, framed the Potsdam dec- needed a man we thumbed through the roll laration, organized the State-War-Navy Co- of Council members and put through a call ordinating Committee, and finally, partici- to New York." pated in the decision to drop the atomic McCloy, bearing the official title of assis- bomb. Probably no civilian other than Roo- tant secretary of war, became almost a sur- sevelt took so direct a role in the war's mili-

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tary decisions. "So varied were his labors prevent a repetition of the economic insta- and so catholic his interests that they defy bility that many American policymakers be- summary. . . ," Stimson wrote in his third- lieved led to World War II. But two years person postwar memoir. "He became so after its inception the Bank was foundering, knowing in the ways of Washington that unable to balance the respective needs of Stimson sometimes wondered whether Wall Street purchasers of its bonds, Ameri- anyone in the administration ever acted can policymakers, and a Europe with a bot- without 'having a word with McCloy'; when tomless demand for dollars. occasionally he was the first to give McCloy From 1947 to 1949, as McCloy labored news he would remark that his assistant to put the World Bank on its feet, he also must be weakening." participated in presidential commissions By war's end, the role played by Stim- that established the unprecedented institu- son for nearly a half-century was ready to tions deemed necessary to carry out the be assumed, perhaps not immediately but new American policy of containment, the inevitably, by McCloy and his cohort. National Security Council (NSC) and the Shortly before resigning from the War De- Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These, partment, McCloy in his diary made a con- especially the CIA, were quickly staffed scious reference to the mantle he felt he with Ivy League men and others cut from had inherited: "Later in the day, in what reliable Establishment cloth. McCloy, in his was a most emotional affair for me, seamlessly connected official and quasi-offi- [Stimson] . . . bestowed on Patterson, cia1 roles, personified the deepening post- Lovett, Bundy and myself the Distinguished war links between Washington and a co- Service Medal. . . .The presentation was alescing American Establishment. done in the Secretary's office and I stood Continuing a relationship that began dur- under the steady gaze of Elihu Root. I felt a ing the war, members of the Council on direct current running from Root through Foreign Relations served as a sounding Stimson to me. . . ." board for Washington policymakers, many In 1946, McCloy went back to the prac- of whom were drawn from the Council's tice of Wall Street law, leaving Cravath to ranks, and Council members in return had join Milbank, Tweed, a firm distinguished private access to foreign-policy officials. by its ties to the Rockefeller family. But the Establishment consensus on the need to satisfactions of power, and McCloy's con- confront communism and foster condi- victions about the proper role of the United tions conducive to U.S. interests around the States in world affairs, hastened his return world produced not only the governmental to Washington. In 1946, he agreed to serve machinery to prosecute the Cold War but on the Acheson-Lilienthal committee, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic charged with developing a proposal to con- Treaty Organization (NATO). Little wonder trol the development of atomic energy. that McCloy would recall the late 1940s as a Then, in 1947, despite McCloy's lack of fi- "Periclean Age" in foreign policymaking. nancial experience, President Harry S. Tru- Shared premises and conclusions man suddenly made him a banker. One of largely explain why presidents from Tru- the pillars of the liberal, dollar-denomi- man to Reagan would seek McCloy's ser- nated postwar order was to be the Interna- vices during the next four decades, along tional Bank for Reconstruction & Develop- with those of a handful of other men who ment, or World Bank. With U.S. leadership had prosecuted World War I1 or were and money, the Bank was supposed to help "present at the creation" of containment,

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to borrow Dean Acheson's phrase. These conservatism bound it to ruling elites that were men, as one observer wrote, "whose were reactionary and undemocratic. Yet stature [was] based on prior performance the Establishment's anticommunist im- under fire. . . men of ability and judgment pulse was so strong that containment in Eu- [and] action who knew what it meant to get rope, which corresponded to American in- and to give realistic and meaningful policy terests and ideals, was universally applied advice." That McCloy was called upon so to Third World regions, where the genuine, often was doubtless also due to his inex- uncorrupted nationalists were often left of haustible energy, unwavering enthusiasm center. Ideology supplanted dispassionate for the task at hand, and desire to remain and pragmatic analysis, overwhelming close to power. He was known as a man even expert American opinion. This reflex more interested in getting things done than was evident as soon as Japanese guns fell in winning credit for them. He considered silent, when the first postwar social revolu- himself a doer, not a conceptualist like Ach- tion began in China. Following a visit to Pe- eson. Nor was he prone to the introspec- king in November 1945, McCloy wrote to tion of a George Kennan. One of his law Henry Luce, cofounder and proprietor of partners, Elliot Richardson, liked to com- Time and herald of the American Century. pare him to a naturally gifted shortstop. In "We ought to give Chiang Kai-Shek a fair the same way that a shortstop instinctively chance to show what he can do in the way reaches for a ball, stops, pivots, and throws of reform . . . ," said McCloy. "Now that he's to first, McCloy was a "natural at what he on the 10-yard line of victory is a hell of a did. There was no space, no gap between time for us to be thinking about abandon- understanding what needed to be done and ing the long 'investment' we have in him." doing it." A lifelong Republican, like Stim- America did not intervene in the Chi- son, McCloy would serve more often, and nese civil war, of course. But the oversell- for longer periods, under Democratic presi- ing of the communist threat, which was dents, thus embodying, along with so many deemed necessary to persuade the Ameri- other things, postwar bipartisanship in the can public to foot the bill for containment conduct of U.S. foreign policy. in Europe, set into motion a destructive dy- namic that one day would shake the Estab- ike all great edifices, however, the lishment. Inevitable reverses abroad helped Establishment's foreign policy had hold U.S. foreign policy hostage to what his- faults, mistaken constructions that torian Richard Hofstadter called the "para- were masked by consensus. The greatest er- noid style" in American politics, eventually ror was undifferentiated anticommunism. igniting McCarthyism and stifling dissent Establishment members understood Eu- and full debate, even within the Establish- rope and the nature of the struggle there. ment. An unlikely sign of McCarthyism-in- In Europe, sophisticated societies had been waiting involving McCloy himself appeared disrupted and needed to be rebuilt, and Eu- as early as 1946. In a May memo, FBI head ropean elites believed in (or could be per- J. Edgar Hoover warned the Truman Ad- suaded to adhere to) democratic principles. ministration of an "enormous Soviet espio- The world outside Europe was altogether nage ring in Washington. . . with reference different. Many countries had not yet won to atomic energy," and identified McCloy, national sovereignty, and while Washington along with Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss, as generally opposed reimposition of colonial worrisome for "their pro-Soviet leanings." empires after 1945, the Establishment's McCloy in fact proved to be one of

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America's ablest Cold War diplomats. In during World War 11. Using the resources of 1949, he left the World Bank to become the Ford Foundation, and collaborating American High Commissioner to Occupied with U.S. government agencies, McCloy Germany, entering the cockpit of the strug- channeled funds into cultural activities, gle over Europe. Aided by a staff comprised educational exchanges, and information almost exclusively of men who had inter- programs all designed to roll back or retard ested themselves in German affairs at the the advance of communist ideology in Eu- Council, McCloy virtually godfathered the rope, and later the Third World. Some pro- acceptance of the Federal Republic into the grams existed to criticize the reality of com- Western alliance. The acceptance of West munism; others, like the funds earmarked Germany-and West Germany's accep- for Jean Monnet's Action Committee for a tance of the West-alongside a stable if United Europe, supported a positive alter- rigid European order were rightly regarded native. The political unification of Western as McCloy's great accomplishments and as Europe became a favorite Establishment perhaps the greatest accomplishments of cause during the 1950s. his generation. Germany had brought With American power at its peak in the America into two European wars. It was 1950s, and the Establishment more visible where the brief against communism was at the levers of American authority, this confirmed, when the Berlin Wall went up governing elite began to attract deserved at- in 1961. And it was also where the Cold tention. Henry Fairlie, an expatriate British War in Europe ended. journalist, was the first to appropriate the term Establishment from his native soil and rom 1953 to 1960, and despite the apply it to the American scene. Writing in first two-term Republican presi- 1954, Fairlie identified several psychologi- Fdency in 20 years, McCloy was pri- cal and social attributes common to mem- marily a private citizen, albeit an extraordi- bers-in-good-standingof the Establishment. narily influential one. Part of the reason for Of similar origin and education, they knew his retreat was the dominance over foreign each other or everyone "worth knowing"; policy exercised by John Foster Dulles. Be- they shared deep assumptions that did not ing secretary of state, and following in need to be articulated; their power to pro- Stimson's footsteps, was arguably the one mote a course of action was exceeded only job McCloy wanted. When the office went by their power to stop things, and their to Dulles, McCloy returned to banking, be- power to promote sound, reliable men. coming chairman of Chase Manhattan Usually neither elected officials nor career Bank, which he brought into being in 1955 civil servants, Establishmentarians, when by negotiating the merger of the Chase Na- outside government, could be found at the tional Bank with the Bank of Manhattan. command posts of the major institutions in Much of his influence on foreign policy the country. Inside government, they were devolved from his post at the Ford Founda- invariably found at the commanding tion, where he served as chairman from heights of a presidential administration, in 1953 to 1965. Based on his service in Ger- the departments of State, Defense, or Trea- many, McCloy had a keen appreciation for sury. They could be identified in any case what has been called the "revolution in by their allegiance to the Atlantic Alliance statecraft," that is, the untraditional modes and foreign aid. of influence available to states in an age of All these attributes applied to McCloy, interdependence, many of them developed who besides leading the Chase and the Ford

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Foundation was chairman of the Council Control and Disarmament Agency, McCloy on Foreign Relations. Not surprisingly, made himself available for special "elder- when Richard Rovere wrote his tongue-in- statesman" assignments. These ranged cheek article on the Eastern Establishment from adviser during the Cuban Missile Cri- in 1961, he anointed McCloy chairman. sis to service on the Warren Commission, The only detail Rovere got wrong was iden- from public performances to secret mis- tifymg McCloy as an Episcopalian. sions. Whenever relations with West Ger- But, in truth, the nearly pure WASP many were involved, McCloy was almost character of the Establishment, properly certain to be called upon. called the Eastern (or even Northeastern) As the State Department later described Establishment until the 1950s, was chang- this extraordinary role, McCloy has "over ing. The regulating institutions remained the years been privy to confidential in- more or less intact, yet new sources of formation from U.S. cabinet members and wealth were springing up in Texas and Cali- other senior officials. In turn he has regu- fornia. Then too, the great Roosevelt "in- larly conveyed information from high for- clusion" was still bringing down barriers. eign officials who conveyed information to American soldiers could hardly fight Mr. McCloy in the full knowledge it would against racist doctrines abroad only to re- be passed to us and the expectation that the turn to a land of racial prejudice and ethnic information would be protected. His visits exclusion, and such attitudes became so- are frequently facilitated by the Department cially unacceptable, or at least not express- and our official representatives abroad." ible. Equally significant, the GI bill enabled State Department officials turned to Mc- millions of Americans to gain admittance to colleges previously dominated by the WASP upper class, and merit increasingly became as important a factor as back- ground. Other class precincts-law firms, corporations, and men's clubs-were also opening up to non-WASP men of ambition, energy, and talent, and such newcomers no longer had to endure the "brutal bargain." It ceased to be news when a Jewish lawyer was elevated to partner status at Cravath, and America's high culture ceased to be WASP culture. Of all the nation's large eth- nic groups, only black Americans were still excluded. In 1961, the first non-WASP president, John E Kennedy, asked McCloy to become secretary of the treasury. But McCloy was inclined to pass the baton onto a new gen- eration, to the Robert McNamaras and Dean Rusks, men who generally fought in World War I1 rather than managed it. After helping Kennedy secure congressional ap- In 1949, the new High Commissioner made the proval of a new bureaucracy, the Arms cover of Time, then a signal honor.

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Cloy for "outside views assimilable to in- worked against them, blinding them to the side needs," as one scholar put it. And in a fact that their views were no longer in- real sense, "public opinion" as late as the formed or right. 1960s really meant the opinion of men like McCloy, who had been in and out of gov- t is a matter of some dispute as to ernment and were respected for their which generation of the Establishment know-how, intelligence, and experience. was chiefly responsible. Some critics During this period, McCloy was practic- reserve blame for the "best and the ing corporate law at Milbank, Tweed. He brightest" of the Kennedy and Johnson ad- had the name and reputation that trans- ministrations, the Bundy and Rostow lated into extra billings, and he played a brothers, Dean Rusk, and Robert S. McNa- role reserved for Establishment lawyers mara. But if the successor generation was with only the most impressive credentials, incapable of imagining that a backward, reputations, and contacts. For some 25 peasant nation could defy American power, years, McCloy provided legal counsel to the seeds of their ill-considered crusade large U.S. corporations enmeshed in diffi- were planted earlier. The template of the culties abroad. He represented Hanna Min- postwar struggle over Europe had been ing, Westinghouse, Alcoa, and all of the ma- forced onto the Third World ever since the jor oil companies in disputes everywhere debate over "who lost China." Writing in from Latin America to the Middle East. Cli- 1960, McCloy said, "The less-developed ents turned to him for his personal qualities lands. . . promise to be the principal battle- and skills, but it was also McCloy's proxim- ground on which the forces of freedom and ity to political power and understanding of communism compete-a battleground in Washington that made him a liaison be- which the future shape of society may fi- tween the political and business worlds. nally be tested and determined." Vietnam Years later George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's only revealed the poverty of American per- secretary of state, would say to McCloy, ceptions and policy. "More than anyone I know you have led a McCloy, along with other "Wise Men" career that erased the artificial distinction called in by Johnson for advice, had between public and private service." qualms about a land war in Asia. But he Until the mid-1960s, the postwar Estab- finally told LBJ in mid-1965, "You've got to lishment had ample reason to be satisfied do it, you've got to go in." America's credi- with its conduct of foreign policy. True, bility was at stake, he warned. McCloy China had been lost, Korea had been a eventually turned against the war in 1968, stalemate, and Cuba had become a thorn in but he did so more out of concern about the American side, but American power what Vietnam was doing to the United was intact and though the peace was hard States than what America was doing in and dangerous, it was still a peace. Then Vietnam. When he extended, as Amherst's came Vietnam. That debacle is rightly seen chairman of the board of trustees, an invita- as the petard on which Establishment con- tion to Secretary of Defense Robert McNa- ceits, and the conceits of postwar American mara to address the class of 1967, McCloy policy in general, were finally hoisted. The was angered and stunned by the hostile detached reasonableness and objectivity so (though remarkably polite by later stand- typical of the Establishment seemed to van- ards) reception given to an architect of the ish, and now the eminence and respect war. Vietnam, he concluded, was tearing automatically accorded its members apart the next generation of leaders and un-

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derrnining faith in American principles and consensus on America's world role. In fact, institutions. a whole view of the world and of history, as During the late 1960s and '70s, McCloy well as the culture, standards, and manners played a role in making adjustments to U.S. that produced men like McCloy, seemed to foreign policy while maintaining contain- be receding. Respect for government plum- ment. He helped reconstruct NATO after meted, and along with it, the moral author- the French withdrawal in 1966, monitored ity of institutions and elites. The stench of West Germany's Ostpolitik, and figured failure in Vietnam was sharpened by the prominently in U.S. relations with oil pro- disappointments of the Great Society, the ducers in the Middle East. Taken together scandal of Watergate, and the uncontrolla- with the opening to China and arms control ble stagflation of the 1970s. negotiations with the Soviet Union, these changes represented a foreign-policy immy Carter, and then Ronald Rea- agenda as Establishment in nature as that gan, ran against Washington, cam- of the Truman administration. The endur- paigning on the principle that the fed- ing irony was that all this was done during eral government was an unworthy and the presidency of Richard Nixon, an inse- destructive force in the life of the nation. cure Californian always resentful of the Reagan then delegitimized taxes as the East Coast brahmins, and one of the politi- price to be paid for a civilized society, while cians who poisoned the domestic debate devoting extraordinary resources to the over foreign policy. But now he led the military in peacetime. For the first time in Establishment's policy of accommodation decades, the "best and the brightest" of a and adjustment to communist power. new generation of Americans retreated be- Extricating America from Vietnam was hind their privileges and contented them- such a long and bitter process, however, selves with selfish pursuits. It was no coin- that it further discredited U.S. foreign pol- cidence that the 1980s marked a decade of icy and the Establishment that oversaw it. speculative abuse in the American econ- The hostile interpretation of The Power omy unparalleled since the 1920s. Seldom Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills suddenly has the maldistribution of wealth increased gained popular currency. The Establish- so dramatically within a single decade. ment, it was said, shaped events for self- Greed was not only rewarded but cele- serving reasons from invulnerable posi- brated, as a laissez-faire attitude permeated tions behind the scenes. How could it lay Washington and Wall Street. Those with the claim to America's foreign policy when the best education and resources acted self- United States, in the name of indiscrimi- ishly, looted corporate coffers, and broke nate anticommunism, had as its allies some the social compact. of the most repressive, brutal, and corrupt In one of his last public interviews, Mc- governments in the world? Cloy observed that "These big salaries law- McCloy, after he turned 80 years old in yers are getting make it much harder for 1975, often commented on the fact that he them to consider government as part of had lived almost half the life of the Ameri- their careers. When I was young, the idea can Republic. Depending on his mood, he of serving in Washington was the most ex- would cite the fact to impress a listener citing prospect I could imagine." When with how young the country was, or with public service was not disdained in the how old he was getting to be. In either case, 1980s, it was simply viewed as a stepping- he lamented what he saw as the end of the stone to a lucrative reentry into the corpo-

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rate world. To judge from the makeup of ably by those who enjoy the highest hon- the Bush administration, the idea of public ors," as Aristotle wrote, then the traditional service is not completely extinct, but the standards which carry authority and to Establishment remains debilitated and elite which the rest of society aspires are threat- status something to be thoroughly ashamed ened. As the demographic cast of America of. Before embarking on his 1980 cam- changes irrevocably, from one largely de- paign for the Republican presidential nomi- fined by European and African roots to one nation, George Bush ostentatiously re- that can also trace its lineage to Asia and signed from the Council on Foreign Latin America, will the upper class act, as Relations and subsequently declared his E. Digby Baltzell asked in The Protestant fondness for pork rinds. Establishment (1964), like Henry Adams or The governing elite seems to have lost Charles Eliot? Both prominent WASPs, they sight of the sources of American power. reacted quite differently to the massive Rather than engagement being the natural southern and eastern European immigra- consequence of a robust polity and econ- tion of their day. Adams took refuge in an- omy, the satisfaction of exercising power cestry and race, while Eliot, the president appears to be a preoccupation in and of it- of Harvard, assumed that old-stock Ameri- self. "I love coping with the problems in cans should share their institutions and foreign affairs," Bush recently told a stu- valuable traditions with the newcomers. dent who asked him what he likes most about his job. It is a sentiment that might he decline of WASP dominance of have been appropriate in the 1950s, but not elite culture has been proclaimed at in the 1990s, when students are drilled in least since H. L. Mencken declared how to attend school without getting shot its demise in 1924. At its strongest, WASP by gangs. The Establishment remnant, re- culture was imitated and aspired to by all, luctant to admit the heavy toll exacted by because it was relatively open to all. A new the Cold War, has failed to face up to the American culture and a new American fact that America's economic house is in view of history, more representative of to- considerable disorder. Can a sustainable day's racially diverse America, may yet be foreign policy be fashioned by any elite that synthesized, but a single culture must serve ignores domestic realities? as an axis of attraction to balance diversity. Along with this problem is the chronic Without any major foreign threat, America American dilemma of re-creating a repre- may not need the kind of cohesive Estab- sentative governing elite while eliminating lishment forged by hot and cold wars after exclusion of minority groups which already 1940. But it cannot prosper without leader- make up 25 percent of the population. ship exerted by a meritocracy. There are now more Asian-Americans in The essence of elite responsibility, as New York than in Hawaii, and the popula- John McCloy knew, is to create the stand- tion of European-descended whites in Cali- ards by which the nation lives and to which fornia is shrinking so dramatically that they the nation aspires. Or to borrow from the could be a minority by the year 2000. If 1st-century Jewish sage Hillel, "If I am not "persons of great ability, and second to for myself, who will be for me? If I am only none in their merits, are treated dishonor- for myself, what am I?"

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E GODS by John B. Judis

n September 1939, just over a the Establishment's critics in the 1960s. week after Hitler's invasion of Po- They saw popular democracy as the natural land and Britain's declaration of alternative to Establishment rule, but the war, Walter Mallory, the executive Establishment's decline has diffused director of the Council on Foreign responsibility for American foreign policy Relations, and Hamilton Fish Arm- without making the process any more dem- strong, the editor of its journal, Foreign Af- ocratic. The public is as removed as ever fairs, went to Washington to see how the from most foreign policy decisions, but in Council could help prepare America for place of an informally linked Establishment what they expected would be another we now have partisan think tanks and self- world war. Meeting with high State Depart- interested lobbies. ment officials, they worked out an unprece- dented arrangement under which the ontroversy has long obscured the Council would serve as the department's true character of the Establishment. unofficial policy planning agency. For the It was never simply what Marx next six years, Council members, organized called a "ruling class" or what sociologist into War and Peace Studies, sketched the C. Wright Mills later called a "power elite." outlines of the new American-led world or- Instead, it was a group of powerful citizens der that would emerge from the war. who shared a unique view of where the The Council's close relationship to the country should go. Most members of the Roosevelt administration during World Establishment belonged to the upper class, War I1 marked the coming-to-power of but some were labor leaders and heads of what sociologists and journalists later broad-based organizations whose participa- called the American Establishment. For the tion made the Establishment tar more rep- next three decades, a like-minded group of resentative than its critics granted. corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and The foreign-policy Establishment dates policy experts, passing in and out of gov- from the end of World War I. In 1921, the ernment and operating through organiza- Council on Foreign Relations was founded tions like the Council, shaped the contours by men who had accompanied Woodrow of American foreign policy. Today, the gov- Wilson to Versailles in 1919. Returning ernment's higher circles are still drawn home disillusioned, they were nevertheless from a relatively narrow social group, but more determined than ever to create what the members of this group no longer repre- Wilson had called a new world order. The sent a cohesive body united in its funda- Establishment was defined by this vision. mental outlook. Instead, the individuals The founders of the Council, who included who exercise influence over foreign policy Thomas Lament, a J. P. Morgan and Com- today represent the same conflicting set of pany partner, and businessman Whitney private interests that effect domestic policy. Shepardson, have often been described as This is not the outcome envisaged by liberal internationalists, but the term has to

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be carefully defined. They did not see free trade and international cooperation through organizations such as the League of Nations as ends in themselves but as the means by which American economic power, hitherto held in check by war and imperial rivalry among European powers, could come to the fore. They were willing to sacrifice some degree of diplomatic and military sovereignty to gain national eco- nomic ends. But when they saw that inter- national organization could not stem the threat of fascism or communism to an open market system, they were among the first to favor taking up arms. In the 1920s and early '30s, the Coun- cil's hundred-odd members, who met regu- larly for dinner at New York City's Harvard Club before a permanent headquarters was established in a brownstone on East 65th Street, constituted a center of dissent against the prevailing Republican isolation- The Council on Foreign Relations ism. They were prestigious outsiders rather than powerful insiders. During the Roose- elite organization that contributed to this velt administration, however, Council new consensus-other groups such as the members began to play a leading role in Twentieth Century Fund, the Carnegie En- foreign policy. A Council group helped dowment for International Peace, the Com- draft legislation for an Export-Import Bank mittee for Economic Development, and the and for reciprocal trade agreements, and in Brookings Institution also played signifi- the late 1930s, as Roosevelt prepared the cant roles. After the war, Ivy League univer- country for war, he called on Council mem- sities also established foreign-policy insti- bers to fill the highest positions in the State tutes that contributed. But these and War departments and to help plan the organizations and institutes, whose mem- postwar order. After the war, the Council bers regularly corresponded with one an- and its members in the Truman administra- other and sat together in Council study tion, drawing upon lessons learned at Ver- groups, supplemented rather than coun- sailles, helped frame the objectives of the tered the Council's work. Collectively, they postwar era: to create an American-domi- demonstrated the Establishment's expand- nated international order, based on the dol- ing reach and power. lar and free trade, and to contain the The Establishment's influence reached spread of Soviet communism. a peak in the early 1960s. In a process me- The Council was by no means the only morialized in David Halberstam's The Best

John B. Judis is the author of William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988) and of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century, to be published next year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. He is now working on a book about the decline of the American Establish- went. Copyright @ 1991 by John B. Judis.

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and the Brightest (1972), President-elect disagreement with the larger Cold War John F Kennedy gave banker and Council strategy that had guided American foreign of Foreign Relations director Robert Lovett policy since the end of World War 11. Was virtual veto power over his key cabinet ap- communism, they asked, a monolithic pointments. JFK chose men like invest- movement that the United States had to ment banker Douglas Dillon of Dillon, contain at all costs and in all regions? Read, and Company, McGeorge Bundy of Could communism in a small Third World Harvard, and Dean Rusk of the Rockefeller country like Vietnam be merely an expres- Foundation, all of whom had spent decades sion of anticolonial nationalism? in Council study groups and discussions. The war in Vietnam also struck at the Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, democratic pretensions of the Establish- paid just as close attention to Establishment ment's liberal internationalism. Most mem- opinion. During the war in Vietnam, John- bers of the Establishment continued to ad- son summoned the Establishment's "Wise here to the Wilsonian faith that by Men," including Chase Manhattan chair- encouraging national self-determination, man John McCloy, former secretary of state the United States was making the world Dean Acheson, and Dillon, to the White safe for democracy. In Vietnam, however, it House to advise him, and it was their coun- appeared that the united States was fighting sel against further escalation in March 1968 on behalf of a regime no more committed that precipitated Johnson's decision to seek to democracy than its communist adversar- a negotiated settlement. But by then not ies were. Moreover, the United States was only the country but the Establishment it- not simply repelling an invasion, as it had self had been torn apart by the war. in South Korea, but was intervening in a civil war that it had helped to precipitate. uring the 1950s and early '60s, the The debate over the war within the Council held study groups on Establishment paralyzed the Council on Southeast Asia that recommended Foreign Relations. From 1964, when the es- containing Vietnamese communism. One calation began, until 1968, the Council report in 1956, for instance, warned that failed to hold any study groups on Vietnam, "the independent existence of the nations because, the New York Times reported, two of Asia is at stake." But as early as 1965, board members felt the issue was "too divi- Establishment stalwarts began voicing res- sive." Then in the fall of 1970, matters un- ervations about the war. They included expectedly came to a head. Walter Lippmann, who was perhaps the na- Because of retirements, the Council had tion's most eminent columnist, University to find both a new president and a new edi- of Chicago political scientist and foreign- tor of Foreign Affairs. A search committee, policy theorist Hans Morgenthau, and for- chaired by David Rockefeller, of the Chase mer State Department official George F. Manhattan Bank, was created to seek re- Kennan, Jr., the author of the famous "Xu placements. The committee decided to ask article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, which laid William Bundy to be president, and at that the foundation for containment. These dis- year's Harvard-Yale game, Harvard gradu- senters initially argued that the United ate Rockefeller asked Yale graduate Bundy States was committing itself to a disastrous if he was interested in the job. Bundy, who land war over a militarily unimportant had developed ulcers serving in the De- country, but as the war dragged on, they fense and State departments under Ken- and other Council members began to voice nedy and Johnson, was not interested in be-

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coming the Council's chief administrator, around Bundy. Rockefeller refused to ac- but he told Rockefeller that he would like knowledge that what Bundy had done in to edit Foreign Affairs. Over drinks after the the State Department was relevant. "Why I game, Rockefeller and Bundy settled it: know all the Bundys. They're a fine upright Bundy would replace the venerable Hamil- family," he declared at a meeting with the ton Fish Armstrong as editor of Foreign Af- dissidents. Former Council chairman Mc- fairs. The appointment would be an- Cloy was indignant. "The real intolerance nounced the following summer. these days is found among the professors To Rockefeller, Bundy seemed the per- who sit up on every goddam hilltop in their feet choice. A gradu- institutes for interna- ate of Groton and tional affairs," Mc- Yale, he was the son- Cloy told the New in-law of former sec- York Times. "They're retary of state Dean positively monastic Acheson. He had up there. They need been a member of the Council the way the Council since the Greek philoso- 1960 and a director phers needed the since 1964. But as the Agora-a place Pentagon Papers where they can walk would reveal that among practical men June, Bundy was also and keep in touch the man most respon- with reality." sible in the Johnson The old guard administration for prevailed, and Bundy planning the secret became editor, but escalation of the war the Council never in Vietnam. completely recov- The search corn- ered from the imbro- mittee was in no posi- glio. Through the tion to withdraw next decade, it kept Rockefeller's offer, trying, unsuccess- but when the ap- fully, to restore the pointment was finally powerful consensus announced, a num- that had made possi- ber of younger mem- The Chase Manhattan Bank ble the Establish- bers, including politi- ment's hold over for- cal scientists Richard Falk and Richard eign policy. In 1973, it started an ambitious Ullman, organized a protest that split the "1980s Project" to chart the "structure, key Council ranks and for the first time opened relationships, rules, processes, and institu- its deliberations to public scrutiny. Histo- tions" of the international system, but by rian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. declared his the decade's end, it abandoned the effort. support for the protesters, and Walter Lipp- The other factor threatening the consen- mann, one of the Council's original mem- sus within the Establishment was the de- bers, chose that moment to resign. cline of the American economy. The Wilso- The Council's old guard closed ranks nian internationalism that underlay the

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Establishment had been based on the rec- plauded Nixon's moves, the Wall Street ognition that the United States was displac- bankers, lawyers, and policymakers of the ing Great Britain as the world's most pow- Establishment were alarmed. They saw the erful economy. The United States thus aggressive nationalism of what they called stood to benefit from free trade and open the "Nixon shocks" as a threat to the inter- markets just as Britain had in the 19th cen- national order they had created after World tury. War 11. The heyday of liberal internationalism The next month brought more differ- had occurred after the United States ences over the trade issue. After World War emerged from World War I1 in a position of 11, the Council and other Establishment unchallenged economic superiority. In organizations had welcomed national labor 1950, the United States accounted for an leaders into their ranks. In the 1920s, astonishing 50 percent of the world's gross organized labor had been highly protec- national product. But Western Europe and tionist, but a new generation of trade union Japan began to rebuild their economies, leaders, notably the United Auto Workers' opening new factories that were often Walter Reuther, had come to see free trade more productive than older American as being in labor's overall interest. In 1947 plants and protecting their fledgling indus- the Twentieth Century Fund had brought tries with trade barriers. Like Great Britain business and labor leaders together in an a century before, the United States chose to influential report, Rebuilding the World ignore and sometimes even to encourage Economy-America's Role in Foreign Trade foreign protectionism, recognizing that and Investment, that strongly endorsed a American prosperity depended on recovery liberalized international trading regime. in Western Europe and Japan. With over a third of America's workers By the end of the 1960s, spurred by unionized, labor's support was critical to growing U.S. demand, Japan and Western the Establishment's hegemony in foreign Europe caught up. While American exports affairs. It provided the crucial link between grew by 67 percent during the 1960s, West the higher circles and the average voter German exports jumped 109 percent and and was the most valuable defense against those of Japan 333 percent. As the United the recurrence of popular isolationism. States entered the 1970s, it faced its first But the growth of imports and the exo- trade deficit since 1893 and a mounting dus of American companies to low-wage dollar crisis as foreigners, inundated by dol- countries, which accelerated during the lars, threatened to empty the nation's re- 1960s, cooled the liberal internationalist serves by exchanging dollars for gold at the enthusiasm of both labor leaders and do- fixed rate set at Bretton Woods. The Ameri- mestic manufacturers. In September 197 1, can economy was still the most powerful in the unions introduced a precedent-break- the world, but it was now first among ing bill in Congress to limit imports and to equals. And as the more prescient Ameri- remove the tax exemption on U.S. multina- cans peered into the future, they could see tional corporations, which stood accused of the signs of further decline. shifting American jobs overseas. The bill, In August 197 1, the Nixon administra- sponsored by Senator Vance Hartke (D.- tion took action. Nixon slapped a tariff on Ind.) and Representative James Burke (D.- imports, abandoned the gold standard, and Mass.), did not pass, but its very existence imposed wage and price controls to stem alarmed the proponents of liberal interna- inflation. While many businessmen ap- tionalism. In Washington, several multina-

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tional corporations and banks organized professor and Council member who, like through the Emergency Committee for Rockefeller, vacationed in Seal Harbor, American Trade (ECAT) to fight it. Maine. These looming disputes over the Nixon Brzezinski, a longtime competitor of shocks and the Burke-Hartke bill seemed Kissinger, was also critical of Nixon's eco- far less important than the sharp clash over nomic initiatives. The Polish emigre made Vietnam, but in the years to come they his mark as a hardline Sovietologist, but by would prove to be more serious and last- the late 1960s he had become interested in ing. While the debate over Vietnam threw relations among the developed countries. into question the Establishment's post- Indeed, he had written a book, Between World War I1 containment strategy, the de- Two Ages (1970), in which he called for the bate over trade shook the very foundations United States, Canada, Japan, and Western of Wilsonian internationalism. Europe to form a "community of devel- oped nations." Now in reaction to the n 1971 and '72 Establishment circles Nixon shocks, Brzezinski convinced reverberated with concern over Nix- Brookings Foreign Policy Director Henry on's policies and Burke-Hartke. In Sep- Owen to sponsor a series of tripartite stud- tember 197 1, Fred Bergsten, an economist ies along with the Japanese Economic Re- with longstanding ties to the Council who search Center and the European Commu- had just resigned as National Security Ad- nity Institute of University Studies. He also viser Henry Kissinger's economics analyst, talked to Rockefeller and Owen, another along with former Johnson administration Seal Harbor vacationer, about the idea of officials Richard Gardner and Richard Coo- an organization that would draw together per, warned at a congressional hearing that leaders from North America, Japan, and Nixon's policies could lead to an interna- Western Europe. tional trade war. In Foreign Affairs, In the spring of 1972, Brzezinski, Rocke- Bergsten attacked Nixon for promoting a feller, and Bergsten attended the annual "protectionist" and "disastrous isolationist" meeting of the Bilderberg Society, held at trend. Another Nixon official, Philip the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, The Trezise, resigned partly out of dissatisfac- Netherlands. The society had been set up in tion with Nixon's policies and began to bat- 1954 as a private forum where American tle the administration's trade measures and European political leaders, business- from inside the Broohngs Institution and men, and policy experts could air their con- the Council. cerns. According to one participant at the Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David meeting, Rockefeller proposed a tripartite Rockefeller shared the policy experts' con- or trilateral organization, and then Brzezin- cern. But after the bruising battle over ski, acting as if he were hearing the idea for Bundy's appointment, he had lost confi- the first time, enthusiastically seconded his dence that high-level policy discussions suggestion. That July, 17 men, including could be carried on at the Council on For- Brzezinsh, Bergsten, Owen, and McGeorge eign Relations. Even though he remained Bundy, met at Rockefeller's Pocantico Hills the chairman of the Council's board of di- estate in the New York suburbs to plan rectors, Rockefeller had begun to cast what came to be called the Trilateral Com- about for a new organization. He got his mission. inspiration for the form it might take from The new group, which was officially es- Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Columbia University tablished the next year, held its first execu-

WQ AUTUMN 1991 48 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

tive committee meeting in Tokyo in October. Brzezinski was director and Rockefel- ler chairman of the execu- tive committee. The 60- member American contingent included Berg- sten, Gardner, Trezise, and most of the key Establish- ment figures who had pro- tested the Nixon shocks. American funding came from the same corporations and banks, such as Caterpil- lar Tractor and Exxon, that had contributed to ECAT. With 180 members overall The Brookings Institution (later rising to 300), the Commission had offices in Manhattan, jected the Cold War practice of viewing Paris, and Tokyo. North-South relations with less developed Like the Council on Foreign Relations, nations through the prism of East-West rela- the Trilateral Commission did not have an tions. Speaking at the Commission's 1977 official ideology. Yet, as economist Jeffrey meeting, Brzezinski, who had just become Frieden has explained, the Commission's President Jimmy Carter's National Security leaders had a common vision of a "transna- Adviser, called on the trilateral nations to tional world economy." The Commission's "assimilate East-West relations into a first report stressed the economic interde- broader framework of cooperation, rather pendence of nations and opposed any at- than to concentrate on East-West relations tempt to restrict trade or investment. The as the decisive and dominant concern of Commission's "overriding goal is to make our time." the world safe for interdependence," the re- From the beginning, the Commission port declared. This "will call for checking had the support of the American, Japanese, the intrusion of national governments into and West European governments, and its the international exchange of both eco- reports and conferences served to lay the nomic and noneconomic goods." groundwork for several important initia- Commission members also backed a tives. The idea of economic summits, for version of the Nixon administration's strat- instance, came out of a Trilateral Commis- egy of detente with the Soviet Union, call- sion recommendation, as did the World ing for the trilateral nations to draw the So- Bank's adoption of a special "petrodollar" viet Union and its East European satellites window to handle burgeoning OPEC sur- into growing trade relations. In 1977, it is- pluses and Third World deficits. But the sued an optimistic report on Collaboration most visible sign of Commission influence with Communist Countries on Managing came when an obscure Georgia governor Global Problems. In the wake of Vietnam was elected president. Rockefeller had first and the rise of the Organization of Petro- met Jimmy Carter when the Georgia gover- leum Exporting Countries (OPEC), it re- nor came to New York in 1971 to meet

