Spring 1991
The Mormons' Progress
In Essence
Rich-ard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, in Presidential Studies ~uarterl~ (Winter 1991), Center for the Study of the Presidency, 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Historians have been playing the game of grading the presidents ever since 1948, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., asked a panel of colleagues to award them all A's (great), B's (near-great), and so on, down to the ignominious E's (failure). No stand- ards of evaluation were specified, how- ever, and the criteria of later surveys often f...
Dwight Eisenhower. Jackson solved the dilemma justifying presiden- tial activism "in the name of limiting the activities of hierarchical institutions," such as the "monster" National Bank of the United States.
Although Ellis and Wildavsky give the modem presidents no formal grades, they do note that the performances by chief ex- ecutives in recent decades have provided grounds for praise as well as criticism. "Reports of failed presidencies have risen along with egalitarian...
Paul E. Peter-Isn't That Special? son, in Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1990-91), Academy of Political Science, 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York,
N.Y. 10115-0012.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which elimi- nated a host of valuable tax loopholes, rep- resented a defeat of the special interests that many analysts thought would never happen. Can it be that special interests have lost much of their renowned influ- ence in Washington? Exactly, argues Pe- terson, a Harvard political scientist....
this standard, for example, retirees are not a special interest.
To estimate the influence of special in- terests, Peterson measures the percentage of the gross national product (GNP) spent the federal government on activities "not of paramount interest" to the two ma- jor political parties. That means all federal outlays not spent on the public debt, de- fense, benefits for the elderly, "safety net" programs for the poor, and agricultural subsidies important to the farm states...
Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.), and Representative Bill Nichols (D.-Ala.), the measure was en- acted over opposition from the services. It made the JCS chairman the "principal mil- itary adviser" to the president, the Na- tional Security Council, and the secretary of defense. The other service chiefs were relegated to secondary roles and put di- rectly under the chairman. The military chain of command now runs from the sec- retary of defense through the chairman and then out to the...
"Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Eco- nomic History" Peter Temin, in The Journal of Interdisciplin-ary History (Winter 1991), Tufts Univ., 26 Winthrop St., Med- ford, Mass. 02155.
From the mid-19th century to the mid- served as a model for other nations. But 20th, U.S. economic growth was among now, says Temin, an economist at the the wonders of the world. The modern Massachusetts Institute of Technology, business enterprises that emerged here "the special...
based on free la- bor," Temin notes. It also resulted in a na- tional government "strongly sympathetic to the growth of industry."
The big industrial corporations that emerged as the American System was be-
SOCIETY
ing transformed into mass production were "an American phenomenon," Temin says. Large companies in Europe were limited to a much narrower range of in- dustries. The American firms flourished in a favorable legal setting. Court decisions, for insta...
.
Unless their underlying assumptions are accepted, Searle says, the cultural leftists' explicit arguments seem weak. "From the point of view of the tradition, the answers to each argument are fairly obvious," he observes. Thus, "it is not the aim of educa- tion to provide a representation or sample of everything that has been thought and written, but to sive students access to works of high quality. [Education there- fore] is its very nature 'elitist' and 'hi- erarchical' because...
PERIODICALS
In the 1959 study in which Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman introduced the Type-A man to the world, they re- ported that men who have a sense of ur- gency about time and who are inclined to be competitive and hostile, are twice as likely to have a heart attack. Following up on that, Levine and his colleagues exam- ined the rates of death from ischemic heart disease (a decreased flow of blood to the heart) for their 36 cities. After adjusting for the median age of each city's popula-...
Robert W.
Radio Wars
McChesney, in Journal of Communication (Autumn 1990), Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19 104-6220.
In retrospect, commercial broadcasters' near-monopoly over the radio airwaves seems to have been almost inevitable. But it did not seem that way back in the 1920s and early '30s, says McChesney, a journal- ism professor at the University of Wiscon- sin, Madison. Although scholars have not stressed the fact, there was opposition to the...
Radio (NCER) with the aim of getting Con- gress to reserve 15 percent of the broad- cast channels for educational use.
But the opposition movement faced in NBC, CBS, and the National Association of Broadcasters, "one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington." FDR had more important battles to fight, and on June 18, 1934, he signed into law the Communica- tions Act of 1934 which created the Fed- eral Communications Commission and marked the effective end of the war over the airwaves....
