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Issue 14
September 2005
Letters from New York
2
Picture Credits
From the Editor’s Chair Welcome to the 14th edition of American Studies Today. Once again, we
have a wide range of articles, from the scholarly to the personal, and a large
number of thoughtful and probing book reviews. We hope that there is
enough here to get you thinking, and to act as a stimulus to your students. I
have always been impressed by the commitment of our growing band of
authors and reviewers, and by the quality of their contributions. Although
many of our articles are the product of careful and extensive research, with
comprehensive references, this is not intended to be a scholarly journal, but
a practical resource for teaching and learning about all aspects of American
life to school and college students. If you or your students have anything to
contribute, don’t be shy. We welcome contributions from our subscribers.
Those that don’t fit in the printed issue can always find space on the website.
We also welcome feedback from our readers on anything you have read in
the journal. This is your magazine.
American History Slide
Collection: 5, 6, 16, 18, 27
David Forster: 9, 30
Samantha Jones: 13, 14
Lenny Quart: 1, 22,
LJMU: 31
Pam Wonsek: 32
In closing, may I join with our Centre Director, Ian Ralston, in paying tribute
to Pam Wonsek, a long-standing friend of the centre. Her constant support
and good humour was a source of strength to us all, and she will be sadly
missed.
American Studies Today
is the official journal of the American Studies Resources Centre,
The Aldham Robarts Centre, Liverpool John Moores University,
Mount Pleasant Liverpool L3 5UZ
In this issue 3
Tel & fax: 0151-231 3241
by Jonathan Coleman, University of
Wales
e-mail: info@americansc.org.uk
web site: www.americansc.org.uk
8
Editor-in-Chief: Ian Ralston
Editor: David Forster
Layout
Forster
and
graphics:
David
The views expressed are those of
the contributors, and not necessarily those of the centre, the college or the university.
Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson
and the Vietnam War, 1964—68
Cultural Transformations, Urban
Place, Architecture and Rock and
Roll Music
by Dr Rob MacDonald, Liverpool JMU
12
From Winstanley to Washington
D.C. and New York
By Samantha Jones, Winstanley College,
Wigan
© 2005, Liverpool John Moores
University, Liverpool Community
College and the Contributors.
Articles in this journal may be
freely reproduced for use in subscribing institutions only, provided that the source is acknowledged.
15
The journal is published with financial assistance from the
United States Embassy.
22
Please
30
News and events from the ASRC
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Book Reviews
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New Wine in New
Surviving the 1960’s
Skins—
By Ed Weedon
Letters from New York
By Lenny Quart
3
Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, 1964‐68 Jonathan Coleman, Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth Britain has long
claimed a special
relationship with the
United States in
terms of foreign
policy, but this has
not always meant
giving
unquestioning
support to American
military involvement
overseas. Jonathan
Coleman explores
the strained
relationship between
Harold Wilson and
Lyndon Johnson
which resulted from
the Labour
Government’s
refusal to send
troops to support the
Americans in
Vietnam.
T
ony Blair and George
Bush
may
stand
‘shoulder-to-shoulder’
on most issues, but the
vaunted ‘special’ relationship
between 10 Downing Street and
the White House has not always
been so cosy. The years 1964-68,
when the Labour government of
Harold Wilson and the Democratic administration of Lyndon B.
Johnson were in power, saw
pronounced strain at the highest
levels of Anglo-American bonds,
caused to a significant extent by
differences over America’s war
in Vietnam. Opposition to the
war within the Labour Party and
among the British general public
meant that the Wilson government could not satisfy the
United States’ desire for support; certainly, London had to
reject the frequent American
requests for combat troops. In
the absence of direct British participation, the Johnson administration tended to regard Wilson’s various attempts to moderate the war largely as an irrelevance or even as a downright
nuisance. Tensions over Vietnam helped ensure that the Wilson-Johnson relationship was
probably the worst between any
British prime minister and US
president.
The Anglo-American ‘special’
relationship of the 1960s
stemmed from the intimate
practical cooperation against the
Axis powers during the Second
World War and rested upon a
nexus of continued institutional
ties in the fields of defence and
intelligence, as well as frequent
and prominent dealings between presidents and prime
ministers. Harold Wilson, who
was elected in October 1964,
was an especially keen advocate
of close Anglo-American ties,
recognising that visibly constructive bonds with Washington would help to preserve Britain’s seat at the ‘top table’ of
world affairs and enhance his
own standing as a statesman.
The US Ambassador to London,
David Bruce, explained to President Johnson in 1965 that the
Prime Minister was ‘anxious to
establish … something like the
close relationship … which existed between Harold Macmillan
and President Kennedy’. These
two leaders had established a
political friendship of great cordiality, frequent consultation
and mutual respect.
War dashes Wilson’s hopes
The Vietnam War helped to dash
Wilson’s hopes of forming similar bonds with Lyndon Johnson.
A 1965 Foreign Office document
examined the conflict in the context of Anglo-American relations, noting that Britain’s ‘direct
involvement’ in Vietnam was
‘insignificant. Our major interest
in the situation … is to see that it
does not escalate into a global
or regional war in which we
might be involved’. But Britain’s
‘interests as a non-communist
power would be impaired if the
United States Government were
defeated in the field, or defaulted on its commitments’.
Britain should therefore satisfy
its interests by giving moral
‘support to our major ally’. Wilson did favour this proAmerican line, with the result
that in general terms his government backed US policy in Vietnam. But unlike the mandarins
of the Foreign Office, he also
needed to address Labour Party
and public opinion. In March
4
1965 Bruce explained to Washington that the British leader
was ‘hotly accused by many
British, including a formidable
number of moderate Labour
Parliamentarians, of being a
mere satellite of the US, and of
subscribing blindly and completely to policies about which
he has not been consulted in
advance’.
This unforgiving climate of opinion meant that the Labour government could not consent to
providing troops for Vietnam, a
matter which the Americans first
raised in December 1964, at a
summit meeting in Washington.
On this occasion, Wilson justified his response on the grounds
that as co-chairman of the Geneva peace conference of 1954
(which partitioned Indochina)
Britain should not become in-
Minister learned of a ‘vicious
attack by the Vietcong in the
Saigon area, involving the destruction of a club largely used
by US servicemen’. Fearing an
exaggerated American response, he discussed the matter
with his Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, at 11:30 pm that
day. They concluded that, in
view of the growing public controversy over Vietnam, Wilson
‘should fly to Washington to
discuss matters with the President’. After further consultations, at about 3:15 am GMT,
10:15 pm EST, he finally telephoned Johnson directly. Wilson stated ‘that he would like to
come to Washington’ to help
deal with the ‘high-level of concern in London’. Johnson was
distinctly hostile, insisting that ‘it
would be a very serious mistake
for the Prime Minister to come
The President regarded the escalating conflict in Vietnam ‘as a
lamentable diversion of money
and effort from the more worthwhile task of building a ‘‘Great
Society’’’
volved in the fighting, and because British forces were already engaged in a counterinsurgency operation in Malaysia
known as ‘Confrontation’. But
given that the President required
only a symbolic commitment of
troops to indicate to world opinion that he had British support,
involvement in ‘Confrontation’
was a weak excuse. Nor once
‘Confrontation’ had ended late in
1966 did the Labour government
show any greater willingness to
send troops to Vietnam, suggesting domestic politics had
more to do with the refusal than
did international issues.
over … there was nothing to be
gained by flapping around the
Atlantic with our coattails out’.
He reiterated that ‘the US did
not have the company of many
allies’ in Vietnam. If the Prime
Minister had ‘any men to spare,
he would be glad to have them’.
Wilson returned to the question
of a meeting in Washington, but
Johnson tried to dismiss him
entirely by asking: ‘Why don’t
you run Malaysia and let me run
Vietnam?’ This was the voice of
a president under increasing
strain over the deteriorating
situation in Vietnam and resenting foreign attempts to influence
his policies.
It soon became clear that the
refusal rankled with Johnson.
On 10 February 1965, the Prime
Beyond the troops issue, a further reason for Johnson’s rejection of Wilson’s request for a
summit was the belief that British politicians were inclined to
visit Washington in order to
‘play to the gallery’ at home.
Once, when London requested a
routine meeting, the President is
said to have responded to an
aide that ‘we got enough pollution around here already without
Harold coming over with his fly
open and his pecker hanging
out, peeing all over me’. Johnson was essentially a parochial
as well as somewhat vulgar politician and was far more interested in domestic politics than
foreign policy. British Ambassador Patrick Dean noted in February 1966 that the President regarded the escalating conflict in
Vietnam ‘as a lamentable diversion of money and effort from
the more worthwhile task of
building a ‘‘Great Society’’’ at
home and had long since
‘realised that in terms of domestic politics the war was likely to
become increasingly unpopular’.
Oliver Wright of the Foreign Office explained to Wilson soon
after the fateful telephone call of
February 1965 that ‘the man
who is at present at the head of
the United States is basically not
interested in foreign affairs’.
Wright spoke later of his recent
attendance at a CIA briefing designed ‘to demonstrate the degree of direct North Vietnamese
involvement in South Vietnam’,
but for him, the presentation
simply demonstrated that, because of the nature of the war,
the Americans ‘cannot win and
cannot yet see any way of getting off the hook which will not
damage their prestige internationally and the President’s position domestically’. This, he suggested, explained Johnson’s
‘bear-with-a-sore-head attitude
on the telephone’ earlier.
Dissociation
There is evidence that in 1965 at
least one of Johnson’s senior
advisers considered using what
might be described as unorthodox measures to prod the British
into sending combat soldiers to
Vietnam. Wilson noted that un-
5
First Air Cavalry Division landing at Song Re, South Vietnam in 1967
der his premiership ‘there was a
small minority on the extreme
left’ in Britain who maintained
that ‘short-term monetary accommodation’ from the United
States was made available ‘only
in return for a secret understanding that Britain would support US policy in Vietnam’. Certainly, the British government
was susceptible to a certain
amount of economic ‘armtwisting’ by the Americans. The
economy had suffered for some
years as a result of uncompetitive industrial practices, an overvalued pound, and a resulting
failure to prosper in foreign markets. The frequent sterling crises
effected by these defects led the
US Treasury to orchestrate a
number of multilateral ‘bailouts’
to prevent the British from devaluing sterling, a measure that
might have negative repercussions upon the dollar. Britain
therefore needed American help
to maintain the parity of sterling.
Documentary material from British and US archives indicates
that some of Johnson’s advisers
decided that Washington should
only support the pound if Britain
continued to maintain its extensive defence commitments ‘East
of Suez’ and in West Germany,
as withdrawals from these areas
would undermine the United
States’ own foreign and defence
policies. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy went
further by trying to bring Vietnam into the deal, counselling
the President on 28 July 1965
that it made ‘no sense for us to
rescue the pound in a situation
in which there is no British flag
in Vietnam ... a British brigade in
Vietnam would be worth a billion dollars at the moment of
truth for sterling’. Undoubtedly,
the idea of linking support for
the pound with the nature of
British external policies did influence the President’s thinking.
Francis Bator of the National
Security Council once noted
Johnson’s position that anything
‘which could be regarded as
even a partial British withdrawal
from overseas responsibilities is
bound to lead to an agonising
reappraisal’ of support for sterling. Johnson did not, however,
accept Bundy’s ‘brigade for a
billion’ idea. He understood that
if it ever emerged publicly
that Wilson had been in
effect blackmailed into
sending men to Vietnam
then the controversy of
America’s stand there
might be inflamed still further – and drastically. During the sterling crisis of
September 1965, Wilson
informed Bruce that ‘at a
time when President Johnson would dearly have
liked to see United Kingdom participation in Vietnam this had never been
raised during all the discussions leading up to the
present support operation’
for sterling. Thus the contemporary legend that British policy towards Vietnam, which in any case fell
short of what the White
House wanted, derived
from some financial arrangement has little substance.
There was a more public issue in
the Anglo-American relationship
in June 1966, when the Wilson
government felt obliged to
‘dissociate’ itself from certain
American initiatives in Vietnam.
Labour won the general election
in March with a decisive 94-seat
majority – a great improvement
from the single-figure margin
with which Wilson had previously had to contend - but the
victory brought a substantial
influx of fractious and antiAmerican left-wingers who
could not be ignored. On 28
June 1966, the United States
began bombing POL (petrol, oil,
lubricants) facilities in the North
Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and
Haiphong, a move regarded in
many quarters as directed
mainly against civilians. To satisfy Labour radicals, Wilson
‘dissociated’ his government
A British brigade in Vietnam
would be worth a billion dollars
at the moment of truth for sterling
6
forward its various arbitration
schemes. Firstly, as well as
ending the sheer destruction
and bloodshed in Vietnam,
success in peacemaking
would extricate its American
allies from a difficult situation; secondly, it would prevent any possible escalation
of the war to involve China
and the Soviet Union; thirdly,
visible efforts to mediate
would soothe feelings within
the Labour Party and among
the British general public;
and, finally, for Wilson personally, well-publicised mediation efforts would bolster
his standing with the Labour
Party and on the world stage.
American soldiers on patrol in Vietnam
from this measure, producing
consternation in the White
House at this seeming act of
betrayal from an ally. The White
House’s new National Security
Adviser, Walt Rostow, suggested that British policy was
essentially a weak and cowardly
one: Washington faced ‘an attitude of mind which, in effect,
prefers that we take losses in the
free world rather than the risks
of sharp confrontation’.