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with bankers about underwriting his state's lateral Commission became a badge of dis- loans. Impressed by the southerner, Rocke- honor that could be hung around the neck feller had decided to make him one of two of political opponents. In 1980, candidate governors invited to join the Trilateral Ronald Reagan was able to use the Com- Commission. Brzezinski became Carter's mission memberships of George Bush and foreign-policy mentor, tutoring him and then Carter to discredit them with voters. writing his major speeches during his presi- But even before 1980, the Commission had dential campaign. When Carter won, he ap- been undermined by policy disagreements pointed 26 Commission members-about within it and within the broader foreign- a fourth of the American contingent-to policy Establishment. high administration posts. The appointees From the beginning, some members of included Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cy- the Establishment rejected the Commis- rus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold sion's optimistic assumptions about U.S.- Brown, and Secretary of the Treasury Soviet relations. In the summer of 1974, W. Michael Blumenthal. Paul Nitze, a former investment banker at Like the Council on Foreign Relations Dillon, Read, and Company, who had been of the 1920s, the Trilateral Commission re- in and out of high government positions flected a new consensus among Establish- since World War 11, resigned as a Nixon ad- ment figures. And the large number of ministration arms negotiator, denouncing Commission members in the Carter admin- Nixon and Kissinger for encouraging the istration, united by a common ideology, "myth of detente." In 1976, after Carter's seemed to suggest that the foreign-policy election, Nitze and other Establishment fig- Establishment-given up for dead after the ures, including former Pentagon officials clash over Bundy's appointment-had James Schlesinger and David Packard, been revived. But by 1980, when Ronald formed the Committee on the Present Dan- Reagan won a landslide victory over Carter, ger to reassert the Cold War view of U.S.- the Trilateral Commission had itself be- Soviet relations, calling for an arms build- come a casualty of American politics. up and opposing new arms-control What eventually doomed the Commis- agreements. sion was its identification with the Carter Nitze's initiative divided the Establish- administration. As Carter's reputation sank ment, even as it split the Carter adrninistra- under the weight of stagflation and the Ira- tion. As the Committee took the offensive, nian hostage crisis, membership in the Tri- lobbying against the confirmation of Trilat-

The State Department

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era1 Commission member Paul Warnke as American foreign policy. Beginning in the chief arms negotiator, it succeeded in divid- mid- 1970s, conservatives tried to build ing Brzezinski from Vance. Under attack what journalist Sidney Blumenthal has from the conservatives, Brzezinski re- called a "counter-Establishment," creating discovered the hardline views he had aban- a variety of new think tanks and journals of doned in the early 1970s, and this led to their own. These institutions were highly ef- ongoing strife with Vance and the State De- fective in influencing policy, but they failed partment. The turmoil also penetrated the to play the dominant role that the Council Trilateral Commission, which followed its on Foreign Relations or the Brookings In- optimistic 1977 report on East-West rela- stitution had played from the late 1930s to tions with a bleaker Cold War assessment the late '60s. in 1978. By the late 1970s, the Establish- One such institution was the Washing- ment and the American members of the ton-based Heritage Foundation, founded in Trilateral Commission had become as bit- 1973 by activists Ed Feulner and Paul terly divided over Cold War strategy as they Weyrich with financial backing from had been over Vietnam. brewer Adolph Coors and textile magnate The American members of the Trilateral Roger Milliken. In contrast to the Council Commission also encountered some oppo- on Foreign Relations and other Establish- sition to their economic stands. Rockefeller ment institutions, Heritage never pre- and Brzezinski's concept of a trilateral alli- tended to be nonpartisan or to represent a ance looked like a continuation of the consensus of elite opinion. Heritage and Establishment's Wilsonian international- other conservative think tanks were much ism, but in fact it represented a subtle de- closer to being lobbies for conservative parture from it. Wilson's internationalism causes and, later, for the Reagan adminis- had been based on an assumption of Ameri- tration. They were too embroiled in the can economic, but not military, superiority. present to plan the future. Its goal was to eliminate military compe- Indeed, once Reagan assumed office, tition among nations so that the United Heritage became an annex of the govern- States could flourish in free economic com- ment, providing junior employees through petition. But the Trilateral conception as- its job banks, and issuing policy briefings to sumed that America, having lost its abso- influence day-by-day debate on Capitol Hill. lute superiority, would profit most by Its own junior staff adhered to a broad line ceding its economic sovereignty to a seam- set down by Heritage's management. On less international capitalism. While Wall U.S.-Soviet relations, Heritage stood for the Street bankers and lawyers would continue "rollback" of the Soviet empire-the con- to press this idea for the next decade, it servative alternative to the older Establish- would attract growing opposition not only ment's strategy of Cold War containment- from labor unions but from American man- and on trade and foreign investment, Heri- ufacturing firms threatened by foreign tage shared the Wall Street bankers and competition. multinational executives' support for free trade and unfettered investment. s Rockefeller and McCloy's Estab- By the mid-1980s, Heritage and its lishment fell to blows over US.-So- funders were as divided and confused as A viet relations and international eco- the liberal Establishment they had hoped to nomics, other institutions became more supplant. Soviet President Mikhail Gorba- important in determining the course of chev rendered conservative Cold War doc-

WQ AUTUMN 1991 5 1 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

in financing a nonpartisan institution that did not mirror their views. William Ba- roody, Jr. departed in 1986, and AEI, once the flagship of the conservative think tanks, became a lesser version of Heritage. Far from representing the creation of a new consensus, the conservative organizations simply reflected the breakup of the old.

ven more important than the birth of the new conservative think tanks was the growth of "K Street," the law offices and public-relations firms situ- ated on or around one of downtown Wash- ington's main thoroughfares. These firms- tied into the foreign-policy Establishment by prominent former officials such as Clark Clifford or Elliot Richardson-came to have considerable influence over foreign The Heritage Foundation policy, but increasingly on behalf of over- trine moot, and the flood of imports, en- seas clients. Instead of contributing to a couraged by Reagan economic policies, new consensus, they provoked charges of battered many of the American manufac- corruption and conflict of interest within turers that had sustained Heritage and the the Establishment. Right. Abandoning their unequivocal sup- Prior to the New Deal, a few law firms port for free trade, both Milliken and Coors had Washington offices specializing in pat- began to balk at supporting a think tank ent law, but the New Deal created a de- that opposed trade relief for domestic man- mand for lawyers who could help clients ufacturers, and they complained bitterly deal with government. Covington and Burl- about Heritage's growing reliance on con- ing, which Dean Acheson joined in 1921, tributions from South Korea and Taiwan. grew into one of the nation's most powerful The one conservative group that con- firms during the 1930s. Then came the sciously tried to mimic the older Establish- boom during the 1970s and '80s, brought ment institutions was the American Enter- about first by the growth of regulatory prise Institute (AEI). Under William agencies during the Nixon years and then Baroody and then his son William, Jr., who by a surge of trade cases and legislation, took over from his father in 1978, AEI which stimulated a flood of foreign money sought to create scholarship rather than into K Street. In 1989, Japanese firms alone propaganda. It recruited Democrats and paid $150 million for the services of Wash- liberal researchers as well as conservatives ington lawyers and lobbyists. These in- and Republicans. In the late 1970s, it cluded 125 former officials, many of them played an important role in winning sup- prominent members of the foreign-policy port for deregulation of business. But by Establishment like Richardson, a former the mid-1980s, AEI faced a financial crisis, Nixon administration official and a mem- brought about partly by a revolt from con- ber of Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission. servative funders who were not interested Typical of the new K-Street firms was

AUTUMN 1991 52 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld. Texas and public-relations experts responded that lawyer, banker, and real-estate tycoon Rob- they were furthering the principles of lib- ert Strauss established a Washington eral internationalism. branch of the Dallas firm in 197 1 when he Indeed, there was nothing new in what came to Washington as treasurer of the these firms and their lawyers were doing, Democratic National Committee (DNC). Since the turn of the century, prominent Strauss then served as chairman of the lawyers had represented foreign firms and DNC from 1972 to 1976, U.S. special trade governments. In the 1950s, former New representative from 1977 to 1979, Mideast York Governor Thomas Dewey was hired negotiator in 1979, and then in 1980 as Car- by Japan to enhance its reputation in the ter's campaign manager. By the time he re- United States, and Acheson's firm was em- turned to the firm in 1981 it was one of ployed by South Africa. But the decline of Washington's most powerful, and this was the American economy put this kind of no coincidence. Clients flocked to Akin, representation in a different light. Instead Gump because of Strauss's association with of being seen as part of a larger efort to the firm. Moreover, when he returned, draw foreign countries and their firms into Strauss brought top officials from the U.S. a US.-dominated world economy, promi- trade representative's office with him, at- nent lawyers such as Richardson and tracting important foreign clients, includ- Strauss were increasingly accused of be- ing the Japanese electronics giant Fujitsu. traying American interests-of using lib- By 1991, Akin, Gump had 206 lawyers in eral internationalism to justify predatory Washington alone and had become one of trade practices by America's competitors. the nation's top 35 law firms. And Strauss, Beginning in the late 1980s, a spate of before being appointed ambassador to the books and articles appeared warning that Soviet Union in June 1991, was able to K-Street lawyers and lobbyists were doing move in the gray area between private just that. Many of the authors represented wealth and public power, advising presi- wings of the Establishment, and their views dents and serving on prestigious commis- were given currency in prestigious publica- sions, while working as a lawyer to pro- tions. Former TRW Vice President Pat mote the interests of his firm and its clients. Choate saw part of his book, Agents of Influ- In the 1980s, the K-Street firms proved ence (1990), excerpted in the Harvard Busi- extremely successful in shaping the govern- ness Review, and former Reagan adminis- ment's agenda on trade and foreign invest- tration official Clyde Prestowitz parlayed ment. Law firms hired by Japanese elec- the success of his book Trading Places tronics companies delayed the (1988) into a think tank, the Economic implementation of trade penalties against Strategy Institute, funded by major U.S. Japanese consumer electronics and semi- corporations and unions and dedicated to conductor firms until after American indus- countering foreign influence on K Street. tries had been decimated by below-cost im- These books and articles also raised ports; they lobbied against more restrictive questions about the independence from trade laws; they helped block any congres- foreign influence of think tanks like sional attempts to restrict or even gather Bergsten's Institute for International Eco- information on foreign investors; they nomics, founded in 1981 with a grant from threw their weight against proposals to sub- the German Marshall Fund. In 1989, the sidize research and development by Ameri- Committee for Economic Development can firms. When challenged, these lawyers (CED) became embroiled in controversy

WQ AUTUMN 1991 53 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

when it sponsored a US-Japan joint eco- late 1980s, major corporations, including nomic study in which the Japanese group TRW, Coming Glass, Chrysler, Ford, Gen- was chaired by Nissan's chief executive offi- eral Motors, and USX, had declared their cer and the American group by a former support for "managed trade" with Japan U.S. trade representative whose public-rela- and Western Europe. On any major issue, tions firm was representing Nissan. coalitions of corporations and banks were As was the case with K-Street lawyers, likely to be arrayed against each other. Dur- the think tanks and policy groups' accep- ing the recent Uruguay round of the Gen- tance of foreign contributions and advice eral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) represented nothing new in itself. But with talks, the Emergency Committee for Ameri- American firms fighting for survival against can Trade joined Japanese and South Ko- foreign competitors, these contributions rean companies in pressing for the elimina- took on a different meaning, placing the tion of penalties against companies that organizations on one side of a new ideolog- "dump" their goods below cost in foreign ical and commercial divide. With their in- markets. On the other side of the issue was tegrity and independence in doubt, the organizations in turn became even more cautious about what they said and did, mak- ing it even less likely that they would be able to forge a new consensus.

n Washington, some expected that the end of the Cold War and the accession of George Bush would revive the Estab- lishment. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, Nitze, who became Reagan's arms negotiator, found himself allied with Warnke and other former adversaries against Reagan conser- vatives who rejected any arms agreement The White House with the Soviet Union. By the end of the decade, Nitze, Warnke, Kissinger, Vance, the Labor-Industry Coalition for Interna- and Brzezinski, while disagreeing on some tional Trade, including B. F. Goodrich, particulars, shared roughly similar posi- Motorola, Coming, Inland Steel, TRW, and tions on US.-Soviet relations. Kissinger and W. R. Grace and Company. Vance were even joint authors of an article The Establishment institutions dealt for Foreign Affairs. But such newfound with the lack of unity on these issues by unity on US.-Soviet relations did not carry staging debates and publishing pro and con over into other areas of foreign policy, such reports. The Council on Foreign Relations as the Mideast, or into the most contentious held a debate in 1989 between financiers questions of international economics. Felix Rohatyn and Peter Peterson, the new The divisions over economic policy that chairman of the Council, on whether for- surfaced in 1971 continued to widen, pre- eign investment was helping or hurting venting any new consensus from emerging. America. Bergsten's Institute for Interna- In 197 1, labor was the main dissenter from tional Economics, after being criticized for the postwar consensus on free trade and putting out a report downplaying the im- unfettered foreign investment, but by the portance of Japanese trade barriers to the

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American trade deficit, turned around and Trilateral Commission survives, its North published a study documenting these barri- American office run by a former Brzezinski ers. But the clearest indication of irrecon- graduate student out of a warren of offices cilable differences occurred in 1989 when on Manhattan's East Side. But if one means the New York-based Twentieth Century by the Establishment the people and institu- Fund set up a Task Force on the Future of tions whose liberal international outlook American Trade Policy. Four decades be- dominated American foreign policy from fore, a Twentieth Century Fund task force 1939 to 1969, then the Establishment is in had played a critical role in establishing a severe disarray. consensus in favor of free trade, but this The decline of this Establishment has time the 12 participants, including two not benefited the country. Contrary to what bankers, two corporate vice-presidents, one its critics might have supposed, its tall did AFL-CIO official, and policy analysts from not lead to the rise of popular democracy, MIT, Brookings, Georgetown, and the Car- nor even to representative government. In negie Endowment, failed to agree. Finally, a nation of 250 million, direct democracy is the Fund published a report entitled The not possible; and in foreign policy-where Free Trade Debate with opposing positions the questions are often obscure-it is in- on trade and foreign investment. conceivable. Ideally,- government- should As influence over foreign economic pol- function transparently, providing citizens icy became more widely diffused, respon- with the ability to set policy by influencing sibility for American military-diplomatic the decisions of their elected represen- strategy narrowed. During the months be- tatives. Governments have invariably relied fore the U.S. war against Iraq, Establish- on informal networks of private citizens, ment policy experts-lacking a common organized through pressure groups, lob- framework-were hopelessly divided over bies, political organizations, and elite what the administration should do; and groupings like the Council on Foreign Rela- President Bush kept decisionmaking fo- tions to fill the interstices between individ- cused in a small circle cut off even from his ual will and public power. own National Security Council. As the Cold For three decades, the old Establish- War continues to ebb and as consensus fur- ment occupied this area, holding study ther erodes, the major Establishment insti- groups, publishing papers, and providing tutions serve largely as debating societies. the officials that filled the upper echelons of They will perform an important function- government. But as it has disintegrated, but no more so than any university or narrow lobbies and pressure groups rather publication that is willing to air both sides than an enlightened citizenry have filled the of a controversy. Whether the Establish- vacuum. Worse still, these lobbies and pres- ment itself still exists is a matter of seman- sure groups represent no underlying con- tics, not history. If one means by the Estab- sensus but only their own separate inter- lishment merely a collection of upper-class ests. American foreign policy, once the individuals and elite institutions, then the realm of the gods, has become the domain Establishment is alive and well. Even the of mere influence peddlers.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 55 BACKGROUND BOOKS

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

nly a couple of decades ago, scholars cline of the WASP (Simon & Schuster, 1971) 0could still speak with some plausibility of to Robert C. Christopher's Crashing the Gates: The Power Elite (C. Wright Mills, 1956), The The De-WASPing of America's Power Elite Protestant Establishment (E. Digby Baltzell, (Simon & Schuster, 1989). They represent two 1964), or The Higher Circles (G. William of the main schools of thought about the Domhoff, 1970). Today, the authors' precise in- WASP's demise. Christopher believes that the ventories of the social institutions that were tide of political and demographic change in thought to sustain the ruling elite seem antique, 20th-century America was so powerful that no almost comical. "A person is considered to be a adaptations could have saved them. Schrag, member of the upper class," Domhoff wrote in somewhat like Baltzell, suggests that the WASPs introducing one such inventory, "if his sister, were brought down by their own shortcomings: wife. mother, or mother-in-law attended one of "They grew great as initiators and entrepre- the following schools or belongs to one of the neurs. They invented the country and its values, following groups. . . ." shaped the institutions and organizations, and In retrospect, Baltzell emerges as the fore- tried to teach the newcomers-lest they be- most seer of the group. He understood more come uncouth boors-how to ioin and behave. clearly than his counterparts did that America's But when technology, depression and the un- elite-and all three had very different defini- certainties of the postwar world frightened and tions and ovinions of the elite-was on the confused them, they drew the institutions verge of dissolution. Rather than welcoming around themselves, moved to the suburbs, and talented newcomers into the national "aristoc- talked prudence." racy," the nation's White-Anglo-Saxon-Protes- Today there is great nostalgia for the old tant (WASP) governing class was engaging in a days of the Establishment, as evidenced by the suicidal attempt to bar the doors, especially popular appeal of books such as The Wise against Jews. "The traditional standards upon Men: Architects of the American Century (Si- which this country was built and governed mon & Schuster, 1986), by Walter Isaacson and down through the years are in danger of losing Evan Thomas, and by a lengthening procession authority," he wrote, "largely because the of Establishment biographies (though not all of American upper class, whose [WASP] members these are flattering) and memoirs. Edmund may still be deferred to and envied because of Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt their privileged status, is no longer honored in (Putnam, 1979), for example, is only the best of the land. For its standards of admission have several studies of this founding father of the na- gradually come to demand the dishonorable tional Establishment. Godfrey Hodgson's por- treatment of far too many distinguished Ameri- trait of TR's protege, The Colonel: The Life cans for it to continue, as a class, to fill its tradi- and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 tional function of moral leadership." (Knopf, 1990) casts its subject, who served as Baltzell said there was still time for the Herbert Hoover's secretary of state and Frank- WASPs to save themselves-and thus the Estab- lin Roosevelt's secretary of war, as a giant who lishment over which they presided-but his set the mold of the Establishment man. Other warning went largely unheeded. Today, it is the books include Ronald Steel's Walter Lipp- Protestant remnant that goes unheeded. There mann and the American Century (Little, are still WASPs with power and WASPs with Brown, 1980); Thomas Powers' The Man Who money, but they no longer constitute an Estab- Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the lishment with moral authority. This decline has CIA (Knopf, 1979); Clark Clifford's Counsel to been amply documented and celebrated in a the President: A Memoir (with Richard number of books, from Peter Schrag's The De- Holbrooke, Random House, 1991). Joseph

WQ AUTUMN 1991 5 6 THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

Alsop's memoirs are soon to appear and biogra- self-sacrifice began to yield to that of self-real- phers are now at work on lives of John J. Mc- ization." This sort of culture produces Bart Cloy, Dean Acheson, and Robert S. McNamara, Simpsons, not Henry Stimsons. among others. Another explanation, not considered by In part, the nostalgia for the Establishment many writers, concerns the neglected P in reflects a longing for consensus and stability in WASP: the possibility that the decay of religious the governance of national affairs. It seems also faith among the elite helps explain the decline to reflect a feeling that some of these leaders of the public-service ethos that sustained the were in important ways superior to their suc- Establishment. The thought is entertained by cessors. Henry Stimson, for example, is cast in Richard Brookhiser, an editor of the conserva- noble terms by his biographer: "The ideas that tive National Review, in The Way of the WASP: did touch and move him were for the most part How It Made America and How It Can Save old ideas: traditional religious loyalty and prac- It.. . So to Speak (Free Press, 1991), but even tice; the patriotic traditions of the Founding Fa- he discounts it. WASP culture, he believes, still thers; old and stirring ideals like 'justice, duty, nourishes a form of civic-mindedness. but it is honor, trust.' " misdirected towards a progressivism in politics The WASP ideal that Stimson represented and religion that is badly out of step with main- lingers in the popular mind, but hollowed of its stream America. moral content and reduced to style-Madras The new Establishment that many observers shorts, Ralph Lauren sweaters, horn-rimmed seem to pine for may not be possible. The glasses. Americans no longer aim to emulate country is much more populous and prosper- WASP virtues but, as the preppie fad of the ous (and more politically divided) than it was 1980s and the sumptuous faux austerity of the during the Establishment's heyday. The mak- Ralph Lauren ads suggest, to live a fantasy ver- ings of a new Establishment seem to be avail- sion of the WASP lifestyle. It is the rugged, TR- able in the new "inside-the-Beltway" institu- style outdoorsmanship of George Bush that we tions described, for example, by Hedrick Smith see constantly on display-the Maine retreat, in The Power Game: How Washington Really the cigarette boat on choppy seas, the dogged Works (Random, 1987). If the other books golf games. It was Bush's genteel WASP values, make anything clear, however, it is that it takes his corny geniality and his platitudes about pub- more than motive and opportunity to make an lic service that earned him scorn as a wimp Establishment. A certain conviction, spirit, and early in the 1988 presidential campaign. sense of common moral purpose are needed. Where have all the Stimsons gone? In an And because they made their money on Wall essay in Culture As History: The Transforma- Street (much as the founding fathers made tion of American Society in the Twentieth theirs on the farm),,. the old Establishmentarians Century (Pantheon, 1985), historian Warren I. could more plausibly claim to play a disin- Susman suggests that American culture bred a terested role in public affairs than today's new type of individual after the turn of the cen- 'players" from K Street can. tury. The 19th-century "culture of character" The old Establishment was built on the in- was based on the principle that "the highest dustrial fortunes of the 19th century. The new development of self ended in a version of self- rich of the Information Age, like the Trumps control or self-mastery, which often meant ful- and Milkens, have so far only flaunted their fillment through sacrifice in the name of a wealth or flattered themselves by purchasing higher law, ideals of duty, honor, integrity." This glamor. A century ago a rich man's first thought sustained "the human needs of a producer-ori- might have been to found a prep school or col- ented society." But the new consumer society lege; today he puts his name on an art museum. of the 20th century required a different sort of Yet though we may resent today's rich and person, Susman speculates, and early on "inter- powerful for lacking the fiber of their predeces- est grew in personality, individual idiosyncra- sors, it is not so clear that, lacking it ourselves, sies, personal needs and interests. The vision of we would know enough to honor it.

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Sometimes events overtake us. When we at the WQ first learned about this article last spring, we were eager to bring it to our readers. It seemed to us that James Billington's argument that the Soviet Union was in the midst not of a revolution but of what he calls a "fever break" was vitally important. We were not alone. In late May, Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a leading histo- rian of Russian culture, was invited to present his paper at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, before an audience of several hundred select Soviet citizens. Believing Billington's perception of the historic moment would provide encouragement and needed perspective for reformers who had begun to doubt their own cause, a prominent Soviet democrat arranged for its publication in Moscow's Independent Gazette. It appeared in June, just as Russians were going to the polls to elect a president for the first time in their history. It hit close enough to home to provoke an unprecedented official protest by the Soviet embassy in Washington, apparently prompted by some of the same forces that launched the putsch. In August, a week before Boris Yeltsin and his allies stared down the leaders of the coup, Billington was back in the Soviet Union repeating his argument. We present his essay here not only as a prophetic historical document but, with minor modifications that reflect recent events, as a continuing guide to possible turns in Russia's future.

by James H. Billington

e are living in the midst led by intellectual elites with political blue- of a great historical prints. The upheavals in Eastem Europe drama that we did not were almost exactly the opposite: nonvi- expect, do not under- olent, filled with religious idealism, and stand, and cannot even thrown up from below without clear lead- . name. It has been ers, let alone programs. It has been called called a revolution, but modem revolutions reform from above with Mikhail Gorbachev have generally been violent, secular, and as a Peter the Great: but Gorbachev never

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had a clear program, and events rapidly moved far be- yond anything he intended, expected, or could control. The attempted August coup against Gorbachev, the counter-reaction of the Rus- sian people, the rise of Yeltsin, and debates over the future of the Soviet Union all perpetuate the turmoil. - - A more appropriate term for what is happening might be the Russian word pere- lorn, meaning a break in an entire organism, a "fever break" that determines whether a person will live or die. Stalin used the word perelom to describe his plunge into the holocaust of totalitarianism. calling the first year of his'first five-year plan, 1929, "the year of the Defying the old guard from atop a tank, Boris Yeltsin in effect great fever break." Sixty declared communism dead, ending an era that began when Lenin years later came another announced its coming from atop an armored vehicle in 1917. such break, this one ending totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Then in wave of repression in a culture where the August 1991 a related perelom convulsed music is melancholy, endings are sad, and the Soviet Union itself. democracy is all but unknown. The dialogue has been cacophonous, Such images are not altogether wrong, the set surrealistic, and the cast of charac- but they are inadequate for suggesting ei- ters unlikely and almost anti-political: ab- ther the dangers or the creative possibilities surdist playwrights as chiefs of state in in the current tumult. My own alternative Czechoslovakia and Hungary; archival his- analysis is based on seven propositions. torians leading the factions that broke with The first is that Americans are not communism completely in the Polish and merely spectators but more deeply in- Soviet parliaments; purveyors of the most volved than we realize in what happens in- immaterial of the arts, music, as heads of side the Soviet Union. American political state in a fading East Germany and a rising and military strength helped force the Lithuania; a curator of ancient manuscripts change within the Soviet Union during the as head of state in Armenia. 1980s, and America is now the main model The West has viewed this all largely as by which reformers in the Soviet Union de- an Eastern melodrama dominated by Gor- fine and measure themselves as they strug- bachev-first as a St. George liberating the gle to open up and restructure their conti- satellites, then seemingly joining the drag- nent-wide, multicultural nation. ons inside the Soviet Union, then clamber- Russian culture, never as securely self- ing back on the democratic white horse lest contained as, say, the Chinese or French Boris Yeltsin ride off alone. cultures, has always tended to borrow from We have seen ourselves only as specta- its principal external adversary. The Rus- tors-uncertain as to how much money sians took their religion and art from By- should be thrown on the stage, vaguely zantium in the 10th and 11th centuries, hoping that Westernized minorities can their modern governmental institutions break away, somehow assuming that the from Sweden in the early 18th century, the Russians will eventually produce a new language of their ruling class from the

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French in the late 18th and early 19th cen- eral entitlements and their own distinctive turies, and their first industrial models identities. Only Act V will tell us whether from Germany in the late 19th and early humanity will be able finally to live at 20th centuries-all either while or just after peace in a culturally divided, ecologically fighting furiously with each of these West- overtaxed planet-or whether we will sim- em adversaries. Now, as the Cold War ends, ply use new weapons and empowerment to the Soviet Union seems singularly bent on renew old patterns of tribal and national learning from the American "scorpion" it conflict. Only then will we know if the end- so long faced in the bottle. ing will be happy or sad, peaceful pluralism The most important reason why Ameri- or renewed warfare that could lead to total cans cannot be passive spectators at the So- destruction. viet spectacle is that the strategic strength The Soviet Union today is traumatically of the Soviet Union directed at the United enduring both the end of Act I11 and the States remains unabated, despite the dimin- beginning of Act IV. Its peoples are at once ished targeting of Europe. The world, for all struggling both for common legal rights its multipolar aspects, remains bipolar in and for particular national identities. terms of deliverable nuclear destruction. The central tension in the Soviet Union We are at the fever break in the body today is neither a political one between politic of Soviet totalitarianism, but I con- personalities nor an economic one be- tend, as my second proposition, that the tween programs. The key conflict is rather current scene in the Soviet Union is part an elemental struggle for legitimacy be- not of the Eastern melodrama that I previ- tween two very different, rival forces-pri- ously described but instead of a broader meval, moral forces that compete within, global drama of a high moral order. as well as among, people-forces that can Act I in this drama of the 20th century be best understood by reading the long was that of total war. the two world wars novels rather than the short histories of which threw the masses violently on stage Russia. and ended European world dominance. From this follows my third proposition. Act I1 was that of totalitarian peace, the at- The central struggle in the Soviet break tempt to impose a totalistic order on the with its totalitarian past has been between world first by Germany and then by the So- physical power and moral authority, be- viet Union in the Cold War that followed tween a dictatorial machine trying to con- the hot wars. Act I11 was the victory of free- trol things at the top and a movement to- dom. which climaxed in the late 1980s wards democracy from below. when a liberal political and economic or- der emerged as the preferred norm over n recent months, we have paid so much both the totalitarianism of Act I1 and the attention to the failures of the Soviet sys- surviving authoritarianism of the Third tem that we have overlooked its one con- World. Act IV is the search for authority, a spicuous success: the creation of the larg- quest that seems to be on the rise in this est, most powerful, and long-lived political decade. As newly freed peoples search for machine of the modern era. The Leninist unique identities in a world of creeping machine in the Soviet Union (essentially technological uniformity and for a source the three million people in the inner of responsibility amid the fluidity of free- nomenklatura of the Communist Party) has dom, they are rediscovering their own proven to be perhaps the most successful deeper cultural traditions. political oligarchy of this century. While Act V-the classical last act-lies ahead maintaining its hold on power, it skillfully in the New Millennium: that of a genuinely distributed patronage, atomized dissenters multipolar world in which other currently at home, and anesthetized opposition dormant peoples in the Third World will abroad. Considering the colossal economic simultaneously claim both freedom's gen- failure and human cruelty of the Soviet sys-

James H. Biflirzgton, the Librarian of Congress, is the former director of the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is the author of, among other books, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (1970) and Fire in the Minds of Men (1980). Copyright @ 1991 by James H. Billington.

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tern, the nomenklatura's ability to retain popular move toward democracy. power must be recognized as one of the My fourth proposition is that the deci- great, sinister political accomplishments of sive element in resolving the deepening the.--. 20th centurv. union-wide crisis produced by nationality ~orbachevisa pure child of this tensions and economic failures is the nomenklatura elite. Having once presided search for identity by the dominant Russian over the resort area of Stavropol, where the nationality itself. The decisive actor in overweight, geriatric leadership came to determining the outcome of the conflict be- take the waters at the spa, he was brought tween dictatorship and democracy and of back to the capital to supervise the oligar- the multiple search for identities within the chy's transition to a postwar, post-Stalinist Soviet Union in Act IV of our global drama generation of party leadership. Gorbachev will be-as in a Greek tragedy or a Russian in power proved to be one of the most dex- opera-the chorus: the awakening Russian terous of all Leninist politicians, playing off people, who control most of the natural re- against each other the requisite left and sources and almost all of the weapons of right oppositions while continuously the Soviet Union. consolidating his own control over policy The dominant Russian nationality has by invoking a vague slogan devoid of objec- the most acutely difficult identity crisis of tive content (perestroika), which he alone all the nationalities in the Soviet Union. could define. After creating new parliamen- Whereas the minorities can define their tary institutions, which brought younger post-totalitarian identity in opposition not and professional people into the political just to communism but to Russian imperial process as a liberal counterweight to the occupation, the dominant Russians must conservative party bureaucracy, Gorbachev confront a double indignity. They are immediately built himself a super-presi- blamed for a system under which they have dencv bevond the control of either. From suffered as much as anyone else. Yet they this post he continued to persuade the out- realize that their communism was to some side world that he was a sensible centrist extent self-imposed rather than imported maneuvering between right and left ex- by an invading army. The inner trauma is cesses. But he was extraordinarily unpopu- considerable for a people that was indoctri- lar at home and had little ability to move nated for half a century into Stalin's highly anything with all his levers of power. He Russocentric version of communism, a ver- had more formal power than any Soviet sion that portrayed Russians as being the leader since Stalin, but very little authority. center of human progress and the van- Authority, however, was being reconsti- guard of history. The televised tumult tuted by a democratic opposition welling among the minority nationalities simply up from below and seeping in from the pe- heightens the tension among Russians, who riphery. In almost every election in which no longer know who they really are or what there was a genuine contest in the Russian they are connected to either historically or as well as other republics, democratic geographically. forces have prevailed over reactionary ones-dramatically so in the centers of the efining a post-totalitarian identity for Russian republic's military, industrial, and the Russian people has been the single political power: Moscow, Leningrad (now most crucial element in reconstituting po- St. Petersburg), Sverdlovsk. litical legitimacy within the Soviet domain. The basic struggle, then, in the Soviet Each of the two contesting forces in the So- Union was between the Leninist political viet Union came up with an answer; and machine (fortified by a resurgent KGB that the result was a struggle for the Russian had power but almost no legitimacy) and a soul between the Leninists and the demo- broad, diffuse democratic movement that cratic movement. had legitimacy and authority but almost no The Leninists, unable to base their legiti- power or experience in economic and po- macy on a failed communist ideology, fell litical governance. The Leninist machine back on a kind of Russian nationalism that was itself divided; and, as last August glorifies the state and army as the heart of showed, it was finally unable to reverse the the Russian experience. This degraded na-

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tionalism plays one minority nationality off have created not so much parties (the very against another and everyone off against word has been delegitimized) as fronts, Jews in accordance with well-established platforms, and unions. techniques of imperial crisis management. At the same time many of these same It also defends alleged rural values against people are also beginning to recover a Rus- Western corruption and rehabilitates much sian tradition that is defined more in terms of the tsarist past, forgiving a kind of nation- of spiritual and cultural accomplishment alism that Russians call "governmental- than in those of military and strategic ism" (gosudar'stvennost'). power. This return to a different cultural An example of the more sophisticated identity is evident in the extraordinary forms of nomenklatura-sponsored national- popularity of the environmental and his- ism could be found in the output of a new toric restoration movements (perhaps the think tank, the Experimental Creative Cen- two most popular causes in the new civil ter, which flourished in the months leading society) and in a striking revival of religion, up to the aborted coup. Headed by a for- particularly among the educated younger mer actor and richly subsidized with a bud- generation in the Russian and Slavic parts get of 100 million rubles and a host of of the Soviet Union. transfer appointments from government The recovery of religion among the Rus- agencies including the KGB, this center ex- sians as they move from Act I11 to Act IV of tolled the virtues of unitary, authoritarian our global drama (from problems of free- societies based on agrarian values-Japan, dom to those of identity) is a complex phe- China, Korea, and Cuba-and called for a nomenon. It emerged in reactionto moral program of "national salvation" from the and aesthetic impoverishment and the alleged chaos of democratic pluralism. sheer boredom of the "stagnation" era un- The rival reformist camp had a strik- der Brezhnev. It began as a classical revolt ingly different vision of Russian identity, of sons against fathers-in this case, con- well depicted in the rich and varied inde- formist atheist fathers-and has created, pendent press. This openly democratic particularly in the generation under Gorba- press represented new independent orga- chev, an attitude that has led to more than nizations initially activated by the early Gor- curiosity if often less than conversion. bachev reforms. Disillusioned by pere- Religion spread through a kind of out- stroika, the leaders of these groups turned migration from the center to the periphery; next to Yeltsin and then even beyond him it evolved spiritually from the formalistic, to a younger generation of local activists often politically subservient Orthodox who seek a total break with communism. Church to the still growing Baptist Church This broad movement attaches renewed and on to the even faster growing historical importance to autonomous re- Pentecostals. gional traditions and to local organizations of the kind that permitted Russia to survive ut there was also an attempt by the po- in two world wars despite bad leadership in litical establishment to exploit the reli- both. Russians are beginning to celebrate gious reawakening; the nomenklatura, for the forgotten variety and improvisational instance, seemed to use the millennia1 cele- skills in their past history, just as they are brations of Russian Christianity in 1988 as a relying increasingly on the so-called second relegitimizing device. Gorbachev (whose economy to provide basic goods and ser- mother is a devout Orthodox believer) and vices needed to survive the breakdown of his wife have both cultivated links with the the state economy. greatest and most deeply Christian scholar A new, better-educated Russian genera- of Old Russian culture, Dmitry Likhachev, tion, assisted by electronic communication, a survivor of the original gulag at Solovki. energized by the genuine opening of Yeltsin chose an avowed Christian general glasnost, is forging a shared determination as his running mate in the recent presiden- to build from below political and economic tial campaign in the Russian republic and structures that are more participatory and announced that his grandchildren had accountable as part of the definition and been baptized. Publications of the prolifer- entitlement of modem civilized life. They ating religio-philosophical circles and orga-