Frank Lambert, in The Journal of American ~Ltory(Dec. 1996, 1125 Atwater, Indiana Univ., ~liomin~ton, Ind. 47401.
"Great and visible effects followed his preaching. There was never such a general awakening, and concern for the things of God known in America before." So wrote Anglican evangelist George Whitefield in 1740 in a third-person account of his own revivalist activities, cleverly advertising them means of an "objective" newspa- per article. But his puffery actually w...
Robert L. Wilken, in First Things (Dec. 1990), Inst. on Religion and Public Life, 156 Fifth Ave., ~te. 400, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Virtuous deeds "implant in those who pire, the use of written narratives of noble search them out a zeal and yearning that lives to teach virtue was well-established, leads to imitation," declared Plutarch (A.D. notes Wilken, a University of Virginia his- 46-120), whose Parallel Lives of noble torian. "Yet Christian hagiography. . . does Greeks and Romans...
illustrations, as when James cites Job for his patience. But such examples hardly constituted comprehensive biographies.
"Why, then, no lives?" asks Wilken. "The most obvious reason was that the gospels stood in the way. The supreme model for Christian life was Jesus.. .. At this early stage of Christian history, it would have been presumptuous to bring other persons into competition with the primal model." That changed, however, with the Council of Nicaea, called in A.D. 325...
religious doubt, and some scholars have concluded he was a religious skeptic. But Hinckley says his correspondence makes clear that his anguish was not that of "a skeptic try- ing to believe in God, but [that] of a be- liever deorived bv his Creator of the unwa- vering certitude that characterizes faith of the highest order."
Tocqueville thought that only a very few
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
men-persons of rare intellect such as Blaise PascalÃ?â??1'ar capable of genuine be- l...
experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing anguish and intermitting disorders," wrote the Reverend Edmund Stone to the presi- dent of the British Royal Society in 1763. Although he did not know it, Stone had discovered salicylic acid-better known today as aspirin.
Weissmann, a professor of medicine at New York University, reports that "Ameri- cans consume 16,000 tons of aspirin tab- lets a year-80 million pills-and spend about $2 billion a year for nonprescription...
a billion biochemical pathways that we share with years of evolution."
The Human Machine "A Chip YOU Can Talk TO" Rachel Nowak, in Johns Hopkins Magazine (Dec. 1990), 212 Whitehead Hall, Johns Hopkins Univ., 34th and Charles Streets, Baltimore, Md. 21218.
If scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have their way, it won't be long before telephones dial numbers on spoken request, tape recorders transcribe conversations directly onto paper, and cars drive themselves. N...
a billion biochemical pathways that we share with years of evolution."
The Human Machine "A Chip YOU Can Talk TO" Rachel Nowak, in Johns Hopkins Magazine (Dec. 1990), 212 Whitehead Hall, Johns Hopkins Univ., 34th and Charles Streets, Baltimore, Md. 21218.
If scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have their way, it won't be long before telephones dial numbers on spoken request, tape recorders transcribe conversations directly onto paper, and cars drive themselves. N...
Bruce N. Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, and "Expo-
sure to Certain Pesticides May Pose Real Carcinogenic Risk"
and "Arguments That Discredit Animal Studies Lack Scientific
Support" James E. Huff and Joseph K. Haseman, in Chemi-
cal & Engineering News (Jan. 7, 1991), American Chemical So-
ciety, 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
In her influential 1962 book Silent Spring, naturalist Rachel Carson warned of the dangers to the environment, and ulti- mately to h...
Warren T. Brookes, in The Quill (Jan.-Feb. 1991), Society of Professional Journalists, P.O. Box 77, Greencastle, Ind. 46135-0077.
When McDonald's Corp. agreed last fall to abort its program to recycle the polysty- rene cartons it uses for its hamburgers, and to go back instead to using coated pa- perboard, some environmentalists and journalists hailed the decision as "good news for the planet." In reality, says Brookes, a Washington-based editorial writer for the Detroit News, the hamburger...
Warren T. Brookes, in The Quill (Jan.-Feb. 1991), Society of Professional Journalists, P.O. Box 77, Greencastle, Ind. 46135-0077.