Wilson, recognising the impact
of ‘dissociation’ on his already
shaky standing in Washington,
wrote to Johnson about the
pressure he faced to denounce
‘the whole of your Vietnam policy’. Using suitably crude language with the intent of mollifying the American leader, he explained that he had rejected this
view, ‘not only because I distrust
the motives of those who put
this argument forward, but because their argument itself is
balls’. Johnson opposed the
idea of a further visit, as it might
appear that the British leader
was crossing the Atlantic in or-
der to tell him how to conduct
himself – as Clement Attlee had
seemed to do when he saw
President Truman in December
1950, at the height of the Korean
War. On 4 July, Wilson more or
less pleaded with Bruce in order
to secure another trip to the
White House: he was ‘absolutely
confident he could avoid any
embarrassment to the President
during his visit’. He wanted
Johnson to understand that ‘he
does not believe in making a
mess on another fellow’s carpet’. To his relief, the Prime Minister gained his meeting, and
when in Washington his pledges
of continued fealty to the United
States brought at least a temporary rehabilitation of the relationship between him and Johnson.
The President once recorded
that with regard to Vietnam
there were over 70 peacemaking
initiatives during his presidency,
and of these initiatives the British were responsible for nine.
The Wilson government had
several motives behind putting
The two most prominent British attempts to start peace
negotiations were the Commonwealth Peace Mission of
June 1965, and the Kosygin
initiative of February 1967. In
June 1965 Wilson and three
other leaders of Commonwealth nations announced
that they would speak to the
governments chiefly concerned
to try to bring about a peace
settlement in Vietnam. Publicly,
Washington was willing to support the project, not least because a reluctance to do so
would antagonise world opinion. In private, however, there
was a great deal of cynicism
about the Commonwealth
scheme. At one point, Johnson
voiced ‘considerable concern
about the Wilson mission and
said that he saw no point in having the Prime Minister come to
Washington if Washington and
Saigon were the only capitals
which would receive him’. Such
a
visit
might
be
an
‘embarrassment’ to the United
States. The Commonwealth
Peace Mission came to nothing,
not least because the North Vietnamese mocked Wilson’s status
as the mere ‘errand boy’ of the
White House.
There was an equally highprofile, and unsuccessful, example of the Prime Minister’s zeal
for peacemaking in February
1967, when he and a number of
7
colleagues such as Foreign Secretary George Brown tried to use
the visit to London of the Russian premier Alexei Kosygin to
initiate fruitful contacts with the
North Vietnamese. As with the
Commonwealth Peace Mission,
Hanoi had given no intimation
that it was ready to make significant concessions at the negotiating table, and for reasons of its
own Washington decided to
toughen its own policy toward
negotiations at the eleventh
hour. A distraught Wilson cabled
Johnson to complain that he
now found himself in ‘a hell of a
situation’, because his credibility
with the Russians had been
shattered. Bruce had to dissuade
him from the usual impulsive
desire to make a transatlantic
odyssey to try to sort things out
with the President: ‘it would not
be wise for the Prime Minister to
dash off to Washington ... since
it would appear to be an act of
panic and hysteria’.
A visit would not have prospered, not least because of the
widespread conviction in Washington that Wilson’s peace initiative was largely self-serving. A
State Department analysis noted
the British desire ‘to participate
with maximum personal visibility in bringing peace to Vietnam
- in early February alone Wilson
proposed travelling personally
both to Washington and Hanoi’.
This
enthusiasm
was
‘sometimes embarrassing to the
US, which greatly preferred confidential dealings with a minimum of participants’. Vietnam
continued to strain the AngloAmerican relationship. After a
phone call to Washington in November 1967, Bruce noted that
Secretary of State Dean Rusk
was in ‘a dour mood ... caustic,
even bitter, about the British …
not sending troops to help us in
Vietnam’. The British announcement in July 1967 of the intention to withdraw from military
bases in the ‘East of Suez’ region by the mid-1970s had exacerbated the rancour, as it
seemed to undermine American
policy in Asia at an especially
vulnerable juncture. Yet espe-
cially with regard to Vietnam,
the Prime Minister struggled to
please all of the people all of the
time. Bruce had recorded in October that when Wilson had visited Cambridge University ‘eggs
and tomatoes were thrown at
him, and cries of ‘‘right-wing
bastard’’ and ‘‘Vietnam murderer’’ were uttered. His car was
kicked, thumped and beaten
upon, its roof dented, the radio
aerial smashed, and he was only
extricated by the efforts of the
police’.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is worth remembering that there was at least
some appreciation in the White
House for even the relatively
modest extent of Britain’s support over Vietnam. In June 1965,
for example, McGeorge Bundy
advised the President that every
‘experienced observer from
David Bruce on down has been
astonished by the overall
strength and skill of Wilson’s
defence of our policy in Vietnam
and his mastery of his own left
wing in the process’. British support ‘has been of real value internationally - and perhaps of
even more value in limiting the
howls of our own liberals’. As a
social democratic government
with ample experience in diplomacy, British support, qualified
though it was, went some way
in helping to legitimise American policy in Vietnam. However,
in the absence of British troops,
Johnson and his advisers were
never inclined to take heed of
British concerns about the
course of the war; it must be
underlined that Britain did not
manage to exert any moderating
effect upon American military
operations. Nor of course did
the schemes to broker a peace
achieve much, either in terms of
easing tensions between the
Americans and the North Vietnamese or in terms of enhancing British standing in American
eyes. The White House seemed
to regard the British initiatives
as motivated above all by happy
delusions of winning Nobel
peace prizes, and it was ironic,
considering the poor personal
relationship, that in public perceptions Wilson remained too
close to the President to be able
to play the role of disinterested
mediator. Vietnam helped ensure that the Wilson-Johnson
relationship was an especially
troubled one, characterised by
varying shades of strain, resentment and mutual incomprehension. Ultimately, Wilson’s policies towards the Vietnam War
satisfied neither the White
House nor the Labour Party, but
he did at least avoid a major
breach with either. How far the
apparently cosy relations between Tony Blair and the White
House continue to prevail remains to be seen.
Bibliography
Jonathan Colman, A ‘Special
Relationship’? Harold Wilson,
Lyndon B. Johnson and AngloAmerican Relations ‘at the Summit’, 1964-68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
See also Sylvia Ellis, Britain the
United States and the Vietnam
War (New York: Praeger, 2004).
8
Cultural Transformations: Urban Place, Architecture & Rock And Roll Music Dr Rob MacDonald, RIBA., FRSA. Reader in Architecture, Liverpool John Moores University. This article considers
the cultural flow between America and
Liverpool, as represented in urban
place, architecture
and early rock music.
The idea came from
‘John Lennon’s Juke
Box’, a collection of
40 (45rpm) featured
on Chris Walker and
Melvin Bragg’s
South Bank Show
2003, based on an
idea by John Winter.
John Lennon Dreaming of New
York
Way back then in the 1950’s,
(sometime long before the
‘Quarrymen' and the ‘Beatles’),
when John Lennon and Stu Sutcliff formed the ‘Dissenters’, John
might have stood at the Liverpool
Pier Head looking westward,
dreaming of New York. Later in
life, settled in New York with Yoko
and Sean, he had that eternal
yearning to return home to Liverpool with its mythical skyline; the
docks and Manhattan in miniature. The Pier Head would have
been a bustling interchange for
trains, trams, ferries and ocean
liners and the waterfront buildings
were conceived as landmarks,
commanding attention and giving
travellers their first or last impression of the city. Liverpool, overlooking the River Mersey, has a
Waterfront with American grandeur. The focal point is the Pier
Head, and in particular the group
of three buildings of the early 20th
Century, namely the Royal Liver
Building, The Cunard Building and
The Port of Liverpool Building.
Black Roots
Liverpool’s position on the Mersey
was an overwhelming advantage
for transatlantic European trade
with America. In the 19th Century,
Liverpool was to develop many
traditions in transporting people
as emigrants, but its earlier dark
reputation was associated with
the trade in Black African slaves.
By 1740 Liverpool was the chief
port in Europe in the slave trade;
Rev. Williams Bagshaw Stevens
in 1797 said ‘‘throughout this
large-built town every brick is
cemented to its fellow brick by
the blood and sweat of Negroes.’’ In Liverpool there is a
place behind the waterfront
called the Goree Piazza, named
after a Slave Prison in the Gambia, West Africa.
It had only been in the middle of
the 17th Century that Liverpool
merchants had started to develop their trade with America,
but once established it expanded rapidly. Indeed, there is
a statue of Columbus outside
the Palm House in Sefton Park
bearing a plaque “The discov-
erer of America was the maker
of Liverpool.’
The slave trade was hugely influencial in the economic success of the Western World in the
18th and 19th Centuries. The infamous ‘Triangle of Trade’ linked
Africa, Europe and America. By
the mid 18th Century Liverpool
merchants had assumed dominance in the trade and this was,
later, to become reflected in the
architecture. Between 1699 and
1807, Liverpool’s traders trans-
9
pool was during World
War II when a total of
1,747,505 service personnel passed through the
docks on their way to and
from various European
theatres of war.
Disembarkation
Island
The Merseyside Maritime Museum at Liverpool’s Albert Dock
ported 1,364,930 African slaves
in 5249 voyages, compared to
London’s 744,721 in 3047 voyages and Bristol’s 481,487 in
2126 voyages.
The immorality and vileness of the
slave trade cannot be denied.
Through the cruel and enforced
trade in people, the social, cultural
and racial mix of human society
has become radically altered; the
repercussions in culture, architecture and rock & roll music are still
felt today. Liverpool played a significant role in the trade and ultimately this role has had a profound effect on today’s contemporary culture. Liverpool is not proud
of the role it played in the slave
trade: the City of Liverpool has
offered its unconditional apology
and participates in an annual ‘Day
of Atonement.’
Today, citizens of Liverpool ‘The
World Heritage City,’ can only express deep gratitude to the generations of Africans who were
transported to America and gave
and returned a wonderful cultural,
architectural and musical heritage
to the city. After the abolition of the
transportation of slaves in 1807,
sailing ships, and later steamships,
continued to transport European
emigrants from Liverpool to America in large numbers, often in excess of 200,000 per year, although
there was a decline in numbers
during the American Civil War.
It’s not the Leaving of Leaving
of Liverpool
Liverpool was the natural point
of embarkation because it had
the necessary shipping lines,
choice of destinations and infrastructure, including special emigration trains directly to the
Princes Landing Stage. At the
Princes Landing Stage were a
series of transit sheds located
around the Princes Dock. Liverpool offered some hope to millions of people as they sought
new lives across the Atlantic
Ocean. The first emigrants to
pass through Liverpool were the
18th Century European settlers
on their way to the Caribbean to
establish sugar plantations, or to
mainland America to found new
colonies. Later, during the 19th
Century, Liverpool dominated
the European emigration routes
to America. Of the 5.5 million
emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between 1860 and 1900,
4.75 sailed from Liverpool, The
scale of emigration peaked in
1904 at around 270,000. The last
major episode of mass movement of people through Liver-
on
Ellis
Between 1892 and 1954,
Ellis Island, New York, was
America’s main immigration centre, and more than
12 million immigrants were
processed in that period.
Arriving in New York, passengers eager to disembark and begin their lives
had to be patient. First Class,
Second Class and Steerage were
all dealt with differently. It is
estimated that 30% of children
with measles died because of
the cold ferry ride from the liner
to Ellis Island. Immigrants were
labelled and inspected. Doctors
walked along the line looking for
the ill, infirm or insane. A fiveminute interview was designed
to judge whether the person was
socially, economically and morally fit to enter America. After
processing, immigrants left the
‘Registry Hall’ and descended
the so-called ‘Stairs of Separation’. Contemporaneous with
Ford’s production lines, the journey across the ‘Registry Hall’
could take five hours at peak
time. Single women were also
not allowed to leave in the presence of an unrelated man. Many
weddings took place on the
spot. It is estimated that 40% of
Americans today can trace at
least one ancestor’s entry into
America through Ellis Island. (If
you want to check on that greatuncle, go to www.ellisisland.org
and visit Ellissisland.com for
history)
It is estimated that 40% of
Americans today can trace at
least one ancestor’s entry into
America through Ellis Island.
10
John Lennon’s American Waterfront
It is difficult to dispute that John
Lennon was brought up in an
American City; you have only
got to walk around Liverpool to
feel the American vibrations.
The Liver Buildings are more
akin to the early tall skyscrapers
in America such as Allegheny
Court House (1884) by
H.H.Richardson and The Garrick
Theatre (formerly Schiller) by
Adler and Sullivan. The Liver
Building was an ambitious example of new innovative technology in ferro-concrete construction. It was even referred to
as a skyscraper in the contemporary press. The round arched
windows and short columns
below the main cornice recall
technology; it anticipated by 20
years the commercial buildings
of Chicago and New York. The
White Tower Building (1908) is
an early example of steel frame
construction. India Buildings
(1924-31) is typical of North
American architecture of the
1920’s; it includes a central barrel-vaulted arcade, another
American feature. Barclays Bank
(1927-32) is similarly monumental and American. The Adelphi
Hotel was a grand building for
transatlantic travellers; its exterior and interior reflected the
great wealth in the city.
Liverpool led the way in cast
iron innovation; St Georges in
Everton and St Michaels in the
Hamlet both have cast iron
You have only got to walk
around Liverpool to feel the
American vibrations
Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium
Building of 1886 in Chicago. Behind the Liver Building ran the
Overhead Railway, which stood
comparison with the Overhead
Loops in New York and Chicago.
The Cunard Building derives
from American Beaux-arts buildings such as those of McKim
Mead and White in New York.