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nizations are second in quantity only to of the movement may well be not the pre- democratic political publications in the al- dictable provocations of reactionary minor- most unbelievable flood of new indepen- ity enclaves against restive larger minorities dent journals and bulletins. (such as inciting Ossetians against Geor- The heart of the religious revival is, gians or Baltic Russian minorities against however, the recovery of the Orthodox tra- native Baltic rule). The major coming prov- dition within the dominant Russian nation- ocation may well arise from the dying ide- ality. The Orthodoxy of the new generation ology of class warfare, a final spasm of the draws inspiration from the so-called new Leninist stratagem which Stalin perfected martyrs of the Soviet era, who have yet to during his descent into terror: the incite- be theologically recognized by the still- ment of workers against intellectuals. timid official hierarchy. The most recent For a time, this demogogic tactic was martyr was the greatest preacher of the successfully used by reactionaries who re- new generation, Father Alexander Men, viled Gorbachev as a talker rather than a who was murdered with an axe last autumn doer. Yeltsin has played with it in his stump just before he was about to become the first attacks on privilege. And the rhetoric of the theological lecturer at a major state-run rising working class denounces the soft, pedagogical center in Moscow since the postwar generation of better-educated revolution. Though often liturgically con- party bureaucrats as the undeserving bene- servative, the young church tends also to be ficiaries of their work and the contemptible far more socially inclusive and intellec- source of their woes. Either frustration or tually alive, drawing strength from a pro- provocation could produce a paroxysm of phetic emphasis on social justice provided class warfare that pits the frustrated masses by a strong Jewish element typified by Men against the reformist intellectuals. One and by the legendary long-term political would almost have to predict that there will prisoner, Mikhail Kazachkov, founder of be some forms of major social violence in the remarkable St. Petersburg society for the Soviet Union during the next year. Open Christianity. There is also a strong and cerebral philo-Catholic element, since et beyond-or even instead of-such many of the Russian Orthodox priests come bloodshed, a more happy, peaceful from the western Ukraine. evolution may occur if my last two proposi- But the real action-the intellectual re- tions are correct. vival, the interaction with the democratic The first of these (sixth overall) is that movement and with the working masses- the Soviet drama is not fundamentally dis- is occurring in the deep interior of Russia: tinct from the earlier one in Eastern Eu- the growth in a few years of the urban dio- rope-and indeed may be more influenced cese of Nizhni-Novgorod from two to ten by it than is generally realized. To oversim- churches (plus a mosque and a synagogue) plify a bit, I would say that Gorbachev's re- and of Sverdlovsk from one to five. actionary turn of this last year partly re- The Leninist political machine has con- sulted from fear induced by what happened tinued to try diverting this recovery of reli- in Romania and Bulgaria, where deposed gious tradition into reactionary, nationalis- communist leaders were either killed or tic channels-and to try splitting the brought to trial. The Leninist political ma- democratic opposition by playing off chine feared a much greater retribution in against each other the religious and secular, the Soviet Union. Such fear seems to me the Slavophile and Westernizing elements the only explanation for why Gorbachev within the Russian democratic movement. did not follow the Chinese pattern of The future of the Soviet Union will es- largely decollectivizing agriculture in order sentially be determined by which of the two to put food on the table and to secure initial identities-the imperial or the demo- popular support during a difficult period of cratic-the predominant Russian popula- reform. tion eventually chooses. If the Romanian experience inspired My fifth and darkest proposition is that fear in the machine at the top, the Polish the key diversion in the end game of the experience provides hope for the move- Leninist machine against the rising power ment from below. The Polish reformers, by

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building a link between workers and intel- grams and institutions, there probably also lectuals in the Solidarity movement and by has to be a catharsis. The totalitarian fever going cold turkey into a market economy, must break so the patient can stop dying have provided the democratic movement and start sweating, stop lying down and with a model for overthrowing a Leninist start getting up. machine and creating the conditions for This leads to my seventh and last propo- fundamental change. Gorbachev thus now sition: that the final perelom, the big break seems to the movement rather like a Soviet that will enable creative people finally to Jaruzelski, claiming to retain order and focus their chaotically dispersed talents, prevent worse violence from happening, may have more the quality of a nonviolent, but in fact serving as a tragic, transitional spiritual movement than of the violent civil figure who merely delays the victory of the war everyone seems to expect. democratic movement from below. There is almost no good Russian litera- If the Romanian example stirred the ture these days; all of its accumulated fear of the machine, and the Polish exam- moral passion and spiritual questing seem ple inspired hope in the movement, the poured into the reform movement from be- Hungarian and Czech examples may pro- low. And it may be that the only definitive vide more realistic models. In Hungary, break with the unparalleled institutionaliza- economic change preceded and facilitated tion of violence and atheism in the Soviet eventual political change. The Soviets will system will be precisely a movement of almost certainly have to undertake radical nonviolent spirituality. economic reform. Some are currently in- If there is, as I am suggesting, a shared trigued with the South Korean model- need in the Soviet Union to relegitimize the particularly in Kazakhstan, where the chief social contract rather than just rearrange economic planner is a Korean. social relationships, the choice then will But could there also possibly be a Czech seem to be between two different types of outcome, a sudden transformation from be- catharsis-one compatible with a national- low brought on by a populace long thought istic identity, the other with a democratic. to be cynically somnolent but which even- A nationalistic catharsis has already tually, unexpectedly rose up to disarm the been market tested by organizations such Leninist machine with an essentially moral as the Pamyat Society. It promises a cleans- force?-.-.. ing of Russia from foreign impurities, seeks Consider how nonviolent, controlled, scapegoats, and would lead to purges. An and yet expressly political were the mass opposite form of catharsis is as compatible demonstrations in Moscow and the strikes with democratization as the scapegoat- in the provinces during the first half of purge pattern is with authoritarianism. This 1991. Consider how the way had already benign alternative might be called the re- been prepared for a Soviet Have1 who pentance-redemption pattern, which looks could bring new moral authority from out- within and above for a positive identity side the corrupting system by an apostolic rather than without and below for a com- succession of anti-political prophets of mon enemy. Paradoxically, it may be that change. Russia's premier laser and nuclear only in finding a basic spiritual identity physicists, Rem Khokhlov and Andrei Sa- within can one feel free to adopt wholesale kharov, who first stirred up the stagnant political and economic forms from without. waters, have died. But they were succeeded Perhaps only with a secure inner identity by Russia's greatest weight lifter, greatest can one change outer behavior patterns. chess player, greatest linguist, and a galaxy A remarkable feature of the East Euro- of other activists in their early thirties. pean decompression from totalitarianism Of course, what was needed to create has been the absence, for the most part, of new political leadership was a willingness retroactive vindictiveness. Havel's analysis to compromise-a quality not abundantly that all (even those like himself who re- manifest in Russian history but seemingly sisted and went to prison) were implicated demonstrated in the Gorbachev-Yeltsin rap- in the totalitarian nightmare has prepared prochement. If, however, the crisis involves the way for a sense of common blame and basic legitimacy rather than mere pro- shared relief rather than selective scape-

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goating as the means of putting the past to keep up our guard even as we raise our rest. In the Soviet Union, where both the sights. But my sights suggest a Russian peo- guilt and the suffering have been greater ple in movement both forward to democ- and more long-lived, repentance has pro- racy and back to religion. This dual move- vided a rediscovered theological dimension ment unites Russia with other peoples; it is for freeing people to consider an altogether what has already happened in Poland. Is it different future. Repentance is the title and not, in essence, what the United States pro- theme of the most important single artistic duced in a very different way many years work of the Gorbachev era: Tengiz Abu- ago, when democracy arose out of our own ladze's great movie. It is also the title of sev- religious base, which underpinned it ethi- eral new independent journals, the theme cally and preceded it historically? The new of the most innovative new museum of So- interest among Russians in both American viet history (the Museum of the Young liberal democracy and their own conserva- Communist League in Sverdlovsk), and a tive spiritual heritage could prove to be two concept central to the unofficial part of the sides of the same coin rather than conflict- celebrations of the millennium of Russian ing sides of an irreconcilable Slavophile- Christianity in 1988. Westernizer polarity as we have usually In the attempt to come fully to grips been inclined to think. with the gulag experience, Russians have This movement towards democracy is been thrown back on biblical analogies and probably the best long-term guarantee of on the reassertion of the Judeo-Christian peace in the potentially dangerous multi- theme of the redemptive value of suffering. polar world that lies ahead in our global Out of the shared suffering that resulted drama. For out of the large and generally from the atomization of society and deg- depressing literature on how wars actually radation of morality under totalitarianism start in the modem world, there is one en- has grown a sense of common opportunity couraging fact: democracies in history do in the reassertion of small human commu- not fight one another. nities gathered around shared spiritual If we can better understand and build ideals. more human links with the extraordinary process of ferment that is going on in the ven after the failed coup, the possibility Soviet Union (its cultural as well as its eco- remains that prolonged chaos or social nomic and political strivings), we may be violence could produce a reactionary take- able to help influence a new agenda reflect- over. Thus the break in the Soviet Union ing the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr's could still be violent: broken bones or even words: Man's capacity for good makes de- the paroxysm before death, rather than a mocracy possible; his capacity for evil fever break leading back to life. So we must makes it indispensable.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 65 Columbus and the Labyrinth of History

Every generation creates the Columbus it needs. As the Quincentenary of his 1492 voyage approaches, observers are torn between celebrating a brave visionary and condemning the first representative of an age of imperial exploitation. Here Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Noble Wilford explores the various Columbus legends and discovers, beneath them, a very human figure and an adventure unprecedented in boldness.

by John Noble Wilford

istory has not been the lumbus. Such, it seems, is the fate of histori- same since Christopher cal figures whose deeds reverberate Columbus. Neither has through time. he been the same The Columbus story surely confirms the throughout history. axiom that all works of history are interim

During- the five cen- reports. What people did in the past is not tunesH since his epochal voyage of 1492, Co- preserved in amber, a moment captured lumbus has been many things to many peo- and immutable through the ages. Each gen- ple: the protean symbol of the adventuring eration looks back and, drawing from its human spirit, the lone hero defying both own experiences, presumes to find patterns the odds and entrenched thinking to that illuminate both past and present. This change the world; the first modem man or is natural and proper. A succeeding genera- a lucky adventurer blinded by medieval tion can ask questions of the past that those mysticism; an icon of Western faith in in the past never asked themselves. Colum- progress or an object of scorn for his bus could not know that he had ushered in failings of leadership and intellect; a man what we call the Age of Discovery, with all virtually deified at one time and roundly its implications, any more than we can vilified today for his part in the initiation of know what two world wars, nuclear weap- an international slave trade and European ons, the collapse of colonial empires, the imperialism. We hardly know the real Co- end of the Cold War, and the beginning of

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space travel will mean for people centuries Quincentennial, he has fallen victim to a from now. Perceptions change, and so does more self-critical society, one prone to our understanding of the past. hero-bashing and historical pessimism. Accordingly, the image of Columbus has As recently as 1974, Samuel Eliot Mori- changed through the years, sometimes as a son, the biographer of Columbus, con- result of new information, more often be- cluded one of his books with a paean to cause of changes in the lenses through European influence on America: "To the which we view him. Once a beneficiary of people of the New World, pagans expecting this phenomenon, Columbus in times of short and brutish lives, void of hope for any reigning optimism has been exalted as a future, had come the Christian vision of a mythic hero. Now, with the approach of the merciful God and a glorious heaven." It is

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hard to conceive of those words being writ- creasingly expansionist Europe in the 15th ten today. In a forward to the 1983 edition century. The Portuguese had sought a route of Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A around the tip of Africa. Some Florentine Life of Christopher Columbus, British histo- cosmographers had pondered the prospect rian David Beers Quinn criticizes Morison of a westward sea route. But Columbus was for ignoring or dismissing Columbus's apparently the first with the stubborn cour- failings. Columbus, Quinn writes, "cannot age to stake his life on the execution of be detached from the imperialist exploita- such a daring scheme. tion of his discoveries and must be made to After years pleading his case before the take some share of responsibility for the courts of Portugal and Spain, dismissed as a brutal exploitation of the islands and main- hopeless visionary or a tiresomely boastful lands he found." nuisance, Columbus finally won the reluc- By and large, this new perspective has tant support of Ferdinand and Isabella. At produced a more realistic, demythologized the little Andalusian port of Palos de la version of the Columbus story. The tempta- Frontera, he raised a fleet of three ships tion, though, is to swing too far in the other and enlisted some 90 seamen. Whatever direction, rewriting history as we wish it the sailors' trepidations or their opinion of would have been or judging people wholly Columbus when he arrived at Palos, their by anachronistic political standards. This destiny was to share with him a voyage "by has happened all too often regarding Co- which route," Columbus wrote in the pro- lumbus, producing myth and propaganda logue to his journal, "we do not know for in the guise of history. certain anyone previously has passed." All the more reason for us to sift Columbus was never more in command through the romantic inventions and en- of himself and his destiny than on that day, during misconceptions that have clouded August 3, 1492, when he weighed anchor at the real Columbus and to recognize that so Palos. He was a consummate mariner, as much of the man we celebrate or condemn all his contemporaries agreed and histori- is our own creation. He is the embodiment ans have not contradicted, and here he was of our running dialogue about the human doing what he did best and so sure of his potential for good and evil. success. Of course, he never made it to the Indies, as head-shaking savants had pre- dicted, then or on any of his three subse- quent voyages. His landfall came half a ome of the facts about Columbus- world short of them, on an unprepossess- who he was and what he did-are be- ing island inhabited by naked people with yond serious dispute. This mariner of no knowledge whatsoever of Marco Polo's humble and obscure origins was possessed Great Khan. of an idea that became an obsession. He On the morning of October 12, Colum- proposed to sail west across the uncharted bus and his captains, together with their ocean to the fabled shores of the Indies, the most trusted functionaries, clambered into lands of gold and spices celebrated in the armed launches and headed for the sandy tales of Marco Polo and the goal of an in- beach and green trees. They carried the

John Noble Wilford has been a science correspondent for the New York Times since 1965. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wilford is the author of The Mapmakers (1981), The Riddle of the Dinosaur (1985), and Mars Beckons (1990). His Mysterious History of Columbus is being published this October by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright @ 1991 by John Noble Wilford.

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flags of the Christian monarchs of Spain. A ment white men entered their lives. solemn Columbus, without so much as a Columbus made certain by his words thought that it was anything but his to take, and actions that his discovery would not be proclaimed possession of the island for the lost to history. On the homeward voyage, king and for the queen. Columbus and his after visiting a string of other islands and officers then dropped to their knees in more people, he composed a letter to the prayer. court of Ferdinand and Isabella in which It did not escape Columbus that these he announced his discovery. He had made islanders "go around as naked as their good his boast to one and all. He may have mothers bore them; and the women also." harbored some disappointment in not This was not prurience but culture shock. reaching the Asian mainland, but he had Columbus was generally admiring in his sailed across the Ocean Sea and found initial descriptions of the people. They were lands and peoples unknown to Europeans. "guileless and generous." Bringing cotton, And he wanted the court to read about it in parrots, and javelins to trade, they paddled his own words, especially since this justi- out to Columbus's ships in their dugouts, fied his own claim to the titles and wealth each made from a single tree and so long due him pursuant to the deal he had struck that they held 40 men; the West Indian with the court. term for these dugouts was canoa-and The letter Columbus wrote was also his thus a New-World word entered European bid for a place in history. He understood speech. Columbus was pleased to note that that the achievement would go for naught they had no firearms. When he had shown unless the news got back to others. To ex- them some swords, "they took them by the plore (the word, in one version of its ety- edge and through ignorance cut them- mology, comes from the Latin "to cry out") selves." "They should be good and intelli- is to search out and exclaim discovery. Sim- gent servants," he concluded, "for I see ply reaching a new land does not in itself that they say very quickly everything that is constitute a discovery. It must be an- said to them; and I believed they would be- nounced and then recorded in history so come Christians very easily, for it seemed to that the discovery can be acted upon. me that they had no religion." Columbus Others besides the indigenous people the anthropologist had his priorities. preceded Columbus in finding parts of Unfortunately, we have no record of the America. This is no longer an issue of con- first impressions that the people Columbus suming dispute in Columbian studies. Al- called Indians had of the Europeans. What most certainly the Norse under Leif Eric- did they think of these white men with son landed at some northern islands and beards? Their sailing ships and their weap- established a short-lived settlement at New- ons that belched smoke? Their Christian foundland. Ericson and others may have God and their inordinate interest in gold reached America, but they failed to dis- and a place beyond the horizon called the cover it. For nothing came of their deeds. Indies? We will never know. They could not Columbus, in writing the letter, was making put their feelings into writing; they had no sure his deeds would have consequences writing. And the encounter itself doomed and his achievement would enter history. them. Within a generation or two, they be- The letter eventually reached the court came extinct, mainly through exposure to in Barcelona and had the desired effect. European diseases, and so could not pass The king and queen received Columbus on by word of mouth stories about the mo- with pomp and listened to his story with

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'GARDENS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL I EVER SAW'

The following account of October 10-13, 1492, is taken from Columbus's Diario, as abstracted by Bartolorn6 de las Casas and adapted by William Carlos Williams.

Wednesday, 59 leagues, W.S.W., but hours past midnight, the moon having risen counted no more than 44. Here the veovle. . at eleven o'clock and then shining brightly could endure no longer. All now com- in the sky, being in its third quarter, a sailor plained about the length of the voyage. But I named Rodrigo de Triana sighted the land at cheered them as best I could, giving them a distance of about two leagues. At once I good hopes of the advantages they might ordered them to shorten sail and we lay un- gain by it. Roused to madness by their fear, der the mainsail without the bonnets, hove the captains declared they were going back to waiting for daylight. but I told them then, that however much On Friday, the 12th of October, we an- they might complain, I had to go to the In- chored before the land and made ready to dies and they along with me, and that I go on shore. Presently we saw naked people would go until I found them, with the help on the beach. I went ashore in the armed of our Lord. And so for a time it vassed but boat and took the royal standard, and Martin now all was in great danger from the men. Alonzo and Vincent Yafiez, his brother, who Thursday, 1lth of October. The course was captain of the Nina. And we saw the was W.S.W. More sea [spilling over the trees very green, and much water and fruits deck] than there had been during the whole of diverse kinds. Presently many of the in- of the voyage. Sandpipers and a green reed habitants assembled. I gave to some red near the ship. And for this I gave thanks to caps and glass beads to put round their God as it was a sure sign of land. Those of necks, and many other things of little value. the Pinta saw a cane and a pole, and they They came to the ship's boats afterward, took up another small pole which appeared where we were, swimming and bringing us to be worked with iron; also another bit of parrots, cotton threads in skeins, darts-

cane. a land nlant.L r and a small board. The what they had, with good will. As naked as crew of the caravel Nina also saw signs of their mothers bore them, and so the women, land, and a small plant covered with berries. though I did not see more than one young . . . .I admonished the men to keep a girl. All I saw were youths, well made with good lookout on the forecastle and to watch very handsome bodies and very good well for land and to him who should first cry countenances. Their hair short and coarse, out that he had seen land I would give a silk almost like the hairs of a horse's tail. They doublet besides the other rewards promised paint themselves some black, some white, by the Sovereigns which were 10,000 ma- others red and others of what color they can vedis to him who should first see it. Two find. Some paint the faces and others paint

genuine interest and pleasure. They in- laid to rest through historical research. structed him to return to the new-found Columbus did not, for example, have to lands with a larger fleet including soldiers prove that the world was round: All edu- and settlers. America had entered world cated people in Europe at the time ac- history, though Columbus insisted to his dy- cepted this as a given. Isabella did not have ing day that he had reached the Indies. to pawn her jewels to raise money for the expedition; though the Crown, following its wars against the Moors, was strapped for cash, the financial adviser Luis de Santan- his familiar story of Columbus has gel arranged a loan from the ample coffers been embellished to create an en- of the state police and from some Italian during popular legend. Some of the merchant bankers. And Columbus did not tales (though not all of them) have been set sail with a crew of hardened criminals.

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the whole body, some only round the eyes their bodies a small piece of cotton cloth. I and others only on the nose. They are them- saw many trees very unlike those of our selves neither black nor white. country. Branches growing in different ways On Saturday, as dawn broke, many of and all from one trunk; one twig is one form these people came and another is a dif- to the beach, all ferent shape and so youths. Their legs unlike that it is the are very straight, all greatest wonder of in one line, and no the world to see the belly. They came to diversity; thus one the ship in canoes, branch has leaves made out of the like those of a cane, trunk of a tree, all in and others like those one piece, and won- of a mastic tree; and derfully worked, on a single tree propelled with a there are five differ- paddle like a baker's ent kinds. The fish shovel, and go at so unlike ours that it marvelous speed. is wonderful. Some Bright green are the shape of do- trees, the whole land ries and of the finest so green that it is a colors, so bright that pleasure to look on there is not a man it. Gardens of the who would not be most beautiful trees astounded, and I ever saw. Later I would not take great came upon one man delight in seeing in a canoe going them. There are also from one island to whales. I saw no another. He had a beasts on land save little of their bread, parrots and lizards. about the size of a On shore I sent fist, a calabash of the people for water, water, a piece of some with arms. and brown earth, powdered then kneaded, and others with casks; and as it was some 'little some dried leaves which must be a thing distance I waited two hours for them. highly valued by them for they bartered with During that time I walked among the it at San Salvador. He also had with him a trees, which was the most beautiful thing native basket. The women wore in front of which I had ever seen.. , .

Only four men, accused of murdering a mainland he was seeking, but which island? town crier, took advantage of a promised No fewer than nine different possible is- amnesty, and even they were seasoned mar- lands have been identified from the few iners and acquitted themselves well on the ambiguous clues in Columbus's journal. voyage. The site favored by most experts is the Ba- More troublesome for historians have hamian island once called Watling's but re- been certain other mysteries and con- named San Salvador in 1924 to help solid- troversies. ify its claim. Where, for example, did the first landfall Did Columbus really come from Genoa? occur? We know it was a small island the Nearly every European nation has at one inhabitants called Guanahani and Colum- time or another laid some claim to him. bus christened San Salvador. It was in the Was he Jewish? Such conjecture originated Bahamas or thereabouts, far from the Asian in the 19th century and was promoted in

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1940 in Salvadore de Madriaga's vivid biog- feel sure we truly know the man. raphy, Christopher Columbus. But the evi- dence is circumstantial. Records in Genoa indicate that, whatever his more remote an- cestry, Columbus's family had been Chris- othing better illustrates history's tian for several generations. changing images of Columbus When and how in the mists of his root- N than the succession of portraits of less life did Columbus conceive of his auda- him that have appeared over the centuries. cious plan? Was it sheer inspiration bol- They show a man of many faces-hand- stered by rational research? Or did he some and stalwart, heavy and stolid, shad- come into some secret knowledge? Was he owed and vaguely sinister. Artistic interpre- really seeking the Indies? How was he fi- tation, like history, changes with the times. nally able to win royal backing? What were Yet, there should be little confusion his ships like?-no caravel wreck from that over the man's physical appearance. His period has ever been recovered. Scholars son Hemando, who should have known, and amateur sleuths have spent lifetimes said he was "a well-built man of more than trying to resolve these questions, usually average stature, the face long, the cheeks without notable success. somewhat high, his body neither fat nor Part of the problem lies with the passage lean. He had an aquiline nose and light col- of time. Although the record of Columbus ored eyes; his complexion too was light and by contemporaries is more substantial than tending to be red. In youth his hair was that of any other 15th-century explorer, sur- blond, but when he reached the age of 30 it viving accounts are often difficult to assess all turned white." from this distance. Whose version is to be The son went on to describe his father's trusted? The letters of Peter Martyr, the character: "In eating and drinking, and in courtier in Spain who never ventured to the adornment of his person, he was very the New World? The biography by Hernan- moderate and modest," Hemando wrote. do Columbus, the devoted son protective of "He was affable in conversation with his father's fame? The history of the New strangers and very pleasant to the members World by Bartolome de las Casas (1474- of his household, though with a certain 1566), the Dominican friar and champion gravity. He was so strict in matters of reli- of the Indians who never missed a chance gion that for fasting and saying prayers he to condemn the brutality of the early ex- might have been taken for a member of a plorers and colonists? Even the few extant religious order." writings of Columbus himself, who could Hernando may be guilty of some exag- be vague, contradictory and self-serving? geration. Columbus could not be too gentle Hero worship has further distorted his- and modest if he were to promote his vi- tory. We want-or used to want-our he- sion before skeptical courts and if he could roes to be larger than life. The result can be control a crew of rough seamen who sus- a caricature, a plaster saint inviting icono- pected they might be headed to their clasts to step forward with their own im- deaths. He could be harsh in meting out ages, which can also ignore the complexity punishment to seamen and in ordering pu- of human reality. nitive raids against Indian villages. Like oth- We are left, therefore, with enough ma- ers of that time, and to this day, he presum- terial to mold the Columbus we choose to ably saw no contradiction between his extol or excoriate, but not enough ever to behavior and his religious beliefs. By all ac-

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counts Columbus was a demonstrably pi- blockage of regular trade routes to the ous man. Late in life, his writings portrayed spices of the East, and the parlous times for a mind filled with mysticism and a belief in Christianity. Priests and popes were calling his divine mission to carry Christianity to for a new crusade to recapture Constan- all people and prepare them for the im- tinople and Jerusalem. All of this could pending end of the world. have nourished the dreams of a great ad- Of this mysticism, Hernando has noth- venture in an ambitious young man with ing to say. He is also frustratingly reticent nautical experience. or misleading about the genesis of his fa- The most significant mystery about Co- ther's consuming dream and even about lumbus concerns how he came up with his his origins. Columbus himself chose to re- idea for sailing west to the Indies. As in ev- veal very little about his early life. erything else, Columbus's own words on Every verifiable historical document, the subject obfuscate more than elucidate. however, indicates that Columbus was born It was his practice, writes the Italian histo- in Genoa, which was an independent city- rian Paolo Emilio Taviani, "never to tell ev- state (the lesser rival to Venice) whose ships erything to everyone, to say one thing to traded throughout the entire Mediterra- one man, something else to another, to re- nean world. He was probably born in 145 1, veal only portions of his arguments, clues, and both his father Domenico and his fa- and evidence accumulated over the years ther's father were wool weavers; his in his mind." Perhaps Columbus told so mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, was a many partial stories in so many different weaver's daughter. Christopher was proba- versions that, as Morison suspects, he him- bly their eldest child. Bartholomew, the self could no longer remember the origins chart-maker who would share many of Co- of his idea. lumbus's adventures, was a year or two In all probability he formulated the idea younger. The other children who grew to in Portugal sometime between 1476 and adulthood were a sister named Bianchetta 1481. Columbus had come to Portugal and a brother Giacomo, better known by quite literally by accident. When the Geno- the Spanish equivalent, Diego, who joined ese fleet he had shipped with was attacked Christopher on the second voyage. All in and destroyed in the summer of 1476, Co- all, the Columbuses of Genoa were fruitful lumbus was washed ashore at the Portu- and humble tradespeople-and nothing for guese town of Lagos. He made his way to a young man to be ashamed of. Lisbon, where the talk of seagoing explora- At a "tender age," as Columbus once tion was everywhere. He heard stories of wrote, he cast his lot with those who go to westering seamen who found islands tar sea. At first, he probably made short voy- out in the ocean and saw maps sprinkled ages as a crewman, and then longer ones with mythical islands. On voyages north on trading ships to the Genoese colony of perhaps as far as Iceland and south along Chios in the Aegean Sea. But even more the coast of Africa, he gained a taste for At- crucial to Columbus's development than lantic sailing. There may even be some- his ancestry or his birthplace was the tim- thing to the story of the unknown pilot ing of his birth. He was born two years be- from whom Columbus supposedly ob- fore the fall of Constantinople, Christen- tained secret knowledge of lands across the dom's eastern capital, to the Ottoman Turks ocean. But as far as anyone can be sure- in 1453. Young Columbus was to grow up and volumes have been written on the sub- hearing about the scourge of Islam, the ject-there was no sudden revelation, no

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blinding flash of inspiration. culations to deceive those he looked to for Nor did Columbus derive his plan from support? All that can be said with assurance a careful reading of scholars. He was not is that Columbus was by then a man con- then, and never became, a man who read sumed by an enthusiasm that willed away to learn; he read to gather support for what obstacles and brooked no doubt. he already thought to be true. His familiar- His marriage in Portugal may have indi- ity with the travel accounts of Marco Polo rectly contributed to his growing convic- and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a tion. In 1479, he wed Felipa Perestrello de 14th-century collection of travelers' tales Moniz, a daughter of lesser nobility. Her from around the world, did not so much widowed mother showed Columbus the inform his concept as inflame a mind al- journals and maps left by her husband, who ready stoked with the dry tinder of desire. had sailed for Prince Henry the Navigator. From other sources-from a recent Latin From the papers of Bartolomeo Perestrello translation of Claudius Ptolemy's second- and other Portuguese seamen, Columbus century Geography, which described many concluded, his son Hernando wrote, "for Southeast Asian spice islands, to Pierre certain that there were many lands West of dlAilly's Imago Mundi, a compendium of the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, and contemporary knowledge about the world that it was possible to sail to, and discover which argued that the Western Sea was not them." The social position of his wife's fam- very wide-Columbus made some calcula- ily also smoothed the way for Columbus's tions of global distances. Like d'Ailly, he introduction to the court of Portugal's King conveniently managed to constrict the un- John 11. known he proposed to challenge, grossly When Columbus finally laid out his plan underestimating the distance from Europe before John 11, probably in 1483 or 1484, to Japan. Had he unwittingly deceived him- the court cosmographers, a Portuguese his- self? Or had he deliberately contrived cal- torian wrote, "considered the words of Christovae Colom as vain, simply founded on imagina- tion, or things like that Isle Cypango of Marco Polo." Columbus refused to ac- cept rejection. By this time, his wife had died, and in 1485 he took their son, Diego, and left Portugal for Palos, across the border in Spain. Tradition has it that Columbus and little Diego, penniless and hungry, got off the ship and trudged along a dusty road to the Franciscan monastery of La Rabida. He knocked at the portal to beg Columbus triumphant, 1493. To Ferdinand and Isabella, Colwn- for water and bread. If the bus presented not only trophies and treasures froin his voyage but legend is true, the father a bold scheme for colonizizing the new-found lands. may have been taking the

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son there to be a boarding student, freeing just after the Moorish capital of Granada himself to pursue his dream. fell to the Christian forces. He had been led Though a secretive man and often por- to believe that, after the burden of the pro- trayed as a loner, Columbus must not have longed war was lifted, the queen especially been without charm, even charisma. He might be disposed to give her approval. had insinuated himself into the influential Some writers have let themselves imagine society of Lisbon and would do so again in that Isabella saw more in Columbus than Spain. "Columbus's ability to thrust himself an insistent supplicant. Such speculation of into the circles of the great was one of the a sexual relationship between the two, most remarkable things about him," writes Taviani says, is "a sheer fairy-tale, rejected Harvard historian John H. Parry. It was also by all historians." in his character that he seldom acknowl- Nothing seemed to change with the fall edged the help of others. of Granada. Columbus was turned away, At La Rabida, Columbus won the fnend- this time with an air of finality. Behind the ship and confidence of a Franciscan official scenes, however, Luis de Santangel, the knowledgeable in cosmography and chief financial adviser, interceded with as- through him gained introductions to surances to the queen that financing the ex- wealthy patrons and eventually his first au- pedition need not be an insurmountable dience with Ferdinand and Isabella. They obstacle. No one knows why the king and referred his proposal to a commission of queen finally relented. They might have learned men at the University of Sala- been persuaded by the argument that they manca. Washington Irving, in his fanciful had little to lose and much to gain if this biography, has the commissioners saying importunate foreigner just happened to be that the "rotundity of the earth was as yet a on to something. matter of mere speculation." Many of them no doubt deserved Irving's condemnation as a "mass of inert bigotry," but they were right (and Columbus wrong) in their judg- fter his first voyage, when he was ment that Asia could not be reached by the toast of Barcelona, Columbus ships sailing west. They recommended that A supposedly faced down his first the monarchs reject the venture. critics. At a banquet, some noblemen in- Columbus was nothing if not persistent. sisted that if Columbus had not undertaken With a modest retainer from the court, he the enterprise, someone else, a Spaniard continued to solicit support from influen- and not a foreigner, would have made the tial courtiers. While in Cordoba, waiting for same discovery. At this, Columbus called some sign of royal encouragement, he met for an egg and had it placed on the table. Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, a peasant "Gentlemen," he was reported to have said, woman, and they became lovers. In August pointing to the egg, "you make it stand 1488 she gave birth to an illegitimate son, here, not with crumbs, salt, etc. (for anyone Hernando. (They never married, and some- knows how to do it with meal or sand), but time after his first voyage, they drifted naked and without anything at all, as I will, apart. He likely felt a peasant woman was who was the first to discover the Indies." beneath his station.) When it was Columbus's turn, he crushed Through another fnar at La Rabida, Co- one end of the egg and had no trouble mak- lumbus gained other audiences with the ing it stand up on the table. monarchs in 149 1 and again in early 1492, The anecdote has proved irresistible to

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historians and storytellers to illustrate the dians to be sold as slaves in Spain. The best singular role of Columbus in history. But it that can be said in defense of Columbus is never happened-one more Columbian that he was now a desperate man. His myth. The story was not only apocryphal, power to rule La Isabela was waning. His Morison points out, but it "had already visions of wealth were fading. He feared done duty in several Italian biographies of that his influence back in Spain would be other characters." irreparably diminished by critical reports In reality, Columbus would not so easily from recalcitrant officers who had returned put down the critics who dogged him the to Spain. And he had failed again to find a rest of his life-and through history. If only mainland. His desperation was such that he he had stopped with the first voyage, the forced all his crew to sign a declaration echo of those fanfares in that, at Cuba, they had in- Barcelona might not deed reached the main- have faded so fast. land of Cathay. Sick A fleet of 17 and discouraged, he ships, carrying sailed home in some 1,200 people, 1496. left Cadiz in the au- The third voy- tumn of 1493 with age did nothing to instructions to es- restore his reputa- tablish a perma- tion. Departing nent settlement from Seville in on the island of May 1498, he Hispaniola. There, steered a south- near the present erly course and city of Puerto Plata reached an island in the Dominican off the northeastern Republic, Colum- coast of South Amer- bus built a fort, ica, which he named church, and houses Trinidad, for the Holy for what would be his Trinity. A few days colonial capital, La later, he saw a coast- Col~~~nb~tsdisgraced, 1500. Charged with mal- Isabela. The expen- feasance as governor of Hispaniola, Col~trnbus line to the south. Co- ment was disastrous. returned to Svain a prisoner in chains. lumbus recognized The site had no real that the tremendous harbor, insufficient rainfall, and little vege- volume of fresh water flowing from the Ori- tation. Sickness and dissension brought noco River was evidence of a large land, work to a standstill and the colony to the but he failed to appreciate that this might point of starvation. Expeditions into the be a continent or to pursue his investiga- mountains failed to find any rich lodes of tions. Instead, his mind drifted into specu- gold. As Las Casas wrote, they "spread ter- lation that the river must originate in the ror among the Indians in order to show Earthly Paradise. Bound to medieval think- them how strong and powerful the Chris- ing, the man who showed the way across tians were." Bloody warfare ensued. the ocean lost his chance to have the New With little gold to show for his efforts, World bear his name. The honor would Columbus ordered a shipment of Taino In- soon go to a man with a more open-minded

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perspective, Amerigo Vespucci, who on his move me hence, you will aid me to go to second voyage of exploration (150 1-2) con- Rome and on other pilgrimages." cluded that the South American landmass was not Asia but a new continent. Columbus turned his back on South America and sailed to Santo Domingo to olumbus in his last years was a attend to the colony there. He found that dispirited man who felt himself to his brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, had be misunderstood and unappreci-.. lost control. Some of the colonists had ated. He sought to define himself in a re- mutinied, and the crown had dispatched a markable manuscript now known as Libro new governor empowered to do anything de las profecias, or The Book of Prophecies. necessary to restore order. It was then that Between the third and fourth voyages, Co- Columbus was arrested, stripped of his ti- lumbus collected passages of biblical scrip- tles, and sent back in irons to Spain in Oc- tures and the words of a wide range of clas- tober 1500. sical and medieval authors. According to It was an ignominious end to Colum- his own description, this was a notebook bus's authority and to his fame in his life- "of sources, statements, opinions and time. The crown eventually restored his ti- prophecies on the subject of the recovery of tles, but never again was he allowed to God's Holy City and Mount Zion, and on serve as viceroy. The monarchs now were the discovery and evangelization of the is- under no illusions about Columbus. He had lands of the Indies and of all other peoples failed as a colonial administrator, and they and nations." had strong doubts about the validity of his The document reveals the depth and claims to have reached the Indies. passion of Columbus's belief that he had a Columbus was given permission for one special relationship with God and was act- final voyage, which lasted from 1502 to ing as the agent of God's scheme for his- 1504. He was specifically barred from re- tory. He marshaled evidence from the turning to Santo Domingo. Instead, he ex- prophecies of the Bible to show that his re- plored the coast of Central America and at- cent discoveries were only the prelude to tempted without success to establish a the realization of a greater destiny. It was as settlement in Panama. if he saw his role as being not unlike John Historians cite the last voyage as one of the Baptist's in relation to Christ. The his many "missed opportunities." With luck wealth from his voyages and discoveries and more persistence, Columbus might had given the king and queen of Spain the have stumbled upon the Maya civilization means to recover the Holy Land for Chris- or the Pacific Ocean. As it was, he barely tendom, and thereby he had set the stage made it back to Spain. He was marooned a for the grandiose climax of Christian his- year on Jamaica, where he wrote a pathetic tory, the salvation of all the world's peoples letter to the monarchs. "I implore Your and their gathering at Zion on the eve of Highnesses' pardon," he wrote. "I am the end of time. ruined as I have said. Hitherto I have wept Most historians who studied the docu- for others; now have pity upon me, Heaven, ment have tended to dismiss it as the prod- and weep for me, earth! I came to Your uct of his troubled and possibly senile Highnesses with honest purpose and sin- mind. His other writings at the time some- cere zeal, and I do not lie. I humbly beg times betrayed a mind verging on paranoia. Your Highnesses that, if it please God to re- Delno C. West, a historian who has recently

