Winter 1994
An American Tragegy
In Essence
the news media, look mainly at the "big picture." They worry that the nation's health-care expen- ditures in 1993 amounted to 14 percent of gross national product (GNP) and are projected the Congressional Budget Office to grow to 18 per- cent by 2000. Most Americans agree that health- care costs must be controlled, but the costs they have in mind are their own. They do not want less care; they want to pay less, or at least not more. And that, many specialists believe, is a large part of...
Charles W. Calhoun, in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fall 1993), 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Theodore Roosevelt was not the first president to see his office as a "bully pulpit." A dozen years before luin, Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888, grasped the opportunities tl-ie presidency offered to preach to the nation. Indeed, Harkon's "exercise of the 'priestly func- tions' of the presidency," argues Call-ioun, a historian at East Carolina University, helped transform...
Charles W. Calhoun, in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fall 1993), 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Theodore Roosevelt was not the first president to see his office as a "bully pulpit." A dozen years before luin, Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888, grasped the opportunities tl-ie presidency offered to preach to the nation. Indeed, Harkon's "exercise of the 'priestly func- tions' of the presidency," argues Call-ioun, a historian at East Carolina University, helped transform...
1910, 27 state legislatures had been pushed to petition Congress for a constitutional amendment. Two years later, the Senate finally gave in, and in 1913 the 17th Amendment be- came law after it was ratified three-fourths of the states. A 28th Amendment, the authors say, could be only a few years away.
Court Costs
'Dwarfing the Political Capacity of the People? The Relationship Between Judicial Activism & Voter Turnout, 1840-1988" by Philip A. Klinkner, in Polity (Summer 1993), Thompson H...
1910, 27 state legislatures had been pushed to petition Congress for a constitutional amendment. Two years later, the Senate finally gave in, and in 1913 the 17th Amendment be- came law after it was ratified three-fourths of the states. A 28th Amendment, the authors say, could be only a few years away.
Court Costs
'Dwarfing the Political Capacity of the People? The Relationship Between Judicial Activism & Voter Turnout, 1840-1988" by Philip A. Klinkner, in Polity (Summer 1993), Thompson H...
law rather than force-an cesses and failures." objective thy see as the ultimate guarantor of American security Altl~ouglithere may be more and prosperity, and zuhich has been dear to liberal hearts since the democratic, and fewer authori-
Enhghtemnent. . . . tarian, states in the new world, So strilcing has been the contrast between Gulf and post-Gulf that does not mean that "the stances of liberals, that some of their critics sardonically accuse Wilsonian vision of a peaceful, them...
1960, de- pendent wives and children for the first time outnumbered uniformed personnel in the active force. Today, about 60 percent of those on active duty have spouses or other dependents. A new twist was added wit11 the integration of women into the services, beginning in the 1970s. The changes raise difficult sexual and child-care is- sues, not to mention costs. I11 fiscal year 1994, outlays for dependent health care, family hous- ing, and other items may consume $25 billion, or one-tenth of...
early July 1991.
South Africa signed the NPT on July 10,1991, and two months later concluded a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. After next April's unprecedented non- racial elections, an ANC-led government is ex- pected to take office. There remains the question of what the new government will do with the country's stockpile of enriched uranium. The authors are hopeful: "ANC President Nelson Man-dela has declared that South Africa must never again allow its...
Alan Brinkley, in The Join-milofAmerican History (Sept. 1993),1125 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomiiigton, Ind. 47401-3701.
The antimonopoly movement was once one of the more potent forces in American politics. It seemed on its way to new heights when Thur- man W. Arnold (1891-1969) took over the Justice Department's Antitrust Division in 1938, during the New Deal. Arnold had a radical new notion of trustbusting, and while his tenure was quite successful in some respects, he failed to win the public over...
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A Survey of Recent Articles
Polls indicate that most American women strongly support the ideal of equality be- tween the sexes, yet do not call them- selves feminists. Do these women still just not get it?Ordoes modem felninism itself need to have its collective consciousness raised? Feminists of vari- ous hues have lately been pondering a number of such "state of the movement" questions.
"The widespread belief in equality . . . is a be- lief in equality up to a point-the point w...
Robert A. Selig,in The William and Mary Quarterly (July1993),Box 8781, Williamsburg,Va. 23187-8781.