The Liverpool Pier Head and The
New York Statue of Liberty have
a special place in the hearts of
all American emigrants as they
and their ancestors had left
European soil; The Liverpool
Princes Landing Stage is as significant for Trans Atlantic Cultural transformation as New
York’s Ellis Island.
In Downtown Liverpool, behind
the Pier Head, there are numerous narrow streets that fall
down to the river: Water Street,
Chapel Street, Dale Street and
James Street. Several buildings
have a distinctive American
quality. Oriel Chambers (1864) is
the most revolutionary and a
frank expression of function and
structures. They were used as
pattern books for exporting
complete buildings to the southern states of America and the
West Indies. The earlier demolished Cotton Exchange (1906)
and the remaining Orleans
House use a cast iron structural
and cladding system that parallels developments in Chicago.
The need to admit ample light
was an important design factor
in late Victorian and Edwardian
Liverpool office buildings. The
glass-roofed central light well
(or atrium) became a standard
feature in Liverpool. This type of
urban block architecture with
step backs was similar to New
Yorks step backs which evolved
as a means of letting daylight
into the urban street.
It is clear that transatlantic influence found fertile soil in early
20th Liverpool, where, from 1904,
Charles Reilly was Professor of
Architecture. Reilly visited America in 1909 and he became a
convert to the classicism of con-
temporary America. He especially admired the large scale,
lucid planning and scholarly
refinement found in the work of
American architects such as
McKim, Mead and White. In the
1920’s Reilly annually sent Liverpool students to gain experience
in the offices of leading New
York practices. Above all, Herbert J. Rowse, who had travelled
and worked in America, produced the best examples of
American inspired buildings.
The influence of America can
also be seen in the work of
Willink, Thicknesse and Arnold
Thornely.
Origins of the Liverpool Sound
In 1956, this American urban
setting of Liverpool created the
ideal location for a new revolution in rock & roll music; all that
was needed was John Lennon to
light the fuse. Merchant Sailors
were bringing 45rpm records
into the City from America and
shops like Rushworths and
Cranes were selling the latest
Black music to those who
wanted to listen. A year before
John met Paul, he played his
first 45rpm record of Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula. John
asked himself, “How can I do
that?” The roots of Black music
had returned to Liverpool and
the best ‘rock and roll’ was to
put the city on the twentieth century cultural map. For John ‘rock
and roll’ always had sexual connotations, (i.e. intercourse) best
revealed in the words of
“Slipping and Sliding’’ by Little
Richard (1956). At that time John
was most influenced by Chuck
Berry, Gary ‘US’ Bonds and Elvis. The River Mersey was
John’s Mississippi and Liverpool
was his New Orleans. It was
only in 1959 when Black R and B
was being absorbed into White
‘pop’ music; when Gary Bonds
recorded “Quarter to Three’’ in
the early Sixties and when the
Beatles met Bonds in England in
1962.
In 1961 Richie Barett recorded
“Some other Guy’’ with its
“Instant Karma’’ introduction.
Much of this music had its origins in Harlem and at that time
11
“Some other Guy’’ arrived in the
Liverpool record shops. As the
Beatles recorded “Kansas City’’
and “Stand by Me’’, increasingly
White musicians were absorbing
Black music. “Twist and Shout’’
was first recorded by the Isley
Brothers and later the Beatles
gave it their unique twist, shake
it up, mix it up, wild edge, make
me want to shout, shout, shout!
In 1963 the Beatles released
“Twist and Shout’’ with the
rough Liverpool textured voice
of Lennon in the lead.
Increasingly, white musicians in
Liverpool took an interest in
black guitar licks and arrangements. In 1961 Bobby Parker
recorded “Watch your Step’’, an
important but little recognised
arrangement. John Santana and
Jimmy Page were the most influencial musicians, especially
on the Beatles and “I Feel Fine.’’
“Hey Baby’’ (1961) by Bruce
Channel and Delbert McClinton
was influential, especially for the
harmonica playing by McClinton. John Lennon’s urban harmonica introduction to “Love
Me Do’’ (1962) follows a long
line of Brian Jones, Jimmy
Reed, Buster Brown, Howlin
Wolf, Sony Bo Williamson and
Junior Parker.
In 1962 Bruce Channel was on
tour with the Beatles, supported
by local bands ‘The Four Jays’
and ‘The Statesman’. Channel
describes Liverpool as a bleak
lonely place, with bible black
buildings, light shafts and a
memorable seawall. Meanwhile,
John was listening to Booker T
and the MG’s; “Riding Along in
my Automobile” (1964); “BootLeg’’ and “Green Onions’’ were
playing on his juke box.
The Mississipi River flowed
through a delta and the mix of
all ethnic cultures; Memphis City
was the melting pot. Stax Records and Soulsville were the
urban studios of black soul, R &
B and rock and roll. Wilson
Pickett brought out “In the Midnight Hour’’ in 1965. For John, R
& B was required listening with
its laid ‘back beat.’ In 1965 Otis
Reading with Booker T and the
MG’s, recorded “My Girl’’, which
represented the essential American urban experience of cruising
the ghetto in an automobile. By
the late 1960’s Liverpool rock
musicians were incorporating
and imitating the soulfull sounds
of American R and B. Smokey
Robinson and Ronald Isley really
introduced John into Black music. In 1965 Fontella Bass recorded “Rescue Me’’ which was
seen as a direct message to the
American Troops in Vietnam. As
the peace movement developed,
the wider white population were
now becoming attracted to Black
music.
The Sound of Universal Peace
and Love
The revolutionary changes that
had taken place in Liverpool
now moved back across the Atlantic to the
West Coast of
America. In 1965 The Loving
Spoonfuls brought out “Do you
believe in Magic?” The urban
streets of Liverpool were replaced with the Beaches and
poolsides of San Francisco.
John Sebastian, like John Lennon, acknowledges learning
from other songwriters. John
Sebastian acknowledged the
climbing chords and introduc-
tion of “Heatwave’’ by Martha
and the Vandellas. This was
seen as the start of the protest
movement with Bob Dylan in the
vanguard and “Daydream’’ of
1965 closely followed by “Good
day Sunshine.’’
Greenwich Village in New York
became an impromptu school
for musicians. In Washington
Square on Sunday afternoon the
youngsters experimented with
various instruments. The Chelsea Hotel was the place to be
and Bob Dylan was the poet of
the day; for John Lennon
“Possibility West 4th Street’’
evoked urban New York and
Liverpool with Joan Baez as Dylan’s muse.
In 1965, following Dylan and
Baez, Donovan brought out his
third single “Turquoise’’. The
movement towards universal
peace and love was captured as
Folk moved into ‘pop’ music.
John Lennon and the Beatles
met Donovan in India and a new
eastern world opened up and
Donovan taught John Lennon
how to finger pick a folk guitar.
The global culture was now
about experimentation with
deep eastern philosophies. As
Prudence Farrow was in very
deep meditation, Donovan wrote
“Come out to Play’’. At this time
John Lennon’s enlightenment
was fulfilled; his dissatisfaction
with the Beatles peaked and the
maturity of Sergeant Pepper and
Abbey Road was reached. As he
said, in “The dream is over”, “I
don’t believe in magic, I don’t
believe in Beatles…I just believe
in Yoko, Yoko and me, and that’s
reality…’’
British Association for American Studies
School Essay Prize
See enclosed flyer
12
From Winstanley to Washington D.C. and New York by Samantha Jones, a student of Win‐
stanley College, Wigan The politics and law students at Winstanley
College, Wigan made a visit to Washington
D.C. and New York in February 2005. Student
Samantha Jones has written a lively account
S
hining like a beacon of
hope in the notoriously
gloomy and depressing
month of February was
our Politics expedition to both
Washington D.C. and New York.
A group of around forty eager
students from both Upper and
Lower Sixth, riding high on relief
as the January exams disappeared into history, embarked
upon what was soon to become
the trip of a lifetime. Standing in
the shocking brightness of Manchester International’s very own
Terminal Two, we were given a
rather mild taste of what was to
plague us relentlessly throughout our trip. By this I mean security checks and, oh how they
came in their millions. Luckily
for both staff and students alike,
no one fell at the first hurdle and
we all made it safely to our seats
on a fine British Airways aeroplane, ready to leave old Blighty
and her incessant rain far behind
in pursuit of political enlightenment.
Before leaving for the United
States I did have some reserva-
tions regarding its general political climate as the last time I had
visited it, had been a mere eighteen months into George W.
Bush’s first term and less than a
year since the horrific events of
the now infamous 9/11; the USA
was still reeling from the effects
of the world’s largest terrorist
attack, suffering from shock and
disbelief. The country’s foundations had been severely rocked
and the full extent of the shockwaves had yet to be felt. In the
back of my mind I wondered
how we as English college students would be received by the
American public given our perceived hostility to Bush’s reelection as all at Winstanley
lived in hope of a Kerry victory.
After a reasonably lengthy and
uneventful flight, we arrived at
New York’s JFK airport only to
be greeted by an immigration
queue that was as long as the
proverbial piece of string, watching helplessly as American nationals strolled past. However,
within an hour we found that
hell hath no fury like an immi-
gration officer scorned and after
we had had our passports
checked, our photographs taken
and our fingerprints scanned
into a computer coupled with a
short round of cold hard questioning, we were able to enter
the land of the free.
A four-hour luxury coach journey to Washington D.C. took us
through New Jersey, down the
freeway made famous by the
Sopranos’ opening sequence
and then onwards through Delaware and other such states until
we reached our hotel late in the
evening. By the time morning
arrived we were up and ready to
go and after an 8am assault on
Starbucks we found ourselves
walking to Capitol Hill in the glorious morning sunshine surrounded by snow. It was at this
point that it struck me how
beautiful a city Washington is,
albeit a little impersonal; the lack
of litter is truly astounding!
Upon arrival at the Capitol we
were ushered into the entrance
area and issued with the coveted
‘International Guest Pass’ that
would enable us to enter the
House of Representatives’ gallery. The Capitol was designed
by Dr. William Thornton and its
cornerstone was laid by none
other than George Washington
in 1793. Over the years it has
grown to incorporate new
states, their senators and representatives, but one thing that
has remained constant is the
sheer breathtaking beauty of the
architecture, in particular the
rotunda, the very epicentre of
the Capitol. Four giant paintings
by John Trumball hang equidistant apart and depict fundamental events in American history.
However arguably the most
awe-inspiring aspect of the rotunda is ‘The Apotheosis of
Washington’ by Constantino
Brumidi suspended a precarious
180 feet above the ground. We
also were able to visit the Old
Hall of the House and spent time
looking at the intricate statues –
two donated by each state to
commemorate their most prized
citizens. It was interesting to be
able to go inside the House of
13
Representatives and see where
our very own Tony Blair addressed its 435 members. It also
amused me to think how the
somewhat more miniscule Commons has to accommodate over
200 more members, which left
me with the question; do the
representatives appreciate their
space?
Next on our 2005 tour of D.C.
came the Pentagon, and I soon
found out that Weapons of Mass
Destruction were not the only
things that the American military
couldn’t find, as it soon became
apparent that their sense of humour had also gone astray. We
handed over our passports and
filed into a quite lavishly furnished room where our guide, a
young army officer, found it
highly amusing that none of us
were over keen on speaking. As
we were escorted around the
corridors of power we had the
pleasure of being watched from
every angle by two further military personnel scarcely older
than ourselves and from armed
personnel at every staircase.
Various paintings of excellent
quality lined the walls and depicted American exploits in
World War II, events such as the
Battle of Britain and D Day immortalised on canvas but with
the rather glaring omission of a
certain event known technically
as Pearl Harbour. Their focus is
most defiantly upon success, a
theme that prevailed throughout
the tour. We were shown the
Pentagon hotdog stand located
in its central courtyard. Allegedly during the Cold War it
drove the Russians mad, as they
believed it to be the entrance to
a secret underground nuclear
lair, when supposedly in reality
it was simply a fast food outlet.
Towards the end of the tour we
visited a small room that had
been turned into a memorial for
all of those who had lost their
lives at the Pentagon on the 11th
September 2001, an eerily quiet
place with a real sense of calm
about it, a fitting tribute to the
friends, family and colleagues
that were lost on that day.
On a lighter note I think that it’s
fair to say we were all amazed
and incredibly impressed by our
guide’s ability to walk backwards with consummate skill
while giving chapter and verse
on US foreign policy; if that’s
how part of their $369 billion
defence budget is being spent,
it’s defiantly money well spent!
Seriously though, I do believe
that the Pentagon is well worth a
visit even if I still fail to understand the reasoning behind
many of the decisions taken
within its five walls.
Whilst in Washington we also
visited the Holocaust Museum. It
houses one of the actual train
carriages used to transport peo-
ple to Auschwitz and whilst
stood inside I found it painfully
easy to think of the people it
once contained and their subsequent fates. The museum also
has a large airy room where it is
possible to light a candle and
spend some quiet time in reflective thought and remembrance.
Our trip to Arlington cemetery
was equally moving and as we
stood staring into the eternal
flame located by John Fitzgerald
Kennedy’s grave, the sun began
to set and a lone bugler played
the Last Post.
At the Jefferson Memorial we
made what seemed like the fatal
mistake of standing at the foot
of the statue and announcing:
“This is all well and good but
what’s so special about this
guy?!” We were soon informed.
A local passer-by stopped and
began to explain about Thomas
Jefferson and how he was the
third President of the USA. However the conversation soon
turned political and he told us of
his distaste of President Bush
and his administration and explained how more left-wing
Americans were feeling very
disheartened after Bush’s second victory. He then proceeded
to give us an impromptu (and
free) guided tour around some
of the monuments and a brief
history of Washington D.C itself.