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COLUMBUS'S MYSTERIOUS SIGNATURE

In 1498, Columbus instructed all of his heirs bined religious and nautical symbolism. The to continue to "sign with my signature unifying idea is the medieval association of which I now employ which is an X with an S the Virgin Mary with Stella Maris, the indis- over it and an M with a Roman A over it and pensable navigational star also known as Po- over them an S and then a Greek Y with an S laris, or the North Star. The first cross bar over it, preserving the relation of the lines stands for StellA MariS. The vertical "mast" and the points." At the top, thus, is the letter stands for "Stella Ave Mans," after the ves- S between two dots. On the palindromic sec- per hymn "Ave, stella twaris." By design, the ond row are the letter S A S, also preceded, structure represents both a Christian cross separated, and ended with dots. The third and a ship's mast. The line X M Y may have row has the letters X M and a Greek Y, with- one meaning, "Jesus cum Maris sit nobis in out dots. Below that is the final signature, via" (an invocation with which Columbus Xpo Ferens, a Greco-Latin form of his given opened much of his writing), with the Y name. representing the fork in the road and the To this day no one can decipher the symbolism for his having chosen the hard meaning Columbus had in mind, but it al- way to destiny's fulfillment. Fleming sug- most certainly bears on his religious out- vests a double meaning. The X and Y at ei- look. The sirnolest ex- therend of the bottom planations hold that the line could also stand for letters stand for seven "Christophorus," his words. It has been sug- name and destiny, and gested that the four letters "Jacobus," for "St. stand for "Servus Sum James," whose feast day Altissimi Salvatoris," for and Christopher's are the "Servant I Am of the Most same and who is, not inci- High Savior." The three dentally, the patron saint letters of the third line of Spain, Santiago-Sant could be an invocation to 1 Yaeo." Christ Jesus and Marv. or Fleming's crypto- to Christ, Mary, andJ~oseph.Another pro- graphic skills have uncovered other clues in posed solution is that the seven letters are the signature to Columbus's "religious the initials for "Spiritus Sanctus Altissimi imagination." But, for understanding Co- Salvator Xristus Maria Yesus." lumbus the mystical discoverer, Fleming John Fleming, a medievalist at Princeton draws insight from his associations with University, believes he has cracked the code, Mary, Christopher, and Santiago. He writes: finding it to be an "acrostic of considerable "In Columbus's heavenly city, the Virgin complexity committed to a more or less Mary stands ever firm between her two learned and hermetic mystical theology." Christ-bearing guards, Christophorus on the Columbus, he concludes, was borrowing one hand, San Yago the Moorslayer on the from two medieval traditions in formal sig- other. And in the larger meaning of these natures, that of the church worthies, like St. two saints, both celebrated by the Roman Francis, who devised intricate crucigrams, church on a single day, which was of course and that of the church mariners who often Columbus's name-day, we may see adum- included in their craft marks anchors, masts, brated much of the glory, and much of the fishhooks, and so forth. For his signature, tragedy, of the European encounter with the Fleming says, Columbus seems to have com- New World." From The Mysterious History of Columbus, copvrighf @ 1991 by Alfred A. Knopi. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

translated the Book of Prophecies, suspects 1492, it undermines the popular image of that historians were "reluctant to admit Columbus as a man of the modern age who that the first American hero was influenced applied reason in conceiving his venture. It by prophetic ideas." If the book indeed re- exposes him as a person thoroughly mired fleets Columbus's thinking even before in the medieval world, obsessed with escha-

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tology, and driven by a supposed call from Contrary to legend, he was neither desti- God to cany out a mission of apocalyptic tute nor alone at the end. His two sons dimensions. were with him, in a comfortable home. We West contends that this spirituality, cannot be sure of the traditional story, that which fed Columbus's apocalyptic view of he died believing he had reached the In- history, lay at the heart of the man and dies. He never gave explicit expression to shaped his actions. Rather than some map any recognition that he had found some- or unknown pilot's tale, this may have been thing other than Asia. All the evidence, the "secret knowledge" that inspired Co- though, suggests that he died unsatisfied. lumbus. Certainly, without his unwavering His death went unheralded. There was belief in himself and his destiny, Columbus no public ceremony of mourning and no might not have sustained the single-minded recorded expressions of grief at the royal persistence it took to win support for the court. The man who rose from obscurity enterprise and to see it through. "The Lord died in obscurity. His remains have been purposed that there should be something moved so many times over the centuries, clearly miraculous in this matter of the voy- from Spain to the New World and presum- age to the Indies," Columbus wrote in the ably back again, that no one is sure of his Prophecies, "so as to encourage me and final resting place. others in the. . . Household of God." Begin- In the first century after his voyages, Co- ning in 1493, he began signing nearly all of lumbus languished in the backwaters of his- his letters and documents Christoferens, a tory. His reputation suffered from his many Latinization of his given name that means failures as a colonial governor. The 15 19- "Christ-bearer." 1522 Magellan circumnavigation left no New attention to the spiritual side of Co- doubt about the magnitude of Columbus's lumbus does not, however, necessarily error in thinking he had reached the Indies. bring this complex man into focus. Images Conquering explorers such as Cortes and of a superstitious spiritualist and the mod- Pizarro won greater immediate fame by ern explorer must be superimposed to pro- their dazzling exploits against the Aztecs duce a stereoscopic picture of Columbus, and Incas. Cartographers saw fit to name revealing the depth and heights of the men- the New World after Vespucci, not Colum- tal terrain through which he traveled as he bus. Books of general history scarcely men- found America and then lost his way in fail- tioned Columbus or ignored him alto- ure, self-pity, and a fog of mysticism. gether. Within 50 years of Columbus's death, Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican bishop who extolled and defended the Indi- olumbus was probably no more ans, produced the first revisionist history. than 55 years old when he died on In his History of the Indies, Las Casas wrote May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. eloquently of the atrocities committed But he was much older in body and in tor- against the Indians. To sail to the islands mented mind. His last voyages had left him Columbus had discovered, Las Casas wrote, crippled with arthritis and weak from fever. one needed only to follow the floating He was reduced to a sad figure, spending corpses of Indians that marked the way. His his last years in disgrace while stubbornly accounts of torture and killings docu- pressing his claims for the restoration of ti- mented the so-called Black Legend of tles and the wealth due him. Spanish cruelty that was seized upon by the

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English, Dutch, and French to fan the fires most exalted hero. In him the new nation of national rivalries and religious hatreds. without its own history and mythology As the Age of Discovery flourished dur- found a hero from the distant past, one ing the late 16th century, Columbus began seemingly free of association with the Euro- to be rescued from oblivion. He was cele- pean colonial powers and Old-world tyr- brated in poetry and plays, especially in It- anny. Americans invoked Columbus, the aly and later in Spain. A glimmer of histo- solitary individual who had challenged the ry's future hero could be seen in a popular unknown, as they contemplated the dan- play by Lope de Vega in 1614. In The New gers and promise of their own wilderness World Discovered by Christopher Columbus, frontier. "Instead of ravaging the newly he portrayed Columbus as a dreamer up found countries," Washington Irving wrote against the establishment, a man of singular in his 1828 biography, Columbus "sought to purpose who triumphed, the embodiment colonize and cultivate them, to civilize the of that spirit driving humans to explore and natives." discover. This would be the Columbus Americans It was in the New World, though, that knew and honored throughout the 19th Columbus would be transformed almost and into the present century. With the in- beyond human recognition into an icon. flux of millions of immigrants after the Civil By the late 17th century, people in the War, he was even made to assume the role British colonies of North America were be- of ethnic hero. In response to adverse Prot- ginning to think of themselves as Ameri- estant attitudes and to affirm their own cans and sought to define themselves in Americanism, Irish Catholic immigrants or- their own terms and symbols. Samuel Sew- ganized the Knights of Columbus in 1882. ell, a Boston judge, suggested that the new The fraternity's literature described Colum- lands should rightfully be named for Co- bus as "a prophet and a seer" and an inspi- lumbus, "the magnanimous hero. . . who ration to each knight to become "a better was manifestly appointed by God to be the Catholic and a better citizen." Catholics in Finder out of these lands." The idea took both America and Europe launched a cam- root. In time, writers and orators used the paign to canonize Columbus on the name "Columbia" as a poetic name for grounds that he had brought the "Christian America. Joel Barlow's poem The Vision of faith to half the world." The movement Columbus, appearing in 1787, has an aged failed not because of Columbus's brutal Columbus lamenting his fate until he is vis- treatment of Indians but mainly because of ited by an angel who transports him to the the son he had sired out of wedlock. New World to see what his discovery had Columbus's reputation was never brought to pass. There he could glimpse higher than on the 400th anniversary of his the "fruits of his cares and children of his first voyage. There were parades and fire- toil." works, the naming of streets and dedicating Indeed, the young republic was busy of monuments. The World's Columbian Ex- planning the 300th anniversary of the land- position in Chicago, with its lavish displays fall, in October 1792, when it named its of modern technology, was less a com- new national capital the District of Colum- memoration of the past than the self-confi- bia-perhaps to appease those who de- dent celebration of a future that Americans manded that the entire country be desig- were eager to shape and enjoy. Americans nated Columbia. Next to George ascribed to Columbus all the human virtues Washington, Columbus was the nation's that were most prized in that time of geo-

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graphic and industrial expansion, heady op- ing explorers looked upon the islands and timism, and unquestioning belief in mainland as an inconvenience, the barrier progress. A century before, Columbus had standing in their way to Asia that must be been the symbol of American promise; now breached or circumnavigated. he was the symbol of American success. As early as Peter Martyr, Europeans The 20th century has dispelled much of tried to assimilate the new lands into what that. We have a new Columbus for a new they already knew or thought, rejecting the age. He is the creation of generations that utter newness of the discovery. This was, have known devastating world wars, the after all, during the Renaissance, a period struggle against imperialism, and economic of rediscovering the past while reaching expansion that ravages nature without nec- out to new horizons. And so the peoples of essarily satisfying basic human needs. In the New World were described in terms of this view, the Age of Discovery initiated by the Renaissance-ancient image of the "no- Columbus was not the bright dawning of a ble savage," living in what classical writers glorious epoch but an invasion, a conquest, had described as the innocent "Golden and Columbus himself less a symbol of Age." The inhabitants of the New World, progress than of oppression. Martyr wrote, "seem to live in that golden Columbus scholarship has changed. world of which old writers speak so much, 8 - More historians are writing books from the wherein men lived simply and innocently standpoint of the Indians. They are examin- without enforcement of laws, without quar- ing the consequences-the exchange of reling, judges and libels, content only to plants and animals between continents, the satisfy nature, without further vexation for spread of deadly diseases, the swift decline knowledge of things to come." of the indigenous Americans in the face of The innocence of the indigenous Ameri- European inroads. The Quincentennial cans was more imagined than real. To one happens to come at a time of bitter debate degree or another, they knew warfare, bru- among Americans over racism, sexism, im- tality, slavery, human sacrifice, and canni- perialism, Eurocentrism, and other "isms." balism. Columbus did not, as charged, "in- Kirkpatrick Sale's 1990 book about Colum- troduce" slavery to the New World; the bus said it all in its title, The Conquest of practice existed there before his arrival, Paradise. though his shipments of Tainos to Spain presaged a transoceanic traffic in slaves un- precedented in history. This idealized image of people living in as Columbus a great man, or nature persisted until it was too late to merely an agent of a great learn who the Americans really were and, accomplishment, or perhaps not accepting them for what they were, to find a very admirableman at all? His standing a way to live and let live. Disease and con- in history has varied whenever posterity re- quest wiped out the people and their cul- evaluated the consequences of Europe's tures. In their place Europeans had begun discovery of America. Ultimately, Colum- to "invent" America, as the Mexican histo- bus's reputation in history is judged in rela- rian Edmundo O'Gorman contends, in tion to the place that is accorded America their own image and for their own pur- in history. poses. They had set upon a course, writes Europeans took a long time appreciat- historian Alfred W. Crosby, of creating ing their discovery. Columbus and succeed- "Neo-Europes." This was the America that

WQ AUTUMN 1991 8 1 COLUMBUS

1992: CEREBRATION, NOT CELEBRATION

It was in 1982 that I first became aware that sles, tuberculosis, the plague-to which the the 500th anniversary of Columbus's 1492 native peoples had no immunities. Rec- Voyage of Discovery was a minefield, where ognizing the dimensions of that calamity, the prudent celebrant stepped lightly and many Westerners acknowledge that there is guardedly. little to celebrate. In Spain, where a 500th To my long-time friend Ramon, in an in- Year World's Fair will open in Seville, many stitute attached to the foreign ministry in of that country's intellectuals are decrying Madrid, I said on the telephone one day that what they call a 15th- and 16th-century year, "Ramon, here at Florida we're begin- genocidio. ning to get interested in the Columbus Dis- In the margins of the debate, native de- covery Quincentenary." scendants and their advocates are publiciz- "Why do you say Columbus?" he re- ing a long list of grievances against the Cau- sponded. "He was an Italian mercenary. It casians who abused their liberties, was Spain that discovered America, not Co- expropriated their lands, and despoiled an lumbus." environmental paradise. On July 17-21, "But, Ramon," I protested, "we can't cel- 1990, some 400 Indian people, including a ebrate 1492 in the United States without delegation from the United States, met in mentioning Columbus." Quito, Ecuador, to plan public protests "In your country," he lectured me, "Co- against 500 years of European "invasion" lumbus Day is an Italian holiday. But the and "oppression." Even before that, the first ships, the crews, the money were all Span- sign of reaction in the United States had al- ish. Columbus was a hired hand." ready come when, in December 1989, repre- "But-" sentatives of the American Indian Move- "So when Cape Canaveral space center ment, supported by a group of university holds its 100th anniversary, are you going to students, began picketing the "First Encoun- call it the Werner von Braun celebration?" ters" archaeology exhibition mounted by the I was grateful to Ramon for alerting me, Florida Museum of Natural History as it trav- in his way, to the sensitive character of this elled from Gainesville to Tampa, Atlanta, anniversary. Soon afterwards I learned that and Dallas. (In Tampa, their presence was "Discovery," too, is a term freighted with welcomed because it boosted paid atten- ethnic and cultural contentions, as many de- dance.) In 1992, a loose confederation of scendants of the native peoples in the Ameri- North American Indian groups will picket in cas argue against its Eurocentric and pa- all U.S. cities where the Columbus replica ternalistic coloring. "We were already ships will dock. They seek, one of their lead- here," they remind me. And they were here ers told me, "not confrontation but media so long ago, 10 to 25,000 years the an- attention to present-day Native American thropologists say. I was left to wonder, problems." which was the Old World and which was the African Americans also remind their fel- New? low citizens that the events of 1492 and af- As the past ten years have shown, the terwards gave rise to the slave trade. And Spanish-Italian tension has softened, but the Jews appropriately notice that 1492 was the European-Native American disjunction has year when they were forcibly expelled from hardened, as historians, epidemiologists, their Spanish homeland. In a counter-coun- moralists, romanticists, and native spokes- teraction in all this Quincentenary skirmish- persons have clashed over the benefits, if ing, however, the National Endowment for any, that European entrance onto the Ameri- the Humanities decided not to fund a pro- can stage brought the societies of both posed television documentary about the worlds, particularly this one. early contact period because, reportedly, it Certainly huge numbers of indigenous was too biased against the Europeans. people died as the result of the collision: (Spain, by contrast, is acting uncommonly some, it is true, from the sword, but by far large-minded: It has agreed to fund the the majority from the Europeans' unwitting Smithsonian-Carlos Fuentes television pro- introduction of pathogens-smallpox, mea- duction, "The Buried Mirror," a show that is

WQ AUTUMN 1991 82 COLUMBUS

highly critical of Spain's colonial practices.) third now being stripped of its funds. It is this "politically correct" dynamic But now the good news: In anticipation that, most likely, will keep 1992 from being of the 500th anniversary an enormous quite the exuberant and careless celebration amount of intellectual activity has occurred, that the Bicentennial was in 1976. in the form of archival discoveries, archaeo- Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Americans felt logical excavations, museum and library ex- comfortable with the Bicentennial because hibitions, conferences, and publications. it reinforced their ethnic and cultural givens Some 30 new and upcoming adult titles (Plymouth Rock, Virginia, Washington, Jef- have been enumerated by Publishers ferson, the English language, Northern Eu- Weekly. Over 100 exhibitions and confer- ropean immigration, etc.). Today, nervous ences have been counted by the National about what is happening to "their" country Endowment for the Humanities. This re- and learning that citizens of Hispanic origins markable efflorescence of original research are projected soon be the largest U.S. minor- and scholarship will leave a lasting legacy of ity, the old-line white majority may not be understanding and good. On the twin princi- enthusiastic about celebrating the 500th coming of the Hispanics-espe- cially since they sense no continuing need for Columbus as a unifying princi- ple or symbol. What is likely to happen in 1992? Oc- casional public cele- brations and obser- vances will be produced by civic, ethnic, and cultural bodies. Reproduc- tions of Columbus's ships will arrive in various ports from Spain. Tall ships may parade in New York harbor. Fire- works will explode Father of a country he never knew. This 1893 painting establishes Co- here and there. Peo- l~~inb~~swith Lincoln and W(~.s/~ingtonas America's "holy trinity." ple will view two television mini-series and read countless pies that cerebration is more valuable than ambivalent newspaper stories. celebration and that correcting one para- The Federal Quincentenary Jubilee Com- graph in our children's schoolbooks is mission that was appointed to superintend worth more than a half-million dollars our exultations is in disarray, its chairman worth of fireworks exploded over Biscayne forced out on a charge of mishandling Bay, 1992 should be the best 1492 anniver- funds, its coffers empty of federal dollars, its sary ever. principal private donor, Texaco, pulling the -Michael Gannon plug. Some states, and numerous individual cities (especially those named after Colum- bus, 63 at last count), have plans for obser- vances, large or small. Florida which has the best reasons, geographically and temporally, Michael Cannon is Director of the Institute to do something, has no state-wide plans, for Early Contact Period Studies at the Uni- two commissions having collapsed and a versity of Florida.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 83 COLUMBUS

took its place in world history. America and its original conqueror. Colum- In the 18th century, however, European bus, Johnson said, had to travel "from intellectuals did engage in a searching re- court to court, scorned and repulsed as a appraisal. A scientific movement, encour- wild projector, an idle promiser of king- aged by the French naturalist Georges- doms in the clouds: nor has any part of the Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), world had reason to rejoice that he found at spread the idea that America was somehow last reception and employment.'' inferior to the Old World. As evidence, Buf- The French philosopher Abbe Guil- fon offered denigrating comparisons be- laume-Thomas Raynal (17 13-1 796) chal- tween the "ridiculous" tapir and the ele- lenged others to consider the following phant, the llama and the camel, and the questions: Has the discovery of America "cowardly" puma and the noble lion. been useful or harmful to mankind? If use- Moreover, Old-world animals introduced ful, how can its usefulness be magnified? If there fared poorly, declining in health and harmful, how can the harm be amelio- size, with the sole exception of the pig. It rated? He offered a prize for the essay that was Buffon's thesis that America suffered would best answer those questions. an arrested development because of a hu- The respondents whose essays have sur- mid climate, which he attributed to its rela- vived were evenly divided between opti- tively late emergence from the waters of mists and pessimists. Although "Europe is the Biblical flood. indebted to the New World for a few conve- Buffon's ideas enjoyed a vogue through- niences, and a few luxuries," Raynal him- out the 18th century and inspired more ex- self observed, these were "so cruelly ob- treme arguments about "America's weak- tained, so unequally distributed, and so ness." Not only were the animals inferior, obstinately disputed" that they may not jus- so were the Americans, and even Europe- tify the costs. In conclusion, the abbe ans who settled there soon degenerated. asked, if we had it to do over again, would Unlike the proud patriots in colonial we still want to discover the way to Amer- and post-Revolutionary North America, Eu- ica and India? "Is it to be imagined," ropean intellectuals began expressing Raynal speculated, "that there exists a be- strong reservations about the benefits of the ing infernal enough to answer this question American discovery. There was no gainsay- in the affirmative?" ing its importance. Few disputed the opin- Pangs of guilt and expressions of moral ion of Adam Smith: "The discovery of outrage were futile, however; nothing America, and that of a passage to the East stayed the momentum of European expan- Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the sion in America. Most of the immigrants two greatest and most important events re- had never heard of the "American weak- corded in the history of mankind." ness" or read the intellectuals who ideal- But there were negative assessments, ized or despised the Indians or deplored not unlike today's. The anti-imperialist Europe's bloodstained seizure of the lands. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) wrote: "The By the millions-particularly after the in- Europeans have scarcely visited any coast troduction of the steamship and on through but to gratify avarice, and extend corrup- World War I-immigrants flocked to a tion; to arrogate dominion without rights, promised land where people could make and practice cruelty without incentive." He something of themselves and prepare a bet- was also one of the first to make an unflat- ter life for their children. There had been tering connection between the conquest of nothing quite like this in history. This was

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reflected in the image of Columbia. Little America has become controversial. wonder that Columbus's standing in history And perhaps the greatest controversy of was never higher than it was when the all is whether or not to celebrate the achievements and promise of America Quincentennial. The critics who advocate seemed so bright and were extravagantly not celebrating it are correct, if to celebrate proclaimed at home and abroad. perpetuates a view of the encounter that ig- The "primary factor behind our [cur- nores the terrible toll. This must be ac- rent] reassessment of the encounter," knowledged and memorialized in the hope Crosby writes,"is a general reassessment of that nothing like it is ever repeated. Even the role of rapid change, even catastrophe, so, it would be unhistorical to ignore the in human history, and even the history of more salutary consequences. The New the earth and of the universe." The earlier World, for example, changed Europe faith in progress was founded on a Western through new ideas, new resources, and belief that change came gradually and al- new models of political and social life that most invariably for the better. In 19th-cen- would spread through the world. William tury science, the uniformitarian geology of H. McNeill is one of many historians who Charles Lye11 and the evolutionary theory of believe this led to the Enlightenment of the Charles Darwin were widely accepted be- 18th century and thus to the philosophical, cause they seemed to confirm the idea of political, and scientific foundations of mod- progress: The present world and its inhabi- ern Western civilization. It should not be tants were the products not of global disas- overlooked that this is the kind of society ters and multiple creations but of slow and that encourages and tolerates the revision- steady change. ists who condemn its many unforgivable By contrast, Crosby observes, the 20th transgressions in the New World. century has experienced the two worst Of course, attributing so much to any wars in history, genocide, the invention of one historical development makes some more ominous means of destruction, revo- historians uneasy. In cautioning against the lutions and the collapse of empires, ram- "presentism" in much historical interpreta- pant population growth, and the threat of tion, Herbert Butterfield recalled "the ecological disaster. Catastrophism, not schoolboy who, writing on the results of steady progress, is the modern paradigm. Columbus's discovery of America, enumer- Even the universe was born, many scien- ated amongst other things the execution of tists now believe, in one explosive mo- Charles I, the war of the Spanish Succes- ment-the Big Bang. sion and the French Revolution." No one "The rapidity and magnitude of change will ever know what the world and subse- in our century," Crosby concludes, "has quent events would have been like if the prepared us to ask different questions about discovery had not been made, or if it had the encounter than the older schools of sci- not occurred until much later. But the im- entists and scholars asked." pact of that discovery can hardly be under- estimated. And it did start with Christopher Columbus. That brings up another issue central to f Abbe Raynal held his essay contest to- the Quincentenary debates: Columbus's day, the pessimists might outnumber responsibility for all that followed. It must the optimists. Indeed, almost every- be remembered who he was-not who we thing about Columbus and the discovery of wish he had been. He was a European

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Christian of the 15th century sailing for the whereas the great majority managed to crown of Spain. There can be no expiation, have only a negative share of the con- only understanding. His single-mindedness quest. . . . One of our worst defects, our and boldness, as well as the magnitude of best fictions, is to believe that our miseries his achievement, give him heroic standing. have been imposed on us from abroad, that Others did not have Columbus's bold idea others, for example, the conquistadores, to sail across the unknown ocean, or if they have always been responsible for our prob- did, they never acted upon it. Columbus lems. . . . Did they really do it? We did it; we did. In so many other respects, he failed to are the conquistadores." rise above his milieu and set a more worthy example, and so ended up a tragic figure. But he does not deserve to bear alone the blame for the consequences of his auda- eople have choices, but they do not cious act. always choose well. One wishes Co- We must resist the temptation to shift P lumbus had acquitted himself more blame for our behavior to someone dead nobly, in the full knowledge that, even if he and gone. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian had, others who came after would have al- novelist, finds little to admire in the early most surely squandered the opportunity Spanish conquerors but recognizes the presented to them to make a truly fresh dangers inherent in transferring to them an start in human history-a new world in inordinate share of the blame for modem more than the geographic sense. But America. wishes, yesterday's self-congratulation or "Why have the post-colonial republics today's self-flagellation, are not history. of the Americas-republics that might have Columbus's failings, as well as his ambi- been expected to have deeper and broader tions and courage, are beyond historical notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity- doubt-and are all too human. The mythic failed so miserably to improve the lives of Columbus of our creation is something their Indian citizens?" Vargas Llosa asks. else. His destiny, it seems, is to serve as a "Immense opportunities brought by the barometer of our self-confidence, our civilization that discovered and conquered hopes and aspirations, our faith in progress, America have been beneficial only to a mi- and the capacity of humans to create a nority, sometimes a very small one; more just society.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 86 BACKGROUND BOOKS

COLUMBUS AND THE LABYRINTH OF HISTORY

istorians treat it as axiomatic that each From European scholars, however, a differ- H new generation, by building on past ent, more plausible Columbus has emerged. scholarship, knows more than those that went From Jacques Heers's Christophe Colomb before. By this logic, we must know more about (Hachette, 1981), which showed a typical mer- Columbus than scholars did in 1892 during the chant mariner of his time looking for profitable fourth Centenary. Unfortunately, that is not the opportunities wherever fortune took him, to case (or at least it was not 10 years ago). Alain Milhou's Colon y su mentalidad Popularly, much lore that was common cur- mesianic en el ambiente franciscanista espa- rency about Columbus a century ago has been iiol (Casa-Museo de Colon, 1983), which de- lost, and, in scholarship, few American histori- picted a mystic who believed he was helping ans now specialize in the sorts of topics-navi- spread the Christian message to all the world, a gation, shipbuilding, exploration, mariners and more complex Columbus has taken shape. Two merchants, etc.-that once constituted our current biographies in English embody this knowledge of the "Age of Discovery." Instead new understanding. Oxford historian Felipe there is an increasingly acrimonious debate Femandez-Armesto reveals a Columbus (Ox- about Columbus-and, by extension, about Eu- ford, 1991) who was "the socially ambitious, so- ropean world dominance. The current vilifica- cially awkward parvenu; the autodidact, intel- tion of Columbus, however, is not necessarily lectually aggressive but easily cowed; the more accurate than the uncritical praise of a embittered escapee from distressing realities; century ago. the adventurer inhibited by fear." And John No- Washington Irving's three-volume Life and ble Wilford's The Mysterious History of Co- Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) set lumbus (Knopf, 1991) is, arguably, the most the tone for the 19th century. Irving aimed to thorough and up-to-date narrative about Co- spin a good yam and also to promote Colum- lumbus available in English today. bus as a role model for the nation. His Colum- A second new direction in Columbus stud- bus displayed the virtues which citizens of the ies came from those earlier works that placed new nation should have: piety, high morals, a him within the larger history of global conquest scientific spirit, perseverance, rugged individ- and empire-building. Yale historian J. H. El- ualism, and so on. The immense popularity of liott's The Old World and the New (Cam- Irving's biography influenced, well into the bridge, 1970) focused on the Europeans who 20th century, virtually every American history had to assimilate the unexpected reality of an- textbook. Indeed, as recently as 50 years ago, other world suddenly looming into existence. the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in "The discovery of America," Elliott wrote, "had effect, rewrote Irving's Columbus for the 20th important intellectual consequences, in that it century. In his magisterial Admiral of the brought Europeans into contact with new lands Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus and peoples, and in so doing chal- (Little, Brown, 1942), Morison, an admiral him- lenged. . . traditional European assumptions self, literally went "to sea in quest of light and about geography, theology, history, and the na- truth." He retraced Columbus's voyages and, ture of man." by focusing on his maritime achievements, University of Texas historian Alfred W. Cros- skirted Columbus's more controversial career by's Columbian Exchange: Biological and on land. "We are right in so honoring him," Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood, Morison wrote, "because no other sailor had 1972) traced the migrations of plants, animals,

the persistence, the knowledge and the sheer and, most disastrously,-. microbes and diseases guts to sail thousands of miles into the un- across the ocean. In Plagues and Peoples known ocean until he found land." (Doubleday, 1976), William H. McNeill of the

WQ AUTUMN 199 1 87 COLUMBUS

THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

There is an old American folk song which tells of a "Sweet Betsy from Pike" (Pike County, Missouri) who traveled out westward "with her lover Ike, with two yoke of oxen, a large yellow dog, a tall Shanghai rooster and one spotted hog." Not only Betsy but practically her whole caravan of animals were in a sense "immigrants," descendants of Columbus and other two- and four-legged adventurers who had crossed the Atlantic from Europe. They were part of what historian Al- fred Crosby describes as "a grunting, lowing, neighing, crow- ing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world- altering avalanche." Today, writes Crosby, a "botanist can easily find whole meadows [in America] in which he is hard put to find a species that grew in American pre-Columbian times." In his The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecologi- cal Imperialism (1986), Crosby describes the plants and ani- mals and diseases that crossed the Atlantic in both directions in the wake of Columbus's voyages, thus recreating ecologically the Old World in the New and the New World in the Old. Here are listed some of the immigrants and transplants. Plants

From the Old World to the Americas: From the Americas to the Old World:

Bananas Pomegranates Avocadoes Peanuts Barley Radishes Beans Pineapples Cabbage Rice Chile Peppers Potatoes Cauliflower Sugar Cane Cocoa Pumpkins Daisies Tumbleweed Coffee Squash European Melons Wheat Maize Sweet Potatoes Figs Wild Oats Papaya Tobacco Kentucky Bluegrass Wine Grapes Tomatoes Lemons Lettuce Mangoes Olives Oranges Peaches

WQ AUTUMN 1991 88 COLUMBUS

Diseases From the Old World to the Americas: From the Americas to the Old World:

Amoebic Dysentery Malaria While European diseases ravaged indigenous Bubonic Plague Measles American populations, only one disease, Trap- Chicken Pox Meningitis onema pallidurn (syphilis), is believed to have Cholera Mumps been brought back from the Old World. No Diphtheria Smallpox Old-world human fossils from pre-1490 show German Measles Tonsillitis signs of syphilitic damage. Influenza Trachoma Jaundice Typhus Whooping Cough

Animals From the Old World to the Americas: From the Americas to the Old World:

Anopheles Mosquitoes American Gray Squirrels Cattle American Vine Aphids Chickens Chiggers Domestic Cats Guinea Pigs Donkeys Muscovey Ducks Goats Muskrats Hessian Flies Turkeys Honeybees Horses Larger, fiercer European dogs Pigs Rats Sheep Sheep Sparrows Starlings

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University of Chicago described "the world's gist Kathleen Deagan has established, by biosphere. . . as still reverberating to the series excavating Columbus's first colony La Isabela, of shocks inaugurated by the new permeability the astonishing alacrity with which the Span- of ocean barriers. . . after 1492." McNeill esti- iards adapted their diet, clothing, and dwellings mated there were 25 to 30 million Native to the New World environment. Eugene Lyon, American Indians in Mexico in 1492; by 1620, at the Center for Historical Research in St. Au- after exposure to European disease, there were gustine, has uncovered the first manifest for 1.6 million. In his Conquest of Paradise any of Columbus's ships-for the Nina's third (Knopf, 1990), writer and ecological activist voyage-which describes its rigging, cargo, Kirkpatrick Sale penned the most extreme in- crew, and even the medicine aboard ship. The dictment of all: Columbus's legacy of unbroken mining equipment on the 1495 Spanish ships environmental despoliation has left us no bound for La Isabela shows us, Lyon reports, choice but to start over again. "There is only how early the Spaniards planned a permanent one way to live in America," Sale writes, "and mining industry in the Americas. Deagan's dis- that is as Americans-the original Americans- coveries about La Isabela and Lyon's about Co- for that is what the earth of America demands. lumbus will be presented in an upcoming issue We resist it further only at risk of the imperil- of National Geographic (January 1992). First ment-worse, the likely destruction-of the Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the earth." Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570 It might be thought, at this late date, that (Univ. of Fla., 1989), edited by Jerald Milanich there is nothing left to learn about Columbus or and Susan Milbrath, describes the past decade's his voyages. All the original documents by Co- most significant archaeological and historical lumbus are now in print: The Diario of Chris- breakthroughs in understanding the Hispanic topher Columbus's First Voyage to America, penetration of the Caribbean and the South- 1492-1493 (Univ. of Okla., 1989), translated by east. And it would be almost impossible to com- Oliver Dunn and James Kelly; Cristobal Colon: pile a more complete reference work than The textos y documentos completos (Alianza, Columbus Encyclopedia, edited by Silvio A. 1982), edited by Consuelo Varela; and the mys- Bedini, to be published by Simon and Schuster tical Libro de las Profecias of Christopher next year. Such publications, and the scholar- Columbus (Univ. of Fla., 1991), translated and ship they represent, recapture-and, indeed, edited by Delno C. West. substantially advance-the knowledge about The most exciting scholarship inspired by Columbus and his voyages that was current a the Quincentenary, however, refutes the as- century ago. After 500 years, we are still discov- sumption that everything about Columbus is ei- ering Columbus. ther known or unknowable. Florida archaeolo- -Carla Rahn Phillips

Carla Rakn Phillips is professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She is coauthor, with William Phillips, of The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, which will be published by Cambridge next year.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 90 'Hess is a treasure-a Washington insider with a sharp sense of the important, the interesting, and the mythological. This book is essential reading."-Steven S. Smith, University of Minnesota A revealing look at the culture of journalism in Washington. I 1 (10th S22.95 ISBN 0-8157-3620-2 PopeiS8.95 ISBN 0-8157-3627.4

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Denis Donoghue Being Modern Together The 1990 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature "Denis Donoghue is master of the critical foray in the review, essay and lecture-ideal forms for a rapier mind, great forms for an historical consciousness steeped in contemporary intellectual life." -Ronald Schuchard Reading "Introduction" Glasses Published by Send for your FREE 16-page Catalog today. Emory University Featuring 40 styles of magnifiers, magnified and Scholars Press sunglasses and fisherman glasses. In addi- tion, our catalog provides a guide to lense Available from strengths (diopter) to aid in your selection. Professional Book Distributors P.O. Box 6996 Name Alpharetta, Georgia 30239-6996 - -- (1-800-437-6692) Address

City State Zip Precision Optical Dept. 25.1~Lincoln&6th St. Rochelle, IL61068 Where Feminism Went Wrong

FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: A Cri- now know, this was not the coming of the tique of Individualism. By Elizabeth Fox-Geno- feminist dawn but the beginning of a back- vese. Univ. of N.C. 347 pp. $24.95 lash. During the late 1970s and through the 1980s not only did conservative attacks ut what do women want?" Sigmund on feminism as an ideology increase but Freud once exclaimed, thereby prov- feminists themselves proposed different ing that even men of genius can ask the agendas and quarreled among themselves. most foolish questions. For what women Meanwhile, among the uncommitted ma- want is, after all, fairly simple. They want a jority of women, the cause began to seem fair deal, just as men do. The real problem tedious, misdirected, and of dubious rele- lies in trying to establish exactly what con- vance. Hence the value of Elizabeth Fox- stitutes a fair deal as far as women are con- Genevese's book, which, as well as explor- cerned. and how on earth it is to be ac- ing what has gone wrong, suggests a more complished. realistic program for achieving equality To the first generation of angry and between the sexes. committed feminists emerging after 1850, Some of the iconoclasm that Fox-Geno- the answer seemed reasonably straightfor- vese, a professor of history and women's ward. Women would achieve liberation studies at Emory University, brings to her only after they acquired the right to vote subject stems from her Marxist orienta- and won equal access to higher education tion: She is acutely sensitive to the impor- and to the professions. With the lifting of tance of class as well as gender. Her previ- all artificial barriers to advancement, it ous book, the prize-winning Within the was argued, women would blossom into Plantation Household (1988), was a coun- freedom. Women would become like men. terblast to more roseate notions of female Not until the 1960s did this certainty begin solidarity, pointing out that the nicest, seriously to crumble. By then, it was clear most intelligent white gentlewomen of the that admission to the franchise had led to Old South reconciled themselves to keeo- no sizable female invasion of Congress and ing black women in slavery. Sisterhood, in state legislatures, just as admission to the other words, was simply not enough. universities and the job market had failed When it suited their economic and social to secure women adecent proportion of interests, white, upper-class women chose the top jobs or equal wages. Quite clearly, to see their world in white, upper-class changing the rules of the game had not terms, not in terms of a common female been enough. Ideas had to change as well. bond with those who served them. Bv the Consciousness had to be raised. And then same token, Fox-Genovese is scornful of there was the matter of sex. those contemporary feminists who fail to With the '60s came a new feminist de- understand that manv of their nostrums mand-for equal rights in bed, free access are likely to interest only the well-edu- to sexual pleasure without having to pay cated middle class. Agonizing over how to the penalty of unwanted pregnancies. The balance a high-fashion briefcase on one 1970s gave American women what they hip and a toddler on the other is not going wanted. Contraceptives became widely to mean very much to the pregnant black available to those who could afford and teenager forced to drop out of school. Nor understand them, and the Supreme Court does the author have much time for hish- declared (in Roe v. Wade, 1973) a wom- powered feminist scholars who believe an's decision to have an abortion to be a that language is power or that liberation constitutionally protected right. Yet, as we can come through the deconstruction of