When McDonald's Corp. agreed last fall to abort its program to recycle the polysty- rene cartons it uses for its hamburgers, and to go back instead to using coated pa- perboard, some environmentalists and journalists hailed the decision as "good news for the planet." In reality, says Brookes, a Washington-based editorial writer for the Detroit News, the hamburger...
punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents," said then-Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
That 1989 decision (reaffirmed last year when the court struck down a new federal law making it a crime to bum or deface the American flag) was "the end result of a cultural revolution" that began in the mid- 1950s, according to Boime, an art histo- rian at the University of California at Los Angeles. Jasper Johns fired the revolu- tion's...
fruit trees, flower beds, vases, statues, and marble seats." Some utopian authors were pro-voked Bellamy's work. British Marxist William Morris pronounced Looking Back- ward "a horrible cockney dreamH-and then proceeded to set down, in News From Nowhere (1890), his own vision of the fu- ture. an arcadian communitv of artisans and 'craftsmen.
Bellamy's age, Collins writes, "was the last in which futuristic novels would take such an optimistic bent." Although the 20th century...
Charles A. Joiner, in Asian Survey (Nov. 1990), Univ. of Calif., Room 408, 6701 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, Calif. 94720.
Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have taken two big steps toward revitalizing their moribund economies. One is to move toward free markets, the other is to surrender the com- munist monopoly of political power. Many analysts believe that both steps are essen- tial for the nations' economic health. But not everyone has agreed. Kim I1 Sung in North Korea a...
Charles A. Joiner, in Asian Survey (Nov. 1990), Univ. of Calif., Room 408, 6701 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, Calif. 94720.
Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have taken two big steps toward revitalizing their moribund economies. One is to move toward free markets, the other is to surrender the com- munist monopoly of political power. Many analysts believe that both steps are essen- tial for the nations' economic health. But not everyone has agreed. Kim I1 Sung in North Korea a...
Robert C. Tucker, in The New Re-public (Jan. 21, 1991), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
Most Western sovietologists have long re- garded the October Revolution of 1917, in which Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks seized power, as marking a decisive break with the Russian past. But many Soviet intellectuals, free now in the glasnost era to speak their minds, have been taking a very different view, Princeton political sci- entist Tucker reports. As they see it, he says, czarist absolutism and historic...
Book Reviews
THE MIRROR AT MIDNIGHT: A South African Journey
By Adam Hochschild.
Viking. 309pp. $19.95
A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA? Constitutional
Engineering in a Divided Society.
By David L. Horowitz. Univ. of Calif. 293 pp. $20
PRECISION AND SOUL: Essays and Addresses
By Robert Musil. Ed. and trans. by Burton Pike and David S. Luft.
Univ. of Chicago.301 pp. $29.95
THE PRIZE: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money,and Power
By Daniel Yergin. Simon &
Schuster. 877 pp. $24.95
By Nicholas Lemann.
Knopf. 320 pp. $24.95
By Thomas Laqueur.
Harvard.313 pp. $27.95
By David Cannadine.
Yale. 832 pp. $35
By Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham.
Univ. of Va. 386 pp. $35
By Jane Campbell Hutchinson.
Princeton. 247 pp.$25
By Robert Coles.
Houghton Mifflin. 358 pp. $22.95
By Richard D. Alba.
Yale. 374pp. $35
Ed. by Walter Gratzer.
Norton. 517 pp. $24.95
By Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer.
Harvard. 563 pp.$29.95
Essays
Malise Ruthven
ate one evening in May United States, with investments amounting 1989, in the narrow, cob- to billions. Its clean-cut, youthful mission- bled streets of La Paz, Bo-aries in their white shirts and black ties livia, two Mormon mission- seem as representative of American values aries were shot and killed as the executives of Citibank and other three terrorists in a yel- American institutions that have been at-low Volkswagen. In a handwritten state- tacked by guerrillas. Nor is this...
ate one evening in May United States, with investments amounting 1989, in the narrow, cob- to billions. Its clean-cut, youthful mission- bled streets of La Paz, Bo-aries in their white shirts and black ties livia, two Mormon mission- seem as representative of American values aries were shot and killed as the executives of Citibank and other by three terrorists in a yel- American institutions that have been at-low Volkswagen. In a handwritten state- tacked by guerrillas. Nor is this simply a ment...
or Latter-day Saints, "once upon a time"
was yesterday. Perhaps a majority of to-day's adult Saints grew up in a different uni- verse, one insulated from the larger culture, a world that was divided between "them" and "us." Young Saints learned how to recognize "the other" before they learned their ABCs. To- day much of this has changed: "By 1980," writes religious historian Martin Marty, "the Mormons had grown to be. ..like everyone e...