In my opinion he was one of the
most interesting people I’ve met
in a long while, leaving us with
the immortal line: “Founding
Fathers my ass.” From here we
went to the National Archives
and soon found that as well as
containing the Constitution, the
Bill of Rights and the Declaration
of Independence, it also contained an instant cure for insomnia as well as thousands of constitutionally sexed-up Americans. 1776? So what? (My Politics tutor has warned me that I
will become equally sad when
I’ve studied the U.S. in the autumn.)
Compared to Washington, New
York is like another dimension;
the clinical and at times rather
impersonal capital was replaced
by the infinite vibrancy of the
14
Big Apple, a place that’s dirty
and gritty in a strangely romantic way and what one can only
describe as more of a playground than a city. It proves
that when America puts its mind
to something it really can be
bigger and better than anywhere
else. Perhaps the icing on the
cake was the location of our hotel, right next to the Empire
State Building, which meant that
we were at the heart of the action. On our first night in the
city that never sleeps we all
went to the top of the Empire
State Building and just gazed at
the world below us, the buildings, the lights, the people, the
cars. To describe it would simply be a pointless endeavour as
there are some things that just
have to be experienced.
Whilst in New York we paid a
visit to the United Nations headquarters, which is technically
classed as international territory;
the fun of being able to jump in
and out of the US really never
grows old. Each year over one
million people visit the UN and
we were shown, amongst other
places, the General Assembly
Hall, the largest room in the UN
with seating for up to 1,800 people. The UN HQ really brought
home the issue of what can be
achieved when nations attempt
to put aside their differences and
come together as one. After all,
but for its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights on the 10th of December
1948 as the common standard
of achievement for both people
and nations, then the world
would be a startlingly different
place. It is a shame that such an
institution has been treated so
badly by both Bush and Blair.
One of the surprises of the trip
was the size of the Statue of Liberty, or rather the lack of it. Yes,
it is big but not nearly as gigantic as I imagined and seeing it
appear out of the skyline as our
ferry approached really was one
of the strangest feelings only
matched by seeing the Sydney
Opera House, like being in a
movie only I had $20 in my back
pocket instead of a cheque for
$20 million. Standing on Liberty
Island looking out over the harbour I saw a Royal Navy ship
leaving New York and sailing off
into the distance, a sad reminder
that all to soon we too would
have to be saying our goodbyes.
On a less academic note, whilst
in New York a group of us went
to see ‘Chicago’ on Broadway, a
very formal and sophisticated
affair in contrast to an earlier
night out at the basketball
watching the Washington Wizards beat Milwaukee Bucks.
Anyone who wasn’t hoarse by
the end of the night wasn’t
there.
Blimps, promotions,
cheerleading, oversized drinks,
foam hands and adverts covering every square inch of everything, even the odd moment or
two of basketball action. God
bless you America because we
had a great night. A repeat of
this action was suggested for
New York in the form of a Yankees game but the world came
crashing down when some kind
person pointed out that it wasn’t
baseball season.
For our final night we dined at
the Hard Rock Café and the company that we kept was of the
highest quality. This ‘company’
being in the form of a custom
made ‘Jagstang’ guitar signed
by none other than the one and
only Kurt D. Cobain. There was
also more punk memorabilia in
the Hard Rock than on the Kings
Road, step back to ’77 if you will.
We hailed a cab and on our way
back to the hotel the driver explained to us
naive teenagers the ‘ins’
and the ‘outs’
of the American economy.
He said that
in the current
situation
it
was possible
to get two
B r i t i s h
pounds to the
dollar
and
that the economy in the
US is going
from strength
to strength.
Not wanting to
shatter his dream and mention
the 9.2% rate of unemployment
and the fact that since George
W. Bush took office there has
been the greatest sustained job
loss since the great depression
of the 1930’s, we paid the fare
and left.
In my opinion our 2005 outing
was exceptional, the week spent
in Washington and New York
was like a Tardis in the fact that
until I experienced it I never
would have believed it possible
to fit so much into one week.
Seeing so many places first
hand and speaking to such a
wide variety of people is invaluable, not to mention incredibly
enjoyable and we paid visits to
more places than I have time to
mention. As well as souvenirs
a-plenty and excellent memories
in abundance there are a couple
of things that really have a
prominent place in my memory.
For every gun, there is a person
who is willing to help you out
when you’re lost or need help.
For every faceless corporation,
there is a unique place that will
selflessly distribute perfect
memories to all who take the
time to visit, for every car
bumper with a sticker that proclaims: ‘when you’ve got 'em by
the balls their hearts and minds
will follow,’ there are good, honest people who find the
Wolfowitz concept of ‘The New
American Century’ as souldestroyingly frightening as the
next peaceful human being.
On the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.
15
New Wine in New Skins — Surviving the 1960s By Ed Weeden “No one pours new wine into old wine skins, because the skins will
burst, the wine spilled, and the skins ruined. Instead, they put new
wine into fresh skins, and both are saved.. " (Christian Scriptures.
Matthew, 9:17)
For many people, the
1960’s were a golden
age of student activism, flower power
and rock and roll.
What was it really
like to grow up in
those heady days,
and how different is
it from the life of today’s students? In
this evocative article,
Ed Weeden looks
back at his own student days in America.
M
any people say that if you can remember the
1960's, you weren't really there. I say that if you
can't remember the 1960's you weren't really
there. This decade has had a telling cultural, social, economic and political influence on all who lived through
it and on all who have come since.
Those of us who lived through University life in 1960s America were
profoundly affected by the experience. We came to University, in my
case the University of California at Los Angeles, as 'new skins', ready
to be filled with 'new wine' to supposedly make us ready to lead adult
lives. Little did we suspect the heady potency of that wine. Our experience as 'children of the 50's' left us totally unprepared for the issues
and influences of a decade of change and revolution.
On the one hand, we had a rather straight-laced concept of university
life. We thought of it as a place to grow up, get our degrees and embark on careers. These 'safe' and 'comfortable' goals had been discussed with us by our fathers and mothers, who had lived through the
wild fling that was the 1920's, the terrible hangover of the 1930's, the
brush with war and death in the 1940's, and the trading cold for hot
war in the 1950's. The most common wish for parents of that generation was for us 'not to have to go through what they did' in their lives.
We were told to learn, sacrifice, work hard and get an education.
These were the keys to earning success in life.
On the other hand, we also viewed university life as our first opportunity to do something truly independent of home and family. For the
first time we would be considered adults, and the vast majority of us
were eager (actually eager-and-a-half) to participate fully in living.
Most of us were aware of the economic, social and cultural trends beginning to have an effect on American life. Now, upon entry to university, was our chance to 'have a go'.
In fact, these waves of change started well before the 1960's dawned.
They accelerated between 1965 and 1972, and then seemed to fling off
wildly into the obscurity of the 'lost decade' of the late 1970's. So we
can't call what happened simply a phenomenon of the 1960's. This
was a sweeping cultural movement, or rather counter-cultural movement, that found its focus in the disparity between the ideals and realities of American life.
16
Universty Life and the
World
Real
The trouble with life at any University is that you do indeed
learn about life as it should be,
and then compare it with what
you see in the streets after
classes. When the two do not
match up, or even show signs of
converging, then there is an uncomfortable tension which
needs resolution to make sense.
der every rock, everyone spoke
their minds, and everyone participated. The entire cultural
revolution of the 1960's' can be
summed up as an effort to resolve the disparity between
what we learned about the way
society should be, with what it
actually was in fact, either by
progressive or regressive
means.
bed a-crying get a job. After
breakfast, everyday, she
throws the want ads right my
way And never fails to say,
Get a job! (Silhouettes, Get a
Job, 1957)
Most of us who were at University worked extremely hard to
make our grades. There were
powerful incentives. Those who
did not were relegated permanently to lower paying employ-
Whether called
injustice, inequity, discrimination,
war,
poverty,
the
glass ceiling,
lack of opportunity, or one
of a hundred
other names,
this state of
shortfall
and
tension
demanded a response. These
spanned
the
cultural spectrum
fr om
revolution
through
reform - to isolation and pure
reaction. What
Students of the 60’s and 70’s confronted many movements and conflicting ideologies, as
was common
demonstrated in this classroom scene
to each was
that some sort
ment in society. More imporLeading Three Lives
of response was demanded, and
tantly, they also received a
that the response was a true and
Each of us had three roles to
'draft' classification which regenuine reflection of the individplay: as students, as participants
sulted in their being much more
ual to his or her life situation.
in the times, and as American
likely to be inducted into the
youth. Each role would have an
Contrary to popular opinion, and
U.S. Armed Forces. Since most
influence on the other, and the
the conduct of people before
of us did not want to exchange a
proportion of our energies deand since, there were no bymortarboard for a soldier's helvoted to each role depended
standers during the 'era of the
met and a thoroughly regulated
upon the circumstances of the
1960's'. Perhaps more imporway of life alien to our very
moment.
tantly, there were no masks,
souls, we studied hard.
hiding people's real feelings.
In the mid 1960's our professors
People living through that time
Students
were largely conservative in
really believed in what they said
their approach to academic life
and did - whether they were
To our parents, we were still
and society in general, and demembers of Students for a Destudents, who were expected to
manded solid performance. We
mocratic Society struggling to
'tow the line' and be awarded
worked without the benefit of
end prejudice and war, or memwith careers after graduating.
technology, with only typewritbers of the John Birch Society
Every morning about this
ers and carbon paper for copies
hunting down communists untime she get me out of my
(no white boards, overhead pro-
17
jectors, video players, computers, calculators, tape recorders, online databases, internet,
or other such devices). We all
struggled, and most of us succeeded, because we were driven
by the fear of the consequences
of not succeeding. We had also
been raised during the 1950's
and were accustomed to selfdiscipline, hard work and high
expectations, all of which were
instilled in us by our parents.
Most of us lived off campus, in
order to experience life more
fully. But there were expenses to
pay, and we had to do what we
could to meet them. Let's take a
brief look, using the 1965 exchange rate of 36 pence to the
dollar. University fees amounted
to $125 per quarter (for all
classes) in 1965 (£45). Books
were a major expense, often
exceeding the fees. Transport
was essential. I had a new Volkswagen beetle on which I was
paying $66 per month (£24). The
furnished, two-bedroom apartment I shared with a fellow History major close to the beach
cost us $130 per month (£47).
Naturally our parents helped us,
but only with school fees and
part of the cost of books. The
rest was up to us, and we, like
most students of that era,
worked part time. I earned
$1.60(57p) per hour as a till person in a grocery store, and
thought it was good money.
Activists
But academics was not the only
thing we studied at university.
We studied life as well, through
living it. What we saw made us
feel both fortunate and
ashamed. We felt fortunate that
we had been given so much opportunity by our parents, our
education and our places in society. But we also felt sad, almost
ashamed, that this had been
bought at the cost of excluding
others. This combination of
emotions was the awakening of
a social conscience in many
thousands of university students
all over the America, and it had
both explosive and enduring
results.
We felt that we had an obligation to act, as independent individuals - albeit students - to do
something to help make America and the world a better place.
It wa sn't t hat we fel t
'empowered'. We didn't know
we were not empowered! Perhaps that was youthful arrogance, but many who feel the
same way about things do in
fact have power - the power of
conviction and numbers. So as a
consequence we started talking
and acting publicly to oppose
these disparities.
This of course started a series of
exchanges between those of us
who felt as we did, and those
who did not. These exchanges
were not just dialogues, which
implies only two points of view.
There were many points of view
on both sides of the discussions,
almost as many as there were
individuals involved. It was also
not just a matter of ‘us versus
them'. There were authorities
and members of the older generation who genuinely sided
with us in our desires to improve our nation and the world.
And there were others our own
age and even younger who were
adamantly opposed to these
efforts.
This movement for progressive
change and the opposition to it
started with individuals finding
common ground, and then coalescing to form active groups.
Rosa Parks was an individual.
But her integrity of action gave
birth to Martin Luther King, Jr.
and the Civil Rights Movement.
Mario Savio was in individual.
But his calm and strong refusal
to permit the abridgement of
human rights and freedom on
campuses across the nation led
to Students for a Democratic
Society, with all its social and
anti−war implications. William F.
Buckley was an individual. But
his experiences at Yale University were instrumental in his
helping found both the conservative Young Americans for
Freedom and the conservative
journal National Review. Richard
Daley, mayor of Chicago, was an
individual. But his decision to
use physical violence against the
war protesters during the summer of 1968 helped to doom the
Democratic Convention he was
trying to assist, and ensure the
election of Richard Nixon, with
all its consequences.
For most of us, the entry into
activism happened on a friendto-friend basis. We talked
among ourselves and knew how
the other person felt. We were
invited to a meeting. We went,
and if we liked what we heard,
we participated. We were free to
participate, or free not to participate, in any proportion we liked:
Born free, and life is worth living
But only worth living, because you're born free
(Roger Williams, Born Free,
1966)
We participated in loosely organised group activities on behalf of everyone - starting with
efforts to free universities from
the control of vested economic
and military interests. We
moved naturally, virtually seamlessly, from there to working
with people we discovered were
oppressed by a seemingly democratic society - such as African Americans, Hispanics, poor
whites and women.
