Autumn 1985
The Age of Jackson
In Essence
Democratic Samuel P. Huntington, in The Public In-
terest (Spring 1985), 10 East 53rd St., rospects New York, N.Y. 10022.
What is the future of the national Democratic Party after its rout Reagan in 1984?
"First and foremost, [the Democrats' prospects depend] on whether the New Politics coalition continues to dominate the party," says Hun- tington, a Harvard professor of government. "If it does, the party will remain a minority and its vision . . .that of a minority party."
New...
Seymour Martin Lipset,
in Public Opinion (Apr.-May 1985), Amer-
eople? ican Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St.
N.W.,Washington, D.C. 20036-9964.
In 1983, Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, Fellows, re- spectively, at the Hoover and American Enterprise institutes, pub- lished The Confidence Gap, a book documenting Americans' loss of faith in their leaders. Even President Jimmy Carter had warned in 1979 of "a growing disrespect for government . . . churches . . .schools, the...
the National Opinion Research Center and Harris showed a drop in optimistic responses, from 48 percent in 1966 to 31 percent in November 1984-below the previous nadir of 33 per- cent (the average of three polls) recorded in 1973-74, during the Water- gate hearings.
Lipset believes that Americans' lack of faith in their institutions and leaders is not superficial. It cannot be explained simply in terms of past presidential difficulties, past economic woes, or the media's past obses- sion with "bad"...
trying to achieve so many objectives at once, Western strate- gists have twisted clear, logical policies into incoherent doctrines, "muddling" issues for everyone.
So much the better, says Betts, a senior Brookings Fellow. He be- lieves that policy inconsistency can be a virtue, that a little cloudiness in its defense doctrines gives the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) more room to maneuver in the event of a crisis.
The chief contradiction, Betts contends, is that "what...
Nick
Good Intentions, Eberstadt, in commentary (June 1985),
asted Dollars 165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
For more than a decade now, America's foreign aid policies have cost the taxpayers much, but accomplished little.
So argues Eberstadt, a Harvard population researcher. A "perversion of foreign aid" has occurred not because Americans are stingy with their wealth or lack compassion for the world's poor. Rather, a pro- gram once aimed at Third World economic development...
PERIODICALS
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
Shortly after World War 11, Eberstadt explains, President Harry Tru- man initiated "development assistance," designed to promote eco-nomic self-sufficiency in poor countries overseas. The World Bank, beginning in 1946, was set up to "facilitate investment for productive purposes" in countries needing an industrial base. Even the United Na- tion's Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was limited to pro- viding only "immediate...
the previous one? Opinions vary, al- though most scholars' answer is No.
Were supporters of the gradualist Johnson policy in Vietnam correct when they blamed the news media for undermining vital public sup- port, or was the policy itself fatally flawed? For their part, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger believe that they negotiated a satisfactory end to the war in 1973, but that Congress, cutting aid to Saigon in 1973-74, made Hanoi's victory inevitable. Fromkin and Chace contend that merely holding...
Fukushima, in Foreign Policy (Summer
1985), 11 Dupont Circle, Washington,
D.C. 20036.
In disputes over the causes of America's $36.8 billion trade deficit with Japan, tempers have flared on both sides of the Pacific.
Fukushima, an economist at the Nomura Research Institute, suggests that Americans listen to the Japanese side of the story. He believes that Japanese businessmen have been falsely stereotyped as economic ma- rauders, while in fact, "Japan has been playing a helpful, vital...
making direct investments." American workers are now building Hondas; Japanese steel companies are selling ad- vanced cold strip mill technology to their U.S. counterparts.
Washington, Fukushima says, is using Japan as a scapegoat. With a growing deficit that absorbs two-thirds of all national savings, an over- valued dollar, a diminishing competitive edge in several key industries, and excessive borrowing from overseas, the United States is largely re- sponsible for its own economic woes....
Erik Lundberg, in Journal of'Economic
Literature (Mar. 1985), Dept. of Econom-
ics, Stanford Univ., Stanford, Ca. 94305.
