Spring 1988
Truman vs. Dewey: The 1948 Election
In Essence
Paul West, in Governing (Jan. 1988), 1414 22nd St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037.
Many U.S. presidential candidates-and presidents-have been state gov- ernors. West, a Baltimore Sun correspondent, notes that many sitting governors, including Thomas E. Dewey, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Nelson Rockefeller, "attempted to use their states as laboratories in gearing up to run for national office, with obviously mixed results." Our last two presi- dents have been former governors; Democrat Jimmy...
Congress to the states in 1972, the amendment had been approved 33 state legislatures by 1974. Progress was slow thereafter. The ERA finally died on June 30, 1982, three states short of the 38 needed for ratification.
Bolce, De Maio, and Muzzio, all political scientists at Baruch College, fmd that public support for the ERA fell steadily during the decade that it was considered for ratification by the states.
Surveys by the Center for Political Studies show that 73 percent of the public supported...
1980, the majority supporting ERA had "vanished entirely." After the federal amendment died, many states that ratdied the ERA in the early 1970s-such as New York and Wisconsin-later reflected this collapse of popular support rejecting state Ems of their own. Public opinion in the states that rejected ERA, the authors conclude, "seems unlikely to shift in favor of the amendment in the near future."
"Ike and Hu-oshima: Did He Oppose It?" by Bar-
Ike the D@lomat ton...
Anthony Samp-son, in Regardie's (Dec. 1987), 1010 Wisconsin Ave. N.W., Ste. 600, Washington, D.C. 20007.
Many American politicians argue that U.S. corporations should sell off their South African subsidiaries. "Our country is implicated in the terrible system that blights South Africa," says Senator Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.). "Our corporations have benefited from the apartheid economy."
Sampson, British author of The Seven Sisters and The Changing Anatomy of Britain, argues...
Dick Armey, in Policy
se Review (Winter 1988), Heritage Foundation,
214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C.
20002.
Located in an inhospitable comer of northern Maine, Loring Air Force Base averages 105 inches of snow a year. It was built during the late 1940s to ensure that limited-range B-47 bombers could reach the Soviet Union from a base in the continental United States. As B-47s were re- placed with longer range B-52 and B-1 bombers, Loring's far-northem site was no longer a strategic...
Dick Armey, in Policy
se Review (Winter 1988), Heritage Foundation,
214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C.
20002.
Located in an inhospitable comer of northern Maine, Loring Air Force Base averages 105 inches of snow a year. It was built during the late 1940s to ensure that limited-range B-47 bombers could reach the Soviet Union from a base in the continental United States. As B-47s were re- placed with longer range B-52 and B-1 bombers, Loring's far-northem site was no longer a strategic...
David Clinton, in
TocqueviUe Today The Washington Quarterly (Winter 1988), 55
Hayward st.,cambridge, Mass. 02142.
In Democracy in America (1835-40), French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) argued that U.S. democracy could not pursue long-term foreign policy interests. "A democracy," Tocqueville wrote, "finds it difficult to. ..fix on some plan and carry it through with deter- mination." Any president, trying to distinguish himself from his predeces-...
Richard J. Herrn-
stein and James E. Mazur, in The Sciences
(Nov.-Dec. 19871, New York Academy of Sci-
ences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition. . . is so powerful a principle," wrote Adam Smith in 1776, "that it is alone.. .capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity." Economists still hew to this theory of "utility maximization," which is applied not only to financial decisions...
Richard J. Herrn-
stein and James E. Mazur, in The Sciences
(Nov.-Dec. 19871, New York Academy of Sci-
ences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition. . . is so powerful a principle," wrote Adam Smith in 1776, "that it is alone.. .capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity." Economists still hew to this theory of "utility maximization," which is applied not only to financial decisions...
the politics of selfishness."
Congress passed the Railroad Retirement Act in 1934, over the pro- tests of the Roosevelt administration. The act nationalized existing pension plans into a Railroad Retirement Fund (RRF) that taxes both workers and employers in a manner similar to (but separate from) Social Security. Lobbying retiree groups has kept pensions generous. Railroad pensions range up to 125 percent of a worker's final salary.
Railroads pay for these generous pensions through high...
Richard A.
and Easterlin, in Population and Development Re-
view (June 1987), The Population Council. 1
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y.
10017.
In 1968, fully 25 percent of Americans over the age of 65 lived in poverty, but only 15 percent of children under 16 did so. In 1985, only 13 percent of the aged were poor, but 21 percent of children were in poverty.
Why are the elderly prospering and children not? Easterlin, an econo- mist at the University of Southern California, finds "independent...
Richard A.
and Easterlin, in Population and Development Re-
view (June 1987), The Population Council. 1
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y.
10017.