Since I came from a mixed Hispanic and White working class
neighbourhood south of Los
Angeles, I was particularly active
in efforts to help the Hispanics
form a farm union during this
period. 1 personally participated
in various forms of protest, petitioning stores to boycott non-
18
union farm products, and working with other Unions to support
this effort. As this struggle got
increasingly violent, I offered to
shelter threatened farm workers
and union organisers in my own
apartment. On several occasions
I experienced vigorous police
'visits' looking for union organisers, and on one occasion we had
to suddenly transport individuals from California to Texas to
keep them from being physically
harmed by opponents of the
union.
I got a hammer, and I got a
bell, I got a song to sing all
over
this
land,
the UCLA campus. During that
time we organised teach-ins
which educated the students,
faculty and the public about
what was happening in that conflict. In the process, we succeeded in literally shutting down
the nine campuses of the University of California.
But coupled with the success
was the price of success. To this
day I sometimes have dreams of
being chased down the UCLA
'steps' by baton wielding police
and their airborne helicopters
after one particularly massive
demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia. 1 can still
I think it’s time we stop, hey,
what's that sound, everybody
look what's going down
(Buffalo Springfield,
What It's Worth, 1967)
For
We sincerely believed we had
the answer to problems affecting our nation and the world,
and we acted on those beliefs.
While we may not have been in
the majority, we certainly made
our voices heard to the majority
of American society, and in the
process forged a new view of
matters by that majority:
All across the nation such a
strange vibration
People in motion
There's a whole
generation with
a new explanation
People in motion! People in
motion!
( S c o t t
McKenzie, San
Francisco, 1967)
Anti-War protest at the Pentagon, October 1967
It's the hammer of justice, It's
the bel l of freedom,
It's the song about love between my brothers and my
sisters, All over this land
(Peter, Paul, and Mary, If I
had a Hammer, 1962)
As the war in Vietnam heated up
during the period 1963-1973, my
friends and I participated in various Vietnam Anti-War and
Moratorium activities, including
massive protest marches in the
San Francisco Bay Area and on
smell the tear gas, and these
memories are not a 'pleasant
walk down memory lane'.
There's battle lines being
drawn. Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their
minds. Getting so much resistance from behind.
What a field-day for the heat,
a thousand people in the
street
Singing songs and carrying
signs, mostly say, hooray for
our side
On many sides,
the
individual
interests
of
those who sincerely wished to
'do something'
about the cultural situation of
'the 1960's' had
widespread and
enduring consequences - not all
of which were foreseen. Among
these unforeseen consequences
was the eventual splintering of
the progressive reform movement into major splinter groups.
The first group to leave were
those who despaired of reform,
and who proceeded to look for
more forceful ways to produce
positive change. These included
the Weathermen, the Yippies,
and various black groups including the Panthers and the Nation
of Islam. In many ways these
19
were the most creative and energetic of youthful activists, and
their loss left many of us in a
state of shock, and without momentum.
are still feeling the after affects
of these mistakes and will continue to do so until a new initiative of progressivism returns to
the battlefield of ideas.
The second shock built more
slowly, but hit much closer to
home when it did arrive. Women
left the movement en mass, to
seek out their own definition of
independence, freedom and dignity. Up until the point at which
they left, many of us had been
thinking in terms of generic humanity, of 'mankind'. The
Women's Liberation Movement
made it painfully clear that these
ways of thinking were short
sighted and out of date.
American Youth
The result of all this splintering
was a weakening of the movement overall, and an opportunity
for those favouring reaction to
capitalise on the disorganised
state of progressives. Law enforcement now had a clear mandate to crush any who advocated the 'violent overthrow of
the U.S. Government' - although
that seemed rather odd to me,
since this government was born
in revolution. Rightist politicians
had a comparatively unified voting block compared to the left,
and it showed in 1968 with the
election of Nixon as president.
It was not a happy time for progressives, and it got much
worse as time passed. In large
part the re-emergence of the
right and conservatism in America was and is not due to new
ideas or policies on their part,
but due to the abdication of the
struggle by the left. The left disintegrated its own organisation
through centrifugal spin offs,
and has conspicuously ignored
the interests of the vast 'middle
Amer i ca n' wor king cl ass
(translation: the majority of voters). This amounted to conceding victory to the 'other side' of
the struggle, a concession in
which many of us who lived
through the 'era of the 1960's'
simply refuse to acquiesce. We
At the same time as we
marched, we were not missionaries, or fanatics.
Part of this 'new explanation'
was the free, open and easy way
we lived our lives. We loved life,
and partied as hard as we studied! From days in the early
1960's when we thought it adventurous to make our own beer
(and get deathly ill by drinking
it) to the days when we 'turned
on, tuned in, and dropped out'
to various substances, we participated fully, profoundly and
energetically in living life to the
fullest:
One pill makes you larger,
and one pill makes you small
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And you've just had some
kind of mushroom, and your
mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll
know
When logic and proportion
have fallen sloppy dead
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head! Feed your
head!
(Jefferson Airplane, White
Rabbit, 1968)
Like a true nature's child, we
were born, born to be wild
We can climb so high, that I
never wanna die!
(Steppenwolf, Born to be
Wild, 1968)
Some of us came dangerously close to the cliff edge
in various respects. A few
even plunged over that edge
and into the abyss.
Kicks just keep gettin' harder
to find,
And all your kicks ain't bringin'
you peace of mind
Before you find out it's too
late. you better get straight
(Paul Revere and the Raiders, Kicks, 1966)
But the vast majority of us not
only survived, but enjoyed the
experience. We felt we had an
obligation to experience life to
the fullest, just as we had an
obligation to succeed academically and be socially active. Who
were we to deny others their
right to enjoy life in this fashion?
We were most energetically enjoying life in our own way!
All of this activity centred on
some very simple themes, so
simple we were astonished to
find that previous generations
had seemed to ignore them.
The first of these was Peace. Not
just the absence of war, but a
positive force for good. Described with other words, it
might be called tolerance, understanding, opportunity, or
conviviality. When given a
chance, we felt that peace could
transform humanity:
Ev'rybody's talking about
This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m,
is-m.
All we are saying is give
peace a chance
(John Lennon and the Plastic
Ono Band, Give Peace a
Chance, 1971)
Peace provided the environment
and opportunity for the second
great pillar of values in the 'era
of the 1960's' - Love. Love was
to be the basis for personal interactions in this new society:
What the world needs now is
love, sweet love
It's the only thing, that
there's just too little of
What the world needs now is
love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for
everyone.
(Jackie DeShannon, What the
World Needs Now, 1965}
20
And once peace and love had
been established as the bases of
behaviour, then the result would
spring forth - Freedom:
If there's a man who is down
and needs a helpin' hand
All it takes is you to understand and to pull him
through, ah-hah-unh
Seems to me we got to solve
if individually, ah-hah-unh
And I'll do unto you what you
do to me
Shout it from the mountain on
out to the sea
No two ways about it, people
have to be free
Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be
Nat'ral situation for a man to
be free
(Rascals, People Got to Be
Free, 1968)
This was what we were about peace, love and freedom. Not
just for special interest groups,
or the nation at large, but for
each and every individual within
the nation, and across the world.
But a strange thing happens
when each individual experiences freedom. There is an explosion of choices out of each
person. Often some of these
choices are made with which
others heartily disagree. Not
everyone prized peace and love
as much as freedom. Others
interpreted freedom as the right
to choose what others would
term domination or slavery. Still
others would call slavery what
we termed partnership, or even
freedom. What some called freedom we called debauchery, or
being 'totally wasted'. So many
definitions of peace, love and
freedom emerged that it was as
if we had inherited all the confusion experienced by the builders
of the Tower of Babel.
Further, each of these choices
led down different paths, making any concerted effort to realise common and progressive
goals even more difficult. Each
of these paths also made it increasingly hard to garner the
support of’ middle/working
America' and its votes, which
would ensure that progressive
ideas were transformed into
progressive law and policy. The
result was as if a bright and
shining star had exploded, sending off splinters of light in every
direction, but with a total loss of
illumination on the need for progress.
Looking Back - and Ahead
While the political and social
aspects of the 'era of the 1960's'
may have failed to meet our expectations, the personal and
psychological aspects of this
cultural revolution were a resounding victory. Much remains
to be done, but much was and
remains accomplished. Let's
look again at Peace, Love and
Freedom, and see where they
have improved as well as taking
a look at what they hold for the
future.
Today, in every respect, we have
more freedom as persons to act
the way we wish than we did in
the 1960's. We have more freedom of speech, more freedom of
appearance, more freedom of
social interaction than we did
then. We have more freedom in
education, more freedom in the
job market and more freedom in
the areas of thought and morality than we did then. Each of
these increased freedoms is
most certainly a result of our
struggle at that time.
We also have a vastly increased
'consciousness' of the idea of
peace as a positive and independent force for good in the
world. We have a much more
critical view of war and violence
between groups and countries
now than we did then - and we
are more quickly vocal to make
that critical view heard. We also
have a much more suspect and
critical approach to the domination of the 'corporate state' with
all its economic and social arrogance than we did then. And we
have a much more healthy ap-
proach to doctrinaire and totalitarian 'solutions' - such as Marxist-Leninism, totalitarianism and
religious fanaticism now than
we did then. This increase in the
'consciousness of peace' is due
clearly to the generation which
first voiced its opposition to war,
violence and domination in the
1960's.
We also have a much more mature and vibrant sense of Love
as a force for good as well. We
participate in vastly more private
and public funded assistance to
'have nots' now than we did
then. We are certainly more tolerant of people who do not
share our world or personal
views now than we were then.
We have a more loving view of
our intimate partners now than
then, and permit them to live
with us as true partners, not
consigned to predetermined
roles. This consideration, charity
and positive feeling of Love toward others is largely due to the
social and personal progress
made in that area during this
era.
The Lasting Legacy
We have spoken about the fracturing of the progressive movement of the 'era of the 1960's'.
So what, if anything, was the
unifying factor which still persists after that shining light exploded into oblivion? The unifying factor was the self. Each
group, each individual of that
era was - at heart - motivated by
an increased desire for selfdetermination.
Whether black, female, Hispanic,
white university student, revolutionary, middle class American
or conservative reactionary, the
desire was for greater power
over their own direction and
decisions. That power was
achieved as a result of the 'era
of the 1960's' and has persisted
to this day - despite conservative
governments, recession and
persistent discrimination and
21
lack of opportunity in some areas.
In future, success will belong to
that socio-political approach in
America which makes best use
of this desire for selfdetermination. At present, those
with a conservative approach
appear to be in the ascendant
due to their ability to exploit the
desire for individualism, privacy
and freedom of choice. But I
believe this ascendancy contains
within it an irresistible contradiction.
Conservatism has always been
dependent upon the conformity
to old ideas of person, state, and
tradition. In contrast, it is the
liberal outlook which most cherishes freedom, privacy, innovation and economic progress. If
progressives were to make vigorous use of these concepts,
they could recapture the mass of
the American voting public, who
have no desire at all to be permanently wedded to old concepts, which have not worked in
their interests, and do not benefit them now. We await only effective 'Communicators'.
A generation may bind itself
as long as its majority continues in life; when that has
disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the
rights and powers their
predecessors once held and
may change their laws and
institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent
and unalienable rights of
man. " —Thomas Jefferson
to John Cartwright, 1824. ME
16:48
I am proud to say that our generation exercised that right, with
its consequences - both good
and bad - for our society. Because of the revolution of our
generation, we are freer today to
exercise that self-determination
and make our own way, thanks
to that era.
If you though it was difficult now……….
Instructions to teachers in San Diego, California, from 1872
1.Teachers will fill lamps, clean chimneys and trim
wicks every day.
2.Each teacher will bring a scuttle of coal and a bucket
of water for the days use.
3.Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs for
the individual tastes of children.
4.Men teachers may take one evening each week for
courting purposes or two evenings a week if they go to
church regularly.
5.After ten hours in school the teacher should spend
the remaining time reading the Bible and other good
books.
6.Women teachers who marry or who engage in other
unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7.Every teacher who smokes, uses intoxicating liquor
in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets
shaved in a barber shop will give good reasons to suspect his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty.
8.The teacher who performs his labours faithfully
without fault for five years will be given an increase of
25 cents in his pay – providing the Board of Education approves.
22
Letters from New York By Lenny Quart Lenny has lived in New York for most of
his life, and here he presents a varied selection of letters expressing his own
unique take on city life.
Back to the Land Being a city-lover and devoid of
manual skills, I was never drawn
to growing crops, cutting wood,
milking cows, shearing sheep, or
becoming a full time countryman. But in the 60s and early
70s I remember some of my urban streetwise students (the
sons and daughters of construction workers, cops, and secretaries) talking vaguely about fleeing the city’s ‘rat race’ and going
to live on rural communes or in
isolated log cabins, where the
counterculture’s vision of a
more liberated way of life could
be fully realized. My hunch is
that few of my students ever did
more than live for a couple of
months on a farm or spend a
weekend baring their souls at a
sensitivity session in the Catskills or Berkshires, but the notion
of going “back to the land” had
a great deal of cultural currency
during that period.
Its participants viewed the backto-the-land movement as an
alter native t o the souldestructiveness of technology
and the avarice of consumer
culture. They also saw it as a
way of combating their growing
anxiety about the dangers of
polluted air and water, chemically adulterated food, and energy shortages. Most of the
movement’s participants were
college graduates who had been
energized by the culture of the
sixties. They had read their Thoreau, the Nearings’ Living the
Good Life, and Mother Earth
News, and felt ready to leave
their soft urban and suburban
existences for what they saw as
the purity of a rural life free of
modern machines and comforts.