From the mid-1930s through the late 1960s, Sweden's pioneering "wel- fare state" defied the doomsayers. Achieving full employment, a low rate of inflation, steady growth, greater income equality, and political stability, the Swedish Model held up surprisingly well.
But in 1974, the long rise of Sweden's gross national product (GNP)
The Wilson QuarterlflAutumn 1985
19
PERIODICALS
ECONOMICS. L...
PERIODICALS
ECONOMICS. LABOR. & BUSINESS
ended. Stagflation set in. Investment waned. Labor strife grew. The population rose to nearly 8.3 million. Lundberg, an economist at the Stockholm School of Economics, traces the problem to the reigning So- cial Democrats' dogged adherence to an outdated economic blueprint.
During the 1930s, even before John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) proposed that government spending could stabilize a free market econ- omy, Swedish economists were trying to blend...
Wilson and Cook, who teach public policy at Harvard and Duke, re- spectively, reject the theory that the unemployment rate is directly linked to the homicide rate. They do not, however, deny that "economic conditions may have some effect on the crime rate," which includes many types of crimes against property.
In 1976, JEC Chairman Hubert Humphrey stated that a "1.4 percent rise in unemployment during 1970 is directly responsible for . . . 1,740 additional homicides." Humphrey...
Charles Murray, WQ, Autumn 19841. Murray asserts that "basic social indicators took a turn for the worse" during the 1960s. Jencks, a sociologist at Northwestern Univer- sity, replies that the official overall poverty rate fell from 19 percent in 1965 to 13 percent in 1980, when adjusted for inflation. Medicaid and Medicare, he adds, not only improved poor people's health but also may have helped to lower infant mortality. Life expectancy, in fact, rose more from 1965 to 1980 than from...
Michael Massing, in Columbia Journalism Review (MayIJune 1985), 700 Journalism Bldg., Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027.
Following two much-publicized libel trials (Gen. William Westmore- land and Ariel Sharon against CBS News and Time, respectively), in- vestigative journalists in the United States seem to be backing off difficult stories. But are they?
Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, be-lieves that "a chill has indeed set in." After interviewing...
Gary D. Gaddy and
David Pritchard, in Journal of Communi- Church cations (Winter 1985), The Annenberg
School of Communications, Univ. of Pa.,
3620 Walnut St. C5, Philadelphia, Pa.
19104-3858.
On April 16, 1984, USA Today ran the following headline: "TV Preach- ers Not Hurting Local Church."
This headline encapsulated a two-volume study the Annenberg School of Communications and the Gallup Organization. In 1978 and 1983, Gallup had surveyed more than 1,500 people on their religious-...
Gertrude Himmel-farb, in Commentary (Apr. 1985), 165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
For Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, there was only one Karl Marx. But since the 1930s, when scholars unearthed Marx's early writings, many Western in- tellectuals have suggested that real Marxism has "a human face."
The new Marxism is based not on the materialistic Das Kapital(1867) but on Marx's earlier writings on alienation and other themes. Meanwhile, writes Himmelfarb, a City University historian,...
history."
"Raymond Aron and the History of the Raymond Aron: Twentieth Centurv" bv Pierre Hassner. in
< "
International Studies Quarterly (~ar.
The Ethics of 1985), Butterworth Scientific Ltd, West-
bury House, P.O. Box 63, Guildford GU2 Responsibility 5BH, England; "Raymond Aron" Ed- ward Shils, in The American Scholar (Spring 1985), 181 1 Q St. N.W., Washing- ton, D.C. 20009.
Rarely do those who interpret history become historical figures them- selves. Edward...
"a readiness to accept disagreeable truths." He wrote about the Common Market, Soviet totalitarianism, the thought of Nietzsche and Lenin.
Hassner believes that a quotation from the 17th-century mathemati- cian Blaise Pascal best sums up Aron: "Greatness is not displayed standing at one extremity, but rather by touching both ends at once and filling all the space between."