In 1968, fully 25 percent of Americans over the age of 65 lived in poverty, but only 15 percent of children under 16 did so. In 1985, only 13 percent of the aged were poor, but 21 percent of children were in poverty.
Why are the elderly prospering and children not? Easterlin, an econo- mist at the University of Southern California, finds "independent c...
forcing more recourse to doctors, have an indirect effect in reducing illness, but patients with com- plex ailments will see a physician regardless of whether a prescription is required. "Consumers," he notes, "are able to understand the value of a doctor's advice even if they are not required to seek it."
Schools and "Business-Led School Reform: The Second Wave" Denis I? Doyle, in Across the Board (Nov. 1987), The Conference hard, 845 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10022.
Even...
Lowell Edmunds, in Johns Hopkins Magazine (Dec. 1987), 203 White- head Hall, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md. 21218.
The dinner party, says Edmunds, a classics professor at Johns Hopkins University, "was a prime form of self-expression" for the Roman aristoc- racy. But what did hosts want their banquets to say about themselves? The answer, Edmunds believes, is that meals were a means to transmit and preserve traditional virtues.
Hosts usually invited nine men to dinner; guests reclined...
serving exqui- site food brought from their simple country houses.
The Romans loved disguising food to express the distinction between appearance and reality. The poet Martial (circa A.D. 40-103), for example, once "knew of a chef who could make a whole banquet out of gourds." Edrnunds concludes that culinary deception derives from the belief that a person's outward appearance masked his inner nature. "The Roman ban- queter," he notes, dined "upon his world view."
PRESS &am...
the Civil War, many newspapers covered sports, yet some papers did so reluctantly. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, for example, once gave six columns to a prize fight, but added an editorial denouncing the brutality of the boxing match. As sports news drew more readers, sportswriters gained influence. Baseball writer Henry Chadwick (1824- 1908) helped create the National League (which in 1876 became the first organization of professional sports clubs in the United States), and also founded...
a nuclear power accident, but fail to report the actual number of people killed so far nuclear power, a miniscule total. Moreover, only 16 percent of the stories sur- veyed compared the possible costs and benefits of a risky activity. In most stories, journalists imply that the costs of an activity outweigh its benefits, while failing to give the reader the information needed to reach an inde- pendent assessment. "None of the media," say the authors, "is very infor- mative in providing...
rejects the establishment of an elite ruling class or a dictatorship.
Because Muslims are combating the erosion of their faith, the jihad (holy war) is considered defensive in nature. Thus the mujahideen (war- riors in the way of God) in Afghanistan, while they may take the offensive against Soviet forces, have been "involved in a wholly defensive war."
The primary goal of today's Muslim leaders is to cleanse their society of foreign influence and help Muslims "rediscover and re-embrace...
Mary Midgley, in Philosophy (July 1987), Cambridge Univ. Press, 32 East 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
English philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958) was acclaimed most British intellectuals when his major work, Principia Ethica, was published in 1903. But the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb was an exception. The book, she wrote in a letter, was "a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of." Its effect on young men was "to disintegrate their...
such psycholo- gists as B. F. Skinner) that "making moral judgments" is a distasteful practice that should be avoided at all costs. Yet proponents of this "self- righteous preoccupation with putting down self-righteousness" have not found a suitable substitute for the moral judgments they condemn.
Philosophers, Midgley concludes, should once again discuss "how we need to think and live." But in resuming philosophy's traditional task, they should reject attitudes that...
many circuits operating together rather than as linked chains. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bell Laboratories, and
C.I.T. have fabricated collective-decision circuits, the largest being 54 amplifiers. However, it will take a network of hundreds or thousands of "neurons," with thousands or millions of connections, for a circuit "to be useful" as a research tool.
Collective-decision circuits could be used in many ways. A C.I.T. team led Carver Mead, for example,...
providing continuing education and add- ing special programs on legal issues at their annual conventions. Saks concludes that "expert witnesses" need to learn the details of a case and their role in it. They should "learn to give accurate, two-sided presenta- tions in court, recognizing that they are witnesses, not advocates."
"Learning at the Sub-Neural Level" Robert Kanigel, in Mosaic (Fall 1987), National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. 20550.
Brain biologists...
local politicians and the press.
"Blackout at Bonnede Power" Andrew N. Kleit and Richard L. Stroup, in Regulation (No. 2, 1987), American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.20036.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which supplies low-cost elec- tric power to the Pacific Northwest, is theoretically a self-supporting gov- ernment agency that requires no federal funding.
In fact, argue Kleit, a research associate, and Stroup, a senior asso- ciate, both at...
law from building new plants, BPA bureaucrats persuaded the Washington Pacific Power Supply System (WPPSS, or "Whoops") in 1970 to build three nuclear plants and allow BPA to keep most of the power generated. BPA then forced its customers to pay for the WPPSS plants "net-billing" contracts, which required participating utilities to pass costs on to the consumer. Cost overruns and incompetence caused WPPSS to default on $2.25 billion worth of bonds in 1983. BPA customers are now...