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texts. What use can such stylized, aca- individual taste: "A society unwilling or demic game-playing be for the majority of unable to trust to its own instincts in lay- women who lack the training or the desire ing down a standard of decency does not to understand it? deserve to survive." We must, Fox-Geno- But Fox-Genovese's critique of elitism vese says, return to thinking in terms of is only part of a broader, more controver- the civil liberties of the group, as our medi- sial argument. Feminism, she claims, has eval forbearers did, and not allow our- been too much influenced by the West's selves to be imprisoned by the assumption often unthinking cult of individualism. that the only freedom that matters is indi- Women have justified their claims to vidualistic. Otherwise, she argues, we will equality by exclusive reference to the in- be unable to justify policies such as affir- nate rights of the individual. They would mative action, which restricts the rights of have been on much firmer ground, she ar- individual white males so that represen- gues, had they legitimized what they were tatives from all groups in a society will be trying to do in terms of the larger commu- able to gain some share in its largesse. nity. Thus she suggests that women who Here, then, is a provocative and support free access to abor- tion by invoking the individ- ual's right to choose risk sounding egotistical to the point of inhumanity. A far more valid argument would bypass the question of rights and point out, practically, that most women having abor- tions are unmarried, very young, and very poor-in other words, those who are least able to bring up their children adequately. This ar- gument switches the burden of the decision to society at large, which will have to de- termine in the future whether to make abortion available- to avoid the calamity of un- wanted, poorly looked-after or impover- thoughtful work that should stimulate and ished children-or to disallow abortion enrage both opponents and supporters of but supply free day-care. feminism. No one can deny the impor- Similarly, on the issue of pornography, tance of the central issue it addresses: Fox-Genovese finds it hard to sympathize namely, that being a housewife is unlikely with the "tortured perspective" of such ever again to be a sufficient career for the feminists as Andrea Dworkin and Cather- majority of women in the United States or ine MacKinnon, who condemn pornogra- anywhere else in the West. Divorce is now phy as an invasion of their individual rights too common, and many households can as women. Such shrill claims, she writes, get by only on two incomes. More than "extend the concept of civil rights beyond half of all American women with young all meaning." Pornography, which de- children now work. The huge number of grades men and children too, can plausi- women in the workplace involves an un- bly be censored only on behalf of the com- precedented and irreversible shift in how munity as a whole. Morality is a public our society organizes itself, one of the ma- matter, she argues, not just an exercise of jor changes in world history. Those in

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search of an acute and unfanatical guide to to write in a manner which only the well- its social and political implications will educated and the deeply serious are likely surely find it in this book. Yet to my mind, to find congenial. Feminism without Illusions lacks a crucial Moreover, the same restraints that keep element that would enable it to become Fox-Genovese's analysis so detached and the kind of well-thumbed classic that, say, impersonal make her shrink from offering Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949) a political program. Yet the nature of her or Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch argument should have persuaded her to (1970) have deservedly become. It is no take the risk. Fox-Genovese protests less intelligent-far from it. But it lacks against individualism in the name of "soci- laughter and people and hard politics. It is ety," the community," and the "collectiv- too much of an abstract and immaculately ity," but nowhere does she spell out what annotated academic tract. she means by these abstract terms. The This failing reflects, in part, the very logical outcome of her reasoning, how- success of women's studies, which is no ever, as she must surely recognize, is a re- longer merely the preserve of brilliant and assessment of the role of the state. For eccentric writers working on the margins good historical reasons, Americans are Ear of respectability. Women's studies has be- more suspicious of state intervention than come respectability itself, entrenched in are most Europeans. Yet the state is noth- every American university, with its own ing more than a human contrivance. It faculty, its own learned journals (hundreds can oppress and interfere, certainly, but it of them), and its own much-debated meth- can also protect, enable, and create. odologies. The gain in scholarly rigor has Sooner or later Americans, and particu- been enormous. But what has been lost larly women and others who feel disad- along the way is some of the anecdotage, vantaged in some way, are going to redis- wit, and wickedness which made Greer or cover how to use the state to help Gloria Steinem fun to read and accessible themselves. As is always the case, the to all. Those worried by the declining sup- changing status and demands of women port for feminism would do well to give are symptoms, not causes, of much wider some thought to the question of how its and still more unsettling transformations. proponents can recover a popular voice. For as it is now, we have an astute wom- -Linda Colley, professor of history at en's studies specialist who understands the Yale University, is the author of Lewis need to attack elitism but still feels obliged Namier (1989).

The Last Southerner

SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND. By Hospital. Some 13 years earlier, when Walker Percy. Edited with an Introduction by Percy was 13, his father killed himself, and Patrick Samway. Farrar, Straus. 428 pp. $25 three years later his mother died in an automobile accident. These traumatic ex- orn in 19 16 into a distinguished family periences were made somewhat bearable of the southern patriciate, Walker when a remarkable bachelor cousin Percy had many advantages. Yet he had whom they loved and revered as Uncle also known disorder, sorrow, and displace- Will adopted Walker and his two brothers. ment even before he found himself in 1942 Uncle Will was William Alexander Percy, in an Adirondacks sanatorium, the victim the author of Lanterns on the Levee, deco- of pulmonary tuberculosis contracted rated hero of the Great War, disciple of when he was a medical intern at Bellevue Marcus Aurelius, and gentleman-poet,

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who made his home in Greenville, Missis- mists" or "river of ghosts") in Covington, sippi, the fabled center of the "high cul- Louisiana, where he had gone to live with ture'' of the Mississippi Delta. But the com- his wife and children in 1948, Percy would paratively early death of W. A. Percy in the publish five more novels-The Last Gen- year after Walker Percy graduated from tleman, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures medical school meant the grievous loss of of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of a second father and a second home. the World, Lancelot, The Second Coming, The three-year period at the tuberculo- and The Thanatos Syndrome. He also sis sanatorium-Percy often compared would publish a collection of essays, The himself to Hans Castrop in Thomas Mann's Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, The Magic Mountain-proved to be the How Queer Language Is, and What One most crucial exoerience of disolacement Has to Do with the Other, and a work that he had undergone. During the process of defies categorical description, Lost in the his recovery the budding physician was Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. transformed into the young philosopher. Reading deeply in Dostoyevsky, Kierke- ow we have what may be the final ad- gaard, Kafka, Mann, and other modem Eu- N dition to the Percy nonfiction list, Pat- ropean writers, the young M.D., who had rick Samway's skillfully and imaginatively thought he might specialize in pathology organized gathering of 43 miscellaneous or psychiatry, rejected alike the physiologi- writings. Containing everything from a cal, the sociological, and the psychoana- 1935 undergraduate essay on the movie lytical approaches to the meaning of be- magazine to his major 1989 essay on lan- ins. He had earlier undergone three years guage and being, "The San Andreas Fault ofpsychoanalysis, but now he diagnosed in the Modern Mind," Signposts in a himself as a victim of the spiritual malaise Strange Land makes nearly all of Percy's Kierkesaard" called "the sickness unto nonfiction conveniently available. But the death." Becoming more and more con- volume claims an importance well beyond vinced that "science can say everything that of convenience. The truth is that, al- about a man exceot what he is in himself." though he seemingly made a choice be- he eventually found himself irresistibly at- tween being a novelist and a philosophical tracted to the Christian concept of exis- essayist, Percy was never able simply to as- tence as a pilgrimage of the soul. Giving sume that he was a novelist. He constantly up the practice of medicine almost before employed the essay to define his particular he hadbegun it, he became a convert to identity as a novelist: Signposts in a Roman Catholicism and, granted leisure Strange Land contains, for example, essays by an independent income, began an ob- such as "The State of the Novel: Dying Art scure career as a philosophical essayist. or New Science," "Novel Writing in an Having a strong literary bent, however, he Apocalyptic Time," "How to be a South- read widelv in modem literature and dis- em Novelist in Spite of Being Southern covered that the modem novel was wholly and Catholic." concerned with the theme he was pursu- In his introduction, Samway acknowl- ing as a philosopher: "man as dislocated, edges the dramatic relationship between disoriented. u~rooted.homeless." In- the essayist and the novelist in Percy's ca- spired by camus's and artr re's novels of reer. The very title Signposts in a Strange alienation, he turned to the task of becom- Land is derived from an earlier essay, ins" a novelist himself. He was in his for- "Notes for a Novel about the End of the ties, far past the beginning age for the aver- World,"in which Percy attempted to define age novelist, when his do-it-yourself the mission of the novelist: "Instead of apprenticeship in fiction ended in The constructing a plot and creating a cast of Moviegoer and a National Book Award in characters from a world familiar to every- 1962. Before his death on May 10, 1990, at body, he [the novelist] is more apt to set his home on the Bogue Falaya ("river of forth with a stranger in a strange land

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where the signposts are enigmatic but losing his greatest asset: his sense of eccen- which he sets out to explore nevertheless." tricity. If he is deprived of his psychic dis- tance from nonsouthern writers, what will ven more revealing of his sense of vo- the southern writer do? Start writing like cation as a novelist is Percy's parodic, Saul Bellow? The deprivation entailed in outrageous interview with himself (origi- the modification and disappearance of nally published in Esquire in 1977), "Ques- southern eccentricity affects the southern tions They Never Asked Me, So He Asked writer's strongest resource, the resource Them Himself." Essentially the self-inter- that made the French go "nuts over Poe view is a meditative essay on the "knack and Faulkner," the feeling of being "some- of being a novelist, given Percy's own situ- what extraterrestrial . . . different enough ation: that is, his awareness of holding a from the main body of writers to give the general citizenship in the "here-and-now" reader a triangulation point for getting a of the second half of this century and a fix on things." particular citizenship in the American Yet in a little-known essay on Herman South. A novelist in this situation, Percy Melville reprinted here, Percy suggests the says, has a relation to the world that is like way a southern writer can move beyond that of an "ex-suicide." He "realizes that his "extraterrestriality," his Robinson all is lost, the jig is up, that after all nothing Crusoe-like isolation. Melville's situation is dumber than a grown man sitting down was hardly enviable, having written his and making up a story to entertain some- masterpiece Moby-Dick and seen it sell a body or working in a 'tradition' or 'school' few hundred copies and go out of print, to maintain his reputation as a practitioner and then spending his last 20 years as a of the nouveau roman or whatever." When customs inspector on the New York docks. "one sees that this is a dumb way to live, Percy feels for Melville because "there's that all is vanity sure enough, there are no occupation in the universe that is lone- two possibilities: either commit suicide or lier" than the novelist's. Yet his true kin- not commit suicide." If the choice is not to ship with Melville, Percy says, comes from commit suicide, the "here-and-now" of the the fact that "the post-Christianity and present century opens to the novelist and alienation of the New York writer took a he comes into a sense of creative freedom. hundred years to reach Mississippi." And Not, to be sure, the freedom of God on the so Percy was forced, as Melville had been first day of creation, but a freedom like earlier, into "a dialectical relation to a that known to a man who has undergone shared body of [Christian moral] belief." the disaster of shipwreck and been cast up Whether the writer is a "scoffer" (as Mel- on a remote beach. If the castaway is a ville was) or a "believer" (as he himself is), writer, his freedom is the realization that Percy says, hardly matters: If the writer is dead writers may be famous but they are unafraid to encounter "ultimate ques- also "dead ducks" who can't write any- tions" with the freedom of the artist, he more. "As for me," the survivor says, "I belongs to an inalienable vocational com- might try a little something here in the wet munity." When Melville gave Hawthorne a sand, a word, a form. . . " copy of Moby-Dick, he told him he "had Percy then asks what the novelist's met- written a wicked book, broiled in hellfire, aphorical identity as an ex-suicide has to and that he felt fine, as spotless as a lamb, do with "being southern." The answer, he happy, content." says, is both positive and negative. For the Melville's loneliness had yielded to the southern writer, with all his "special sustaining sense of "ineffable sociability" miseries. . . isolation, madness, tics, amne- that fills the writer when "the writing sia, alcoholism, lust and loss of ordinary works and somebody knows it." It is not powers of speech," is also "as marooned incidental that in speaking of Melville, "a as Crusoe." Or was. In today's Sunbelt lapsed Calvinist from a middle-class fam- South, the southern writer is in danger of ily," Percy makes the New Yorker spiri-

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tually one of the community of New Eng- cations, however, Walker Percy may be the land writers. Raised in that "South, which last of this line. has been called a Christ-haunted place. . . something like New England a -Lewis P. Simpson is the former editor hundred years ago," Percy himself, like all of the Southern Review and the au- serious southern writers, was also a spiri- thor of, most recently, Mind and the tual New Englander. According to all indi- American Civil War (1989).

The Return of History

LEARNING TO CURSE: Essays in Early Mod- reading," with intricate and detailed ex- em Culture. By Stephen J. Greenblatt. plication of the work-with text rather Routledge. 188 pp. $25 than context. Authors were seen as individ- ual geniuses who used irony and ambigu- omething strange is happening to ity to rise above local considerations. They Shakespeare. Anyone who reads cur- wrote at a safe distance from the frantic rent Shakespeare criticism expecting to activity of their world, producing texts that find high-minded debates over the nature were unbounded by time. of irony and ambiguity (let alone cozy dis- For the past two decades, however, his- cussions about order, degree, and hierar- tory has been reentering the study of litera- chy or the ethics of revenge) is in for a big ture. Indeed, in the 1980s, the "New His- surprise. Scholars are now likelier to be toricism" captured the academic found tracking the Bard amid narratives of highground by all but erasing the once- early encounters with Native Americans, firm boundary between a literary work Tudor treatises on gynecology and and its historical context. tranvestism, 16th-century exorcisms and Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of Eng- trials for witchcraft. erotic dreams about lish at Berkeley, can claim paternity for Queen Elizabeth, the this school. Learning policing of the Lon- to Curse follows ~ey don suburbs, or the naissance Self-Fash- Renaissance vogue ioning (1980) and for collecting arte- Shakespearean Nego- facts, fossils, and os- tiations (1988) in re- trich eggs. Whatever drawing the Shake- one's response to spearean map. In- this new turn hap- fluenced by pens to be, boredom anthropology, lin- will not likely be part guistics, and social of it. theory, Greenblatt ar- How fashions gues that history is change. The New no mere background Criticism of the last for literature. Shake- generation held that speare's plays may history was marginal seem to rise above to the study of litera- their contexts, but in ture. New Critics like truth they were no Cleanth Brooks and less involved than W. K. Wimsatt were nonliterary docu- obsessed with "close ments in the

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ceaseless economic, social, and political tin Guerre, her identity is not her own and transactions of their time. can only be authenticated by the will of What Greenblatt means by history, her community as a whole. Greenblatt however, is not easy to define. He has little shows that a character whose actions seem use for kings and queens, battles and par- to be reassuringly individual and self- liaments. Narratives of high politics he willed turns out on inspection to be play- sees mainly as stories that rulers tell to le- ing to a hidden, socially conditioned gitimate their own authority. Greenblatt's script. Greenblatt thus establishes the hid- preferred canvas is history from the mar- den relationship between a literary work gins, the stories that usually get over- and the workings of social power. looked. Greenblatt likes to construct his essays reenblatt's historicism has spawned a around a historical anecdote, preferably G host of imitations, so many indeed one about people who lived and worked that no Shakespeare essay is complete on the edges of society, involving actions without its quirky anecdote. But there are that seem to us baffling or inexplicable. problems with a method that permits so Greenblatt draws out the underlying open a definition of "history." Greenblatt power structures that conditioned these seeks to expose the communal beliefs and people's curious behavior; then he reveals practices that determined the shape of the same structures at work in the period's Shakespeare's plays. Yet he relies on an "high" culture (including plays by Shake- "arbitrary connectedness"-analogies and speare). In one essay, "Psychoanalysis and symbolic relationships between the plays Renaissance Culture," Greenblatt relates and their society-which has to be ac- the queer story of Martin Guerre-a story cepted on trust. already known to American audiences It is clear, too, from the kinds of anec- through a historical novel by Janet Lewis, dotes he prefers, that for all his interest in an analytical study by Natalie Zemon Da- history and anthropology Greenblatt has a vis, and the film The Return of Martin quite contemporary agenda. His anecdotes Guerre (1982). Martin Guerre, a French usually relate acts of violence perpetrated peasant from Artigat, disappeared from his in the name of empire, confusions over home at the age of 24. His place was taken gender categories, or the vulnerability of for several years by an impostor whose the individual before the power of the claim to be the real Martin was accepted state. While this makes for exciting Shake- even by his family. With its traumatic sub- speare, there is something disturbingly stitutions and doublings, and its Freudian ahistorical about it. The past is not so scenario of alienated selfhood, the story much recovered as made over into an im- sounds curiously modem. Yet what strikes age of the present. As much as Greenblatt Greenblatt is that those involved were less insists on the historical embeddedness of concerned about the impostor's true self the Bard, he recruits him in the service of than about the purely outward and legalis- exclusively modem preoccupations. tic testimonies to his identity. To family Indeed, Greenblatt steers us into an his- and friends, Martin's identity was not a torical dead end. Because he implies that matter of personality but of property, literary works are absolutely saturated claims that could be contractually estab- with society's practices and beliefs, even lished. Having swerved so far from Shake- texts once considered subversive turn out speare's plays, Greenblatt now returns, en- to be colluding with power. In the Henry riching our understanding of characters IV plays, for example, Prince Hal can ad- such as Viola in Twelfth Night, who finds mit that his sovereignty rests on an act of that her own identity has been challenged usurpation. But, despite his ostensible bad by a mysterious double. Viola seems real faith, spectators identify with him anyway. to us because of the psychological trauma Greenblatt is fascinated with works that she undergoes. But, from the angle of Mar- appear to unsettle systems of authority but,

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at a deeper level, only reinforce them. For Greenblatt's Renaissance is thus pow- example, he takes up Rabelais's mocking erfully politicized but also profoundly comedy and the notion that it encourages pessimistic. Because literature is locked so a subversion of orthodox norms and val- firmly into the structures of its historical ues. But Greenblatt areues" that Rabelai- moment, there is no way off the ferris sian laughter, by releasing aggression in a wheel, nothing it can achieve beyond con- nonviolent form, admits the impotence of stantly if unwillingly testifying to the domi- its own gestures of rebellion. "The gesture nance of the powers that be. Yet this un- of insult is at the same time an availing conclusion surely arises from the acknowledgement of defeat," he says; it method itself. In Greenblattian history not testifies to the enduring power of what is much can be done other than endlessly to being mocked. Again, in an essay on Mar- recycle social energy. lowe's The Jew of Malta, he brings out the This ruutured radicalism tells us as surprising but deceptive modernity of Mar- much about the situation of academics in lowe's social analysis by juxtaposing it with the 1990s as it does about Shakespeare's Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question." situation in the 1590s. It is certainlv not Like Karl Marx, Marlowe uses anti-Semi- surprising at this juncture to find so subtle tism to expose the underlying materialism and searching a critique of power being of his society. In his play, the Maltese combined with so gloomy a conviction Christians bait the Jew Barabas, but the that nothing can ever be done about it. To- Jewishness which they revile exemplifies ward the end of this volume, Greenblatt the market mentality of their own world. analyzes the political language of present- "Marlowe never discredits anti-Semitism, dav America and finds it involved in the but he does discredit early in the play a same dizzying circulations of power which 'Christian' social concern that might other- criticize authority yet ultimately reaffirm wise have been used to counter a specifi- it. If the America of Reagan and Bush gives cally Jewish antisocial element." To both way to possibilities for more profound Marlowe and Marx, society is cursed by change, Greenblatt's Shakespeare may, the vower of monev. The difference is that conceivably, be the first citizen to change ~aiowehad no expectations that it might along with it. ever be better. Indeed, his laughter at uto- vian solutions is no less harsh than his ridi- -Martin Butler, a former Wilson Center cule of sacred cows. Marlowe's politics Fellow, is lecturer in English at the were radical, Greenblatt writes, but also University of Leeds and the author of radically devoid of hope. Theatre and Crisis 1632- 1642 (1984).

OTHER TITLES

Arts & Letters book on mythology-or so the response to Jo- seph Campbell's The Power of Myth (1988), MYTHOLOGIES. Compiled by Yves Robert Bly's Iron John (1990), and Rollo May's Bonnefoy. Trans. under the direction of Wendy The Cry for Myth (1991) seems to suggest. In Doniger. 2 volumes. Univ. of Chicago. 1267 pp. these works mythology resembles do-it-yourself $250 psychotherapy. The individual is instructed to create his own religion or to "follow his bliss" Once the surest way to write a bestseller was to or to take the hero's voyage through the under- write a cookbook. Today it may be to write a world of his own problems.

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-- - - 1s1ni¥ This, however, is not which it is no longer gods but ideas that guide," I \I " 11 11 81. I \I the way Bonnefoy, a then our own supposedly demythologized "mo- poet and professor at dernity" suddenly looks like a mythological the College de France, creation. As Bonnefoy observes, "Myths are I presents his subject. never recognized for what they are, except Mythologies is less when they belong to others." , about the relations of individuals to myths (sacred narratives) than GOETHE: The Poet and His Age. Volume I: about the relationship The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790). By Nicholas between societies and Boyle. Oxford. 807 pp. $37.50 the mythologies (sys- ' tems of myths) that sus- Poet, dramatist, novelist, painter, scientist, ad- tain them. Nor do any ministrator-Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749- of the 395 articles collected here retell the fa- 1832) has long enjoyed the reputation of an miliar legends that once formed part of our cul- Olympian, the calm, lofty embodiment of an tural literacy. As Wendy Doniger, who super- age that bears his name: the Goethezeit. But, vised the translation, writes, "One has Robert Boyle, a professor of German at Cambridge Graves for that." University, reminds us of the turbulence that In essays that range from Africa to Lapland, Goethe lived through in order to attain such from the Americas to the Near East, the interest classical composure. A child of the prosperous is as much in methodology as in mythology- Frankfurt bourgeoisie, born almost a half-cen- in, as Doniger says, "how to understand a my- tury before the French Revolution, Goethe thology, what questions to ask, what patterns to would live to see every known certainty stood look for." Indeed, behind the work of the on its head. In a famous essay, "In Search of nearly 100 contributors (including anthropolo- Goethe from Within" (1932), the philosopher gists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, and Jose Ortega y Gasset argued that changing mo- philosophers) lies the shadow of two figures not res and social uncertainties propelled Goethe present: Georges Dumezil (1898-1986) and into ceaseless travel, literary experiments, and Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-). Dumezil and Levi- various occupations in order to find a sense of Strauss overturned an earlier understanding of identity that always inwardly eluded him. myth, shaped by Sir James Frazier and Lucien Goethe studied law at Leipzig and Strasbourg Levy-Bruhl. This older view presented mythol- while earning a small reputation as a lyric poet. ogy as a primitive mode of thinking, left behind Then, at age 24, he became nationally famous as societies evolved and became "modem." with the publication of his play Gotz von Ber- Levi-Strauss argued that so-called primitive and lichingen (1773), which boasts one of the most modern beliefs do not differ structurally but quoted lines in German literature-Gotz's defi- represent alternative ways of organizing family ant message to the Emperor to "lick his arse." kinships, social life, and material production. Twelve months later he published the Sorrows Dumezil proposed that the almost infinite vari- of Young Werther (1774), the first modern ety in mythology could be reduced to a small novel about an alienated youth. Overnight, number of myths arranged in different com- Goethe became an international sensation. The binations and that these myths reflect the laws Werther cult inspired countless Werther-style of human mental activity in society. suicides throughout Europe as well as porce- Mythologies shows what happens when a lain services decorated with scenes from the younger generation of scholars apply Dumezil novel. and Levi-Strauss to a dazzling array of topics, In 1775, to prove that the poet could influ- ranging from the placenta in West African ritu- ence events, Goethe accepted an appointment als to the significance of the number seven at the Duke of Saxe-Weimar's court. He soon among the indigenous Indo-Chinese. Yet when became the second most powerful man in Wei- the Swiss scholar Jean Molino discusses nation- mar. The historian Herder jealously observed, alism and socialism as mythic thinking "in "So he is now Permanent Privey Councillor,

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President of the Chamber, President of the War wrights, and supporting innovative collabora- Office, Inspector of Works, down to tions, the American theater today, Brustein ar- roadbuilding, Director of Mines. . . the princi- gues, is "making history at a time when the pal actor, dancer, in short, the factotum of all theater is no longer thought to have a history." Weimar." But in 1786, his writing come to a Instead of pining for the "golden age" of Eu- standstill, Goethe decided to slip away to Italy. gene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Wil- The journey proved decisive. Goethe had liams, Brustein maintains that younger play- gone in search of pleasures, expecting that new wrights such as David Mamet (American literary works would ripen under the Italian Buffalo), Sam Shepard (Buried Child) and Mar- sun. Instead, amid Italy's ruins and great paint- sha Norman ('night, Mother) rival the earlier ings, he learned that art is more than subjective masters. He praises the virtue of a "post- satisfaction and poetry more than the expres- naturalistic" play such as Lanford Wilson's sion of desire. "He had come looking for cul- Balm in Gilead, which presents realistic events mination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immedi- on stage while characters wander through the acy of experience, and he had found," Boyle theater haranguing the audience. "Never per- writes, "the need for study, informed under- mitting the audience to forget it is watching an standing, and hard work." When he returned to artificial rather than a real event," Brustein Weimar two years later, he set up house with writes, such plays "preserved what is unique Christiana Vulpius-whom one of Goethe's about the theater-its immediacy and dan- earlier mistresses spitefully called "a girl who ger-while fulfilling naturalism's mandate to used to be a common whoreu-and eventually explore the habits and habitations of an aban- married her. He also began to write Faust, doned underclass." In a similar spirit, auteur- which would become the most famous work in directors like Lee Breur have adapted the German literature. With Goethe's arrival at ar- classics, combining, for example, Sophocles tistic maturity (and his 41st year), Boyle's first and gospel singers to create The Gospel at Colo- volume ends. nus. And even when Gregory Mosher directed Almost a century later Nietzsche was to com- that old standard, Our Town, he cast avant- ment that Goethe was "not just a good and garde performance artist Spalding Gray as the great man, but an entire culture." It is exactly Stage Manager, thus infusing Thornton this notion, the idea that there was a cultural Wilder's twangy philosophy with contemporary Goethezeit, that Boyle challenges. Boyle's thesis irony. Long lines outside the Brooklyn Acad- is that it was the mature Goethe's distance from emy of Music's annual New Wave Festival or and opposition to his age-an age composed of Brustein's own Harvard Repertory attest to the subjective expression and the poetry of de- popularity of experimental theater. sire-that made Goethe great and makes him a Brustein concedes that there are "radical modem: one of us. problems.. . confronting the American theater today." The founding generation of artistic di- rectors has almost disappeared, and its succes- REIMAGINING AMERICAN THEATRE. By sors are increasingly responsible to their Robert Brustein. Hill and Wang. 336 pp. $24.95 boards of trustees rather than to their own ar- tistic visions. The lines between not-for-profit Is American theater really dead? According to and commercial have blurred, as more resident Brustein, the drama critic of the New Republic, theaters plan their seasons with an eye toward the answer depends on where you look. Broad- New York transfers. The National Endowment way may be suffocating under the weight of im- for the Arts, once a staunch ally, now has to ported British musical extravaganzas and exor- satisfy the political requirements of both the bitant ticket prices, but a network of regional Left (for "politically correct" art) and the Right (or "resident") not-for-profit theatres, from the (for inoffensive, morally sound art). To Bru- Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis to Washing- stein, these developments are difficult to dis- ton's Arena Stage, have made the past 25 years cuss: He is reluctant to admit that the American 'a period of theatrical renewal and change." stage-having survived its own death-may Reworking the classics, producing new play- now be coming down with a serious virus.

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History ing up moralities and mathematics." By then, however, events were passing the Victorians POVERTY AND COMPASSION: The Moral by. They had done much through their writing Imagination of the Late Victorians. By to foster more compassionate govemment- Gertrude Himmelfarb. Knopf. 496 pp. $30 the era saw the extension of housing aid, work- men's compensation, schooling, unemploy- Most arguments about how to deal with poverty ment insurance-but the compassion of the come down, ultimately, to different interpreta- emerging welfare state was increasingly what tions of compassion. Himmelfarb, professor Himmelfarb calls sentimental, "an exercise in emeritus of history at City University of New moral indignation." As the welfare state grew, York, distinguishes between "sentimental" she argues, "it became a moral principle to es- compassion, which consists of moral indigna- chew moral distinctions and judgments." Later tion and feeling good, and "unsentimental" reformers, "with a much attenuated commit- compassion, which is practical and seeks above ment to religion, redoubled their social zeal as all to do good. Himmelfarb profiles the era in if to compensate.. . .It was then that the pas- which British reformers brought to the fore the sion for religion was transmuted into the com- practice of this unsentimental compassion. The passion for humanity." A century later, as com- era begins roughly with, and continues for a passion in its unsentimental guise slowly works generation after, the publication of the first vol- its way back into social policy, this is an era- ume of Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the and a book-worth studying. People in London (1889), a book which calcu- lated a morally freighted "arithmetic of woe." The period, much like our own 1960s, rediscov- REVOLUTION AND REBELLION IN THE ered poverty even as poverty was declining. EARLY MODERN WORLD. By Jack A. What united Himmelfarb's late Victorian re- Goldstone. Univ. of Calif. 608 pp. $34.95 formers-from the neoclassical economist Al- fred Marshall to the religious reformer Arthur A generation ago, the accepted view of revolu- Toynbee to the Fabian socialists Sidney and Be- tions, found in such books as Hannah Arendt's atrice Webb-was their blend of realism and On Revolution (1963) and Crane Brinton's morality: They were convinced that the state Anatomy of Revolution (1965), was that great had to assume a greater role in coping with political upheavals occurred when conditions poverty but, at the same time, that the poor re- were improving and popular expectations were quired moral guidance as much as money. dangerously high. Goldstone, director of the At the end of this period, Beatrice Webb criti- Center for Comparative Research in History, cized the unconditional social benefits being Society, and Culture at the University of Califor- advocated by the young Winston Churchill. In nia, Davis, stands much of this old thinking on 1909 Churchill objected to tying social benefits its head. to personal behavior, saying, "I do not like mix- All of the revolutions Goldstone considers, from the Ottoman Crisis in the early 17th cen- tury to the Taiping Rebellion in 1850, were pre- ceded by periods in which population growth was rapid but material production failed to keep pace. With their economies based almost entirely on agriculture, old regimes had little flexibility in dealing with large fluctuations in population. Massive growth made goods less available, causing both soaring inflation and state fiscal crises. At the same time, social tur- moil and fluctuation created at least the illu- sion of social mobility, "a scramble for creden- tials," as Goldstone calls it, and attendant friction between the haves and have-nots.

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This is hardly an interpretation of revolutions oper John T. Hazel, who sincerely believed he to encourage would-be revolutionaries. Gone was bringing the benefits of civilization to an are the old romantic theories that depicted empty landscape, and the local activists who revolutions as glorious struggles between past opposed his plan to develop a 542-acre portion and future or good and evil; the revolutions of the Civil War battlefield at Manassas (Bull Goldstone studies arise from imbalances be- Run). In the end, the federal government was tween human institutions and environmental persuaded to preserve the battlefield. That solu- factors such as disease, weather, and the pro- tion will not often be available for the Ameri- ductivity of the soil. The fall of an ancien regime can Edge City of the future. Indeed, Garreau and its revolutionary replacement could hardly has little faith that government-or architects have been expected to bring an end to social and planners, who tend to be focused on the difficulties. "In practice," those societies "con- restoration of the old central cities-can have vulsed by severe problems [were] more likely much impact on the Edge Cities. Ultimately, de- to find solutions in stem authority." Revolu- velopers and citizens will have to work out lo- tions, Goldstone concludes, "create great de- cal "social contracts" to channel growth. bates about freedom but often shrink from Garreau is optimistic that they will. He is talk- establishing it." ing, after all, about a frontier, where all things seem possible.

