Spring 1982
The New Deal
In Essence
John G. Tower, in Foreign Affairs (Winter 19811
19821, Reader ~ervices, 58 East 68th St., New York. N.Y. 10021.
Who is chiefly responsible for American foreign policy: The Executive? The Congress? Or are, t'hey equal partners?
The issue has bedeviled the Republic since its founding, writes Tower, a Republican Senator from Texas, but the first significant con- gressional challenge to a President's conduct of foreign affairs was the Senate's rejection of Woodrow Wilson's Versailles Treaty in 1920....
parochial political concerns. In 1981, Tower recalls, House Whip Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) admitted to voting against the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia not on the proposal's merits but because of the political sentiment in his home district.
Domestic policy may benefit from horse-trading, but diplomacy should be made of sterner stuff. Foreign policy is a chess game, Tower concludes dryly, and "chess is not a team sport."
"Local Government, Suburban Segrega- Suburban tion...
Willianl R. Havender, in Journal of Contemporary Studies (Summer 1981), Transaction Periodicals Consortium, Dept. 541, Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
The Food and Drug Administration's attempts to ban nitrites and sac- charin, its successful campaigns against cyclamates and herbicide 2,4,5-T, and the 1980 evacuation (on orders from President Jimmy Car- ter) of 710 families living near a chemical dump in the Love Canal section of Niagara Falls, N.Y.-all have one thing in...
overly fastidious regula- tion, in such areas as job safety, toxic waste, air and water pollution.
Thus, the Delaney Amendment (1958) banned any food additive found to cause cancer in aiz-y animal in a single study, despite scientists' own ingrained wariness and their emphasis on duplicatable results. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, overwhelmed its responsibility for evaluating thousands of new chemicals, has drawn up "generic" guidelines that provide answers in advance...
early struggles to end racial segregation in the South. Mostly children of affluence, these unlikely rebels saw links between their personal troubles (a nagging sense of meaningless- ness, disenchantment with materialism) and larger public issues. In- deed, it was this merger of private and public concerns that gave the youthful Movement its vitality and broad appeal, even before the Viet- nam draft loomed up as a focus for campus protest.
Why did such a lively social phenomenon fade 1973? Certainly...
launching the limited nuclear attack anticipated U.S. strategists, Beres argues. Moreover, even a limited strike would leave some 18 million Americans dead, so the Soviets have no reason to believe Washington would restrain itself in case of such an attack. Finally, the Soviets themselves reject the notion of a limited nuclear war-they would not play by the rules.
Indeed, the American strategy is likely to be a temptation to the Soviets. "Used in retaliation," Beres notes, "counterforce-targeted...
Donald R. Baucom, and Warfare in Air University Review (Sept.-Oct. 1981),
Superintendent of Documents, Govern-
ment Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
20402.
In the spring of 1943, Axis troops were dug into high ground near the North African city of Tunis. The American commander watched as a heavy artillery barrage smothered the enemy's emplacements, then turned to a war correspondent and said: "I'm letting the American taxpayer take this hill." Citing this incident, historian Allan...
Paul
N. Bloom and Stephen A. Greyser, in toC~HSU~~Y~S~?Business Review (Nov.-Dec.
Harvard
1981). Subscription Service Dent.. P.O.
Box 3000, ~oburn,Mass. 01888.-
The middle-class consumer movement, so active during the 1960s and most of the '70s, seems lately to be out of the news, pre-empted such matters as defense, the economy, and events abroad. According to Bloom and Greyser, business professors at the University of Maryland and Harvard, respectively, the picture is more complicated: While...
Paul
N. Bloom and Stephen A. Greyser, in toC~HSU~~Y~S~?Business Review (Nov.-Dec.
Harvard
1981). Subscription Service Dent.. P.O.
Box 3000, ~oburn,Mass. 01888.-
The middle-class consumer movement, so active during the 1960s and most of the '70s, seems lately to be out of the news, pre-empted such matters as defense, the economy, and events abroad. According to Bloom and Greyser, business professors at the University of Maryland and Harvard, respectively, the picture is more complicated: While...
Kiyoshi
Kawahito, in The World Economy (Sept.theJapanese 1981), Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co.,
Box 21 1, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
In 1976 and 1977, American steelmakers complained strongly about the "predatory dumping" of Japanese steel on the American market. Capitalizing on lower labor costs and friendly government subsidies, the Japanese were out to wreck the American steel industry under- cutting American prices-or so the charge went. Kawahito, a professor of economics...
Allen Guttman, in Jour-rial of Sport History (Summer 19811, North American Society for Sport His- tory, 101 White Building, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. 16802.