Eleanor Agnew’s Back From the
Land (Ivan R. Dee) - a book that
is part memoir and part cultural
analysis - provides a balanced,
perceptive portrait of the movement. In 1975 she and her husband quit their solid jobs in the
city, sold their house and belongings, and moved with their
two kids to a remote piece of
property in Maine. Agnew not
only describes her own experiences, but also offers up many
anecdotes from the lives of
other back-to-the-landers.
Swept up in their romantic fantasies the back-to-the-landers
aspired to create bucolic utopias, but rural life quickly wore
them down. Agnew writes that
“like the pioneers of old, we saw
industry and progress as the
enemy of the natural world,” but
they naively forgot that the land
could be unforgiving as well as
bountiful.
Much of the book details their
disenchantment - “the down-
side” - that Agnew and many of
the others experienced in their
new wilderness life. The counterculture economy just did not
work, so self-sufficiency turned
out to be near to impossible: “It
did not have the size, complexity, cash flow, or diversity of
goods and services to survive
very well independently.” As a
result many of these idealists
had to take low-paying, unskilled
town jobs that were more alienating than the careers they were
fleeing.
The Agnews and the others may
have rejected traditional medical
care and embraced holistic and
natural approaches to health,
but they were still beset with
illness and injury that demanded
the use of 20th century technology - chipping away at their limited finances. Relationships also
easily broke up in a world where
a premium was placed on personal liberation and close proximity. And men and women often settled into more traditional
roles in the country, which often
suited the men better than the
women. In fact, the percentage
of break-ups among these rural
idealists probably exceeded the
national divorce rate.
Eleanor and her husband separated within four years - she
seeking creative fulfilment and a
steady paycheck by moving back
23
to the city where she ultimately
became a professor of writing,
while he stayed on in the country. There were others among
their brethren who didn’t surrender their rural dreams, but modestly compromised them by
commuting to decent paying
jobs in the city and deciding to
modernize their plumbing.
Agnew may have given up on
her countercultural dream, but is
not without happy memories of
the years spent on the land - a
time when “everything seemed
possible.” And she’s positive
about the legacy of those years
in the wilderness - feeling that
the returnees were “people of
character,” who learned to appreciate a “balanced life.” Most
of them did not become highpowered lawyers or CEOs, but
turned their social vision into
careers in the arts, or worked as
nurses, teachers, social workers
and community activists.
Agnew concludes her memoir
by writing: “Would I do it again?
Heck, no! The experience was
enriching, challenging, lifealtering, and exhilarating, but
once was enough.”
Still, according to Berkshire
farmer and documentary filmmaker, Laura Meister, there are
a number of college educated
twenty and thirty something
Berkshire residents who have
returned to the land. They pursue less utopian and more realistic goals than Agnew’s generation - blending the use of modern technology with growing
organic crops. Meister, codirector with Erica Spizz of
Sweet Soil - a film about the
relationship of local farmers to
the Berkshire Coop Market, left
Boston two years ago, and embraced organic farming and
community supported agriculture. It’s the kind of farming that
respects the land and the animals in their care.
Most of the communes of the
back-to-the land movement of
the 60s and 70s may have failed,
but they left as a legacy a consciousness that the environment
was something precious and
shouldn’t be callously despoiled.
And the struggle to protect the
environment from those that
would exploit it continues to be
fought.
A Word from a Convention Demonstrator I’m in New York for one of my
interminable dental appointments, but, more importantly, to
bear witness and participate in a
couple of the innumerable
smaller, often improvised, demonstrations that are scheduled to
take place during the Republican
convention. I feel guilty for I
have missed the big march on
August 29th, but receive an account of it from a close friend.
My friend recounts joining the
march behind a performance
group, Billionaires for Bush, who
dressed in tuxedos and faux
evening gowns, roar out satirical
slogans like “Four More Wars”
and “Free Ken Lay.” And then of
continuing to march following a
group of women all dressed in
pink - the “Pink Slip Brigade” who shout in unison “Give Bush
the Pink Slip.” From my friend’s
vantage point, it seemed a generally peaceful march - the humidity making people too enervated to be disruptive. Nothing
in his description of the march
jibed in any way with the virulently right wing New York
Post’s next day headline - “GOP
Bash.”
On Tuesday evening I wander
through Union Square where a
demonstration is scheduled. I
can’t find the demo, but there a
few thousand people milling
about - a veritable political carnival. I see members of the Falun
Gong sect, eyes closed, meditating, Trotskyites selling newspapers that preach class revolution, a feverish, unshaven man
unfurling a large handmade banner calling for the mutiny of our
troops in Iraq, street people
smoking dope and banging on
drums, and many others
(graduate students, graphic art-
ists), carrying signs or wearing a
variety of T-shirts with anti-Bush
slogans - some witty, others
witless and profane. There are
also helmeted police surrounding the Square, looking a touch
ominous. However, only one
incident breaks out, and the
crowd is soon pacified.
The next day I briefly take part in
The Unemployment Line, a symbolic line representing the 1.2
million jobs lost overall since
March 2000, and the more than
eight million Americans who are
currently unemployed. I am part
of a row of mostly middle aged
and older professionals - medical researchers, therapists (more
than 5,000 people), each of us
holding a pink slip, lining the
streets from Broadway and Wall
St., up to 31st St. and then west
along 31st St to 7th Ave. - right
across from the site of the Republican National Convention.
It’s a stirring gesture.
Early Wednesday evening I decide to go with a friend to a Central Labor Council rally that attracts a wide range of union locals - some from heavily minority unions like the hospital and
transit workers, and others from
preponderantly white and male
craft unions like the plumbers,
ironworkers, and electricians. A
few of the workers carry antiwar signs, but most of the
speeches deal with job layoffs,
tax cuts for the rich, the right to
overtime pay, and the need for
affordable health care, rather
than our Iraq policies.
I’m moved by the fact that there
are a great many workers angry
enough to attend an anti-Bush
rally. And though the speakers
are far from rousing, and the
audience seemingly a bit impassive (though a few supportive
remarks from Sopranos star,
James Gandolfini, drew wild
cheers) - the unionists’ opposition to Bush and his anti-labour
policies was clearly heartfelt.
Some of the other protests include groups of young artists
like the Rude Mechanical Orchestra performing a wide range
of music (e.g., Bosnian and Turk-
24
ish songs) giving the words an
anti-Bush slant. Also, a vigil for
the fallen soldiers of the Iraq
War is advertised for Thursday
carrying the sentiment: “On the
day Bush is nominated WE Remember He Lied and They Died.
Clearly, my experience of the
New York demos is fragmentary.
I never get to see the more than
1500 protestors and ordinary
bystanders that were arrested,
or the few violent acts that take
place. I’m grateful so far that the
demonstrators have been nonviolent, and have not provided
campaign fodder for the Republicans.
I feel an existential need to protest, though I know it will probably have little political effect. But
the Convention has demonstrated yet again how gifted the
Republicans are at distorting
and simplifying the Democrats’
positions, and how brutally they
play the political game. In this
election I feel that to be merely
an intelligent observer is to acquiesce to a juggernaut whose
will to win has no moral limits.
Election Post Mortem Sifting through innumerable
election post mortems can be a
confusing process. Every pundit
and political insider has his/her
pet, and sometimes pat, explanation for why Bush defeated
Kerry. I read the varied takes of
Herbert, Kristof, Brooks, Krugman, Friedman, Safire, and
Dowd on the Times’ op-ed
pages: anti-Bush columns and
editorials online from the London Guardian and the apoplectic
Labor tabloid the Mirror; Hendrik
Hertzberg’s balanced, wellwrought post- election essay in
The New Yorker; and, countless
other pieces by lesser known
journalists and Party political
advisers - mostly liberals but
conservatives as well.
Some of the pieces are cogent,
others specious, but just about
every one of them seems to
know why the election unfolded
the way it did. Some hold Kerry
responsible for running a mistake-ridden, slow-to-react campaign, and being incapable of
connecting emotionally with
Middle America. They blame
Kerry for lacking the informal
style, affability, and directness of
a master campaigner like Bush a man clearly more at ease
pressing the flesh and garnering
votes than governing. Others
put much less emphasis on campaign mechanics or the personality of the candidate, and debate whether it was terrorism,
“values”, or wartime insecurity
that gave President Bush his 3
percent win over Kerry. Still others, who are outside the mainstream media, attack Kerry for
not being a Dean or someone
more radical, and for being incapable of providing a stirring alternative vision to Bush’s during
the campaign. They suggest that
he should have called for our
withdrawal from Iraq, and
stopped using the military metaphors and rhetoric that reinforced his anti-terrorist, macho
credentials. And conspiracyoriented Internet bloggers and
some alternative radio programs
have suggested that voter fraud
and rigged or malfunctioning
voting machines in Ohio have
given the Republicans, yet
again, a tainted victory. (Even if
such charges of vote theft and
rigging are erroneous, there is
clearly a need for more transparent and uniform voting procedures.)
I myself continue to struggle to
make sense of all these disparate, often contradictory, analyses, and to get a handle on why
Kerry was defeated. In the end, I
am convinced that there simply
is no one reason for Kerry’s loss
and, for example, the initial assertion (that I confess I too believed), that the key to Bush’s
victory was his support of
“moral values,” was overstated.
But saying that the significance
of “moral values” was exaggerated, does not mean that the
issue didn’t play a substantial
role in Bush’s triumph. Such
people are apparently willing, as
a friend said, to “sell their pottage for a mess of souls.” The
political attitudes of this religious/moralistic constituency
surely have to be more clearly
understood, if there is any possibility for the Democrats to find a
way of reaching them.
One recent, trenchantly written
book that deals with this evangelical backlash is Thomas
Frank’s What's the Matter with
Kansas? How the Conservatives
Won the Heart of America." In
the book Frank returns to his
home state to explore why a
once agrarian populist state
where the villains were the robber baron railroads, had evolved
into a right wing red state. His
main point is that though Kansas is a “state spectacularly ill
served by the Reagan-Bush
stampede of deregulation, privatisation, and laissez-faire,” its
working and lower-middle class
votes for a Party of corporate
interests whose policies fleece
them (e.g., the destruction of the
family farm and the triumph of
agribusiness through deregulation).Frank goes on to analyse
what has brought this backlash
about. He sees it as a cultural
revolt that began with the antiabortion movement in Kansas,
at the beginning of the 90s - a
movement of the ostensibly
“humble,” anti-intellectual, and
The Republicans’ demagoguery
has succeeded in turning the
economic resentment of underpaid and overworked Kansans
into cultural rage.
25
“real” people that viewed its
enemy as the liberal, cosmopolitan elite represented by candidates like Gore and Kerry. From
my perspective, the backlash’s
roots have their origins in the
sixties ‘cultural revolution that
transformed the nature of gender roles, family, marriage, and
sexual morality. And in a mass
media that markets sex all the
time. The evangelicals are frightened by it all, and especially by
their kid’s attraction to the seductions of mass culture. As a
result, for these Middle American voters who want to turn
back the clock, culture outweighs economics. But paradoxically, in Frank’s words,
“they may talk Christ, but walk
corporate.” It’s a movement that
may never succeed in ending
abortion, but supports the abolition of estate taxes, and other
giveaways to the wealthy and
the corporations.
The Republicans’ demagoguery
has succeeded in turning the
economic resentment of these
underpaid and overworked Kansans into cultural rage. And it’s
been accompanied by many
evangelicals believing in the
sacredness of the free market.
As Frank writes, “push them off
the land, and the next thing you
know they’re protesting in front
of abortion clinics.”
How to reach this constituency
politically is what the Democratic Party must assiduously
work at in the next few years.
Frank feels a direct economic
class appeal may be able in
some cases to break apart the
unholy Republican coalition between business interests and
evangelicals. But the Democrats
need the right candidate - a
folksy charismatic one, who can
talk the talk but, at the same
time, doesn’t blur and compromise his differences with the
Republicans on “moral values” clearly a difficult feat.
Still, if I wanted to be sanguine, I
would say that the contradictions inherent in the Republican
coalition would ultimately lead
to its breaking down. For instance, many corporate Republi-
cans may find it hard to embrace
anti-abortion, prayer in the
schools, and other pieces of an
emboldened Christian Right’s
agenda.
Political self-interest, however,
has led to many stranger bedfellows, and the evangelicals, at
this moment, are in the driver’s
seat. They will demand the appointment of a right wing Supreme Court Chief Justice and
the outlawing of gay marriage.
And, given the election results,
the Republican corporate wing
(power meaning far more to
them than principle) will probably try to accommodate them.
Sidney Lumet: New York Director Hollywood films have always
been filled with rogue cops who,
given the temptations of the job,
effortlessly shifted over to the
side of the criminals they had
taken an oath to pursue and
punish. Of course, these “bent”
cops don’t exist merely on celluloid, but inhabit police departments throughout this country.
And in their cupidity and disloyalty, they betray their fellow officers, their departments, and the
public they are supposed to protect.
.
Over the years the NYC Police
Department has endured many
major scandals, but in the last
decade or so it has been relatively free of corruption. Recently, however, the New York
newspapers have carried a number of stories about two retired
city detectives (one the coauthor of a book titled Mafia
Cop) who were accused of acting as hit men for the mob, being involved with drug distribution and money laundering, and
supplying Mafia bosses with the
names of informants.
For more than a decade authorities suspected the two men of
Mafia involvement but were unable to file charges against
them. The indictment was finally
brought by the United States
Attorney in Brooklyn, Roslynn R.
Mauskopf, who spoke with revulsion about the two detectives
as men who “betrayed their
badges, and used their guns and
their shields to facilitate murder.
We never forget that.”