THE D9 AND
OTHER ONS OF
Who among us does not scoff at UFOs) astrology) and ESP? But the fact is that most of us also embrace dozens of other illusions with scarcely a second thought. These illusions) says psychologist Thomas Gilovich) are a product of the human mind's ceaseless quest to find order and meaning in the world-even where there is no order) even if the mind gets the meaning wrong. Many of these erroneous beliefs are harmless; others can lead to bias, prej- udice) error) or) in th...
exaggerated crises such as Love Canal and distracted minor environmental threats, even as larger ones go unattended. At a deeper level, biologist Daniel Botkin says, they hold ancient and sentimental misconceptions of nature, and of man's place in it, that could stifle the emerging new environmentalism.
ATURE
by Daniel B. Botkin
ast June, California voters tried to strike a blow for the state's endangered moun- tain lions when they passed Proposition 1 17, protecting all but the most aggress...
ast June, California voters tried to strike a blow for the state's endangered moun- tain lions when they passed Proposition 1 17, protecting all but the most aggressive cats from human beings. Anybody caught killing, trapping, or transporting a moun- tain lion in the state now faces one year in jail and a $10,000 fine. The Wilderness So- ciety, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club all lined up behind the measure, and there was nothing in the debate (such as it was) to suggest that Proposition 1...
wo weeks into the Middle
East War a distraught At-
lanta Constitution editorial
writer declared on a televi-
sion news broadcast that
the Iraqi oil spill in the Per- sian Gulf had thrown her into "despair." The same day, the New York Times and the Washington Post published equivocal news stories about a U.S. Environmental Protec- tion Agency (EPA) decision to require an Arizona utility company to spend $2.3 bil-lion at one power plant to try to eradicate a seasonal blue haze that s...
changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man- made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its mean- ing. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.'
The End of Nature caused quite a stir; some suggested that it would have the same galvanic impact on public opinion that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (also first published in the New Yorker) had had 27 years before. But while many were titillated McKibben's violent...
astern Europeans have so of-
ten bemoaned the lack of rec-
ognition of their cultures that
when one of their artists does
achieve world standing, they
are quick to proclaim him a genius who speaks for the entire region. A Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugregik, re- cently recalled attending a lecture in Bel- grade by a "world-famous" American au- thor who, when asked if he had ever heard of Ivo Andrik, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo KiE (all three of them widely translated, and Andrik i...
hy is nobody idle any
more?
I mean openly, to-
tally, cheerfully idle,
and by choice. The in-
dustrial world is no doubt full of people who could work harder, and know it, full of procrastinators and easy riders. But no one seems content to achieve nothing any more, whether at school and college, or in industry or the professions. When I first taught at a uni- versity-in the Midwest during the
1950s-a good fifth of the students, it was widely accepted, did no work, or next to none, and w...
sighed and put paper into the type-
writer. "I'd better start," I said. And
I did. Meaning that, unemployable
since I had less than a year to live, I
had to turn myself into a profes-
sional writer.
It was January of 1960 and, according to the prognosis, I had a winter and a spring and a summer to live through and would die with the fall of the leaf. I felt too well. After the long enervation of the trop- ics, my wife Lynne and I were being stimu- lated by the winter gales of t...
the "literacy environment" of the home, the mother's own level of education, and her educational expectations for the child. (The father's back- ground mattered much less.) The quality of schools also made a difference, but a con- siderably smaller one.
A third facet, reading com- prehension, is more compli-cated. But schools and families seemed to be able to compen- sate for each other's failings. In the 1980-82 study, all chil- dren-including those from the worst homes-who had ex- cellent...