Contemporary Affairs THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA: EDGE CITY: Life on the New Frontier. By Reflections on a Multicultural Society. By Joel Garreau. Doubleday. 526 pp. $22.50 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Whittle. 91 pp. u1.95

Joel Garreau has seen the urban future, and it's The most innovative-some would say the not that bad. most questionable-development in recent This future will be dominated by what he publishing comes from the Tennessee pub- calls Edge Cities, those massive agglomerations lisher, Whittle Communications. Whittle hires of office parks, shopping malls, and housing well-known writers to address, in short, punchy developments that already dot the periphery of books of about 100 pages, some of the thornier our metropolitan regions. Garreau, who com- issues of the day; it then sells commercial ad- bines the journalist's eye for detail (he is a vertising and distributes 150,000 free copies to Washington Post reporter) with the analytic business and opinion leaders before the book training of a demographic geographer, portrays goes to stores. With this new addition to the these one-time suburbs as diverse and healthy series, it can now be said that the multicultural places. They put individuals within easy reach "political correctness" controversy has been (by car) of everything, from high-technology "Whittled" down to size. Schlesinger, professor firms to used book stores. Concentrating on a of history at the graduate school of the City Uni- hundred-odd Edge Cities, mostly clustered versity of New York and one of the deans of around nine metropolitan areas, Garreau ar- American liberalism, is well qualified for the gues that they all reflect the search for a new task. balance between the human desire for social As one would expect, Schlesinger takes the contact and for individual freedom. He excuses long, middle-of-the-road view. Recognition of their various deficiencies, such as New Jersey's the contributions of non-WASP minorities was Bridgewater Commons mall, as those of "a first much needed in this country, he argues. But generation vision. . . an experimental effort in a what began in the 1960s as a healthy corrective national work in progress." built on sound scholarship has degenerated While Garreau sometimes echoes the boost- into propagandistic "compensatory" history erism of the developers, he is disturbed by the that distorts the truth in order to fuel a cult of development "growth machine." His book con- group- and ethnicity-mindedness. The matter is cludes with an account of the 1988 confronta- far from merely academic, says Schlesinger: tion in northern Virginia between mega-devel- "The ethnic revolt against the melting pot has

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DEMOCRACY AND DELIBERATION: New Directions for Democratic Reform. By James S. Fishkin. Yale. 172 pp. $1 7.95

Soundbites, Michael Dukakis in a tank, George Bush munching on pork rinds with Iowa farm- ers-so ran the presidential campaign of 1988. Even the "issues" were vacuous: Willie Horton, the ACLU, and "read my lips." Fishkin, a University of Texas political scien- tist, may not have the cure for the problem, but he has come up with a good idea: a "National Issues Convention," to be held in January of the coming year. Six hundred delegates, demo- graphically representative of the U.S. popula- tion, will gather for three days of direct delib- eration with the candidates for both parties' presidential nominations. The delegates will be divided into separate party meetings and at the end of the third day will be polled on the issues and their choice of candidate. The Public Broadcasting System will televise the proceed- ings to a national audience. Although such a proposal hardly needs intel- lectual justification, Fishkin provides just that in Democracy and Deliberation (to be published shortly before the convention). "True democ- racy," argues Fishkin, depends on three condi- tions: political equality, protection against the tyranny of the majority, and real deliberation. reached the point, in rhetoric at least, though Fishkin holds that deliberation is a means to not I think in reality, of a denial of the idea of a the fulfillment of the first condition, political common culture and a single society. If large equality. But despite recent convention re- numbers of people really accept this, the repub- forms, endless primary campaigns still prevent lic would be in serious trouble." conventions from being effective deliberative Signs are that the excesses of the "ethnic up- bodies. An issue-oriented mini-convention surge" will be their own undoing. Already, they coming before the primaries may be the solu- have united outstanding scholars of the left, tion, says Fishkin. Whether it is or not, Democ- right, and center in a chorus of condemnation. racy and Deliberation makes worthwhile read- The spectacle of Marxist historian Eugene Gen- ing for anyone concerned with the ills of our ovese embracing conservative Dinesh political system. D'Souza's Illiberal Education is typical of this unusual united front. Still, one must share Schlesinger's concern about those students Science & Technology who have been taught by "Afrocentric" schol- ars that AIDS is a white-engineered conspiracy STRANGERS AT THE BEDSIDE: A History directed at the black population, or, even more of How Law and Bioethics Transformed sweepingly, that Europeans are "ice people," Medical Decision Making. By David J. responsible for the world's three D's-"domi- Rothman. Basic. 303 pp. $24.95 nation, destruction, and death." No one born in this century needs to be told how poisonous Once upon a time-it was only a few decades such ideas can be. ago, but it now seems something out of an old

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tale-the sick received treatment at home, vis- HISTORY OF AIDS: Emergence and Origin ited by the family doctor, a father figure who of a Modem Pandemic. By Mirko D. Grmek. had his patients' best interests at heart. He Trans. by Russell C. Maulitz and Jacalyn alone made the life-and-death decisions con- Duffin. Princeton. 279 pp. $29.95 cerning his patients' treatments. But today, writes Rothman, professor of social medicine Although a definitive history of AIDS cannot yet at Columbia University, "the discretion that the be written, Grmek, the director of the Ecole [medical] profession once enjoyed has been in- Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, creasingly circumscribed, with an almost be- offers a modest alternativeÑ1' look back by a wildering number of parties and procedures physician trained in historical method." A participating in medical decision making." bestseller in France, Grmek's retrospective This change in the way medical decisions may strike those suffering from HIV infection were made for thousands of years occurred in or those grappling with the scientific or social only a single decade, between 1966 and 1976. ramifications of AIDS as needlessly academic. In 1966 Henry Beecher, Door Professor of Re- His central concern is whether AIDS is a new search in Anesthesia at the Harvard Medical disease or a little recognized entity that has al- School, published an article that caused a sen- ways been with us. sation: It cited case after case in which physi- Grmek admits that AIDS, a disease defined by cians and medical researchers had verformed its epidemic spread, is new, but he argues that clinical experiments "for the good of society" the HIV virus has been around, possibly for without informing their subjects (usually poor centuries, "scattered and manifest only at a low or retarded) of possible negative consequences. level, in sporadic cases." Recently, three Bel- Suddenly the sacrosanct world of medicine gian physicians proposed that the celebrated came under public scrutiny, and soon peer-re- Renaissance humanist, Erasmus, died of AIDS. view groups, hospital boards, and govern- More convincingly, frozen blood and tissue mental commissions would all determine what samples from the 1950s and '60s appear to con- an individual physician could or could not do form to the symptoms of AIDS. in treating his patients. If Grmek is right, why during the 1980s did A second factor contributing to the doctor's this virus suddenly mutate into a highly virulent demotion was the advance in medical technol- strain and spread to epidemic proportions? He ogy. Breakthroughs in kidney dialysis (1960) introduces an intriguing concept, "pathoceno- and heart transplantation (1968) raised disturb- sis," to describe the state of equilibrium and ing, unprecedented questions. Who would be health that occurs in an ecologically stable selected to receive such highly costly treat- population. When this equilibrium is disrupted, ments? And when should treatment be with- disease occurs in epidemic proportions. The held? In 1973, Senators Walter Mondale (D.- pathocenosis of modem society may have been Minn.) and Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.),to the ruptured, he argues, by the coincidence of a disdain of the medical community, established number of factors, ranging from an increase in a commission to explore medical ethics. Then homosexual and heterosexual promiscuity to in 1976, in a much publicized case, the courts expanded air travel to widespread blood-prod- forced doctors to remove Karen Ann Quinlan, uct transfusions. Grmek calls AIDS "the first of who lay in a coma without hope of recovery, the postmodern plagues." "With its link to sex from a hospital respirator. It was clear, Roth- [and] drugs," he writes, "and with the sophis- man writes, who had won in this "contest be- tication of its evolution and its strategy for tween physicians, on the one hand, and pa- spreading itself, AIDS expresses our era." Al- tients and their legal advocates, on the other." though one can doubt that a disease "ex- It became even clearer. In a 1989 Gallup Poll, presses" anything-much less a whole era- 40 percent of the doctor-respondents admitted this perspective permits Grmek to distinguish that if they had known how little control they between HIV as a virus causing physical suffer- would one day have of their own profession, ing and AIDS as a disease for which there may they would never have gone to medical school be a wide variety of societal responses quite dis- in the first place. tinct from the biomedical ones.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 REFLECTIONS

row Wilson, Politician

The idealistic architect of a postwar world order that never came into being: such is the popular image of President Woodrow Wilson. What it omits is the savvy, sometimes ruthless politician whose achievements in the domestic sphere were equalled by only two other 20th-century pres- idents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Robert Dallek here restores the whole man.

by Robert Dallek

ew presidents in American his- called "Congressional Government," he tory elicit more mixed feelings ranks with Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. than Woodrow Wilson. And Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. why not? His life and career Johnson as the century's most aggressive were full of contradictions that chief executives. An avowed pacifist who have puzzled historians for 70 declared himself "too proud to fight" and years. A victim of childhood dyslexia, he be- gained reelection in 19 16 partly by remind- came an avid reader, a skilled academic, ing voters that he had "kept us out of war," and a popular writer and lecturer. A deeply he made military interventions in Latin religious man, who some described as "a America and Europe hallmarks of his two Presbyterian priest" with a dour view of presidential terms. man's imperfectability, he devoted himself There is no greater paradox in Wilson's to secular designs promising the triumph of life and career, however, than the fact that reason and harmony in domestic and his worst failure has become the principal world affairs. A rigid, self-exacting personal- source of his historical reputation as a great ity, whose uncompromising adherence to American president. Administrative and principles barred agreement on some of his legislative triumphs marked Wilson's ser- most important political goals, he was a vice as president of Princeton, governor of brilliant opportunist who won stunning New Jersey, and president of the United electoral victories and led controversial States. But most Americans who would laws through the New Jersey state legisla- concede Wilson a place in the front ranks ture and the U.S. Congress. A southern con- of U.S. chief executives would be hard servative and elitist with a profound distrust pressed to name many, if any, of these of radical ideas and such populists as Wil- achievements. To them, he is best remem- liam Jennings Bryan, he became the Demo- bered as the president who preached self- cratic Party's most effective advocate of ad- determination and a new world order. (And vanced progressivism. A leading proponent not only to Americans: An upcoming Wil- of congressional influence, or what he son biography by Dutch historian J. W.

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Schulte Nordholt is subtitled A Life for World Peace.) In the 1920s and '30s, when America rejected participa- tion in the League of Na- tions and a political or mili- tary role in a world hellbent on another total war, Wil- son's reputation reached a low point. He was a good man whom bankers and munitions makers had duped into entering World War I. He had also led America into the fighting out of the hopelessly naive belief that he could make the world safe for democ- racy and end all wars. American involvement in World War I1 reversed Wilson's historical standing. Now feeling guilty about their isolationism and their Wilson speaks shortly after receiving his party's presidential nomi- reiection of his vision of a nation-~ "sort of political miracle," he called it-in 1912. world at peace, Americans celebrated him as a spumed prophet whose weaker ones and thus make international wisdom and idealism deserved renewed ac- acts of aggression obsolete. ceptance in the 1940s. A new world league Yet present hopes for a new world order of self-governing nations practicing collec- can plummet overnight-and with them tive security for the sake of global stability Wilson's standing. If Wilson's reputation as and peace became the great American a great president rests upon his vision of a hope during World War 11. When the new era in world affairs and the fulfillment fighting's outcome proved to be the Soviet- of some part of that design in our lifetimes, American Cold War, Americans saw it as his place in the forefront of U.S. presidents another setback for Wilson's grand design. seems less than secure. Nevertheless, they did not lose faith in his Will the ghost of Wilson be plagued for- ultimate wisdom, believing that democracy ever by the vagaries of world politics? Only and the international rule of law would if we fail to give scrutiny to his full record. eventually have to replace tyranny and law- A careful reassessment of Wilson's political less aggression if the world were ever to career, especially in domestic affairs, would achieve lasting peace. go far to secure his place as a great Ameri- Now, with America's triumph in the can president who has much to tell us Cold War and the Soviet-American con- about the effective workings of democratic frontation all but over, the country has re- political systems everywhere. newed faith in a world order akin to what Woodrow Wilson proposed in 1918. The or all his idealism and elitism, Wilson's idea took on fresh meaning when President F greatest triumphs throughout his ca- Bush led a coalition of U.N.-backed forces reer rested on his brilliance as a demo- against Iraq's attack upon and absorption cratic politician. He was the "great commu- of Kuwait. The triumph of coalition arms nicator" of his day-a professor who seemed to vindicate Wilson's belief that abandoned academic language and spoke collective action through a world body in catch phrases that inspired mass support. could reduce the likelihood and effective- He was also a master practitioner of the art ness of attacks by strong states against of the possible, a leader with an impressive

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talent for reading the public mood and ad- hoped would become the "very great man" justing to it in order to advance his per- Joseph himself had wished to be. sonal ambition and larger public goals. Although Joseph imparted a love of lit- This is not to suggest that his career was an erature and politics to his son, Bible read- uninterrupted success. He had his share of ings, daily prayers, and Sunday worship ser- spectacular failures. But some of these he vices were centerpieces of Woodrow's early converted into opportunities for further ad- years. His father also taught him the tran- vance. And even his unmitigated failures sient character of human affairs and the su- had more to do with circumstances beyond periority of religious to secular concerns. his control than with flaws in his political Joseph left little doubt in the boy's mind judgment. that he foresaw for him a career in the min- Wilson's early life gave little indication istry as "one of the Church's rarest of a master politician in the making. Born scholars . . . one of her most illustrious in 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, the third of reformers. . . or one of her grandest ora- four children, he was the offspring of de- tors." But Joseph's defeats in church poli- vout Scotch Presbyterian divines. Thomas tics in Woodrow's formative adolescent Woodrow, his maternal grandfather, came years soured father and son on Woodrow's from Scotland to the United States, where entrance into the ministry. he ministered to congregations in small Instead, Woodrow, with his father's Ohio towns. Jesse Woodrow Wilson, Wil- blessing, invested his ambitions in a politi- son's mother, was an intensely religious, cal career. As Richard Hofstadter wrote, austere Victorian lady with no sense of hu- "When young Tommy Wilson sat in the mor and a long history of psychosomatic pew and heard his father bring the Word to ailments. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the people, he was watching the model Woodrow's father, was a brilliant theolo- upon which his career was to be fash- gian and leading light in the southern Pres- ioned." Before college, he hung a portrait byterian church, holding pulpits in Staun- of British Prime Minister William Glad- ton, Virginia; Augusta, Georgia; Columbia, stone above his desk and declared: "That is South Carolina; and Wilmington, North Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever Carolina. Joseph Wilson enjoyed a reputa- lived. I intend to be a statesman, too." Dur- tion as an eloquent and powerful speaker ing his years as a Princeton undergraduate whose "arresting rhetoric and cogent (1875-79), he rationalized his determina- thought" made him one of the leading tion to enter politics by describing it as a southern preachers and religious teachers divine vocation. A career as a statesman of his time. Woodrow Wilson described his was an expression of Christian service, he father as the "greatest teacher" he ever believed, a use of power for the sake of knew. Yet theological disputes and clashes principles or moral goals. Wilson saw the with other strong-willed church leaders "key to success in politics" as "the pursuit drove Joseph, who advocated various re- of perfection through hard work and the forms, from one pulpit to another and left fulfillment of ideals." Politics would allow him with a sense of failure that clouded his him to spread spiritual enlightenment to life. One Wilson biographer notes that "by the yearning masses. mid-career, Joseph Wilson was in some Yet Wilson, as one of his later political ways a broken man, struggling to over- associates said, was a man of high ideals come feelings of inferiority, trying to recon- and no principles, which was another way cile a God of love with the frustration of his of saying that Wilson's ambition for self- ambition for success and promcmence serving political ends outran his commit- within the church." To compensate for his ment to any particular philosophy or set of sense of defeat, Joseph invested his vaunt- goals. Like every great American politician ing ambition in his son Woodrow, whom he since the rise of mass democracy in the

Robert DaUek is ~rofessorof history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books on political and diplomatic history, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (1979), which won a Bancroft Prize, and, most recently, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960 (1991).

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19th century, Wilson allowed the ends to there are men doing thinking, men who are justify the means. But Wilson never thought conversing about the things of of himself as an opportunist. Rather, he thought. . . ." As a prerequisite to the pre- considered himself a democrat responsive ceptorial system, Wilson persuaded the fac- to the national mood and the country's ulty to reorganize the University's curricu- most compelling needs. It is possible to lum and its structure, creating 11 scoff at Wilson's rationalization of his will- departments corresponding to subjects and ingness to bend to current demands, but requiring upperclassmen to concentrate we do well to remember that the country's their studies in one of them. Wilson's re- greatest presidents have all been men of forms, biographer Arthur S. Link asserts, high ideals and no principles, self-serving "mark him as an educational statesman of altruists or selfish pragmatists with a talent originality and breadth and strength." His for evoking the vision of America as the achievement was also a demonstration of world's last best hope. Wilson's political mastery-a case study in Wilson's path to high political office, how to lead strong-minded, independent like so much else in his life, ran an erratic academics to accept a sea change in the life course. Legal studies at the University of of a conservative university. Virginia, self-instruction, and a brief law The fierce struggles and bitter defeats of practice in Atlanta were meant to be a pre- Wilson's next five years are a measure of lude to a political career. But being an at- how difficult fundamental changes in torney had little appeal to Wilson, and he higher education can be without the sort of decided to become a professor of politics astute political management Wilson ini- instead. Consequently, in 1883, at the age of tially used. Between 1906 and 1910 Wilson 27, he entered the Johns Hopkins Univer- fought unsuccessfully to reorganize the so- sity Graduate School, where he earned a cial life of undergraduates and to deter- Ph.D. for Congressional Government mine the location and nature of a graduate (1885). His book was an argument for a college. In the first instance, Wilson tried to Congress more like the British Parliament, deemphasize the importance of campus a deliberative body in which debate rather eating clubs, which had become the focus than contending interests shaped legisla- of undergraduate life, and replace them tion. For 17 years, from 1885 to 1902, he with residential colleges, or quadrangles, taught at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Prince- where students would live under the super- ton, beginning at the last in 1890. By 1898 vision of unmarried faculty members resid- he had grown weary of what he derisively ing in the colleges. Wilson viewed the clubs called his "talking profession," and during as undemocratic, anti-intellectual,and divi- the next four years he shrewdly positioned sive, and the quadrangle plan as a sensible himself to become the unanimous, first-bal- alternative that would advance the universi- lot choice of Princeton's trustees as the uni- ty's educational goals and national stand- versity's president. ing. Wilson assumed that he could put across his plan without the sort of consulta- ilson's eight years as president of tion and preparation he had relied on to Princeton (1902-1910) were a pre- win approval for the preceptorial system. lude to his later political triumphs and de- But his failure to consult alumni, faculty, feats. During the first three years of his and trustees was a major political error that Princeton term, Wilson carried off a series led to his defeat. Likewise, he did not effec- of dazzling reforms. Offended by the shal- tively marshal the support he needed to lowness of much instruction at Princeton win backing for his graduate-school plan, and animated by a desire to make it a spe- and again it made his proposal vulnerable cial university like Oxford and Cambridge, to criticism from opponents. where undergraduate education empha- Physical and emotional problems sized critical thinking rather than "the ideal caused by strokes in 1906 and 1907 may of making a living," Wilson introduced a partly account for Wilson's defeats in the preceptorial system. It aimed at transform- quadrangle and graduate-school fights. But ing Princeton "from a place where there whatever the explanation for his poor per- are youngsters doing tasks to a place where formance in these academic struggles, they

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were by no means without political benefit and democracy. In a speech to Princeton's to Wilson. In fact, what seems most striking Pittsburgh alumni in the spring of 1910, about these conflicts is the way Wilson con- Wilson attacked the nation's universities, verted them to his larger purposes of run- churches, and political parties as serving ning first for governor of New Jersey and the "classes" and neglecting the "masses." then for president of the United States. He declared his determination to democra- Colonel George Harvey, a conservative tize the colleges of the country and called Democrat who owned a publishing empire for moral and spiritual regeneration. In- that included the New York World and censed at his conservative Princeton oppo- Harper's Weekly, proposed Wilson for the nents, who seemed the embodiment of the presidency as early as 1906. Although Wil- privileged interests, and eager to make son made appropriate disclaimers of any himself a gubernatorial and then national interest in seeking the White House, the candidate, Wilson invested idealism in the suggestion aroused in him the longing for progressive crusade, leaving no doubt that high political station that he had held for he was ready to lead a movement that some 30 years. In response to Harvey's ef- might redeem America. forts, Wilson, who was already known na- New Jersey Democratic boss James tionally as a speaker on issues of higher Smith, Jr., seeing Wilson as a conservative education, began speaking out on eco- opportunist whose rhetoric would appease nomic and political questions before non- progressives and whose actions would fa- university audiences. His initial pronounce- vor the corporations and the bosses, ar- ments were essentially conservative verities ranged Wilson's nomination for governor. calculated to identify him with the anti- Wilson seemed to play his part perfectly Bryan, anti-Populist wing of the Demo- during the campaign, quietly accepting cratic Party. "The nomination of Mr. Wil- Smith's help even as he declared his inde- son," one conservative editor wrote in pendence from the party machine and es- 1906, "would be a good thing for the coun- poused the progressive agenda-the direct try as betokening a return of his party to primary, a corrupt-practices law, work- historic party ideals and first principles, men's compensation, and a regulatory and a sobering up after the radical commission policing the railroads and pub- 'crazes."' In 1907 Wilson prepared a lic utilities. On election day Wilson swept "Credo" of his views, which, Arthur Link to victory by a 50,000-vote margin, 233,933 says, could hardly have failed to please re- to 184,573, and the Democrats gained con- actionaries, "for it was conservative to the trol of the normally Republican Assembly. core." It justified the necessity of great Once in the governor's chair, Wilson made trusts and combinations as efficient instru- clear that he would be his own man. He ments of modern business and celebrated defeated Smith's bid for election to the U.S. individualism. In 1908 Wilson refused to Senate by the state legislature and skillfully support Bryan for president and rejected assured the enactment of the four principal suggestions that he become his vice-presi- progressive measures. As he told a friend, dential running mate. "I kept the pressure of opinion constantly During the next two years, however, on the legislature, and the programme was Wilson shifted decidedly to the left. Mindful carried out to its last detail. This with the of the mounting progressive temper in the senatorial business seems, in the minds of country-of the growing affinity of middle- the people looking on, little less than a mir- class Americans for reforms that would acle in the light of what has been the his- limit the power of corporations and politi- tory of reform hitherto in the State." As cal machines-Wilson identified himself Wilson himself recognized, it was less a with what he called the "new morality," the miracle than the product of constant pres- need to eliminate fraud and corruption sure on the legislature at a time when from, and to restore democracy and equal- 'opinion was ripe on all these matters." ity of opportunity to, the nation's economic Wilson's break with the machine and drive and political life. His academic fights over for reform reflected a genuine commit- the quadrangles and graduate school be- ment to improving the lot of New Jersey's came struggles between special privilege citizens. Most of all, they were a demonstra-

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tion of how an ambitious politician in a de- mocracy bends to the popular will for the sake of personal gain and simultaneously serves legitimate public needs. ilson's nomination for president by a w deeply divided Democratic conven- tion in the summer of 1912 was an extraor- dinary event in the history of the party and the nation. Wilson himself called it "a sort of political miracle." Although Wilson was the frontrunner in 19 11 after speaking trips to every part of the nation, by May 1912 aggressive campaigns by Missouri's Champ Clark, speaker of the House of Represen- tatives, and Alabama Representative Oscar W. Underwood made Wilson a decided un- derdog. When Clark won a majority of the delegates on the 10th ballot, it seemed cer- tain that he would eventually get the two- thirds vote needed for the nomination. In every Democratic convention since 1844, a majority vote for a candidate had translated into the required two-thirds. But 19 12 was Among Wilson's progressive measures was the different. Wilson won the nomination on Underwood Tariff of 1914, the first downward the 46th ballot after his managers struck a revision of the tariff since the Civil War. bargain, which kept Underwood's 100-plus delegates from going to Clark. William Jen- progressive reform, especially the reduc- nings Bryan gave Wilson essential progres- tion of the economic power of the trusts. sive support, and the party's most powerful He also saw correctly that Theodore Roose- political bosses-the men who, in the velt's plea for a New Nationalism-regu- words of one historian, had been Wilson's lated monopoly and an expanded role for "bitterest antagonists and who represented federal authority in the economic and so- the forces against which he had been strug- cial life of the nation-impressed most vot- gling''-decided to back him. ers as too paternalistic and more a threat to Wilson's campaign for the presidency than an expansion of freedom. As a result, was another milestone in his evolution as a Wilson won a plurality of the popular vote brilliant democratic politician. He entered in the four-way contest of 1912, 42 percent the election without a clear-cut campaign to a combined 58 percent for William How- theme. The tariff, which he initially focused ard Taft, TR, and socialist Eugene V. Debs. on, inspired little popular response. In late Wilson's victory in the electoral column August, however, after conferring with was far more one-sided, 435 to 99 for TR Louis D. Brandeis, Wilson found a con- and Taft. His victory was also a demonstra- structive and highly popular campaign tion of his talents as a speaker who could theme. Persuading Wilson that political de- satisfy the mass yearning for a new era in mocracy could only follow from economic national affairs. democracy or diminished control by the Wilson's election represented a triumph country's giant business trusts, Brandeis of democratic hopes. After nearly five de- sold him on the New Freedom-the idea cades of conservative rule by the country's that regulated competition would lead to business interests, the nation gave its back- the liberation of economic enterprise in the ing to a reform leader promising an end to United States. This in turn would restore special privilege and the economic and po- grassroots political power and control. Wil- litical democratization of American life. son accurately sensed that the country's "Nobody owns me," Wilson declared at the mood was overwhelmingly favorable to end of his campaign, signaling his readiness

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to act in behalf of the country's working Underwood Tariff of October 1914 was the and middle classes. Despite his own largely first downward revision of the tariff since conservative background, his political agil- the Civil War; it was inspired more by a de- ity and sensitivity to popular demands sire to reduce the cost of living for lower- made it likely that he would not disappoint and middle-class Americans than by any progressive goals. obligation to serve the interests of indus- trial giants. Wilson drove the bill through is first presidential term represents the upper house by exposing the lobbyists one of the three notable periods of do- representing businesses that sought "to mestic reform in 20th-century America. overcome the interests of the public for What makes it particularly remarkable, their private profit." Making the tariff law notes historian John Milton Cooper, is that all the more remarkable was the inclusion Wilson won his reforms without the na- of the first graduated income tax in U.S. his- tional emergencies over the economy and tory. Shortly thereafter, Wilson won passage civil rights that respectively confronted the of the most enduring domestic measure of country during the 1930s and the 1960s. his presidency, the reform of the country's Wilson, in other words, lacked "the pecu- banking and money system. Insisting on liarly favorable political conditions" aiding public, centralized control of banks and the Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. money supply rather than a private, decen- Wilson's successful leadership rested on tralized system, Wilson once again came his effective management of his party and before Congress to influence the outcome Congress. Following the advice of Texas of this debate. The Federal Reserve Act of Representative Albert S. Burleson, a superb December 19 13 combined elements of politician who became postmaster general, both plans, providing for a mix of private Wilson filled his cabinet with "deserving" and public control. Although further re- Democrats and allowed Burleson to use pa- forms would occur later to make the Fed- tronage "ruthlessly to compel adoption of eral Reserve system a more effective instru- administration measures." Despite Bryan's ment for dealing with national economic ignorance of foreign affairs, for example, problems, the Wilson law of 1913 created his prominence persuaded Wilson to make the bask elements of the banking system him secretary of state. Wilson's readiness to that has existed for almost 80 years. During set a bold legislative agenda found support the next nine months, by keeping Congress from both a 73-member Democratic major- in continuous session for an unprece- ity in the House and a decisive majority of dented year and a half, Wilson won passage Democratic and Republican progressives of the Clayton Antitrust and Federal Trade in the Senate. The 28th president quickly Commission acts, contributing to the more proved himself to be an able manipulator effective regulation of big business and of Congress. Eager to create a sense of ur- greater power for organized labor. gency about his legislative program and to In November 19 14, Wilson announced establish a mood of cooperation between that his New Freedom program had been the two branches of government, Wilson achieved and that the progressive move- called a special congressional session at the ment was at an end. A man of funda- start of his term and then spoke to a joint mentally conservative impulses (which he meeting of both houses. Indeed, he was the believed reflected those of the nation at first president to appear in person before larse). Wilson did not wish to overreach Congress since John Adams. Presenting himself. His announcement bewildered ad- himself as a colleague rather than "a mere vanced progressives, who had been unsuc- department of the Government hailing cessfully advocating a variety of social-jus- Congress from some isolated island of jeal- tice measures Wilson considered too ous power," Wilson returned repeatedly to radical to support. Herbert Croly, the editor Capitol Hill for conferences to advance his of the New Republic, charged that "any reform program. man of President Wilson's intellectual In the 18 months between the spring of equipment who seriously asserts that the 1913 and the fall of 1914, Wilson pushed fundamental wrongs of a modem society four key laws through the Congress. The can be easily and quickly righted as a con-

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sequence of a few League of Nations? laws. . . casts suspi- The answer is not na- cion either upon his ivete about world own sincerity or politics, though Wil- upon his grasp of the son himself believed realities of modern "it would be the social and industrial irony of fate if my ad- life." Similarly, Wil- ministration had to son's refusal to estab- deal chiefly with for- lish a National Race eign affairs." In fact, Commission and his the same mastery of active commitment Congress he dis- to racial segregation played in converting in the federal govern- so many significant ment incensed Afri- reform bills into law can-American leaders between 1913 and who had viewed him 1916 was reflected in as a likely supporter his creation of a na- of progressive mea- tional consensus in sures for blacks. 1917 for American Though he did lit- participation in the tle to reverse course This 1915 cartoon reflects growing American Great War. on helping blacks, skepticism that President Wilson would be able At the start of the Wilson stood ready to to keep the United States out of the Great War. fighting in 1914, Wil- return to the vrosres- son declared Amer- sive position forthe sake of reelection in ica neutral in thought and deed. And 1916. "I am sorry for any President of the though Wilson himself had a decidedly pro- United States who does not recognize every British bias, he understood that the country great movement in the Nation," Wilson de- then was only mildly pro-Allied and wanted clared in July 1916. "The minute he stops no part in the war. His policies initially re- recognizing it, he has become a back num- flected these feelings. Only as national sen- ber." The results of the congressional elec- timent changed in response to events in tions in 19 14 convinced Wilson that the key Europe and on the high seas, where Ger- to success in two years was a campaign at- man submarine violations of U.S. neutral tracting TR's Progressive backers to his rights drove Americans more decisively standard. Consequently, in 1916, he ele- into the Allied camp, did Wilson see fit to vated Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme prepare the country for and then lead it Court and signed seven additional reform into the war. His prewar leadership became bills into law. Among other things, these something of a model for Franklin Roose- laws brought relief to farmers and workers velt in 1939-41 as he maneuvered to main- and raised income and inheritance taxes on tain a national majority behind his re- wealthy Americans. The election results in sponses to World War 11. November vindicated his strategy. Wilson Wilson's failure in 1919-20, or, more gained almost three million popular votes precisely, the collapse of his political influ- over his 1912 total and bested Charles Ev- ence in dealing with the peacemaking at ans Hughes, who headed a reunited Repub- the end of the war, consisted of a number lican party, by 23 electoral votes. On this of things-most of them beyond his con- count alone, Wilson's two consecutive vic- trol. His Fourteen Points, his formula for tories as the head of a minority party mark making the world safe for democracy and him as one of the century's exceptional ending all wars, was beyond the capacity of American politicians. any political leader to achieve, then and now. Yet there is every reason to believe hy did Wilson's political astuteness that Wilson enunciated his peace aims as- desert him during his second term in suming that he would have to accept com- his handling of the Versailles Treaty and the promise agreements on many of his goals,

WQ AUTUMN 1991 WOODROW WILSON

as indeed he did in the Versailles negotia- gested in February, 19 19." tions. A number of these compromises on the Fourteen Points went beyond what he ikon's political failure in 19 19-20 hoped to concede, but he recognized that w was a striking exception in a career the conclusion of the fighting had stripped marked by a substantial number of political him of much of his hold over America's al- victories. His defeat and its consequences lies and limited his capacity to bend the were so stunning that they have eclipsed strong-minded French, British, and Italian the record of prior achievements and partly leaders to his will or to influence the radi- obscured Wilson's contributions to Ameri- cal revolutionary regime in Russia. Events can history. were moving too fast in Europe and all But it is not only the disaster of 19 19-20 over the globe for him to make the world that is responsible. Mainstream academia approximate the postwar peace arrange- today dismisses political history and par- ments he had enunciated in 19 18. ticularly the study of powerful leaders as Faced by such circumstances, Wilson distinctly secondary in importance to im- accepted the proposition that a League of personal social forces in explaining histori- Nations, including the United States, would cal change. What seems lost from view be the world's best hope for a stable peace. nowadays is just how essential strong and Wilson's prime objective after the Versailles skillful political leadership remains in conference was to assure American partici- bringing a democracy to accept major re- pation in the new world body. But the po- forms. Wilson is an excellent case in point. litical cards were stacked against him. After For all the public's receptivity to progres- six years of Democratic rule and a growing sivism in the first two decades of the cen- conviction in Republican Party circles that tury, it took a leader of exceptional political the Democrats would be vulnerable in skill to bring warring reform factions to- 1920, Senate Republicans made approval gether in a coalition that could enact a lib- of the Versailles Treaty and American par- eral agenda. By contrast, Wilson's physical ticipation in the League partisan issues incapacity in 1919 assured the defeat of which could redound to their benefit. American participation in a world league Moreover, between 1918 and 1920, Wil- for 25 years. This is not to say that an Amer- son's deteriorating health, particularly a ican presence in an international body major stroke in the fall of 19 19, intensified would have dramatically altered the course a propensity for self-righteousness and of world affairs after 1920, but it might have made him uncharacteristically rigid in deal- made a difference, and the collapse of Wil- ing with a political issue that cried out for son's leadership was the single most impor- flexibility and accommodation. As Edwin A. tant factor in keeping the United States on Weinstein has persuasively argued in his the sidelines. medical and psychological biography of Did social and economic and a host of Wilson, "the cerebral dysfunction which re- other factors influence the course of U.S. sulted from Wilson's devastating strokes history during Wilson's time? Without a prevented the ratification of the Treaty. It is doubt. But a leader of vision and varied almost certain that had Wilson not been so abilities-not all of them purely admira- afflicted, his political skills and facility with ble-was needed to seize the opportunities language would have bridged the gap provided by history and make them reali- between . . . [opposing Senate] resolutions, ties. To forget the boldness of Wilson's lead- much as he had reconciled opposing views ership, and the importance of political lead- of the Federal Reserve bill. . . or had ac- ers generally, is to embrace a narrow vision cepted the modifications of the Treaty sug- of this nation's past-and of its future.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 114 ARY AC IEVEMENT AT HELPED DEFEAT HITLER.

s

1939 the leb ignore' Histog Recounting Drake's intrepid daring in defeating the Armada and Nelson's defiance of the almost invincible Napoleon, Churchill's pride in British pluck and perseverance is reinforced. Then come the darkest days: 1940-41. France has fallen. The German Army is poised for inva- sion. The Luftwaffe has begun its terrible bomb- ings. At this time, as noted in a recent biography", Churchill remembers Drake and Nelson. His memories are given voice. Britain listens. A peo- ple close to defeat are rallied. It is the beginning of victory over Hitler. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for mastery in historical and biographical presentation" To order the set, at the special $29.95 price, mail a completed coupon or Churchill amply demonstrates the wisdom of the Nobel call us toll free at: Committee. His massive A History of the English Speaking Peoples is a tour-de-force of language and prescience. This beautifully produced 4-volume set, cloth bound with Our Unconditional Guarantee: gold lettering and slipcase, will be a rich addition to any library. You must be completely satisfied with every item you buy from Barnes & Noble by mail, or *winston Churchill, An Illustrated Biography-R.G.Grant vou mav return it to us for a full refund.

Volume One: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN. Traces the story of Britain from Roman times through the Tudors' ascension to the English throne in 1485. 521 pp. I Dept. E615, 126 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10011 I Volume Two: THE NEW WORLD. Two cen- 1 turies of discovery, exploration, civil war and Please rush me __copies of A History of the English Speaking Peoples I massive changes in the English Monarchy, I (S1593730) at the special price of S29.95 each. With this purchase get a FREE Barnes & Noble Catalog Please add 33.00 for postage and handling for each set, law and religion up to the year 1688. 433 pp. I and the appropriate sales tax for CA, CT, MA, MI, MN, NJ, NY, & PA. Volume Three: THE AGE OF THE REVOLU- I I TION. A period of slightly more than 100 I Name I years saw three revolutions-each of which I I Address Apt#_ led to war between England and France. The I I volume ends with the treaties of 1815, which I City State Zip I marked the end of Napoleon's Empire. 402 pp. I 1 Payment Method (check one) Volume Four: THE GREAT DEMOCRACIES. I I The defeat of Napoleon left England uncon- I Check -. I tested master of a large portion of the world. I Visa ILL.I ,-. 1 The rise of the Empire is followed through the I Credit Card Number ; 1 Death of Victoria and the end of the Boer War. I I I 1 America's Civil War and growth as a world Signature power is also detailed. 404 pp. I I I Without purchase, send $1.00 with coupon for a Barnes & Noble catalog. 1 L REFLECTIONS

The 'Other' E e At Century's

When the Soviet Union loosened its grip on Eastern Europe in 1989, observers of the region tempered euphoria with caution. Would the national and ethnic conflicts that have long plagued the region resur- face now that the communist lid was ofP Would the challenge of re- building collapsed economies prove overwhelming? As we approach the second anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, historian John Lukacs uncovers some surprising developments in the "other" Europe.

by John Lukacs

urope is of one piece only ever, the shape of American society resem- when people look at her from bled not a pyramid but a huge onion or the outside. There were few balloon, with a huge bulge in the middle. Europeans in 1939. The na- American society was-superficially-a tional differences were pro- homogeneous society, with one vast middle found. From Albanians and class (although the very word "middle" be- AndorransE to Serbs and Turks: there were gan to lose its original meaning), a small more European nations than there are let- upper class (the point of the onion), and a ters of the alphabet." I wrote these sen- somewhat larger but no longer funda- tences 20 years ago.* What I said about Eu- mental "root end" of the poor (who will rope then is also true of Europe today, with always be with us, as Jesus said). I think- one important difference. and fear-that such balloons will explode The nations of Europe have become, in sooner or later, and something like the old their social composition, Americanized. pyramid will return. But that is not my Some time around 1920 something hap- point here. pened in the United States that has no My point is that the social shapes (but precedent in the history of mankind. Previ- only the shapes) of the nations of Europe- ously, the structure of every society resem- all "democracies" now-resemble that of bled a pyramid, with the relatively few rich the United States, and this may be even and powerful on the top, the impoverished more true of the "new democracies" of and, by and large, powerless masses on the Eastern Europe than of the democratic na- bottom, and the middle class, or classes, tions of the West. All nomenklaturas (politi- somewhere in between, within the tapering cal upper classes) notwithstanding, 45 sides of the pyramid. By the 1920s, how- years of communist rule contributed to the homogenization of their societies. The old *In the introduction of The Last European War, 1939-1941. proletariats have been disappearing fast. As

WQ AUTUMN 1991 THE 'OTHER' EUROPE

in the United States, there is no longer any cal, not economic. They involve the lust for meaningful difference between "workers" power, not money. (But then this has been and "bourgeois," between the working true of mankind ever since Adam and Eve, class and what we might call a lower mid- and misunderstood by Adam Smith as well dle class. There is some, but not much, dif- as by Karl Marx.) ference between a lower middle and an up- per middle class. But, as in the United States, that difference is less financial or material than it is cultural, and-in the he material problems (I prefer the television age-this difference is diminish- word material to economic) are seri- ing. There are the few rich on the top, but ous. The universally accepted idea is that an upper class, in both the traditional and they are the results of 45 years of commu- functional senses, hardly exists at all. nist mismanagement. While there is much This is one of the reasons why the preva- truth to that, it is not the entire truth. The lent view of Eastern Europe in the West is material conditions in the lives of most East wrong. According to this view, the deep cri- European people are less different from sis in Eastern Europe is economic, and the those of the peoples of Western Europe uneven progress toward liberal democracy than they were 45 years ago. (Romania may is a consequence of that crisis. By and be the only partial exception.) In every East large, the opposite of that idie reque is true. European country the great majority were The great and enduring problems are politi- peasants 45 years ago, whereas there is no

WQ AUTUMN 1991 117 THE 'OTHER' EUROPE

country today (with the possible exception visibly improving, and the Hungarian na- of Albania) in which more than a minority tional currency is now very close to West- are engaged in agricultural work. All over ern standards of international convertibil- Eastern Europe people to whom such ity. Yet opinion polls as well as personal things were beyond the dreams of avarice conversations show that Hungarians are 45 years ago now possess, in spite of com- among the more pessimistic peoples of munism, their own automobiles, refriger- Eastern Europe-a condition which has ators, television sets-not to mention ac- nothing to do with the Hungarian Gross cess to electricity, upon which many of National Product but quite a lot with the these necessities depend. prosody of Magyar poetic diction, charac- What remains true is that communist terized by its ever falling tone. governments delayed-and compro- mised-these developments considerably. he 20th century was a short century. It Had there been no communist regimes in lasted 75 years, from 1914 to 1989. The the East European countries, their popula- entire landscape of its history was domi- tions would have reached their present ma- nated by two world wars, the consequences terial standards 25 or 35 years earlier. Even of which-very much including the divi- so, the standard of everyday life in most sion of Europe-lasted until 1989. This East European countries would still have 20th century is now over. As we move into lagged behind those of, say, Finland or Aus- the 21st century, Western and Eastern Eu- tria-the former mutilated and impover- rope will become more alike, as far as ma- ished by the war and then compelled to ad- terial conditions go. Foreign investments in just its national interests in some respects Eastern Europe will assist in bringing this to those of Russia, the latter partially occu- about. But-again, contrary to accepted pied by Soviet troops until 1955. National ideas-they will not matter much in the conditions and, yes, national character re- long run, one reason being that all French main as important as before, notwithstand- or German or American investors in East- ing the uniformities declared by "commu- ern Europe want to gather their profits in nism." Yugoslavia pronounced its the short run. For the moment Eastern Eu- independence from the Soviet bloc in 1948, rope attracts foreign investment by the still- it opened its borders soon thereafter, and low cost of its labor, but labor costs are began moving toward a "mixed" economy bound to rise, sooner rather than later. Peo- more than 30 years ago. Yet even then Bu- ple tend to confuse international finance dapest was more of a Western city than Bel- with economics. The first is-at least in the grade, and of course so it is now. foreseeable future-truly international, This brings me to the anomalies and with monies flowing freely across frontiers contradictions inherent in all economic (those of the Soviet Union remaining an ex- 'facts"-or, rather, in those categories, de- ception). But, then, capital has become in- fined by economists, which have scant rele- creasingly abstract, and the more abstract vance to the realities of everyday life, in- money becomes the less durable it is. Eco- cluding its material realities. In Poland- nomics, on the other hand-in its proper, alone in the Soviet bloc-agriculture was old, original meaning-refers to the hus- not collectivized. Yet agriculture in Poland banding of one's household assets, in the is now worse off than in almost any other biblical, Greek, and even German (Wirt- East European country. Romania is the schaft) senses of the word. To believe that only East European country whose foreign Slovaks or Bulgarians have now "entered" debts were wholly paid off. Yet material or "re-entered" the capitalist phase of their and financial conditions are worse in Ro- historical development is nonsense. Cap- mania than anywhere else in Eastern Eu- italism took 300 years to ripen in Western rope. In Hungary material conditions are Europe, reaching its full development in

John Luckacs is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. Born and educated in Budapest, Hungary, he is the author of, among other books, A History of the Cold War (1961), Budapest 1900 (1988) and, most recently, The Duel: 10 May-3 1 July 1940, The Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler (1991). Copyright @ 1991 by John Lukacs.