This outsized police scandal
made me think of the eighty
year old, quintessential New
York director, Sidney Lumet,
who this year was given an honorary Oscar, the high point of as
dreary and pedestrian an Academy Award ceremony as I’ve
ever seen. Lumet is one film
artist who richly deserved his
Oscar - rarely the norm on a
night where sentiment and lavish promotional campaigns, not
talent, are often the basis for
being handed a statue. And the
passionate homage to Lumet’s
career Al Pacino delivered when
introducing him, was one of the
humdrum evening’s few moving
moments.
Lumet, a consummate professional and an artist with a strong
moral perspective, has directed
a wide variety of films - from
Twelve Angry Men (1957) and
Network (1976), to literary adaptations of Miller’s A View from
the Bridge (1962), O’Neill’s Long
Day’s Journey into Night (1963)
and Chekhov’s The Seagull
(1969). But arguably, much of
his best work can be found in his
films about the culture and corruption of New York City’s police
department.
Films like Serpico (1973) and his
unsung masterpiece, Prince of
the City (1981) were both
adapted from real life events,
and Lumet set the films on the
city’s grittiest streets where the
cops, as if it were part of their
job description, are either on the
take or steal from the drug dealers who they arrest.
In Serpico, Al Pacino plays a
cop who transforms himself
from an innocent, idealistic police recruit into a volatile,
bearded, undercover hippie detective. In the process he
arouses the distrust and anger
of his fellow cops when he won't
accept bribes (“who can trust a
cop that don’t take money?”), a
courageous act that leads to his
26
ostracism. Pushed to his breaking point, Serpico soon agrees
to cooperate with the Knapp
Commission, which has set out
to rid the NYPD of its graft. But
the film does not end on a triumphant note - its final image is of
Serpico, sitting with his sheepdog, a broken loner.
Prince of the City is a more aesthetically and intellectually
dense film, where there are no
real heroes or villains - just a
morally ambiguous, unravelling
protagonist, Danny Ciello, who
seeks penance for his corrupt
and brutal behaviour on the job.
Danny wants to purge himself of
his sins without betraying his
partners. But that becomes impossible, and he ends up ratting
out his fellow cops, an outrage
to the ties built on their sense of
unity and loyalty to each other.
As his wife says, ”nobody loves
you but your partners and me.”
In Prince of the City every character is morally compromised,
and the cops can be men who
want to do good and rid the
streets of drug dealers, and, simultaneously, be utterly corrupt.
And the federal prosecutors,
who are trying to clean up the
police force, can be cold and
driven men - willing to callously
use people to achieve their ends.
Lumet believes in the legal system, but feels it must be constantly questioned so that honesty is preserved. In examining
the conscience of his protagonists, he shows how difficult it is
for virtue to win out in a volatile,
morally treacherous world.
So Lumet’s police and criminals
are always more complex than
the ones populating most Hollywood films or featuring in the
bare details of a newspaper
story. What’s disturbing, but
also predictable, is that Hollywood had to wait until Lumet’s
career was almost at its end to
finally reward him for the power
and intricacy of his best films.
The Great American ‘Menace’
About a month ago I read an
unusually powerful Thomas
Friedman Thanksgiving column
in the Times that praised the
bravery of our troops in Iraq
while decrying the “rampant
selfishness” that permeates our
country. Friedman concluded
the piece by thanking our troops
for their courage “even though
in so many ways on so many
days we don’t deserve them.”
(Friedman’s justified praise
leaves out the fact that these
same valorous troops use of
indiscriminate firepower has
often meant the death of many
innocent families, and in rarely
reported incidents, have, at
times, brutalized Iraqi civilians.)
I had been stunned before the
war by Friedman’s grossly misconceived support of it, on the
grounds that it could remove
Saddam Hussein’s “genocidal
tyranny” and replace it with a
“decent, pluralistic, representative government.” However, this
particular column happened to
be on the side of the angels. Of
course, I am prejudiced. Friedman’s jeremiad against Ameri-
has become the guileless, unseeing inner city man-child, Ron
Artest, for his flagrant misbehaviour on and off the basketball
court. The ballplayers, often
men from poverty backgrounds,
with only high school degrees or
a couple of years of college,
have fragile egos (an obsession
with the macho notion of being
“disrespected”). And they are
usually surrounded by homeboy
entourages who parasitically live
off them and reinforce the most
self-destructive aspects of their
characters. But the players are
merely pawns of a league that
has marketed and overpaid
them, encouraged them to indulge in narcissistic showmanship, and cared little about their
psychological readiness or maturity to handle multi-milliondollar contracts.
And the fans (I’ll admit that I’m
an avid one), many of them wellpaid corporate drones, seem
more boorish and infantile than
Lumet shows how difficult it is
for virtue to win out in a volatile,
morally treacherous world.
can society’s blatant hypocrisy
and self-centeredness echoed
my own sentiments.
Friedman’s recent column also
provided a very suggestive comparison. He condemned Republican House members who abjectly bent the body’s ethical
rules to protect their thuggish
and radical right wing Majority
Leader, Tom De Lay (a man who
could call Howard Dean a "cruel
and extremist demagogue").
And at the same time Friedman
castigated professional athletes
for their egocentricity and uncontrolled behaviour. The problem is, that the Afro-American
NBA basketball players, who are
just performers, are the ones
who arouse the American public’s rage, not the politicians
whose exercise of power often
deals with life and death issues.
So the great American menace
they have been in the past. In a
sport where 85% of the players
are Afro-American, and the majority of the fans are white, the
fans’ vituperation, fuelled by
beer, is often underscored with
racist condescension and contempt, though these fans’ penchant for spewing curses and
generally behaving loutishly
goes beyond racism. Their
swaggering exhibitionism takes
precedence over any of their
vicarious identification with the
players and supposed passion
for the game. The arena then
turns into a vulgar spectacle
where the fans become, at least
in their own minds, the star performers.
The conduct of the fans and the
players, however, help create
the kind of action-filled incident
the public feasts on. We can
blame the news media for high-
27
lighting natural calamities, serial
killers, movie star romances,
and celebrity court cases rather
than important issues (that have
less emotional immediacy and
whose complexity demands
more thought than tabloid-style
news offerings.) But the public is
equally culpable. The murder of
Laci Peterson engages them in
ways the Red Cross report on
the American military’s mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay doesn’t. And even a
good portion of the public that
does pay attention to hard news
just doesn’t care about our flouting of the Geneva Conventions and so Abu Ghraib has just disappeared from public consciousness. For most readers and
viewers it seems acceptable to
abuse Taliban and Iraqi prisoners, since they are perceived as
dangerous terrorists who have
no legal rights. A double standard obviously exists - government sanctioned misconduct is
justified, while the athletes’ antics are condemned.
It’s possible that governmental
actions, unless they involve a
radical break with traditional
mores like the legalization of gay
marriage, can barely get a rise
from a large portion of the general public. For example, the
pork barrel-filled omnibus
spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress
cut funding for housing the elderly, people with AIDS, and
those who are disabled, block
grants for affordable housing
and community development,
and even homeless assistance.
And in the same bill, under pressure from the Bush Administration, House Republicans celebrated World AIDS Day a week
early, by cutting funding for the
internationally supported Global
Fund to Fight AIDS by $200 million.
I can just imagine, given the
growing national debt (it has
climbed over $2 trillion since
Bush took office) what sort of
draconian cuts in social spending may take place in the next
few years. But unless we enter a
full-scale economic depression,
and the upper middle class and
wealthy begin to truly suffer
rather than the poor and working class, the reaction against
the government will be muted.
Yes, we are a selfish, hypocritical society, but it’s good to know
that we have suddenly discovered that it is NBA basketball
players who set America’s moral
tone, not our government, not
the media, not ourselves.
The New York Subway Beginning in March 1900,
ground was broken in Manhattan for an electric-powered subway. Twelve thousand men
worked to build the subway for
the privately owned Interborough Rapid Transit Company
(IRT). When the subway opened
on October 27, 1904, 150,000
people paid a nickel each to ride.
New Yorkers embraced the IRT’s
clean (electric power produced
no smoke and cinders), quick
ride. It was the fastest city transportation system in the world,
since its four-track design enabled both express and local
trains to run in each direction its slogan being “City Hall to
Harlem in 15 minutes!” And it
was the subway that allowed the
city’s population to expand into
the far reaches of the outer boroughs.
Soon the Brooklyn Rapid Transit
Company began building a new
subway between Brooklyn and
Manhattan - the BMT opening in
1915. Construction work began
on a third, publicly-owned, subway in 1925, and in 1932 the
Eighth Avenue Line, the IND,
was finished - while the Sixth
Avenue line, the last major piece of the IND system, opened in 1940. The
city now had three separately owned and operated subways - forming
the largest subway system in the world. By
1940 New York City had
taken over the IRT and
BMT and become owneroperator of all the subway and elevated lines.
However, after decades
of inadequate maintenance and a failure to
replace outmoded equipment (mass transit was
severely underfunded by
the federal government
while large sums of
money went to highways) coupled with the
city’s mid-70s horrific
financial crisis, the sub-
New York’s Grand Central Station
28
way system turned into a veritable purgatory. Trains derailed or
were abruptly taken out of service, track fires became a commonplace, violent and petty
crime escalated, panhandlers
aggressively roamed the cars
that were littered with soda and
beer cans, newspapers, and halfeaten food, and groups of homeless people settled with their
tattered bags of possessions in
stations, tunnels, and sometimes in the cars themselves.
exhausted, or just utterly alone
in the world, but there are others
whose vibrant faces convey a
sense that their lives remain full
of possibility. All of them stand
and sit inside badly lit subway
cars with graffiti enveloping almost every available space including station maps, ads, and
windows. Still, Davidson’s photos are so iridescently textured
that they give the subway’s
grimness a nightmarish sense of
beauty.
Topping it all off was the fact
that the inside and outside of the
subway cars were decorated
with the kind of colourful, frenzied graffiti name tags and
scrawling that were treated as
imaginative folk art by chic curators and collectors, and were
seen by some writers as an affirmation of identity by the powerless. But most of us who rode
the subways felt the graffiti as
an onslaught on our senses and
a blatant sign of how out of control the city and the subway system had become. And, as a result of the system’s deterioration, a subway ridership that had
been falling (caused partially by
the flight of the middle class to
the suburbs), declined precipitously. Many New Yorkers began to dread the descent underground.
However, the subway system
began to slowly turn around,
when nearly $11, 000 million
was committed to capital improvements in the 80s. As a result, by the 1990s all the cars
were air conditioned, and the
system was returned to good
repair. There were also now new
cars whose surfaces were graffiti-resistant, and the tracks, signals, and stations had been
overhauled. And the belated
introduction of the electronic
MetroCard in 1997 had made the
system more efficient, and less
vulnerable to fare beating.
Images of the subway from that
period appear in a new exhibit at
the Museum of the City of New
York of 65 colour photographs
by documentary photographer,
Bruce Davidson (the photos are
also published by St. Ann’s
Press in a book, Subway). Davidson’s photos vividly evoke the
harsh reality of riding the subway then. Many of the images
are close-ups of a wide variety
of passengers - from corporate
and commuter types in suits and
ties to a half-dressed, disoriented homeless woman. There
are feral gang members, respectable office workers, and
poor families with children
sprawled out on the seats - the
subway in Davidson’s words
being the ”great social equalizer.” Many of the people in
Davidson’s photos look haunted,
The subway today no longer
feels like a fetid, perilous slum.
Crime is down, the numbers of
passengers are up, and though
there are now scratch graffiti on
the windows and many of the
ads are for ambulance-chasing
lawyers and dubious business
schools - it is relatively safe and
clean. But there is still a constant
danger that without more financial help from the city and state,
the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority will face a $1.4 billion
budget shortfall in 2006. It will
then be forced to raise fares after already making service cuts
and increasing fares in 2005. The
subway is the lifeblood of the
New York, and it was no coincidence that its renewal paralleled
the city’s own resurrection. It
would begin to undermine all of
the city’s gains in the last decade if riding the subway begins
to feel again like a voyage of the
dammed.
Times Square: Past and Present On April 8, 2004, Times Square
celebrated the 100th anniversary
of the day in 1904 when Mayor
George McLellan formally conferred that name on the area
around 42nd Street and Broadway. It had been called Longacre
Square, but it was renamed after
the New York Times that had
just constructed the Times
Tower on 43rd Street for its offices. Six months later, the subway system opened. And from
that moment on, Times Square
became the centre of Manhattan, and the crossroads of the
world.
Times Square was never a quiet
residential community; from its
inception, it was the city’s entertainment and popular culture
centre. In the early years, brothels and gambling establishments in the area boisterously
competed with vaudeville, "legit"
stage shows and movies. During
the Roaring '20s, theatres and
restaurants filled in the area’s
west edge, and jazz played to
the north. And in 1927, 264
shows opened on Broadway the largest number ever. James
Traub, the author of an incisive
and entertaining recent book on
Times Square, The Devil’s Playground (Random House), writes
that “in the twenties…Times
Square became a national theatre of urbanity and wit, as well
as a giddy revolt against Prohibition.” By the thirties, however,
the “long slide into decrepitude”
had already begun, though the
decay remained invisible to the
casual observer or tourist.
For even the Depression and
World War II couldn't dim Times
Square’s lights and nightlife. A
tourist could follow world news
on the headline "zipper" around
the Times building, listen to a
crooner sing or ogle showgirls
at the Latin Quarter, and marvel
at the Camel billboard with its
puffs of smoke. It was the natural milieu of Broadway of famous habitués like Damon
Runyon and Walter Winchell,
29
Jack Dempsey and Toots Shor. It
was also where on August 14,
1945 a crowd of two million
gathered, embracing, cheering,
and sobbing with joy when it
was announced that the war
with the Japanese had ended.