Many visiting foreigners recorded their impres- sions of 18th-century America, but few, if any, had quite die qualifications of Georg Daniel Flolv. "Relatively unburdened book learning or pre- conceived ideas, he had fewer prejudices" than many well-born observers of American life, writes Selig, a visiting professor at Hope College, in Hol- land, Michigan.
Born in 1756in southwestern Germany,...
the zuay). To be a rebel, to be in revolt, implied being loclwd into yo~~tlzfl~l~Ã?Â¥;ess
Far from wishing to stay young, we who wereyo~~ng
in the '50s mere ea-ger togrow up. Groimng upmeantgrmm'ng info free- dom, winch was the name of our desire.
I am reminded here of the English poet Philip Larkin's saying that his religious sympathies first began to wane zuheiz he discovered that in the Christian version of heaven one zuould becomeas a little child again. Staying a child zuas...
counselors and special classes. After three years, the youngsters had higher IQs and fewer behavioral problems than others born prematurely.
The lesson of these scattered experiences seems to be that intervention works best when it is deep and long-lasting. W11ic11 leads Wil- son to a radical proposal: Why not provide public subsidies to allow the poor to send their children to public or private boarding scl~ools? The well-to-do have always had this option for the upbringing of their children,...
"Bad News Bears" Robert Licliter and Ted J. Smith, in Media Critic (1993),P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921.
Watching almost any batch of network televi- sion newscasts in recent years, one would come away feeling that the nation's economy was poised on the brink of ruin.
In fact, contend Lichter, codirector of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Smith, associate professor of mass comm~ini- cations at Virginia Commonwealth Univer- sity, the standard TV news portrait of t...
Stephen Hess, in Society (Jan.-Feb. 1994), Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
Once a staple of front pages and nightly news shows, regular coverage of Congress is now scant, especially on TV. CNN is now the only TV news organization that has correspondents cov- ering both the House and the Senate full-time, observes Hess, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
One reason for the change, he says, is a shift in power within many "mainstream" news or- ganizations....
Stephen Hess, in Society (Jan.-Feb. 1994), Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
Once a staple of front pages and nightly news shows, regular coverage of Congress is now scant, especially on TV. CNN is now the only TV news organization that has correspondents cov- ering both the House and the Senate full-time, observes Hess, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
One reason for the change, he says, is a shift in power within many "mainstream" news or- ganizations....
religion, then took natural science as their guide early in the 20th century, today they draw from a wide variety of sources, ranging from French philosopher Jacques Derrida to mathematician Jolin von Neumann.
"Pliilosophy-which ought mission to be and is by tradition an integration of knowl- edge~liasitself become increasingly disinte- grated," Resclier laments. Yet American pliilosopl~y's "pluralistic character" is just "a realistic and effective accommodation" to...
the parties and candidates themselves.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY &ENVIRONMENT
Computerized Q.E.D.'s
'The Death of Proof" John Horgan, in Scientific American (Oct. 19931,415Madison Ave., New York,
N.Y.10017-1111.
When Princeton's Andrew J. Wiles announced last June that he had solved Format's last tlieo- rem, his fellow mathematicians gasped iii aston- ishment. More than 350 years ago, Pierre de Fermat claimed that he had found a proof of the proposition that for the equation Xn + Y" =...
Mark Earnest and John A. Sbarbaro, in The Sciences (Sept.-Oct. 1993),New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Along with the rise of acquired immunodefi- ciency syndrome (AIDS) and human immuno- deficiency virus, there has been an unexpected resurgence of tuberculosis (TB) in recent years. The newspapers report ominously that today's TB is drug resistant. Yet all but "a minuscule fraction" of the 27,000 active TB cases today are treatable, note Earnest and Sbarbaro,...
Mark Earnest and John A. Sbarbaro, in The Sciences (Sept.-Oct. 1993),New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Along with the rise of acquired immunodefi- ciency syndrome (AIDS) and human immuno- deficiency virus, there has been an unexpected resurgence of tuberculosis (TB) in recent years. The newspapers report ominously that today's TB is drug resistant. Yet all but "a minuscule fraction" of the 27,000 active TB cases today are treatable, note Earnest and Sbarbaro,...
Robert Walser, in U7e Ml~sicol Q~[flrtcrly(Su~nrner1993),Oxford Univ. Press, Jo~~nials Dept., 200 Madisoii Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.
Trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-91) helped create the "cool" sound in jazz during the late 1940s, and later in 11is career he was a pioneer of jazz- rock "fusion" and other jazz idioms. Most crit- ics acknowledge Davis's importance as a cre- ative force in jazz, but in assessing him as a per- former they are made uneasy the "mis- takesJ'-the...
F. Jack Hurley, in History of Pliotogrn;diy (Autumn 1993),Taylor & Francis Ltd., 4 John St., London WC1N ZET, United Kingdom.
Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" and Arthur Rothstein's "Dust Storm" are among the most powerful images of American life during the Great Depression. Those photos were among more than 272,000 taken the small photographic section of the U.S. government's Resettlement Administration, established in 1935, and its successor, the Farm Security Administration...
Lange's middle-class audience."
The danger in all this slanted scholarship, Hurley says, is that the historical con- text in which the memorable FSA images were created will be lost. "If we allow that to happen we will have done damage to the images and to American history."
"Dust Storm, Cimnrron County, Oklahoma," Arthur Rothstein.
as a direct order to produce untruthful images for the government. He ignored, Hurley says, the con- text andthe humor in Stryker's comment....
a variety of means of the ideas, attitudes, practices, and habits of temperament and sensibility that are implicit in his master term, 'culture.' " Salvation, Arnold said, was "a harmonious perfection only to be won cultivating many sides in us."
These recommendations could be given 'such a high spiritual priority," Marcus points out, only on the presupposition that revealed religion, specifically Christianity, was no longer "the ultimate authority or standard of values...
Carol Lancaster and "The Failure of Democratic Reform in Angola and Zaire" Keith Somerville, in Survival (Autumn1993),International Inst. for Strategic Studies, 23 Tavistock St., London WC2E 7NQ.
Progress toward democracy in the 47 African nations south of the Sahara has been widespread, if uneven, in recent years. Fifteen African nations can now be regarded as den~ocracies, notes Georgetown University's Lancaster, an adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Develop- ment, and at...
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"Waiting for the Blowout-Hurricane Fidel" Tad Szulc, in The Washington Spectator (Oct. 1, 1993), London Terrace Station, P.O. Box 20065, New York,
N.Y. 10011.
After nearly 35 years in power and at age 66, Cuba's Fidel Castro is almost certainly nearing the end of his rule. The question is whether or not the transition from his "socialist" regime to whatever comes after it can be accomplished without civil war and massive bloodshed. Szulc, a former Nau York Timescorrespondent...
RESEARCHREPORTS
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
"Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States."
Cornell Univ. Press, 124 Roberts PI., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.261 pp. $34.50 Author: Peter Douglas Feaver
"The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons."
Princeton Univ. Press, 41 William St., Princeton, N.J. 08540.286 pp. $29.95; paper, $16.95 Author: Scott D. Sagaiz
"The Logi...
Book Reviews
LAND OF DESIRE: Merchants, Money, and the Rise of a New American Culture
By William Leach.
Pantheon. 510 pp. $30
DEEP POLITICS AND THE DEATH OF JFK
By Peter Dale Scott.
Univ. of Calif. Press. 413 pp. $25
CASE CLOSED: Lee Harvey Oswald and the
Assassination of JFK. By Gerald Posner.
RandomHouse. 607 pp. $25
WHO SHOT JFK?: A Guide to the Major
Conspiracy Theories. By Bob Callahan.
Fireside.159 pp. $12
By Karen Armstrong.
Knopf. 460 pp. $27.50
By Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick.
Oxford Univ. Press.
925 pp. $39.95
By Richard Ellis
. Oxford Univ. Press. 251 pp. $45
By Diana Trilling.
Harcourt Brace. 442 pp. $24.95
By Joan Acocella.
Farrar,Sfraiis. 287 pp. $27.50
By Joel Williamson.
Oxford Univ. Press.509 pp. $35
By Charles Kolb.
Free Press. 387 pp. $22.95
By Gerald Segal.
Sf. Martin's. 234 pp. $21.95
By Timothy Gorton Ash.
Random House. 680 pp. $27.50
By Raymond Bonner.
Knopf.322 pp. $24
By Richard Rhodes.
Whittle Boole in association with Viking Publications.
127 pp. $17.50
By Gerald Holton.