"Critical Thinking and Obedience to Au- uestio&g thority" by John Sabini and Maury Sil-...
Stephen Educating Snails S. Hall, in Science 85 (May 1985), 1101
Vermont Ave. N.W., 10th Floor, Washing-
ton, D.C. 20005.
Snails are a delicacy to some, a slimy nuisance to others. But to two American scientists, these mollusks are providing tantalizing clues to the mystery of human thought and memory.
Daniel Alkon, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., has devoted most of his career to studying snails, specifically the genus Hermissenda, writes Hall, a Science 85contributing...
John P. McKelvey, in
And Scientists TechnologyReview (Jan. 1985), Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, Bldg. lo., Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
Scientists and technologists have lived off each other's creations for centuries. But scientists always seem to get the credit. McKelvey, a physics professor at Clemson University, maintains that technologists have unfairly been pushed to the back seat, that they have furthered scientific progress no less than have scientists themselves.
Hans Christian...
boiling it in water and distilling the oils. He called the liquid "allyl" (from Allium sativum, garlic's botanical name). One hundred years later, Chester J. Cavallito in Rensselaer, N.Y., soaked garlic in ethyl alcohol and came up with a colorless, smelly liquid called allicin. Fur- ther experiments showed that allicin killed certain fungi and bacte- ria, sometimes faster than penicillin.
The WilsonQuarterlyIAutumn 1985
31
PERIODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
But the original ques...
Wil- Confessions of liam D. Ruckelshaus, in Issues in Science and Technology (Spring 1985), 2101 Con-An EPA Man stitution Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
"Think globally and act locally," scientist Rene Dubos once advised environmentalists. Ruckelshaus, who headed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1970 to 1973 and again from 1983 to 1985, wholeheartedly agrees.
At first, Ruckelshaus recalls, the EPA aimed, grandly, to harmonize industry with nature. Congress created the...
weighing the costs and benefits of regulations for industry, workers, and the public. These cold, analytical methods dismay many Ameri- cans. Industry leaders and some scientists, on the other hand, argue that scientific knowledge has not advanced far enough to make firm judgments possible.
Ruckelshaus would alter the EPA's role, leaving it with the power to set broad national pollution standards that would be applied local government. That would reduce the dangers of excessive, abstract regulations...
the absence of radioactive iodine in the en- vironment surrounding the stricken nuclear plant. Previous meltdown models predicted the formation of an iodine vapor cloud, which is po- tentially fatal and difficult to contain. However, as Norman notes, "it is now widely accepted within the nuclear research community that the chemistry underlying the earlier predictions was faulty."
Studies of TMI the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the Industry Degraded Core Rule-making Program (IDCOR),...
Jef- Fs Scott Redeemed frey Hart, in Comnzentary (Mar. 19851,
165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Great Gatsfame, died in Hollywood in 1940; at age 44, he was an alcoholic with a fading literary reputation. Hart, who teaches English at Dartmouth College, thinks a reassessment of the au- thor's last years is overdue.
Hart sees signs of a special maturity in Fitzgerald's later work, in- cluding the screenplays he wrote for Hollywood at the end of his career. His work...
Jef- Fs Scott Redeemed frey Hart, in Comnzentary (Mar. 19851,
165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Great Gatsfame, died in Hollywood in 1940; at age 44, he was an alcoholic with a fading literary reputation. Hart, who teaches English at Dartmouth College, thinks a reassessment of the au- thor's last years is overdue.
Hart sees signs of a special maturity in Fitzgerald's later work, in- cluding the screenplays he wrote for Hollywood at the end of his career. His work...
the gas fire, eating sardines from the tin with a shoe horn." Waugh's humor, Ep- stein says, "would not have been possible if not dressed out in his care- fully measured prose . . . the straight face from behind which the smashing punch lines are delivered."
The English writer's personal life was far from carefully measured. A convert to Catholicism at age 27 (after his first wife left him for another man), later a heavy drinker and drug user, Waugh was renowned for his social brutality....