Mindlessly partisan, doltishly passive, prone to abusiveness, drink, and riot-such has been the image of the sports fan for hundreds of years. Tertullian, the second-century Church Father, railed against the ex- cesses of the Circus-goer. More recently, neo-Marxists have condemned Western spectator sports as a dehumanizing...
pitting 10,000 beasts against the same number of gladiators. Often, though, the games were overshadowed fierce feuding, drinking, courting, and rioting in the stands. Fans in Jus- tinian's Constantinople burned down their wooden coliseum four times between 491 and 532 A.D.
Medieval spectators were far less unruly, perhaps because of the smaller scale of events and the narrower social gap between players and viewers. Tournaments of knights, beginning as wild and rough 'mimic wars" in the 12th...
consensus-"Nan had a pad. Nan had a tan pad. Dad ran. Dad ran to the pad."-are hardly the stuff of epics. Bored, children "read them with less facility," said the authors. "Publishers, in re- sponse, make the books even simpler."
Other attempts to spice up textbooks have, in fact, worked against reading. Some publishers have doubled the space devoted to illustra- tions, making the printed text even less appealing comparison. Others emphasize play; in one well-known...
Smith, novelist Scott Spencer (Endless Love, 1979) believes society has lost its commitment to children. To- day's youth must compete with the "narcissistic lifestyles" of adults. Children sense they can no longer be "afforded" and, claims Spencer, in a final act of obedience, oblige their parents killing themselves.
PRESS & TELEVISION
"Suing Media for Libel: A Litigation
Study" by Marc A. Franklin, in American
Bar Foundation Research Journal (Sum-
mer 198...
C. R. Eisendrath, in
Michigan ~&rt& Review (Fall 1981),
3032 Rackham Bldg., University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109,
Had French laws concerning the press been applied in the United States, the Watergate story, the Pentagon Papers, critical accounts of the Vietnam War, and most reports about Senator Edward Kennedy's Chappaquidick accident might never have appeared. So writes Eisen- drath, communications professor at the University of Michigan.
There are 46 "exempted subjects"...
Robert N. Bellah, in Teachers College Rec- ord (Fall 198 I), Teachers College, Coium-
the Good Society bia University. 525 West 120th St.. New York, N.Y. 10027
The early Greek philosophers openly debated what a society's goals should be. But since the time of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469- 1527), social theorists have repeatedly professed to pure objectivity. Their claims are misleading, contends Bellah, a Berkeley sociologist.
Machiavelli claimed he described how the world was, not how it should...
Anne Carr, in Theology Today (Oct. 1981), Princeton IS God? Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 29,
Princeton, N.J. 08540.
During the 1960s, "God is dead" became a major, and controversial, precept for many Christian theologians. Two decades later, leading Western and Third World theologians are proclaiming, a la Mark Twain, that such rumors were very much exaggerated. These scholars -e.g., Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner-argue, how-ever, that images of God must change substantially...
Patrick J. Ryan, in Jour-
nal of Religion in Africa (vol. 11, no. 3, and African gods 1980), E. J. Brill, Oudi Rijn 33a-35,
Leiden, The Netherlands.
When North African Muslims first ventured into black West Africa around AD. 1000, they were appalled that the natives seemed to wor- ship many gods. About 500 years later, Christian explorers were simi- larly dismayed. Only in this century have anthropologists recognized the region's long tradition of belief in a single Supreme Being, reports Ryan,...
George 01-shevsky, in Science Digest (Aug.1981),224 West 57th St., New York,N.Y. 10019.
Remembered today for slumping world economies and higher oil prices, the 1970s were nonetheless boom years for dinosaur hunters, reports Olshevsky, a freelance science writer. During the decade, some 20 percent of the 300-odd known dinosaur genera were discovered. As a result, paleontologists are revising their views of the "terrible lizards" who ruled the Earth before suddenly vanishing 64 million...
Joel M. Weisberg, Joseph H.
Taylor, and Lee A. Fowler, in Scientific
American (Oct. 198 I), 415 Madison Ave.,
New York, N.Y. 10017.
An object 15,000 light-years from Earth has provided "the first strong evidence" for Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, a central component of his general theory of relativity. So report Weisberg and Taylor, physicists at Princeton, and Fowler, a physicist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.
Einstein (1879-1955) held...
measuring the intervals, astronomers can discern the orbits and gauge the two bodies' gravitational effects with great accuracy.
Relativity predicts that gravitational waves thrown off as the two stars whirl in space should reduce the total amount of energy in the system. The authors reasoned that this loss would slow PSR 1913+ 16's orbital speed and gradually shrink both the size of its orbit and the time it takes to circle its companion. Indeed, after six years, the deviation was more than one...
the need to keep everyone's interest up, says Richman, produced modern language's multifaceted structure. With- out it, human speech might have followed another course: the continu- ous gradings of voice and meaning found among most primates.