Yvonne Korshak, in
Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Fall
1987), 16-00 Pollitt Dr., Fair Lawn, N.J. 07410.
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee com- posed of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to design a seal for the new United States. The three men differed in their ideas. Franklin suggested a depiction of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, Adams proposed Hercules poised between Vice and Virtue, and Jefferson argued for the Israelites in the w...
Yvonne Korshak, in
Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Fall
1987), 16-00 Pollitt Dr., Fair Lawn, N.J. 07410.
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee com- posed of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to design a seal for the new United States. The three men differed in their ideas. Franklin suggested a depiction of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, Adams proposed Hercules poised between Vice and Virtue, and Jefferson argued for the Israelites in the w...
French workingmen, writes Korshak, became the "quintessential French liberty cap." During the Revolution the symbol proliferated-on plaques, furniture, tea sets, and atop the Declara- tion of the Rights of Man.
Unlike the first American coins, which eliminated the cap, the French versions maintained it. Today it remains a powerful symbol for the state on French coins and postage stamps. In the United States, says Korshak, the cap's "radical meaning" faded simply being forgotten....
wi Success "New Zealand's Economy: Learning to Fly" in
The Economist (Nov. 21, 1987), 25 St. James
St., London SWlA lHG, United Kingdom.
New Zealand's economy has been failing ever since 1950, when the British Empire began to recede. But the market-oriented policies of Labour Prime Minister David Lange, argues a staff-written Economist report, may be halting New Zealand's long economic decline.
During the early 1980s, New Zealand was "one of the most regulated and distorted...
Mustafa Barzani. Barzani's son continues to battle Iraq, but now with support from Iran and Libya.
Since the Iran-Iraq war began in 1980, the Kurds have continued their violent campaigns in three nations.
Home to five Kurdish partisan armies, northern Iraq is "a cauldron of Kurdish separatism." Two groups of 10,000 guerrillas oppose the Iraqis, taking advantage of the army's preoccupation with the war to the south, and threatening the highway and oil pipeline to Turkey. Three armies...
Michael C. Reed, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (June 1987), 32 East 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
The overthrow of governments is common in much of Africa. Yet in the small West African country of Gabon, French neocolonialism has helped ensure that only two men have ruled this nation of perhaps one million since its independence in 1960. Gabon's very identity, notes Reed, a doc- toral candidate at the University of Washington, Seattle, "is inseparable from France."
Gabon's...
the early 1990s. And an extensive exploration of Mars is planned, including the landing of an unmanned rov- ing vehicle (with a 500-kilometer range) on the "Red Planet' in 1994 or 1996; a possible manned flight is anticipated at about the same time.
"We do not intend to slacken our efforts," Soviet leader Wail Gorbachev said in a 1986 speech at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, "and lose leading positions in space exploration."
tmce? "The New Industrial Relations: British...
public agencies and private institutions
"Reagan and the Economy:
The Successes, Failures, and Unfinished Agenda.'
Institute for Contemporary Studies, 243 Kearny St., San Francisco, Calif., 94108. 301 pp.
$22.95.
Author: Michael J. Boskin
How have Ronald Reagan's economic
strategies affected American life?
Boskin, a Stanford University economist,
contends that the administration's policies,
continuing budget deficits aside, have made
the United States more productive and
prosperous tha...
Book Reviews
by James Gleick
Viking, 1987
352 pp. $19.95
by Grace E. Goodell
Oxford, 1986
362 pp. $45
by Simon Scharna
Knopf, 1987
698 pp. $39.95
by Norman B. Hannah
Madison, 1987
335 pp. $19.95
David Montgomery Cambridge, 1987 494 pp. $27.95
WQ SPRING 1988 144
agreement" quickly evolved: North Vietnam did not overrun remote northern Laos; the Americans did not block the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the south. The trail was vital to the Comm~~&s' hidden, un- ending "slow invasion" of South Vietnam; used for replacements and re-supply, it would enable them to wage war there forever, on their own terms. But Washington always feared a wider confict. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson...
by Robert Kuttner
Viking, 1987
265 pp. $18.95
by Harry Harding
Brookings, 1987
369 pp. $32.95
by Robert A. M. Stem, Gregory
Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins
Rizzoli, 1987
847 pp. $75
Translated by Frederick Noonan
Great Ocean, 1987
200 pp. $16.95
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, 1987
52 pp. $12.95
by Paul Taylor
Knopf, 1987
371 pp. $22.95
by Loren R. Graham
Columbia, 1987
565 pp. $45
by Luther J. Carter
Resources for the Future, 1987
473 pp. $25
by Brian M. Pagan
Tharnes & Hudson, 1987
288 pp. $19.95
Essays
Ferry Boat Over The Broad Waters Of San Francisco Bay." After Dewey lost, a reader asked
Life '5 editor, "How does it feel out on that limb?" The reply: "Crowded."