Paul H. Kreis-
r. Gandhi's berg, in Foreign Affairs (Spring 1985), 58 India East 68th St.,New York, N.Y. 10021.
Only hours after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, power passed to her son, Rajiv, now Prime Minister. Kreisberg, director of studies at New York's Council on Foreign Relations, believes that the change in leadership promises to brighten India's future and ease tensions between India and other nations.
Rajiv Gandhi's insistence on calm and unity during the turmoil...
Hanna Buczynska-
'Flying' U Garewicz, in Haward Educational Review
(Feb. 1985), 300 Longfellow Hall, 13 Ap-
pian Way, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Few phenomena better illustrate Poland's tradition of intellectual re- sistance than the Latajacy Uniwersytet, or "flying university."
Its most recent manifestation, relates Buczynska-Garewicz, herself a former flying university professor, appeared in January 1978. Thirty seven professors and 15 writers issued a declaration lamenting "a dan...
Hanna Buczynska-
'Flying' U Garewicz, in Haward Educational Review
(Feb. 1985), 300 Longfellow Hall, 13 Ap-
pian Way, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Few phenomena better illustrate Poland's tradition of intellectual re- sistance than the Latajacy Uniwersytet, or "flying university."
Its most recent manifestation, relates Buczynska-Garewicz, herself a former flying university professor, appeared in January 1978. Thirty seven professors and 15 writers issued a declaration lamenting "a dan...
then some 110 serious literary magazines were being published; novels and books of literary criticism filled bookstores. "Just as people hungered for food," observed critic Nakamura Mitsuo, "they hungered for literature." Many postwar writers (Niwa Fumio, Hayashi Fumiko, Funahashi Seiichi) vividly described war horrors and explicit sex, a new phenomenon in Japanese literature. The "quintessential postwar work," in Rubin's opinion, is Tamura Taijiro's Gates of the Flesh...
Book Reviews
by Peter Hebblethwaite
Doubleday, 1985
550 pp. $19.95
by Jacqueline Jones
Basic, 1985
432 pp. $25.95
by Geoffrey W. Conrad &
Arthur A. Demarest
Cambridge, 1984, 266 pp.
$49.50 cloth, $17.95 paper
by Willard Randall
Little, Brown, 1985
558 pp. $22.50
by Kevin Starr
Oxford, 1985
380 pp. $19.95
by Robert N. Bellah,
Richard Madsen,
William M. Sullivan,
Ann Swidler, and
Steven M. Tipton
Univ. of Calif., 1985
355 pp. $16.95
by Gregg Herken
Knopf, 1985
409 pp. $18.95
by Philip H. Frankel
Cambridge, 1984
215 pp. $44.50
edited by Jim Hillier
Haward, 1985
305 pp. $22.50
by T. J. Clark
Knopf, 1984
338 pp. $25
by John S. Gamer
Univ. of Mass., 1984
288 pp. $25
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic, 1985
880 pp. $24.95
by E. James
Lieberman, M.D.
Free Press, 1985
485 pp. $24.95
by Claude Levi-Strauss
Basic, 1985
311 pp. $24.95
By Robert S. Gottfried. Free Press, 1985.203
pp. $8.95
By Irene
L. Gendzier. Grove, 1985.300 pp. $8.95
A translation and study
by Richard Bowring. Princeton, 1985.290
pp. $10.50
Essays
only 1.4 percent.
TheWil.wn QuarterlyIAutumn 1985
46
Why is the Soviet system, with so many problems, as stable as it is? Princeton University's Stephen F. Cohen argues that the Kremlin has provided most Soviet citizens with security, na- tional pride, and modest "improvements in each succeeding generation's way of life." Other Sovietologists contend that, thanks to the regime's success in repressing dissent, blocking foreign influence, and curbing travel abroad, most Soviet citi- zens...
ot;The main task of the Five Year Plan," proclaims this 1971 poster, "is to ensure a significant rise in the material and cultural standard of living. . . ." Since the mid-1970s, the Soviet GNP-which grew at an average annual rate of nearly five percent from 1960 to 1975-has stagnated, rising in 1980 by only 1.4 percent.