Harvard. 203 pp. $24.95
Essays
uc11 has been written about the first
100 or so years of railroading in
America, when the industry roared forward in tandem with the U.S. economy. Sel- dom discussed, like some embarrassing relative who went to pot, are the years since 1940.
For the most part, railroad literature consists of individual histories of the dozens of railways that sprouted during the industry's heyday. Many of these books-and there are literally hundreds of them-are more anecdotal than lus- torical, and, as often a...
tions are utterly separate and unique, some of larger, latter-day states. The Fourth World them very ancient indeed, as in the case of the
50 WQ WINTER 1994
LITTLE NATIONS
ALASTAIR REID
Basques of Spain. The demands of such en- claves may very well occupy an international small-claims court for the next century. At present, we are made only too brutally aware of the ruthlessness and mindlessness of their impatience.In talking about thwarted nation- alism, however, one fundamental point has t...
THE RISE OF EUROPE'S
The formation of the European
Community and the end of the Cold War
had one common and quite
unintended result: Both gave
encouragement to the nationalist urges
of numerous regions zuithin
Europe's established nation-states.
What these stirrings zuill finally
produce in places such as
the fanner Yugoslavia, Scotland, or
Lombardy is impossible to predict.
But three of our contributors--
Alastair Reid, William McPJierson, and
David Gies-look at three...
t their outset at least, the 1992
Summer Olympics in Barcelona
appeared to be organized by
people who had nationalism, not sports, foremost inmind. Consider the curious fact that the three official languages of the games were English, French, and Catalan. Why Catalan and not Spanish? Because Olym- pic Committee rules allow for the use of Eng- lish, French, and the language of the country hosting the games. More to the point, the or- ganizers had no doubt that Catalan was the language of their...
RISE OF EUROPE'S LITTLE NATIONS
n idea very much afoot in Europe this solution, while it worked in certain parts
today-oiie that arouses political of Europe for a time, today proves to be a trou-
passions everywhere from Ab- bling inheritance. Not only is it ill-suited to
, khazia to Scotland-is tlie notion nation-states (to those that liave existed for of cultural and territorial autonomy. The idea centuries as well as to those that liave emerged is, in fact, a compromise between tlie old...
38 WQ WINTER 1994
he years have been kind to the
memory of Winston Churchill.
Half a century has passed since his
rousing rule of Britain during World War 11, and while he still has his critics, and against them his defenders, the controversies that attended his career are muted or stilled now. Since the war, the empire he cherished has dissolved into a host of sovereign nations, and John Bull himself has had to swallow hard and learn to be a good European. Seen against such changes, Churchill's B...
0nce the Americans had backed into independence by demanding their rights as Englishmen, what next? No one supposed they were immune to the universal passions distin- guished by Kant: for possession, for power, and for honor. To fend off anarchy and sus- tain a workable society they would have to govern and ration those passions, in the process evolving cultural norms that even those who did not benefit immediately or equally would abide by.
Many foreigners and a fair number of ultrafederalists...
Misleading to call it a move- ment, and still worse to think of it as a program, but we now have seen enough minor liter- ary eruptions to suspect that it is a cultural symptom that bears some reflection: this burst of novel-writing from people who liave lived the conceptual life, the life of method and ar- gument, who often carry leather cases, or who give public lectures and contribute essays to learned journals. In tlie past five years, some of the world's leading literary critics liave turned...
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t's at least sometl~ing to think abo~~t, the valtle-and often t11e superiority-of what
now that the 20th century is behind us, a century that, by historian John Lukacs's reckoning, began in 1914 and ended in
1989. Thatmostvertipousof centuriesbganwitl~ a resounding bang, one that dealt a near-n~ortal blow to all the big ideals and to all t11e gods.
In fact, the only god that came through the horrors of Verdun and the Somme unscatlied was irony. Not merely unscathed, it rose within the pantl~eo~~.
After W...
In the 20th century, German history has done its best to obscure German poetry. Murder makes better copy, and when foreign troops march into your country you are not in a mood to read their bards and classics, unless of course you work for intelligence. Nor does your interest get much of a boost from those troops' defeat. Nearly 50 years after World War II's carriage, we are still more familiar with the names of the Third Reich's leaders than with those of Else Lasker-Schuler, Gottfried Benn, Gunter Eich, Karl Krolov, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Peter Huchel. Apparently, the dust hasn't settled yet.