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the 19th century. Capitalism resulted from most cases the same people. The services particular conditions-social, religious, po- may improve, but not drastically. This is be- litical, and intellectual-that barely existed cause the very words "employment" and in Eastern Europe in the 19th century and "unemployment" are as inaccurate in East- barely exist there today. Capitalism, like ern Europe as they are in the West. The parliamentary liberalism, was a 19th-cen- question is not whether "work" is avail- tury phenomenon that has little relevance able-there is, and plenty of it. But people to the 21st, with its current material reali- are less in quest of work than they are of ties being obscured by the vocabulary of jobs-jobs with an acceptable and secure economists, whose definitions mean less salary (and pension). Whether these jobs and less. are arranged for them by the state bureau- An example of such obfuscation is the cracy or by a commercial one, by a "pub- current use of the term "privatization." lic" or a "private" company, is a matter of Bloated industries, bloated bureaucracies, indifference to most Eastern Europeans. In inadequate or even fraudulent accounting cultural life-university salaries, theaters, practices have been the results of the "so- publishing-the issue is not "privatization" cialist" order-or, more correctly, of the but the diminution of government subsi- party state. At the same time, there has oc- dies, and that has become a crisis indeed. It curred in much of Eastern Europe a re- is, however, counterbalanced by the fact markable growth of truly private enter- that under other titles-research and travel prise. In agriculture this involved more grants, for example-such government than the energy and production within the subsidies continue to exist. The underpaid so-called household plots. It involved the professor of an East European university fact that, in many ways, collective farms finds himself in the same situation as a were collective in name only. On many col- somewhat underpaid minor business exec- lective farms, particular families took care utive in America whose company pays his of particular fields for planting and harvest- trip abroad. That there are two kinds of ing or elevage, and a fair portion of the monies, private money and expense-ac- profits have come to them. To parcel up count money, and that the management most of the collective farms, to return to an and the real value of these may, at best, agriculture in which the average peasant overlap, while their meaning for their bene- family possessed not more than five or ten ficiaries is quite different, is something that acres, is largely useless. (But then is "agri- has not yet affected the formulas of econo- business," as practiced in the United States, mists either in the East or West; and I fear "private enterprise"? Hardly: It is ruled by that it never will. corporations, and its profitability is entirely Housing is the great problem in Eastern dependent on government subsidies.) Europe-and there, too, the question is not Meanwhile in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Po- what is private or public "ownership" but land, fewer and fewer people work in agri- the sense of possession. Most people in culture. What is growing-in Eastern Eu- Prague, Warsaw, Budapest (but, then, also rope as well as in the West-is the so-called in Vienna, Berlin, Paris. . . ) are renters of service sector. There private enterprise apartments, not the owners of houses (or came into being decades before the politi- even of condominiums). The difference is cal transformations of 1989-1990. Even the that in East European cities the rents are communist state has for many years toler- still low. (That difference is disappearing, ated the existence of individual suppliers of too, with the governments having to raise services, and even where official permits all public-utility fees.) But we must con- were not issued, people have been paying sider two things. First, an Eastern Euro- separate monies to people whose services pean living in the same apartment for many they need, whether bricklayers or doctors. years, often decades, has a far stronger Of course there is, and there must be, a sense of both permanence and possession considerable selling off of state or munici- than a houseowning American who moves pal businesses, which is, almost without ex- every three years and buys and sells "his" ception, a good thing. The question re- house, usually on credit. The second is that mains, however: Who will staff them? In the number of people in some East Euro-

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pean countries who actually own real es- away in the heat of Hungarian political tate-mostly summer houses or condomin- rhetoric. Earlier I read another statement iums-is much larger than it ever has been, by a member-indeed, a government un- and that people acquired most of these pri- dersecretary of state-of the same political vate possessions during the last 20 or 25 party, not, mind you, an extremist one. years of officially "communist" rule. "The enemy of the Hungarian people," this In Eastern Europe (as everywhere else man said, "is no longer communism. It is in the world) the once-clear line between liberalism; atheistic liberalism." I am nei- what is "public" and what is "private" is by ther an atheist nor a liberal, but I surely did no means clear. It has been obscured dur- not like what I read. ing this century. The irony is that in Eastern The main political reality in Eastern Eu- Europe (this is possibly true of Russia, too) rope-it is a reality and not a specter people who do have some private property haunting it-is nationalism. The principal have a much stronger sense of the private cause of the two world wars of the 20th character of their possessions than do peo- century was nationalism, and both of these ple in the West. But this, too, is involved world wars broke out in Eastern Europe- with the corroded and corrupt meanings of as did the so-called Cold War, which is now our still-standard economic vocabulary. over. Yet nationalism in Eastern Europe is What is "private"? What is "public"? What as strone as ever. is "property"? What is "possession"? In- In &tern Europe nationalism is the deed-what is "money"? (Actual money? only popular religion, by which I mean the Credit allowance? Expense-account only religion that still possesses a popular money?) In sum, while the economic prob- rhetoric. When I say to an American na- lems of East European countries in the tionalist that being a good American will 1990s are serious, they are not entirely dif- not necessarily get one into heaven, he may ferent from those in the West, and these dif- be startled but he will understand and pre- ferences are bound to diminish. Where the sumably even agree. When I say to a Hun- problems are different, they are so because garian nationalist that just because some- of different political customs and structures one is a good Hungarian does not and habits. Those are the deeper prob- necessarily mean he will get into heaven, lems-both apparent and latent. he is startled and finds it difficult, if not im- possible, to agree. Populist nationalism, as distinct from the now almost extinct varie- ties of the liberal nationalism of the 19th have a friend who returned to Hungary century, is a modem and democratic phe- permanently after 40 years in the United nomenon. Old-fashioned patriotism grew States. He was a young lawyer and a mem- from a sense of belonging to a particular ber of Parliament until 1949, when he fled country; it was self-confident rather than from the ranidlv advancing shadow of com- self-conscious, introverted and essentially munist terror. He had a decent career in defensive. Populist nationalists, by contrast, the United States. He passed the New York are self-conscious rather than self-confi- State Bar Examination and busied himself dent, extroverted and aggressive, suspi- with lawyering and with emigre affairs. cious of all other people within the same About a year ago he chose to return to nation who do not seem to agree with all Hungary for good, and because of the then points of the populist-nationalist ideology. existing (and by now waning) prestige of Hence they assign them to the status of mi- Hungarian emigres who had made a name norities, suggesting-and at times empha- for themselves abroad, he is now one of the sizing-that such minorities do not and leading personages of one of the smaller cannot belong within the authentic body of parties that make up the government coali- the national people. This is, of course, yet tion. In May I read a passage from one of another manifestation of the potential tyr- his speeches in the newspapers. "The oppo- anny of the majority, which, as Tocqueville sition," he said, "is the enemy of the Hun- observed, is the great danger of democratic garian people." Forty years of liberal de- societies in democratic times. mocracy in the United States had melted When, in 193 1, the king of Spain abdi-

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cated and a liberal parliamentary republic was the anathema pronounced upon Hitler was proclaimed in Spain, Mussolini said and the Third Reich. Yet national socialism, that "this was going back to oil lamps in the despite the terrible distortion Hitler gave age of electricity." He was right. Liberal those words, survived him. Most govern- parliamentarianism belonged to the 19th ments in the world have become welfare century, not the 20th. Indeed, in Spain it states of sorts, and those of Eastern Europe soon degenerated into a sorry mess and, af- are no exception. We are all, to some de- ter five years, into a civil war. But then gree, nationalist socialists. Only interna- came World War I1 and the demise of Hit- tional socialism is a mirage. It is finance ler and Mussolini, reviving the prestige of capitalism that is more international than communism (which is now gone) and of socialism, which is why Hitler hated it and American-style democracy, which is not made it national-that is, answerable to gone yet. For the latter we must be thank- German needs. That was easy, because ful, and its effects must not be underesti- money succumbs to the pressures of popu- mated. It is because of the prestige of the list nationalism even faster than class-con- "West" that populist nationalism and the sciousness does. tyranny of majorities in Eastern Europe will constrain themselves within certain limits, n Eastern Europe today, there is a grow- for a foreseeable time. But this does not I ing nostalgia for, and appreciation of, mean that parliamentary liberalism-in- those nationalist regimes that existed in eluding the habits of dialogue, compro- Eastern Europe both before and during mise, and the sense of a certain kind of World War 11. This of course differs from community shared by the kind of people country to country. Also, we must not for- who make up the parliaments-is, or will get that entire independent states in East- be, the dominant political reality in Eastern ern Europe-Slovakia or Croatia, for exam- Europe. Parliamentary liberalism, like cap- ple-were created by Hitler. There are italism, belonged to the 19th century, when other nations, too, whose anticommunist it was supported both by a certain climate and nationalist pasts were inseparable from of ideas and by a particular structure of so- their alliance with Hitler's Reich during ciety. That society was bourgeois-bour- World War 11. In Romania. for examnle. geois and not merely middle-class. The streets and boulevards in town after to- bourgeoisie had a patrician tinge, and it are now being renamed in honor of Mar- was from this class that most adminis- shal Antonescu, the Romanian "Conduca- trators, governors, and professional and tor" (Fuhrer) whose personality Hitler es- parliamentary representatives were drawn. teemed very highly. In Slovakia this hero- Such societies, especially in Eastern Eu- worship focuses upon the figure of Father rope, do not now exist. Tiso, the nationalist prelate Hitler installed The communists (including Stalin) as the President of Slovakia and who was came to understand the powerful appeal of unusually eager to deliver his country's nationalism long ago. Well before 1989 the Jews to the Germans, even before the Ger- communist parties in Eastern Europe had mans pressured him to do so. In Hungary two wings, each cordially hating the other: (by contrast with Romania, where the mur- one internationalist, the other nationalist, derous Iron Guard now enjoys a resurgent with the former weakening steadily. Thus wave of nostalgic prestige), there is no be- there is more than opportunism latent in lated appreciation of the Hungarian Na- the fact that many of the populists among tional Socialist Arrow-Cross. Yet many peo- the new democratic parties, and even gov- ple have come to regard the era before ernments, of Eastern Europe are former 1945 as a period of national greatness that communists-of the nationalist wing, of Hungary should cherish and to which it course. For what happened in 1989-1990 might even return. was more than the end of communism in Then there is the prospect of the return Eastern Europe. It was, as I said earlier, the of German power in the region. Not yet: end of a century largely defined by two The Germans have their hands full with world wars and their consequences. One East Germany, and will for years to come. important result of the end of World War I1 Also-and this is more important-most

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West Germans have come to terms with though it is still too early to say for certain, their history; to them, the idea of a renewed it appears that the age of great revolutions German expansion to the east is both fright- and of great wars is over. That great wars ening and repugnant. All the same, a great between nations are being replaced by pro- political vacuum exists in Eastern Europe, tracted, seemingly endless guerrilla war- and it is reasonable to assume that much of fare, not only between different national- it may one day be filled by Germany. As ities but also between different sections of a long as a German predominance in Eastern population, is already a fact, not only in Europe remains economic or cultural, this Eastern Europe but in many places in the hegemony will not be particularly worri- West, including the United States. In the some. But it will not be possible, in the long run, the power of the state, of central- long run, to keep it within those limits. The ized government, will weaken everywhere, smaller the East European states, the more including in Eastern Europe. The erosion they will depend on Germany. This applies of the authority of governments has already to the political configurations within each begun, and that erosion almost inevitably nation, too. There will be certain political results in the piecemeal erosion of power. parties attracted to and willing to depend This means a profound change in the struc- on German rather than on other West Eu- ture of societies; indeed, in the texture of ropean or American political support. Keep history. Whether that bodes good or ill is, as in mind the prospective fragmentation of yet, impossible to tell. Eastern Europe: Slovenia, Croatia, Slova- The private aspirations of the East Euro- Ida, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine are all pean masses to middle-class possessions natural allies of Germany-not least be- and to some kind of a middle-class exis- cause of their nationalist memories of tence may not be particularly attractive or World War 11. What is already happening in heroic, but they are an obstacle to the ap- Eastern Europe (including the Yugoslav peals of demagoguery, including those of crisis, which unfolds even as I write) is not extreme nationalism. Add to this the desire only the dismantling of "Yalta," that is, of of Eastern Europeans to belong to "Eu- the results of World War 11; here and there ropew-something that means, among we can see the dismantling of "Versailles," other matters, the desire for the approval of that is, of the results of World War I. In- the "West." How long this will last I do not deed, the 20th century is over. know. There will not be anything like a united Europe in the immediate, or even in hese may be worrisome portents. But the foreseeable, future. But the differences T they are counterbalanced by other, between Western and Eastern Europe will larger realities. As I said at the outset, the decrease year by year. And this is why I am societies of Eastern Europe are American- sometimes more optimistic about the pros- ized, not Germanized. If Tocqueville's pro- pects of Eastern Europe than I am about phetic warnings about the tyranny of the those of Western Europe. Precisely because majority are applicable to them, so is that the former is still behind the latter, pre- other profound chapter in Tocqueville's De- cisely because it must catch up with some mocracy in America: "Why Great Revolu- of the realities of the West, Eastern Europe- tions Will Become Rare." Revolutions are ans have not yet become aware of the trou- made by desperate men, and not many peo- bling and often corrupting nature of some ple in Eastern Europe are desperate of those realities. For the West the time has enough to risk their painfully acquired and already come to rethink the entire meaning jealously preserved private possessions. of "progress," a difficult and painful task Sixty or 70 years ago the present nationalist indeed. Yet for the East, the difficult exac- independence movements in the Baltics or tions of such a rethinking lie some years in Yugoslavia would have erupted in great ahead. In that respect, the "other" Europe national uprisings. Today they don't. Al- has yet to enter the 21st century.

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Continued from page 20

The major news media, for instance, the character, behavior and past of the "went to extraordinary lengths" to shield complainant are seen as central elements from the public the identity of "the Central in determining whether a crime has oc- Park jogger," a young Wellesley graduate curred." No one, for instance, would tell and Wall Street investment banker, who an elderly lady cheated out of her life sav- was brutally beaten and raped by a gang of ings by a con man that she had been "ask- youths in 1989. ing for it." Gartner and others argued that naming Why is rape different? "Because lots of rape victims will help to eventually re- people, too often including the ones in the move the social stigma against rape vic- jury box, think women really do want to be tims. The contention, Pollitt observes, forced into sex, or by acting or dressing or rests on a dubious assumption. "Why drinking in a certain way, give up the right would society blame rape victims less if it to say no. . . ." That being so, Pollitt says, knew who they were?" The issue of nam- privacy for women who claim to have ing the victim, she says, cannot be di- been raped is justified. Instead of denying vorced from blaming the victim. it to them, "we should take a good hard The news media's coverage of the Palm look at our national passion for thrusting Beach case, Pollitt says, underlines the fact unwanted publicity on people who are not that rape is treated differently from other accused of wrongdoing but find them- crimes. "There is no other crime in which selves willy-nilly in the news."

Vox Pop u li? "The Power of Talk Radio" by James C. Roberts, in The Ameri- can Enterprise (May-June 1991), American Enterprise Inst., 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.20036. Overshadowed first by television and then phones in.) Today, a big-name syndicated by the rise of stations on the FM band, AM talk show, such as Rush Limbaugh's, radio once seemed well on the way to ob- which originates at WABC in New York, solescence. Now, however, this stepchild reaches four million people a day on 250 of the airwaves has found a new formula stations nationwide. that may be balm not only for its bottom With audiences has come influence. Jim line but for American democracy. Gearhart's show on WKXW Trenton, That, at least, is the hope of Roberts, reaching half a million New Jerseyites a president of a Washington, D.C.-based ra- day, was instrumental in forcing a partial dio syndicate: "At a time when the public rollback of Governor James Florio's 1990 is reading less and is coming to rely on the tax increases. That same year, talk-show 30-second sound bite for information, talk hosts across the nation spearheaded a suc- radio. . . provides a forum for in-depth dis- cessful grass-roots protest against the pro- cussions of. . . public policy issues." posed congressional pay raise. Joe Klein of There are about 10,000 radio stations in New York magazine has dubbed the hosts the country, reaching 80 percent of Ameri- the "political organizers of the '90s." A less cans at least once a day. Roughly 400-500 sympathetic David Broder, of the Washing- of the stations had a newsltalk format in ton Post, accuses them of "know-nothing 1990, up from 300-400 a year earlier. To- demagoguery." day's national talk shows were made possi- Attitudes such as that, say Roberts and ble by two key developments: Satellite other defenders of talk radio, show how technology of the late 1970s allowed pro- distant the national news media are from grams to be aired nationally; phone de- common concerns-and help to explain regulation a few years later fostered the talk radio's success. Talk-show hosts tend cheap "800" number service that let listen- to be conservative or "populist." (Ralph ers call in from far and wide. (About five Nader was a frequent talk-show guest dur- percent of the shows' listening audience ing the congressional pay-raise campaign.)

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Even Roberts parts company with enthusi- Yet, he maintains, "talk radio will provide asts who believe that talk will eventually an anchor for our rootless and mobile so- crowd music off the airwaves, creating a ciety and an invisible public forum for our brave new world of informational radio. far-flung democracy."

"For and Against the 'New' Education" by Bernard Knox, in In Defense Humanities (July-Aug. 1991), National Endowment for the Hu- Of Sophistry inanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20506. Plato (427-347 B.c.) gave the Sophists a and society, to the criterion of reasoned, bad name, and it has persisted to this day. organized discussion." For the first time in The denigration was quite undeserved, ob- Athenian history, he says, doubts were ex- serves Knox, a classics professor emeritus pressed about the superiority of Greeks to at Yale University. In fact, he says, the barbarians, and there was debate over the Sophists, who taught rhetoric in Athens position of women in society, of political during the fifth century B.c.,were "the first equality, and even of slavery. professors of the humanities," and they Plato, who turned the word Sophist into "created an education designed for the a term of abuse, "also, though this aspect first great democracy." of his work is seldom mentioned, tried to The birth of Athenian democracy in that suppress the new humanities," Knox century had created a need for a new edu- points out. "It was perfectly logical that he cation. Whether to win a majority in the should do so. They had been created to Assembly for a desired policy, or just to provide education in citizenship for that win a verdict for oneself in the new courts democracy which Plato loathed and de- of law, Athenians now found "the art of spised, not only because it had put his mas- persuasion" to be the key to success. And ter Socrates to death but also because he the Sophists-such as Protagoras, Gorgias, saw clearly the real flaws of Athenian im- and Hippias-were professionals in that perial democracy-its inability to main- art. "Protagoras offered to teach, for a tain a stable policy, its encouragement of price. . . how to make the weaker case ap- sycophancy and political corruption." But pear the stronger. This, of course, is the Plato also perceived as flaws of democracy essence of the art of persuasion: it is the "what in fact were its virtues-its open- weaker case that needs the rhetoric." But ness to new ideas, its freedom of speech." although rhetoric was its core, the Soph- In the fifth century B.C. as today, Knox ists' educational program also included, in says, the humanities were on the defen- rudimentary form, all the liberal arts, sive. Now, the "canon" of the great books Knox says. For the ancient Greeks, Homer of Western civilization is being attacked; and other poets were the authorities on but then, too, the humanities were under questions of conduct and belief, and the fire. Then as now, "they were vulnerable Sophists all claimed to be interpreters of to the accusation that they posed questions poetry. Their discussions might begin as but gave no definitive answers; that their literary critiques, but they then moved eas- effect was often unsettling, if not subver- ily into the moral and political realms. sive; that they made their devotees unfit The Sophists, Knox says, "encouraged for real life." But the humanities came their students to question every received into being as an education for democ- idea, to subject age-old concepts of the racy-and that, Knox says, is still the relationship between man and god, man strongest argument for them.

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A New Age of Faith? At the end of a century that has not been kind to religious faith, it is noteworthy that belief has managed to endure. And now two well-known writers-poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, in New Perspectives Quarterly (Spring 1991), and neoconservative thinker Irving Kristol, in Cornmen- tat? (Aug. 1991)-dare to predict that religion may enjoy a revival in the 21st century.

Czeslaw Milosz Im'ng Kristok [The 18th century] has been called The Age of We have, in recent years, observed two major Reason and our scientific-technological civiliza- events that represent turning points in the his- tion has been traced back to the basic premises tory of the 20th century. The first is the death of laid down by thinkers and scientists of that socialism, both as an ideal and a political pro- time.. . . What should surprise us about that gram.. . . The second is the collapse of secular century is its optimism . . . . Human reason up- humanism-the religious basis of socialism-as proached then the super-abundance of existing an ideal, but not yet as an ideological program, phenomena with a confidence in its own unlim- a way of life. [However,] as the ideal is wither- ited forces because God assigned to it the task of ing away, the real will sooner or later follonj discovering the marvels of His creation. [It] was suit. The Age of Pious Reason. . . . If one looks back at the intellectual history of The next century, the lgth, would exacerbate this centuty, one sees the rationalist religion of some tendencies of its predecessor and elabo- secular humanism gradually losing its credibility rate what can be called a scientific even as it marches triumphantly through the in- Weltanschaung [~vorldview]~in fact quite dis- stitutions of our society-through the schools, tant from those harmonious visions of the earlier the courts, the churches, the media. This loss of scientists. Destructive of values, it would prompt credibility flows from two fundafnental flaws in Friedrich Nietzsche to announce the advent of sec~ilarhumanis~n. "European nihilism." . . . First, the philosophical rationalism of secular I would be wary in joining all those who hail humanism can, at best, provide us with a state- the new physics as the beginning of an era of ment of the necessary assumptions of a moral recovered harmony. . . . Yet I am more cynical code, but it cannot deliver any such code it- when in the biochemist Jacques Monod's self.. . . Chance and Necessity I find his desperate state- For a long time now, the Western world has ment about the one-way path we are launched been leading a kind of schizophrenic existence, on by science: "a track which 19tIz-century sci- with a prevailing moral code inherited from the entism sa1v leading infallibly upward to an em- Judeo-Christian tradition and a sef of secular- pyrean noon hour of mankind, whereas what humanist beliefs about the nature and destiny of we see opening before us today is an abyss of man to which that code is logically irrelevant. darkness." I think Jacques Monod was writing a Inevitably, belief in the moral code has become dirge to bygone attitudes, while science now more and more attenuated over time, as we again stands before a breath-taking, miraculous have found ourselves bafled by the Niet~chean spectacle of unsuspected complexity and it is the challenge: if God is really dead, by what author- new physics which is responsible for this change ity do we say any particular practice is prohib- of orientation . . . . The theory of quanta, inde- ited or permitted?. . . pendently of concl~isio~zsdrawn from A second flaw in secular h~tmanisrnis even it.. . restores the mind to its role of a co-creator more fundamental. . . . If there is one indisput- in the fabric of reality. This favors a shift from able fact about the human condition it is that no belittling man as an insignificant speck in the cofnmunity can survive if it is persuaded-or immensity of galaxies to regarding him again as even if it suspects-that its members are leading the main actor in the universal drama. . . . The meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. . . . enthusiasm of the 18th-cent~ityscientists who As the spirit of secular humanism loses its mo- searched for an objective order looks naive to- mentum, it is reasonable to anticipate that reli- day, yet I sense at the end of our century some- gion will play a more central role in American thing like a renewal of a hopeful tone. life.

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A "Ltin America's Reformation'' by Timothy Goodman, in The Latin Atnerican Enterprise (July-Aug. 19911, American Enterprise P~otestantEthic Inst., 1150 17th st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036. Protestant evangelicalism has made great as individualism, rationalism, "the need inroads in traditionally Catholic Latin for achievement, and identification with America. Evangelicals-most of them society at large rather than just the imme- Pentecostals, who practice faith healing diate family circle." Latin American evan- and speaking in tongues-have grown gelicals are inclined "more toward emo- from 15 million in 1960 to over 40 million. tionalism and superstition . . . than toward More than hzilf of them live in Brazil, mak- rationalism," he says. Their religion seems ing up nearly one-fifth of its 150 million to breed disharmony rather than a sense of people. Sociologist Peter Berger and oth- the common good: "Competition, rancor, ers think that the evangelical upsurge will and polarization are often rife among, and encourage the growth of capitalism and even within, their churches.'' democracy in Latin America, just as the Nor is it likely, in Goodman's view, that spread of Calvinism and the Protestant evangelicalism "will unleash the acquisi- ethic did in Europe beginning in the 16th tive drive." Evangelicalism 'lupholds ta- century. But this may be too optimistic a boos against the accumulation of material reading, cautions Goodman, a research as- things; Pentecostals work hard for many sociate at the American Enterprise Insti- reasons, but making money is rarely prom- tute. Evangelicalism, he says, is "more inent among them." likely to retard than to hasten the onset of Perhaps most important, even if the new 'modernity' in Latin America." religion should provide "a positive cul- Berger, sociologist David Martin, and tural context" for modernization, that other optimists, notes Goodman, contend would not be enough to lift Latin America that evangelicalism "inculcates a 'bour- out of poverty. The new culture could not geois' message of self-improvement, tames by itself overcome "the economic and po- maclzismo, fosters peaceability, and en- litical factors-especially statist economic courages hard work as a service to God. It policies, weak political institutions, and in- promotes the 'small' capitalist virtues of ept leadership--that historically have left dependability, thrift, and sobriety,'' It also the region underdeveloped and poorly encourages self-reliance and skills and governed.'' That will require fundamental practices conducive to self-government. reforms. Latin America may blaze a path Yet, Goodman argues, evangelicalism to the promised land of prosperity, but still promotes "values typical of traditional "[a] Protestant Reformation alone will not society." It scants such "modem" values do it and may not even contribute to it."

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOG

'S "ButteAies and Bad Taste: Rethinking a Classic Tale of Mim- The V~C~YOY icry" by Tim Walker, in Science News (June 1, 1991), 1719 N Doublec~oss st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036. For decades, biology textbooks have held ologists have long believed that the viceroy up the viceroy buttemy as a classic exam- was concealing an appetizing body be- ple of Batesian mimicry. The bright or- neath its monarch-like colors. English nat- ange wings of the viceroy (Limenitis uralist Henry Walter Bates, after observing archippus) closely resemble those of the buttedies in the Amazon river basin in the toxic monarch (Danaus plexippus), and bi- mid-1800~~first advanced the idea that a

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Why Scientists Can't Write "Science is the great adventure of our age. place active personalized storytelling with It's ironic that its reports should be so dull passive abstract discourse. It's the difference to read," says novelist Michael Crichton, au- between saying "I got zip this morning and thor of The Andromeda Strain and other wrote a letter to American Scientist" and works. In American Scientist (Jan.-Feb. saying "Letter-writing on some mornings may 1991), he speculates about the source of this occur." barrier between layman and expert. Passive abstraction has many drawbacks. Since nobody in the real world comtnuni- I have often been struck by the fact that scien- cates this way, it's an alien mode that we tisfs in conversation are crisp and clear must shift into, like a foreign language. It's a about their work. The same scientists, writing struggle to write. It's agony to read. Particu- in a journal, produce a nightmare of incorn- larly in reports of experiments, it doesn't re- prehensibility. Various explanations have flect what actually happened. But most im- been proposed, but I think the real problem portant, abstraction actually provides less may be structural: Scientific writing now de- information than narrative, by removing the mands a passive, abstract literary form. flavors, the feelings, the juice, and sorneti~nes In conversation, the scientist provides in- even the substance. . . . formation in the way we ordinarily expect to Of course there are historical and intellec- ' receive it: as a narrative. "We had an unaa- tual reasorfs why scientists choose to deper- swered question in our field. The question sonalize their reports, But the absence of the was important for these reasons. So we up- observer is no longer so fashionable a posture proached it in this way. Here's what hap- as it once was. It may be time for scientists to pened when we did.". , . return to the more vigorous prose tradition of I Unfortunately, science has chosen to re- Galileo. species of butterfly tasty to birds could hct, the birds frequently turned up their thus protect itself. New research, however, beaks after just one peck. The results indicates that it is scientists, not birds, "clearly refute the traditional hypothesis whom the viceroy has been deceiving all that viceroys are palatable Batesian these years, reports Tim Walker, an intern mimics," Ritland and Brower said. at Science News. Why had scientists assumed that the The buttedies' secret was revealed in an viceroy was a taste treat? In part simply avian taste test conducted by David B. because the viceroy evolved from admiral Ritland and Lincoln P. Brower of the Uni- butterflies, which are known to be tasty. versity of Florida, Gainesville. The wing- But also because the viceroy, in its cater- less abdomens of viceroys, monarchs, and pillar stage, does not feed on poisonous other butterfly species were served up to plants-the only way, many biologists local red-winged blackbirds. Despite the have believed, that a buttedy could ac- textbook wisdom, the birds found the vice- quire toxic chemicals. But the viceroy, it roy just as unappetizing as the monarch. In seems, knew better.

High Drama "The Height of Ambition" by David H. DeVorkin, in Air & Spuce/Swzitksoniutz (Apr.-May 1991), 370 L'Enfant Promenade S.W., 10th Fl., Washington, D.C. 20024. In the 1920s and '~OS, the stratosphere exploration of space. beckoned to both adventurers and scien- To prewar scientists, explains DeVorkin, tists. But their interests in exploring it curator of astronomy and space sciences were not the same, and a conflict devel- at the National Air and Space Museum's oped that foreshadowed the debate in later department of space history, the strato- decades over manned versus unmanned sphere offered a chance "to solve the rid-

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dle of the elusive 'cosmic ray,"' a mysteri- ous form of highly penetrating radiation first detected in 1912. But-just as in the space age-finding answers to "arcane questions. . . couldn't fire public imagina- tion and generate financial support." What did capture the public's imagina- tion was the spectacle of men in hydro- gen-filled balloons daring to ascend into the perilously thin air of the stratosphere, which begins some seven miles above the earth's surface and extends for 24. To these bold explorers, ever intent on setting new records, "science was little more than an excuse to make bigger and better flights," DeVorkin says. Scientists who pre- ferred use of unmanned balloons grew to resent the high-flying adventurers. Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard (1884- 1962) was an experienced balloonist who, as DeVorkin writes, "decided to make his mark in physics by combining his passions for flight and science: he would create a sealed, pressurized, manned laboratory that could be flown by balloon into the stratosphere to solve the mystery of the cosmic ray." Ascending from Augsburg, Bavaria, on May 27, 193 1, Piccard and an assistant went up nearly 10 miles, a record. "The sky is beautiful up there- almost black," Piccard wrote in an ac- count for National Geographic. The aero- nauts ran into unanticipated difficulties in their descent but finally landed safely. Piccard's flight made him a celebrity, but he had had time to make just one cos- mic ray observation, and other scientists gave it little credence. By then, however, DeVorkin writes, "scientists using other means had found the origin of the cosmic ray to be indeed cosmic.'' Four years later, the final flight of the era took place. Albert W. Stevens and Orvil Anderson of the Army Air Corps went up in Explorer II on Nov. 11, 1935, and set a new record of nearly 14 miles. Because an earlier flight in a hydrogen- filled balloon had ended with the balloon's explosion, the Explorer 11 balloon was filled with helium, This increased the mar- National Geographic offered eager readers this gin of safety for the men aboard, DeVorkin scorecard on the "stratosphere race" in 1936. says, but it also considerably reduced such

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scientific value as the flight might have be dumped. As would become evident had. Because helium has less lifting capac- three decades later, the debate over ity than hydrogen, half the scientific equip- manned-versus-unmanned exploration of ment that was supposed be aboard had to the high frontier was far fi-om over.

"Great bpectations: Why Technology Predictions Go Awry" by False Prophets Herb Brody, in Technology Review (July 1991), Building W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.

It was the brightu world of tomorrow. Solar "outfits like these have foretold billion-dol- cells and nuclear fusion were to provide lar markets for artificial intelligence, pollution-free electricity, automobiles videotex, and virtually every other new were to run on batteries. hctories were to technology that laboratories have re- rely extensively on robots, and videotex ported." Part of the problem is that the terminals were to be important fixtures in market researchers survey the wrong peo- American homes. But the technological fu- ple: the new technology's vendors. Survey- ture envisioned just a few years ago has ing potential buyers would make for more failed to arrive, notes Brody, a senior edi- realistic projections, but also would be tor of Technology Review. Innovations like much more expensive. nuclear fusion "seem. as alwavs. to be at The news media; of course, are ever least a decade from piacticaliG.''' willing to give hype a hand. Once pub- That's the way it usually goes with ex- lished, the forecasts of "the experts" take perts' technological forecasts, Brody says. on a life of their own. And the result, he adds. is not iust red faces False optimism about new technologies but misspent scientific careers and is also encouraged by underestimating the misallocated money for research. potential of old ones. "Theoretically, it's Why are the much-publicized predic- been possible for the past 25 years for tions so often wrong? Several factors are computers to eliminate photographic involved, according to Brody. One is con- film," says Du Pont executive Alexander flicts of interest. "Interested parties in- MacLachlan. But thanks to continuing clude not only the companies that stand to chemical refinements, he notes, silver-ha- make money from a technology but also lide film has remained in the center of the scientists whose funding grows and wanes picture. with the level of ~ublicexcitement." Re- "Any truly revolutionary technology de- searchers working on nuclear fusion, for fies easy prediction," Brody says. Com- instance, "have kept up a steady barrage of puter designers in the mid-1970s still 'breakthrough' reports since the mid- aimed to build ever larger behemoths. 1970s.'' Few appreciated the value of personal ma- Consulting firms such as Dataquest and chines. In fact, Brody says, from IBM's Business Communications, which analyze study then of what computer users said the business potential of emerging tech- they wanted, the firm "reportedly nologies, feed the bonfires of optimism. concluded. . . that PCs would appeal only "Over the past decade," Brody writes, to a small group of hobbyists.''