TheWil.wn QuarterlyIAutumn 1985
46
Why is the Soviet system, with so many problems, as stable as it is? Princeton University's Stephen F. Cohen argues that the...
y W. Morton
In "The Exchange," a story by the late Yuri Trifonov, a pop- ular Russian writer who often dealt with the stratagems of the Soviet urban middle class, a Moscow woman changes her offi- cial apartment registration and legally moves in with her hus- band's dying mother-whom she hates.
She makes the shift for one important reason: to prevent the old lady's precious single room from reverting, upon her death, to the state. The woman reckons that, through the bartering sys- tem...
In August 1978, while visiting the Soviet Union, I decided to take the local train from Moscow to Vladimir, the capital of a former princedom some 100 miles to the east.
At Moscow's Kursk station, a rather disheveled man in his mid-30s boarded the crowded car and proceeded to address his fellow riders. "Comrades," he began, "would you help me?" He then went on to relate how, as an epileptic, he could find no steady work and was surviving on a pension of a mere 25 rubles a...
shortages of reli- able information, a secretive politi- cal system, and a history and culture that present a tangle of Western and Oriental influences.
Enigma number one, writes Ox- ford's Ronald Hingley, is The Rus- sian Mind (Scribner's, 1977). Ivan the Terrible, the great 16th-century tsar, was imperious enough to order the slaughter of an elephant that failed to bow to him, yet too supersti- tious to order the arrest of a "lunatic naked monk" who wandered the countryside denouncing...
A technological age-especially an extremely brilliant and suc- cessful one-has difficulty in finding a proper role for literature. Such a society sees literature as a diversion, as a mere amuse- ment at best; and so it is classed as a luxury, perhaps an added grace to adorn the high culture that the technology itself has built. Yet such homage obscures the real importance of litera- ture and all of the humanities. It classes them as decorative lux- uries, whereas in truth they are the necessary...
scholars than the 1829-1837 Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The craggy Tennessee general was the first man out- side the colonial gentry to reach the White House. His life was tumultuous. (How many Chief Executives had once fought duels and even killed a man?) But so were his times. Modern political parties, corporations, and a vigorous press all emerged, as did something called Jacksonian Democracy. Yet what was that ex- actly? During the 1920s, historian Carl Russell Fish christened the era the...
rly 150 years after his Presidency, Andrew Jackson remains a model of the "strong" Chief Executive. Alonso Chappel's painting of the victor of the Battle of New Orleans hints at the "native strength" Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the general. It "compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cun- ning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool."
The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1985
100
Perhaps no American period has...
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose portrayal of Jackson as a 19th- century FDR stirred scholarly de- bates for years. While all agree that the age was (as Daniel Webster said) "full of excitement," historians have differed in their measurements of the general himself.
Few have been as underwhelmed as Samuel Eliot Morison: In The Ox- ford History of the American People,
vol. 2 (Oxford, 1965, cloth; Mentor, 1972, paper), he argues that Jackson "catered to mediocrity" and was so...
public agencies and private institutions
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard Univ., 1737 Cambridge St., Cam-
bridge, Mass. 02138.36 pp. $4.95. Authors: Mark Heller and Nadav Safran
The history of Middle Eastern politics since World War I1 has shown that tra- ditional monarchies fall when a res- tive, secular middle class reaches a "critical mass." That has happened in Egypt (1952)- Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Syria (1963), and Libya (1969). Saudi Arabia could well be next, ac-...
Is Hollywood skewing our understanding of history?
itch for rl
armony
by S. Frederick Staw
Last January, the trustees of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago awarded grants totaling $25 million for a va- riety of studies of how the East-West arms competition might at last be (peacefully) ended. The news prompted a rush of proposals for fur-ther studies hom within and beyond academe-among them the fol- lowing, in a travel-stained envelope bearing a four-rupee stamp and a blurred postmark hom India:
A Proposal to the M...