In the wild, such grading has certain advantages. It allows primates to shift quickly among social functions: from threatening to soliciting to submitting. But the range is limited. Choral music, on the other hand, cultivated an appreciation of "discrete...
1990. Meanwhile, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and West Germany are supporting similar research. "Few countries are completely windless," writes Flavin, "something that cannot be said for coal, oil, or uranium ."
"Water for the Third World" Asit K. Biswas, in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1981), hElusive God Foreign Affairs Readers Services, 58 East 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Besides food and energy shortages, many Third World...
Lawrence Mosher, in National Journal
(Oct. 10. 1981). 1730 M St. N.W.. Wash-
How much does clean air cost? A Business Roundtable study estimates that compliance with the Clean Air Act of 1970 alone could cost the nation $400 billion (in 1980 dollars), 1987. For the past several years, industry has been calling for modified air quality standards and for the abolition of needlessly complex rules. On the other side, environmen- talists have urged even stricter regulations to deal with an array of...
as Victim Morris Dickstein, in Sewanee Review (July-Sept. 1981), University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn. 37375.
Writer's block, book reviews, and negotiations with publishers-these matters have long concerned novelists. But, until recently, serious American authors, following the lead of Henry James and T. S. Eliot, kept them separate from their work. Now, however, writers like William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and John Irving are relying on such details from their own lives for the...
Jack B. Oruch, in SpeculumValentine (JUI~1981), The Medieval Academy, 1430
Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass.
02138.
Every February 14, candy and flower shops prosper as Valentine's Day sweethearts celebrate a love feast usually traced historians to pagan Roman traditions. But the shopkeepers should thank English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400) instead, asserts Omch, a University of Kansas English professor.
Modern academics believe that St. Valentine was a churchman who cured a crippled...
the end of the 14th century.
. A.Mozart, "Social and Philosophical Outlook in Mozart's Ooeras" bv Christooher Ball-
Democrat antine, in Musical Quarterly (Oct. 1981), Circulation Office, 48-02 48th Ave., Woodside. N.Y. 11377
The world's most sinful composer is how Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once described Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91). Yet in such comic operas as Don Giovanni and Cost fan Tutte, Mozart never exactly glorified evil, notes Ballantine, who teaches music...
Chris-
topher Lasch, in democracy (Oct. 1981),
43 West 61st St.,New York, N.Y. 10023.
Mass culture, from network television to potboiler novels, has thrown the American Left into a quandary. It seems to reflect popular tastes and therefore to qualify as "democratic" and praiseworthy. Yet even the most populist thinkers regard much of it as aesthetically dreadful, intellectually stultifying, and politically retrograde.
Lasch, a University of Rochester historian, argues that Marxists...
Chris-
topher Lasch, in democracy (Oct. 1981),
43 West 61st St.,New York, N.Y. 10023.
Mass culture, from network television to potboiler novels, has thrown the American Left into a quandary. It seems to reflect popular tastes and therefore to qualify as "democratic" and praiseworthy. Yet even the most populist thinkers regard much of it as aesthetically dreadful, intellectually stultifying, and politically retrograde.
Lasch, a University of Rochester historian, argues that Marxists...
Milton Friedman's "Chicago-school" theories, leading first to a wracking depression, then to strong economic growth and a sharp decline in the inflation rate (700 percent in 1973, six per- cent in early 1981).
?In 1978-81, "structural reforms" of the economy, notably ending much state control and many direct services. Under threat of an Ameri- can AFL-CIO boycott of Chilean exports, for instance, the Pinochet re- gime allowed unions to organize at the plant level and to strike...
Israel, a cooling of the partnership with South Africa that has blossomed since 1973 (Prime Minister Menachem Begin heads the Israel-South Africa Friendship League), or progress in the Camp David talks that draws more Arab nations into the Mideast peace process.
'China's Islamic Connection" Lillian Craig Harris, in Asian Affairs (MayIJune 19811, Heldref Publications, Suite 500, 4000 Albemarle St., N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20016.
Seeking Third World allies against Soviet expansionism, especially...
non-Islamic states to use Islam as a political tool have never had a happy ending," Harris notes. "Islam is a two-edged sword."
Greek fie "Dateline Athens: Greece for the Greeks" F. Stephen Larrabee, in Foreign Policy (Winter 1982), P.O. Box 984, Farm-ingdale,N.Y. 11737.
Last October, Greece alarmed its Western allies by electing a socialist Prime Minister who had harshly criticized Greek membership in NATO and in the European Economic Community. But Andreas Papandreou's...
Book Reviews
by Paul Hollander.