WQ SPRING 1988
48
Chartered jetliners, 30-second TV "spots," exit polls, and image con- sultants-all these characterize the contemporary U.S. presidential election campaign. America has come a long way since the last "old- style" contest four decades ago. The year 1948 saw Harry Truman's sur...
"He looked to me like a very little man as he sat. . . in the huge leather chair." Thus, Jonathan Daniels remembered Harry S. Truman waiting to be sworn in as the 33rd president of the United States on the evening of April 12, 1945. Daniels' general impression was shared by other Americans then and long afterward.
Hairy Truman was not, in fact, an unusually small man. When he took the oath of office, he stood about 5' 9" and weighed 170 pounds. Yet, somehow, to contemporary critics,...
Gloom hwg like a great invisible fog over the Democratic delegates who gathered in Philadelphia during the dog days of July for the party's 1948 national convention. They saw nothing ahead but certain defeat in November. They behaved, reported the Associated Press, "as though they [had] accepted an invitation to a funeral."
Three weeks earlier, during an exuberant session in the same city, the Republicans had triumphantly nominated "the next president of the United States,"...
his victory, the au-thors said, Truman had broken through his "outer shell of submissiveness and ti- midity." Yet, they insisted, the "new" Truman was still a mediocrity-an inept politician and an uninspiring leader.
As surprising as it may seem to Arner- icans who now remember Truman as the jaunty, straight-talking man from Mis- souri, this harsh post-1948 assessment was widely shared at the time. Truman's "approval" rating in the polls never ex- ceeded 32 percent...
A LONG L OF CELLS
Lewis Thomas has a theory that mankind is "going through the early stages of a species' adolescence. If we can. ..shake off the memory of this century. . . we may find ourselves off and running again." His optimism stems from the "high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell." From "that first micro- organism, parent of us all," man's development has mirrored the process that creates each of our bodies, with myriad cells replicat-...
Joseph LaPalombara
In March 1985, Bettino Craxi, then Italy's prime minister, visited Washington. President Ronald Reagan greeted him with a firm hand-shake and a (somewhat) facetious question: "How's your crisis going?" Craxi replied, "Very well, thank you."
No doubt his other NATO allies had asked Craxi, the Socialist Party leader, the same question. When Americans or Canadians or Germans think of Italy, many imagine a sunny, picturesque Mediterranean land- scape whose inhabitants...
In March 1985, Bettino Craxi, then Italy's prime minister, visited Washington. President Ronald Reagan greeted him with a firm hand-shake and a (somewhat) facetious question: "How's your crisis going?" Craxi replied, "Very well, thank you."
No doubt his other NATO allies had asked Craxi, the Socialist Party leader, the same question. When Americans or Canadians or Germans think of Italy, many imagine a sunny, picturesque Mediterranean land- scape whose inhabitants are in chronic...
into World War II and disaster.
There have been few, if any, dictators of the Right or Left in our century whose rise to power owed more to the myopia of democratic statesmen and plain citizens. Mussolini's fall from power was as dramatic as his ascent, and the Fascist era merits our reflections today.
Many younger Americans may think of Mussolini only as actor Jack Oakie portrayed him in Charlie Chaplin's classic 1940 film, The Great Dictator: a rotund, strutting clown, who struck pompous poses...
the Mediterranean and the awesome barrier of the Alps, four-fifths of the territory consists of mountains and hills. Not only the great Alpine arc, sweeping west to east from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, but. . . the Apennines, stretching . . . down the length of Italy. ..set per- manent barriers to the possibilities of cultivation."
So writes Stuart Woolf in A History of Italy, 1700-1860 (Methuen, 1979). Indeed, it was the diversity of Ita- ly's physical and climatic characteristics...
LECTIONS
eetin 10
Few writers have elicited more admiration or more antipathy than Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965). Many critics and fellow poets have assailed him as a stodgy traditionalist who denied any possibility of great modem verse. Just as many have hailed him for defining the modem poetic "sensibility." Here, on the centennial of his birth, Frank McComell reintroduces the Missouri-born expatriate who once said of himself, "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!"
by Fr...
"Ballpark figure" is a nice, fairly new phrase meaning "rough approxima- tion" (such as the estimates of attendance at a ball game). But it seems that America has entered the era of ballpark language where words are used approximately;they mean only roughly what we think they mean. So observes Joseph Epstein, singling out for disdain educators, heiresses, bu- reaucrats, TV anchormen, ecologists, and social scientists-among the many "quasi-semi-demi-ostensibly educated"...