"Do We Need More Ph.D.'s, or Is Fewer Really Better?" by A Plague Constance Holden, in Science (Mar. 1, 1991), American Assoc. of scientists? for the Advancement of Science, 1333 H St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. Some specialists are worried that the economist Paulastephan. She thinks there United States is producing too few scien- already are far too many of them, reports tists, but not Georgia State University Holden, a Science writer. PERIODICALS

There has indeed been a huge growth in of those "right places" plummeted from the number of Ph.D. scientists during the 50 percent in 1963 to 17 percent in 1973. past half-century. In 1940, there were 320 The large number of scientists, asserts doctoral scientists and engineers for every Stephan, also has encouraged intense one million Americans over the age of 22; competition among them, with the result by 1966, the total had reached 778, and being not only an inordinate amount of now it stands at 2,000. This vast increase in time spent chasing research grants but a quantity, Stephan maintains, has resulted general avoidance of research that could in a discernible decrease in quality. be important but may well not pan out. "The average quality of people going Further contributing to the putative de- into science in the '70s and early '80s," cline in the quality of scientists, Stephan Stephan claims, "was not as high as in the contends, has been the shift by increasing '50s and '60s in terms of motivation, abil- numbers of very bright students, starting ity, and interest in science." In the 1970s, in the early 1970s, away from scientific ca- according to studies by Stephan and reers and toward the more lucrative fields Sharon G. Levin of the University of Mis- of business, law, and medicine. souri, recent Ph.D.'s in particle physics Critics of Stephan's argument are not in were producing, over a two-year period, short supply, Holden found. "The young an average of nine fewer articles than their assistant professors I've seen are more ca- predecessors in the 1950s did. pable and more brilliant than ever in the The quality of an individual scientist's past," asserts Richard Atkinson, chancel- work suffers when he does not have ade- lor of the University of California, San quate resources, stimulating colleagues, Diego. Critics say that more Ph.D. scien- and due recognition, she argues. These are tists are required to sustain the U.S. econo- available at top-level research institutions my's technological edge. Unless "we're and national laboratories, but most new just going to change the whole society science positions have been created else- we're living in," Atkinson says, we need to where. A physicist's chance of being at one have more scientists.

RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT

"Incentive-Based Regulation: A New Era from an Old Idea?" by Going To Market Robert W. Hahn and Robert N. Stavins, in Ecology Law Quar- For Cleaner Air? terly (Vol. 18, No. 1, 1991), Boalt Hall School of Law, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, Calif. 94720. For more than two decades, economists economic incentives to keep their emis- have been pushing the idea of market- sions down. based environmental regulation. In recent In the past, Congress and the Environ- years, Congress and others involved in mental Protection Agency (EPA) have fa- making policy have started to listen. When vored the "command-and-control" ap- the Clean Air Act was overhauled last year, proach to environmental protection, for example, Congress and the Bush ad- compelling firms to use certain pollution- ministration included a "tradeable per- control equipment or to meet certain mit" system for controlling acid rain. Un- emission standards. der this scheme, companies are permitted That sort of regulatory approach may to generate certain levels of sulfur dioxide; work to control pollution, say Hahn, a resi- if they keep their emissions below those dent scholar at the American Enterprise levels, they can then sell their surplus per- Institute, and Stavins, a Harvard professor mits to other firms. This gives companies of public policy, but the method is inef-

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ficient (because the costs vary greatly and "trade" their lead-content savings. among firms) and expensive to society. Other market-oriented devices have been Since 1984, the cost of compliance with put into use here and abroad. Nine states, U.S. environmental regulations has in- for example, seeking to reduce litter, have creased nearly 40 percent and now stands mandatory deposit laws in effect for bot- at about $90 billion a year. Set against a tles and cans. France. the Netherlands. backdrop of fiscal austerity and concern and Germany curb water pollution by about improving U.S. firms' productivity means of fees or taxes. and competitiveness, the high cost of com- Hahn and Stavins say they are "bullish" mand-and-control environmental protec- on the use of economic incentives but still tion has made political leaders and envi- think they will remain limited. EPA bu- ronmentalists much more receptive to reaucrats, environmentalists, and others market-oriented ways of pursuing the have a great deal invested in the status same goal. The Environmental Defense quo. Even industry lobbyists in Washing- Fund, for example, has become "an enthu- ton display a "curious resistance" to mar- siastic proponent" of such approaches, the ket-oriented reforms. Like their oppo- authors say, and the Sierra Club and the nents, their stock-in-trade is manipulation National Audubon Society now back "se- of the existing system; new rules for play- lective use" of them. ing the game are a threat (and might, at Economic-incentive methods have been least at first, cost some industries more). employed in the past on a limited basis. In But despite all the resistance, the authors 1982-87, the EPA, in its successful drive to say, economic-incentive proposals are go- reduce use of lead in gasoline, used a per- ing to get "a warmer reception" from poli- mit system that let fuel refiners "bank" cyrnakers in the years ahead.

"Risk Perception, Trust, and Nuclear Waste: Lessons from Too Hot Yucca Mountain" by Paul Slovic, Mark Layman, and James H. To Handle Flynn, in Environment (Apr. 1991), Heldref Publications, 4000 Albemarle St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016. When it comes to the disposal of highly came to mind in response to the term un- radioactive nuclear waste, expert appraisal derground nuclear waste repository. More and public opinion could not be more op- than half the 10,000 responses were nega- posed. Government and industry scientists tive, and the words most often expressed say that spent fuel from the nation's 11 1 were dangerous, danger, death, and pollu- commercial nuclear reactors-each one tion. Positive images were rare. generating about 30 tons of high-level nu- The public's fears, the authors say, rep- clear waste every year-can be safely resent "a urofound breakdown of nublic stored in deep, underground repositories trust in the scientific, governmental, and , - for tens of thousands of years. The risks industrial managers of nuclear technol- involved are negligible, most specialists ogies." Restoring this trust will not be say. Yet the public regards those risks as easy, they observe, especially in light of immense and unacceptable. In Nevada, in- past Energy Department "mismanage- tense opposition from both state officials ment" of the Yucca Mountain project. and residents has stymied the U.S. Energy The only feasible course, they conclude, Department's efforts to evaluate Yucca "is to delay the siting of a permanent Mountain as a potential site for a perma- repository for several decades and to store nent nuclear waste storage facility. the wastes wherever they are produced in Surveys that psychologist Slovic, presi- the interim in dry-cask storage." Accord- dent of Decision Research, and his col- ing to the National Research Council, they leagues conducted in 1988-90 asked peo- note, such storage is "as safe as under- ple to reveal the thoughts or images that ground storage" for 120- 150 years.

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"Nearer to God" by Paul Johnson, in National Review (June 10, Music's Prophet 1991), 150 East 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016. Percy Bysshe Shelley in 182 1 called poets sic, as a key to it, became more serious, "the unacknowledged legislators of the too." Music was used to enhance the world." But Ludwig van Beethoven (1770- higher arts; poetry was made into songs, 1827) had already staked out a similar operas, and even symphonies. claim on behalf of a genuinely lowly Beethoven altered the form and content group: musicians. In fact, it was Beetho- of music. Eighteenth-century opera was, ven, according to journalist-historian for the most part, about sexual intrigue; Johnson, who "first established and popu- Beethoven's Fidelio (1805) "shift[ed] the larized the notion of the artist as universal ground fundamentally to the brotherhood genius, as a moral figure in his own of man and the glory of fidelity." His Fifth right-indeed, as a kind of intermediary Symphony in C Minor, composed two between God and Man." years later, "operates at the highest level of Musicians in the late 18th century were human intellect and emotion," Johnson minor church functionaries or servants of observes. Music, the composer insisted, "is the aristocracy. Music was seen as an aes- a greater revelation than the whole of wis- thetically inferior art because its appeal, dom and philosophy." intense but brief, was confined to the A Roman Catholic, Beethoven was not senses. Unlike poetry, philosopher Im- consciously trying to turn music into a sec- manuel Kant (1724- 1804) said, music did ular religion. Nevertheless, says Johnson, not "leave anything over for reflections." for increasing numbers of people, "the Such attitudes changed after about 1800, new kind of transcendent music Beetho- Johnson writes, when "music was seen as ven wrote, and the new importance he increasingly significant because it height- gave to music in the intellectual and moral ened self-awareness, now regarded as de- cosmos, did constitute a secular substitute sirable.. . . Emotion.. . created forms of for religion; there was a new faith, and knowledge as serious as reason, and mu- Beethoven was its prophet."

"The Great-Teacher Myth" by Robert B. Heilman, in The Ameri- The Performing can Scholar (Summer 1991), 181 1 Q St. N.W., Washington, Teacher D.C. 20009. The 1989 film Dead Poets Society, about explication, that might lead to some edu- the style and influence of a charismatic cation." Keating, the professor says, "is teacher at a boys' preparatory school, was not a teacher at all but a performer," one popular with audiences and praised by who has cast himself in a single, lifetime many critics. The New Yorker deemed the roleÑ1'th gutsy, charismatic, infallible, movie "a classic." What is strange, ob- one-in-a-millionguide against the system." serves Heilman, a professor emeritus of Any system needs serious critics, Heilman English at the University of Washington at adds, "but Keating is only a guy with a Seattle, is that the character whom audi- mike in a midnight show." ences are supposed to look upon as the Dead Poets Society, he says, missed what ideal teacher, John Keating (Robin Wil- the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean liams), never does any real teaching. Brodie, also about a star teacher, did not. "What we see is moonlight larks and for- In that movie, based on a Muriel Spark est frolics-midsummer nights' dream novel, "we see the full character: the self- fantasies taken for actualities, instead of worship and power-love of the spectacular that steady book work, aided by sensible teacher who manages to seem superior to

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About This Mona Lisa Fed up with "the red rant of unearned her odd, asexual face, in where the mystery praise," novelist Stanley Elkin fires away in live^, the secret agenda, in toward her Art & Antiques (Summer 1991) at some giacondas, her giacontindrums, the hidden "overrated masterpieces," from Hamlet to mystery of her guarded gingivitis smile! Be- Citizen Kane. But when he comes to Leo- cause I'm changing my mind here, a little I nardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the curmud- am, and thinking maybe it's Nut King Cole's geonly critic almost succumbs to her fam- version I'm not that crazy about, his viscous ously mysterious smile. syrups I'm thinking of, confusing the box-step cliche and sentimentals with the fact of her See her there in her cat-who-ate-the-canaries, face. Because what levers our attention is her smug repose and babushka of hair like a that nose and those lips, and a truth about art face on a buck. A study in browns, in mudsis the company it keeps with the slightly and all the purplish earthens of her jautz- askew, the fly in that woodpile of symmetry, diced, low-level, f-stop light. See her, see her mere balance in painting, equilibrium, a there, this, well, girl of a certain age, with a stunt of the "beautiful." What commissions faint streak of bone structure blowing off her the eye is face. . . . It's the face that draws the .skin like a plume of jet trail all she has for eye in the Mona Lisa, but I was only kidding brow. See her, see the leftward glancing of about the mystery of that smile. There is no her color-coordinated eyes inside the puffy, mystery. No one ever had to solve a face, and horizontal parentheses of her lashless lids. the notion of this face's enigmatics has al- See the long, low-slung nose dropped incheswaysbeen a kind of anthropomorphism, only below the painterly rules of thumb. Now see paint's pathetic fallacy, facial phrenology, a her famous statelies, her upright, comfortable horoscopics by bone structure, an astrology aplomb, her left foreann along the ann of a of the eye, the palmistry of character, wrong- chair, her fat right hand covering it, as clubby headed, literary, the racism of beauty, unreli- and ut ease as one foot crossed over an- able finally as any other pseudoscience, as if other. . . . to say, oh, as if to say, "Read my lips." In and closer in to the central occasion of Next slide. . . . a whole cadre of routine-bound dull parts in real life, and these self-loving per- souls.. . . In contrast with the myopia of formers, always playing the malcontent, Dead Poets Society, it had insight into the do serve a function, in Heilman's view. singular nexus between certain leadership They provide an outlet for students' melo- gifts and the ego that cannot settle for a dramatic "discontents, suspicions, and steady engagement in the common enter- negative judgments." In short, while the prise but must star in public displays of Keatingesque Great Teacher may seldom, extraordinary powers over the young." if ever, be a good teacher, he does make a The Keating-Brodie type has its counter- fine institutional safety valve.

"Genius and Glory: John Singleton Copley's The Death of Major Propagandistic Peirson" by Richard H. Saunders, in The American Art Journal License (VOI.XXII, NO. 3, 1990), 40 W. 57th st., 5th fl., New York, N.Y. 10019.

John Singleton Copley's The Death of Ma- Copley (1738-1815), who had been a jor Peirson (1784) was a masterpiece and successful portrait painter in colonial Bos- possibly the finest British historical paint- ton, was by 1781 well established as a ing of the 18th century. Yet, like the en- painter in London. That January, French graving of the Boston Massacre that forces invaded the Channel island of Jer- strongly influenced it, Copley's painting sey and obtained its surrender; British played fast and loose with certain histori- forces, led by Major Francis Peirson, ig- cal facts. nored the surrender order of the island's

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Colley and E. Hedges, Scottish troops of the 78th Highland Regi- ment, led by officers in kilts and tam-o'shanters, advance in rows, fir- ing on the retreating French. One Highlander, meanwhile, rushes to assist the wounded Peirson, who braces himself against a building near where his troops entered the square. In placing him at the edge of the scene, Saunders notes, the artists "chose reportage over drama." Copley, by contrast (and despite

at least one battlefield account),,. put* Copley gave a military skinnish great national import. Peirson at center stage, falling dra- matically "into the arks of his mili- lieutenant governor, advanced on the tary subalterns." He relegated the Scottish main town's central square, and routed Highlanders to far less prominent posi- the French. In the moment of triumph, tions. It was English noble sacrifice that however, young Peirson was fatally shot. the painting was to display, after all. He Copley sensed the appeal that Peirson's also added a splendidly attired black ser- sacrifice and the modest military victory vant, who avenges Peirson's death-but might have to Englishmen, dispirited by who probably did not exist. years of martial failure in the American Copley drew inspiration for his master- colonies. In his rendition, Copley did want piece from the 1770 print of the Boston historical accuracy-but only up to a Massacre, which depicted a similar scene. point, according to Saunders, director of Paul Revere, who received most of the the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery credit for the print, had taken the idea at Middlebury College. Copley believed from an almost identical one by Copley's "that it was not the artist's duty to depict half-brother, Henry Pelham. Effective as reality. On the contrary, it was the artist's radical propaganda, the Revere-Pelham responsibility to elevate reality to a level portrayal of the massacre had little to do beyond that of simple reporting, to com- with what actually happened: Boston municate values such as nobility and sacri- toughs provoked British troops into firing fice to future generations." on them. Just over a decade later, Copley Other artists had taken a less elevated transformed the "graphic image of colo- approach to the Jersey battle. In the center nial hatred" into a masterful portrayal of of the earliest picture, by Thomas Gram "the glory of British military prowess."

OTHER NATIONS

The 'Perfect "Mexico: The Crumbling of the 'Perfect Dictatorship'" by An- drew Reding, in World Policy Jocvnal (Spring 1991), World Pol- Dictatorship icy Inst., New School for Social Research, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017. Long hidden by a veil of constitutional de- ers alike, as a de facto form of dictatorship, mocracy, Mexico's system of presidential says Reding, a Senior Fellow at the World absolutism (presidencialismo) is increas- Policy Institute. Indeed, when Peruvian ingly being seen, by Mexicans and foreign- novelist Mario Vargas Llosa declared in

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1990 that Mexico was a "perfect dictator- Democratic Revolution (PRD)-under- ship," having all the characteristics of a scored his challenge. "The PRD's call for a dictatorship except the appearance of one, revolutionary change in the way Mexico is his phrase was widely repeated inside Mex- governed," Reding observes, "has, in ef- ico. Yet this very fact, Reding points out, fect, transformed every election in which "is itself a clear sign that the 'perfect dic- it participates into a referendum on tatorship' is no longer so perfect." authoritarian rule." A new political culture, stressing respect Today, Reding says, "the culture of presi- for democracy and human rights, has dencialismo appears more naked than at emerged in Mexico. The catalyst for it, any time since the ill-fated reign of Porfirio Reding says, was the July 1988 presidential Diaz [the dictator overthrown in 19 111. elections, in which there were allegationsu The emerging democratic culture rejects of massive vote fraud. When early returns the absolutist presidency outright, insisting on election night showed opposition lead- on a true separation of powers, indepen- er Cuauhtkmoc Cardenas in the lead. the dent electoral authorities,. a -genuine multi- US.-style computerized vote tabulation party system, and strict enforcement of in- system that was providing returns over na- ternationally recognized standards of tional television suddenly went dead. The human rights."" While these ideas are not votes instead were counted "the old-fash- new, Reding points out, their incorpora- ioned way." After a week's delay, the offi- tion into a political movement is. cial results were released, showing an old- Although" the Salinas administration has fashioned result: Carlos Salinas de Gortari overhauled the nation's electoral system, of the long-ruling Institutional Revolution- Reding says, the vaunted reforms still re- ary Party (PRI) was the winner. flect "a pervasive distrust of democracy, a Cardenas. however. would not follow continuing obsession with the trauma of "the old rules, whereby he might have rec- 1988, anda determination to reconstruct ognized a Salinas presidency in exchange the damaged foundations of presidencialis- for more favorable treatment of his coali- mo." Salinas may continue to hold power, tion in the Senate and at the state and local Reding concludes, "but nothing short of levels." The next year, he founded a new genuine democracy can now restore re- party, whose very name-the Party of the spect for the presidency."

"Are Russians Lazy?" by S. Frederick Starr, in World Monitor Moxie (June 1991), 1 Norway St., Boston, Mass. 021 15. In Moscow Many Western observers, and not a few economy," according to U.S. researchers, Russian ones, have expressed skepticism produced half of all personal income. Pri- about the prospects for democratic change vate entrepreneurs, by Soviet estimates in in the Soviet Union. Democracy and free 1986, accounted for 20 percent of all retail enterprise, they say, require a capacity for trade, 30 percent of the service sector, and independent initiative that, after centuries 40 percent of businesses in areas from of czars and decades of commissars, most auto repairs to tailoring. Russians don't have. Not so, says historian Although Soviet President Mikhail Starr, president of Oberlin College. Gorbachev "has stated repeatedly that the "There is much evidencethat the stereo- public is hostile to private enterprise," the type of passive Russians who lack civic ini- All Union Center for the Study of Public tiative is dead wrong," he declares. "Take Opinion in Moscow found that a third of the economy, for instance. If Russians are Russians would open their own businesses so lacking in initiative, how did a huge pri- if they could do so legally; a quarter of the vate (if illegal) sector arise even during the rest are put off from doing so only by a repressive Brezhnev years?" This "second lack of access to credit or by fear that the

WQ AUTUMN 1991 135 PERIODICALS

state would seize whatever they earned. "If Russians are too pas- sive to assert their will against the entrenched po- litical establishment, one would scarcely expect them to form independent groups to press their demands," Starr notes. Yet that is just what has happened in re- cent years, as thousands of lobbying clubs and associa- tions of all types have been set up. Labor has estab- lished independent unions, many patterned on Poland's Solidarity. Lawyers, journal- Unlike these supposed Soviet heroes of production in Natalia ists, and other professionals Levitina's "The 'Vanguard' of Perestroika," many Russians have also have organized their ample capacity for independent initiative, says historian Starr. own groups. ~nde~endent political parties have already come to sians, freed from fear, possess as much ini- power in most non-Russian republics, and tiative and capacity for independent action organization is proceeding rapidly in the as do members of other developed soci- far-flung territory of the Russian Republic. eties in Europe, Asia, and the Americas." Despite "the stereotypical images ad- The West, he says, should accept "at face vanced by those in Russia and the West value" the democratic movement in the who are eager to justify the Kremlin's new Soviet Union, not "belittle it simply be- authoritarianism as a necessary evil," Starr cause it has not, in a mere five years, tri- says, there is "ample evidence that Rus- umphed completely over the old system."

Premature "Germany and the Cold War: An Inquest" by Jacob E. Heilbrunn, in Global Affairs (Summer 1991), International Se- Reunification curity Council, 1155 15th St. N.W., Ste. 502, Washington, D.C. 20005. German reunification, finally accom- The allies at the time looked upon plished in 1990, might have come about Stalin's note with great suspicion, seeing almost four decades earlier. Heilbrunn, a in it a tactical move to block formation of writer and former assistant editor at the the European Defense Community. Yet the National Interest, says that it was probably U.S. State Department and Britain's White- a good thing that it did not. hall took the dictator's proposal seriously. On March 10, 1952, Soviet leader Josef When Stalin later in the month advanced a Stalin sent a note to the U.S., British, and revised version, the State Department Pol- French governments, in which he pro- icy Planning Staff commented that "It posed creation of a unified, neutral Ger- would be unwise to assume that the note is many. Could this proposal, asks Heil- only a propaganda move." brunn, have been an opportunity to unify Kurt Schumacher, leader of the German Germany on minimally acceptable terms, Social Democratic Party (SPD), enthusias- one that, had it been seized, might have tically agreed. He wanted to see "an inde- spared East Germans nearly four decades pendent, unified Germany-and unified of totalitarian rule? precisely because it was independent,"

WQ AUTUMN 1991 PERIODICALS

Heilbrunn says. "Schu- macher was pro-Western, but. . . he was convinced that by championing social democracy, the SPD could bring the eastern zone into its orbit. . . . A unified, dem- ocratic Germany would jockey for advantage be- tween East and West." He therefore was eager to see the allies enter negotiations to create such a Germany. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union viewed Stalin's pro- posal with alarm, and he persuaded the allies to re- buff it. According to Heilbrunn, Adenauer told the Americans that even to agree to a conference with the Soviets on the subject "would open the door to bringing Germany into the Soviet orbit." The chancel- lor "had no confidence in the German people," ob- served Sir Ivone Kirkpat- rick, head of the British Foreign Office in the 1950s. As a result, he "felt that the integration of Western Ger- many with the West was more important than the unification of Germany." In the view of German historian Rolf Steininger, Adenauer thus lost a chance to find out whether it was possible then to have "a Germany united in freedom." But Heil- but because, unlike Schumacher, he un- brunn says that while Adenauer's rejection derstood that the German problem could of Stalin's offer was indeed "a turning not be solved in isolation from a solution point," the reasoning behind it was sound. for Eastern Europe and because he fore- "Adenauer spurned negotiations," saw circumstances in which German unifi- Heilbrunn writes, "not because he re- cation would come about in a manner jected unification per se-it remained the much more advantageous for Germany official aim of the [Federal Republic of and Europe." Nearly four decades later, Germany] and was enshrined in the pre- events seem to have proved that Adenauer amble to its Grundgesetz, or Basic Law- was right.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 S PORTS

Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"Recent Trends in Economic Inequality in the United States: Income vs. Expenditures vs. Material Well-Being." Paper delivered at a conference on poverty in America, sponsored by Bard College's Jerome Levy Economics Institute, June 18-19, 1991. Authors: Susan E. Mayer and Christopher Jencks The late 1970s and '80s are 1984-85 of only about Chicago in 1989, found that widely seen as hard times for $1,400Ñvirtuall the same as none of the women spent less poor families. While the aver- it had been more than a dec- than $500 per month in cash. age American family's real in- ade earlier. (According to dif- Not one of the mothers was liv- come rose by 11 percent be- ferent, and dubious, Bureau of ing entirely on her welfare tween 1979 and '89, for Labor Statistics data, the in- check-and not one was re- example, the real income of come of the poor plummeted porting all her outside income families in the bottom fifth fell by half, down to only $900.) to the welfare department. The by four percent. The poverty The gap of more than $3,000 average mother's unreported rate increased from 10.5 per- is partially explained by the cash income amounted to as cent to 11.4 percent. fact that Census Bureau re- much as her welfare check. But all these figures are mis- searchers did not ask people to This hardly means that the leading, contend sociologists report certain kinds of income poor are rolling in money. Mayer, of the University of Chi- (e.g., from savings, loans, pay- Still, Mayer and Jencks note, cago, and Jencks, of North- ments by boarders, or even il- there are other indications western University. While the legal drug sales). Even so, the from decennial census data cash income reported by poor poor clearly did not give a full that belie the image of worsen- families was stagnant (after ad- account of all the money they ing poverty. In 1980, at the end justment for inflation) during received from licit or illicit of a decade in which their real the 1970s and '80s, their re- employment, family members, per-capita income supposedly ported expenditures jumped. and other sources. did not increase, poor families U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis- "There may be a few house- were less likely than in 1970 to tics surveys indicate that be- holds getting by on such live in crowded housing and tween 1973 and '85, average amounts [the reported $1,400 more likely to have a car, a consumer spending by the annually per capita], especially telephone, an air conditioner, poorest tenth of American if they live in subsidized hous- and a "complete" bathroom. households went from $2,829 ing, get food stamps, and have Available statistics on in- per person (in 1987 dollars) to Medicaid," Mayer and Jencks come, the authors conclude, $4,545-a whopping 60 per- acknowledge. But they note do not provide an accurate pic- cent increase. Meanwhile, sim- that researcher Kathryn Edin, ture of how the poor are far- ilar households were reporting who interviewed 50 mothers ing. That throws into question to the Census Bureau an aver- receiving welfare (as well as all assessments of government age per-capita income in food stamps and other aid) in programs to aid them.

"Watching America: What Television Tells Us About Our Lives." Prentice Hall Press, 15 Columbus Cir., New York, N.Y. 10023. 322 pp. $24.95. Authors: S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothrnan Television dramas, movies, Smith College political scien- men are portrayed is a case in and sit-coms, once "the ser- tist. Their study of 620 prime- point. Before 1965, there were vant of the status quo," in re- time shows broadcast between twice as many "good guys" as cent decades have become "an 1955 and '86 indicates TV "bad guys" in TV'S version of agent of social change," con- "now fosters populist suspi- corporate America. In the en- tend the Lichters, directors of cions of traditional mores and suing decade, however, the the Center for Media and Pub- institutions.'' proportion was reversed. Now, lic Affairs, and Rothman, a The way in which business- the men in gray flannel suits

WQ AUTUMN 1991 138 RESEARCH REPORTS

are villains, responsible even No pre-1970 program the au- themes" of recent TV enter- for much of the violent crime thors studied justified extra- tainment, it should come as no in TV-land. (And it is a violent marital sex without qualifica- surprise that the authors' sur- place: Since 1955 the murder tion, but of the subsequent vey of 104 leading TV produc- rate has been 1,000 times shows, 41 percent presented ers and other creative types re- higher, per 1,000 inhabitants, "recreational" sex as perfectly veals them to be very liberal in than in the real world.) Next to okay. "On the TV screen," the their political and social views. professional criminals, in fact, authors note, "sex is usually "On such issues as abortion, businessmen commit the larg- without consequences, without homosexual rights, and extra- est share of TV crimes, includ- worry, and with rarely a bad marital sex, they overwhelm- ing one-third of the homicides. experience." In part, they ac- ingly reject traditional restric- That gives new meaning to the knowledge, television is just tions." Despite TV'S portrayal term "hostile takeover." following society's changing of businessmen, however, Sex is another realm in mores. "But [it] also seeks to most of the creators favor free which TV entertainment has accelerate these changes, by enterprise and think people challenged traditional views. championing causes like gay with greater ability should earn In TV-land today, "sexual re- rights, which the mass audi- more. They certainly do: Two- pression [is presented] as a ence still opposes." thirds make more than barrier to human fulfillment." Given the "left populist $200,000 a year.

"Exploring the Moon and Mars: Choices for the Nation." Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402-9325. 104 pp. $5. President George Bush has ing Mars-but with robots. Sticking to Bush's timetable, proposed sending Americans The Japanese plan to send un- however, may mean giving back to the Moon to establish a manned craft to the Moon. short shrift to these new tech- permanent lunar base, and The cost of Bush's proposal, nologies, OTA notes, if re- then mounting a mission to according to very tentative esti- sources are channeled into Mars by the year 2019, the 50th mates, could reach $300-550 technologies to support the hu- anniversary of the Apollo billion. Human exploration of man crews. Moon landing. Congress' Of- such extremely harsh environ- Future decisions about space fice of Technology Assessment ments, OTA says, may cost 10 exploration, and about the rel- (OTA) is skeptical: "It is far to 100 times as much as un- ative roles of humans and ro- from clear what the United manned exploration. bots in it, may have an impor- States would gain from dem- In the Apollo era, the state of tant impact on the economy. onstrating leadership in hu- automation and robotics tech- "The experience gained in ap- man exploration" of Mars. nology was primitive, and the plying [automation and robot- Bush's idea is reminiscent of astronauts went to the Moon ics] technologies to tasks in President John Kennedy's with little robotic support. To- space could assist their devel- 1961 pledge to land a man on day, specialists believe it will opment in other parts of U.S. the Moon. But times have soon be possible for robots, industry and help the United changed. The United States acting largely on their own, to States to compete. . . in the then was in the midst of the carry out many space explora- world economy," OTA says. Cold War. Today, there is no tion activities. Small "rovers," Given Washington's budget race to send humans to the for example, could move about woes, putting men on Mars Moon or to Mars. The Euro- on Mars, making observations may not seem as urgent as pean Space Agency has ex- and collecting and analyzing putting a man on the Moon did pressed an interest in explor- soil samples. 30 years ago.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 139 We welcome timely letters from readers, especially those who wish to amplify or correct information published in the Quarterly and/or react to the views expressed in our essays. 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.

What Schools Cannot Do ents' meeting to discuss the "philosophy of educa- tion," or the "theoretical impact of education," The articles by Chester Finn ["The Ho Hum Revo- there would be no one in attendance. However, if lution", WQ, Summer '911 and Patrick Welsh ["A the Taylor School Board were to announce "no Teacher's View"] are interesting when viewed football in 1991-92," the board office would be against the backdrop of the school reform initia- jammed with angry parents. tive, America 2000: six national goals to be mea- I believe that we, the parents, educators, princi- sured by tests and attained by the year 2000. pals, and ordinary taxpayers, have not really asked Welsh focuses on what Finn (and America 2000) ourselves, "What do we want the schools to do?" ignore: cataclysmic shifts in the moral fiber and Nor have we asked, "What exactly is education?" supportive infrastructure of the culture surround- Robert D. Hatfield ing schools. For Welsh, the answer lies in a culture Taylor, Mich. that makes students work harder. Finn's answer is to hold schools accountable for performance, presumably on the tests envisioned Asking the Wrong Question for America 2000. Are such schools to create the work ethic in a culture that will then produce stu- "Why Our Schools Still Don't Work" is the wrong dents who work harder in schools? Caution is war- question to ask. Instead, we must ask, What makes ranted when a major remedial role in the health of our schools work? And, we must understand that a nation is proposed for schools. our public school system is the engine of our de- Regarding the role of schools in the economy, mocracy and a vibrant economy. Finn mentions Lamar Alexander's argument for re- The National PTA has discovered that parent in- form: "Better schools mean better jobs.. . ." I am volvement is the difference between mediocre more persuaded by those specialists who strongly schools and great ones. More importantly, parent dispute the presence of a direct link between excel- involvement in schools is the link between lessons lent schools and a continuing robust economy. The and learning. It has been proven to increase aca- links with most other elements of a culture are demic achievement in spite of socioeconomic con- even weaker-esveciallv in a culture such as ours ditions and across raciallethnic barriers. where so many disparate forces teach, as Welsh Our schools today must try to educate all who documents. appear at the classroom door. This was not always The two pieces cancel each other. Together they the case. Our competitive, information-based pose the agenda: simultaneously addressing the world requires an educated citizenry. The impedi- curricula and instructional core of schools and the ments to obtaining this education are many. Now, conditions in the surrounding culture needed to students come to school with all the problems that sustain them. To believe, however, that the six na- society refuses to address-they are hungry, home- tional goals and a system of tests will put our less, abused, neglected and ignored, angry, and schools and our nation-in that order-right again scared. These children may live in violent inner- is to assume the most mythical and mystical rela- city communities or in rural isolation. tionship in our long and misguided history of pre- The problems of our schools are, in reality, the tending for schools what they cannot do. problems of society. Now is not the time to replace John I. Goodlad, Director the educational engine that drives our society sim- Ctr. for Educational Renewal ply because it needs a tune-up. Yes, our schools Univ. of Wash. need to improve. Established in the 1800s, our pub- lic schools desperately need to adapt to the 21st century. And, they definitely must have more par- Parents Who Care ents involved. These are challenges to be over- come; not reasons for abandonment. Perhaps we are asking too much of our schools Pat Henry, President and not enough of ourselves, the parents of the stu- The National PTA dents. If my local school board were to call a par- Chicago, Ill.

WQ AUTUMN 1991 The Naming of Hinduism

It is clear from "Hinduism and the Fate of India" [WQ,Summer '911 that the nominalist controversy still flourishes, at least among Indologists, histori- ans of religions, and other students of "Hinduism." Yet the adversaries in this longstanding debate con- tinue to formulate their differences in ways that are not terribly productive, and it would seem they are talking past each other about two rather different "Hinduisms," or rather, about two very different paradigms of Hinduism. For all its longevity and original interest, this de- bate has been fairly sterile for some time, and the current situation in India demands something bet- ter. Ideally, I should like to see a rethinking of how nation, state, and religion have interacted through- out Indian history, which could help us to under- stand how a religion that was constructed for the nation by the colonial state, has now come to serve The Cambridge as the most important instrument through which much of that nation is mobilizing itself, not just for ncvc one another round of a seemingly interminable conflict 1 with other religious groups, but also in opposition to the workings of a neo-colonial state and the westernized elites that have dominated that state SECOND EDITION since its inception. Brian Hook, Editor The struggles that wrack India have never been simply and straightforwardly sectarian, and nation- Denis Twitchett, Associate Editor alism in the Third World is always complex, with A revised edition of the authoritative, social, political, and economic dimensions to it, illustrated account of China's rich and however much these may be inflected by religious colorful history, its people, and its culture. concerns. Those in the West who feel their inter- Here is updated information on the most ests to be threatened by such movements often recent developments in China including the dwell on their religious character in alarming and crisis of 1989 and its aftermath. even lurid terms as a way to tilt public opinion 512 pages1250 photog^-aphsl60 maps against them. In light of such propagandistic ex- $49.50 cesses, it seems to me all the more important that we exercise the most critical judgment when talk ALSO AVAILABLE - turns to "Hinduism and the Fate of India." Bruce Lincoln Prof. of Comparative Studies in Discourse & Society The Cambridge Univ. of Minn. Handboolz of Contemporary China Correction by Colin Mackerras and Amanda Yorke In the article "Who Killed Hollywood" [WQ,Sum- Here are thousands of important facts and mer '911, the "total national population" is given as figures on all aspects of Chinese life since 1949 approximately 79% million in 1946. The U.S. popu- - from population statistics and economic figures to biographies of important people. lation in 1940 was 131.7 million; in 1950 it was 150.7 million. 276 pages110 maps196 tables and figures David S. Croyder $37.50 Bethesda, Md.

Editors' Note: We should have said that the 1946 Available at bookstores or from population was approximately 141 million. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 Authors.. . WASHINGTON ON VIEW

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December 2, Museum of American History December 4, National Gallery of Art Keynote by Anthony Burgess, Novelist, Composer, Mozart in History and Author of the forthcoming A Paean for Mozart William Baumol, Department of Economics, "Mozart and the Wolf Gang" Princeton University, and Hilde Baumol: "On the Economics of Musical Composition in Mozart's Vienna.'' Michael P Steinberg, Department of Histo~y, Cornell University: "Don Giovanni Against the Baroque, or, December 3, National Gallery of Art The Culture Punished" The Nature of Creativity Leon Botstein; President, Bard College and David Feldman, Department of Psychology, Conductor, American Symphony Orchestra: Tufts University: "Nineteenth-Century Mozart.'' "Mozart and the Transformational Imperative." Commentator: Carl Schorske Howard Gardner, Graduate School of Education, Department of History Haward University: Princeton University "How Unique is Mozart?" Afternoon Film Showing: Don Giovanni, Neal Zasla~v,Department of Music, Directed by Joseph Losey Cornell University: Introduced by Stanley Kauhann "Mozart as a Working Stiff." Commentator: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Department of Education, The University of Chicago December 5, National Gallery of Art Afternoon Film Showing: 7'he Magic Flute, Genius Within and Beyond Tradition Directed by Ingmar Bergman Wye Allanbrook, Department of Music, Introduced by Stanley Kauhann, Theater and Film St. John's College: Critic; Visiting Professor of Drama, City University of "Mozart and the Comedy of Closure." New York Graduate Center Maynard Solomon, Department of Music, New York University: "Mozart: The Family Treasure." Joseph Kerman, Department of Music, All events are open to the public free of charge, University of California, Berkeley: but to ensure admission please request tickets by "Mozart's Concertos and Their Audiences." writing to: Commentator: Martin Mueller Mozart Symposium Department of English Northwestern University The Woodrow Wilson Center 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W. Afternoon Film Showing: Mam'age of Figaro, Washington, D.C. 20560 Directed by Peter Sellars Please specify which sessions you wish to attend. Introduced by Stanley Kauhann For information call (202) 357-4335.

This project is made possible by generous gifts from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.