Oxford, 1981
524 pp. $25
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Essays
a conservative President, once again ponder the role they want government to play in their lives. Here, Alan Brinkley looks at the various American reform traditions that influenced FDR as he fashioned, willy-nilly, the New Deal; Bradford Lee supplies a " report card" on the Roosevelt administration's economic policies; and William Leuchtenburg examines FDR's lingering impact on the men who succeeded him in the White House.
Alan Brinkley
A century of political tradition was shattered i...
A century of political tradition was shattered in July 1932. Until Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before his party's dele- gates that year in Chicago, no Democratic nominee had ever addressed a national convention. By custom, the candidate had remained at home for the duration, feigning surprise and delight when party officials called upon him several weeks later to "notify" him of his victory. Roosevelt had no patience with such niceties. He flew to Chicago, walked into the sweltering...
shows that it reshaped American institutions and gave material suste- nance to millions of people who had been thrown out of jobs and into various states of misery by the Depression. The greatest lift probably came from FDR himself. Of his predecessor in the White House, one observer remarked, "If you put a rose in Hoover's hand, it would wilt." Roosevelt, by contrast, radiated confidence. "Never was there such a change in the transfer of a government," New York Times columnist...
, not excepting the present incumbent.
Each of FDR's successors has, in different ways, had to cope with the question of how to comport himself with respect to the Roosevelt tradition. Much of America's political history since 1945 is a reflection of their responses.
On April 12, 1945, as World War I1 neared its end, Vice President Harry Truman was presiding over a dull Senate de- bate on a water treaty. When it ended, shortly before sunset, he made his way to the office of the Speaker of the...
his distant cousin, Theodore, a vigorous leader who told Franklin during one of his infrequent visits to the White House that "men of good background and education owed their country public service."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that FDR had a "second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament ." James MacGregor Burns reaches the same conclusion in his highly readable, two-volume biography, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956, cloth; 1963, paper)...
All mathematics is divided into three parts. Roughly, these parts are the study of number systems, called algebra; the study of geometrical spaces, called
7ooo
topology; and the study of functions, called analysis. There are also a few islands-number theory and set theory, for example -and two vast continents that have broken off from the mainland and are drifting -
\ill,,!lcolktll,lll ' out to sea: computer science and statistics.
Ron BwA, am! Visiiiixiipi-
I~I~~,~~ Most mathematicians id...
A legend in Trinidad has it that God created the islands of the Caribbean by shaking loose from his fingers a fistful of earth and letting it fall into the waters below. Geologists are less fanciful. Of the many thousands of islands in the 1.5-million- square-mile Caribbean Sea, almost all are the summits of par- tially submerged volcanoes strung like vertebrae in a gentle arc from Florida to Venezuela. The vegetation is lush, the soil fertile enough in places for a few crops, the rainfall abundant-30...
A legend in Trinidad has it that God created the islands of the Caribbean by shaking loose from his fingers a fistful of earth and letting it fall into the waters below. Geologists are less fanciful. Of the many thousands of islands in the 1.5-million- square-mile Caribbean Sea, almost all are the summits of par- tially submerged volcanoes strung like vertebrae in a gentle arc from Florida to Venezuela. The vegetation is lush, the soil fertile enough in places for a few crops, the rainfall abundant-30...
Knight's estimate). Many of the smaller islands, such as Bar- bados and Antigua, were not perma- nently settled any of the three local Indian groups-the primitive Ciboney; the proud and fierce Carib; or the sophisticated and peaceable Taino Arawak.
The Arawak were farmers and fishers who organized their villages around ceremonial ball courts. They worked gold, turned pottery, fashioned sculpture, and domesti- cated at least one animal, a type of dog. "They do not carry arms, nor know them,"...
public agencies and private institutions
"Cruise Missiles: Technology, Strategy, Politics."
Brookines Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
612 pp. $32.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Editor: Richard K. Betts
The small, slow, 1500-mile range cruise missile has emerged as the major current U.S. military innovation-a descendant of the crude German V-l buzz bombs used against England during World War 11. It was first pushed Pentagon civilians as a strategic weapon, r...
In one of those perfect antitheses that The second, published a year later, seem more natural to literary criti- was Hawthorne's depiction of con-cism than to literary history, Haw- temporary Salem life (with flash- thorne's earliest major novels, The backs into the pasts of his fictional Scarlet Letter and The House of the Pyncheon and Maule families) -a Seven Gables, represent the opposite picture that Hawthorne had hoped to poles of his divided genius. finish with all the minute detail of a
The...
exposing the stupidity and pomposity of his superiors, the officers and bureaucrats of the Hapsburg empire. For Czechs living under communist rule, Hasek's work has served as a popular antidote to gloom.
Hasek (1883-1923) was an unpredictable rebel-a folk hero in disguise. A descendant of Slavic peasants, he was born in Prague, a city dominated an officious German minority. His early adult years were devoted to anarchism, drink, and the writing of satire. Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army...