Times Square was America’s
site for general gatherings and
celebrations like New Year’s
Eve, as opposed to Union
Square where unions and left
political groups held their rallies.
However, by the 40s, not only
were national celebrations held
in Times Square, but a criminal
world begun to develop in the
area. Still, the streets were
dominated more in Traub’s
words by the “benevolent eccentricity” of shooting galleries
and dime museums than by any
sense of true danger. The Times
Square of that period was for
Traub “the last word in seedy,
thrilling urbanity at a moment
when urbanity was still prized.”
But the migration to the suburbs
and the rise of television in the
50s began to drain Times
Square of much of its social and
cultural purpose. And by the
mid-70s, the great movie palaces had become 24-hour porn
theatres with live nude shows,
and the neighborhood was left
to pimps, hookers, addicts, pickpockets, teenage runaways, and
the homeless. Trash–filled 42nd
Street between Broadway and
8th Avenue was by far the most
crime-ridden block in New York,
and a rape, an armed robbery or
a murder took place nearly every
day within Times Square’s police precincts. Suburbanites and
tourists began to avoid the area,
except to attend Broadway musicals and then jump into cars,
cabs, and tour buses and leave
for home as quickly as possible.
Consequently, the city’s political
and real estate interests saw that
it was imperative to clean up
and transform the Square. The
redevelopment process, like all
of New York’s major building
projects, was predictably an
elongated affair. But by the late
90s, the makeover of Times
Square into a much safer,
cleaner, more homogenized and
tourist-friendly place had taken
place. And despite the dazzle of
the undulating lighted signs and
the shops with bright neon
lights (the result of new zoning
regulations promoted by the
Municipal Art Society) critics
saw it as losing its unique character. From the critics’ perspective, the Square had been turned
into a sterile, chain store- dominated mall (e.g., Starbucks, Toys
“R” Us). But this image of Times
Square as sanitized and standardized seems to me simplistic.
It’s true that on a walk through
the area on a recent weekday
afternoon, the shops that dominate are of the bland Planet Hollywood, and Applebee’s variety,
though on the side streets peddlers sell fake designer watches
and pocketbooks. And many of
the people passing by do fit the
stereotype of Middle-American
tourist families in polyester or
Bermuda shorts clicking their
cameras, and heading for The
Lion King, 42nd Street, or Madame Tussaud’s. But when I
meander down the once putrescent 42nd St to 8th, Avenue,
amid the multiplexes, theatres,
food courts, and Hilton Hotel - I
find that Times Square’s dark
aspects have not been obliterated. I see leathery homeless
men carrying Hefty bags overflowing with soda cans; a menacing group of Black Israelites (a
cult) inveighing against the new
Babylon - New York; and a
young girl shouting about a bus
ticket at her drugged-out, red
bandana-wearing mother, who
is lying on the sidewalk near the
Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Yes, despite these residues of
the old Times Square, it is no
longer a neighborhood where
police sirens constantly wail,
and every third person looks like
they could skin you alive if they
were given the chance. But if
most of the picturesque local
shops are gone replaced by
stores like the featureless Duane
Reade, a vital urban dance still
takes place there day and night.
It’s not my kind of place, but a
great many people find ease and
pleasure in what it offers. I understand how seductive nostalgia for a more complex urban
world can be, but there is just no
way that the Times Square of
the past can be resurrected.
ASRC Schools Conference Issues In American History And Politics Interest Groups, The Presidency, Congress and Voting A one-day conference for A-Level and Access students of American Government and Politics, American History and Media Studies.
WEDNESDAY October 19th 2005
See enclosed flyer for details
30
News and Events from the ASRC on the reservations for Native
Americans and his own personal
experiences. Now acting as an
official ambassador for the Navajo Nation, Dennis also gave a
demonstration of traditional Navajo Dance (including the famous ‘Hoop’ dance) as well as
Navajo songs. An imposing figure dressed in traditional dress,
Dennis entranced his audience
with his performance and provided a real sense of the richness of Navajo tradition and
culture.
Dennis is equally at home on the
stage or in the lecture theatre or
classroom. Valerie and I were
privileged to see him perform at
the Pavilion Theatre in Rhyl during his present tour. This was a
return visit, and many of his fans
from previous tours were in the
audience. They were not disappointed.
He began the show by demonstrating his love of wildlife. He
walked onto a plain, black stage,
with beautiful grey owl called
Misty on his arm. He spoke lovingly about its life and habitat,
then took the owl off and returned with a flute and drums to
perform a series of traditional
Navajo songs.
Powerful and moving
Dennis Lee Rogers returns with his Spirit Dancer Tour A report by David and Valerie Forster In conjunction with Liverpool
Museums, the ASRC again acted
as host for a visit and performance from the renowned Navajo
artist and educator Dennis Lee
Rogers. Dennis first visited Liverpool over five years ago and
his return provided another opportunity for an audience the
ranged from pensioners, followers of Native American issues,
and students from all levels of
education, to hear Dennis discuss issues that impacted on life
In the second half, Denis was
resplendent in his Navajo regalia
and costume and performed a
number of powerful and energetic dances to traditional music. He also spoke of his love of
country music, and told us a
very moving story about the
lead singer of a country group
who had recently died of cancer,
and how he had been invited to
perform with the remaining two
musicians in a tribute, and how
he felt that the spirit of the departed singer was so powerfully
with them that even the roadies
were moved to tears. He performed the dance to the music
of their song, “Spirit Dancer”, an
31
incredibly powerful and moving
experience.
Throughout the show, Dennis
paid tribute to his father, who
had been his inspiration and
mentor throughout his life, and
who had died at the beginning
of the year. He spoke of the importance of this relationship,
which was reinforced by his
choice of support group, Ryder
and James, a father-and-son
country music duo from Wrexham.
Altogether it was an inspirational evening, which emphasised the universality of Dennis’s
appeal.
Presidential Election Schools Conference (October 2004) As the climax to the 2004 Presidential Election approached,
over 200 students and teachers
of US Government and Politics
attended the ASRC annual
schools conference on the elections, held again in the Merseyside Maritime Museum Conference Centre. As well as hearing
a presentation from Chris Hansen, an activist with Democrats
Abroad and the Kerry campaign,
lectures were also given by Niall
Palmer (Brunel University) on
the role of the media, Jon Herbert (Keele University) on foreign policy and the election, and
Eddie Ashbee
(Copenhagen
Business School) on the electoral process. A last minute hitch
prevented a speaker from Republicans Abroad attending, but
students were still provided with
an illuminating insight into one
of the most closely observed
and hard fought elections for
many years.
World War Two and American Memory Professor Donald Miller
from Lafayette College
in Pennsylvania added
to a full programme of
conferences and guest
lectures. Well known as
one of America’s leading
academics and writers
on World War Two, (his
latest publication D-Days
in the Pacific, provides a
sweeping chronicle of
the four-year battle for
Pacific dominance in
World War II) Professor ASRC research student Joanne Daniels with
Miller presented a lecProfessor Miller
ture to a broad range of
and Japanese civilians. Those
students and staff from JMU
readers with cable or satellite TV
and Liverpool Community Colshould watch out for a three part
lege on not only the impact of
series soon to be broadcast on
US bombing during the war but
the History Channel based on
also the human cost on both the
Professor Millers work on the
young men who crewed the airwar in the pacific.
craft, (the majority of whom had
never flown prior to the outbreak of war) as well as German
32
Eleanor Roosevelt in Liverpool Obituary Last year’s edition of American
Studies Today carried as its lead
the story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s
wartime visit to Liverpool and
how, through the efforts of a
Ralf Shepherd and the ASRC,
the details of her visit and wartime broadcast had been rediscovered. Since then, the
ASRC has continued to support
efforts to have a memorial
plaque placed on Ackerely
House (from where the speech
was broadcast). As of yet nothing has been finalised but efforts
continue. The ASRC also received a letter of thanks from
the Roosevelt Library in Hyde
Park, New York (who had recovered the transcript of the broadcast from the National Archives)
for relaying to them the details
of Ralf’s experiences, which had
now been placed in their archives.
Pam Wonsek Information USA CD ROM’s The US Embassy has provided
the ASRC with copies of a CD
ROM ‘Info USA’ that we can
send to teachers free of charge.
The database within the CD covers basic statistical information
on many elements of American
society and politics as well as
links to a vast number of documents and government departments. If you would like a copy,
contact Ian Ralston at
i.ralston@livjm.ac.uk, giving
your school/college name and a
postal address.
1949‐2005 Ian Ralston has written this tribute to a great librarian, educator and friend of the Centre, who died this
month.
I
t is with great sadness
that I have to report the
sudden death on May
3rd of a great friend of
the ASRC, Pam Wonsek,
at the age of 55, in Beth Israel Medical Center, Manhattan, New York.
Pam had been a great supporter and active member of
the ASRC’s US Advisory
Panel for nearly ten years.
This began after I first met
Pam at a session of the Salzburg Seminar in Austria
where she was participating
as a guest lecturer. Pam
then became a major supporter of our work and a valued contributor to
American Studies Today. In addition to this she also provided invaluable research support when others would have given up. But above all
this, Pam became a great personal friend.
Born in Los Angeles, Pam’s mother was a professional dancer and her
father an accomplished major league baseball player. She was educated
at the University of Massachusetts, Simon College Boston and City University New York, where she became Deputy Chief Librarian and lecturer in Communications in the Department of Film and Media.
All those who came into contact with Pam not only recognised her great
sense of internationalism but also her professional commitment and
skills. Above all though, to all those who became her friends, was her
infectious sense of humour and her immense generosity.
I know I speak for all her friends and colleagues, not only in the US and
at Hunter College (CUNY), but also in Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, India, the Lebanon, Spain and of course the UK, when I say that
Pam brought a lot of fun into our lives. She was also a major influence
in developing international cooperation and understanding between
those involved in the study of the US right across the world.
All of us will desperately miss her.
33
Book Reviews Biography
Brown, Henry Box.
Narrative of the Life of
Henry Box Brown.
New York: Oxford University
Press, February 1, 2002.
ISBN 0-19-5148533. List price $5.79.
Reviewed
by
James
Winter,
Head of International and European Partnerships,
Liverpool
John
Moores University
In this attractive volume, Richard
Newman and Henry Louis Gates
Jr. publish Henry Box Brown’s
revision of his extraordinary
narrative for the first time in the
US.
Newman’s introduction
offers illustrated historical and
biographical context that makes
it an ideal introduction to the
genre at A-level. He reminds us
of Gates’s theory that slave narratives were simultaneously unreliable, secretive (except for
this one), a literature of resis-
tance and the means to establishing a public, historical self
for America’s black population.
Henry Box Brown achieved phenomenal renown for his spectacular escape from slavery in
Virginia by posting himself to
Philadelphia in a wooden box.
His reception among Northern
Abolitionists led to the publication of the original narrative by
Charles Stearns (Brown was
illiterate) and lecture tours in
both America and England.
Controversy followed swiftly.
Stearn’s overblown rhetoric
helped anti-Abolitionists cast
doubt on the veracity of this and
all slave narratives, yet Brown
was castigated by Frederick
Douglass for revealing his escape route, thus closing it down
to other slaves. Doubts grew
about Brown’s motives, which
looked suspiciously like the establishment of a personal, rather
than a racial, self (he made no
attempt, for example, to retrieve
his lost family still in slavery).
This volume publishes for the
first time in the US the version
of the narrative that Brown pub-
lished in Manchester in 1851,
having stripped out much of
Stearns’ rhetoric. Such a momentous and overdue event is
reflected in this edition’s high
production values but there are
nevertheless a startling number
of misprints, some so intriguing
that only the absence of a footnote suggests they have no historical significance.
Newman
provides little new information
about Brown himself and leaves
many questions hanging in the
air, even challenging the reader
to pick up the research baton
(for example, Brown’s unaccountable disappearance from
the public eye in England or,
intriguingly, Wales). The original narrative was published in
the same year as Brown’s escape in March 1849. In October,
two of his accomplices were
arrested organising an identical
escape, but which of those
events came first Newman does
not specify and so Douglass’s
objections are left untested. As
an A-Level text and a springboard for further research, this
volume will prove a solid addition to the bookshelf, but those
seeking deeper insight into the
genre of slave narratives will
find it elsewhere in the library.
Interested in studying for a degree in American
Studies?
Visit the on-line guide to graduate and postgraduate courses in all UK universities and colleges at
http://www.americansc.org.uk/Eccles/Index.htm
34
Culture
Martin, Reinhold The
Organisational
Complex: Architecture,
Media and Corporate
Space (2003),
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.
£25.95 ISBN 0262134268
Reviewed by Dr
Rob MacDonald,
Reader in Architecture, Centre
for Architecture,
L i ve r p o ol
School of Art &
Design,
Liverpool
John
Moores University.
When the forces of International
Terrorism attacked New York on
Nine-Eleven, they hit deep into
the heart of American architecture, media and corporate space.
In this book, the Twin Towers,
with their blank generic façades,
represent a hot mix of cybernetic, military, economic, artistic
and philosophical thinking of the
Corporate States of America. It
is no wonder that the Twin Towers became the target of such
terror and hatred. The topic of
The Organisational Complex is
an interlocking narrative of architectural thought and practice
during the ‘boom period’ of
American office building between 1945 and 1960.
The book discusses The Organisational Complex, Pattern Seeing, The Physiognomy of the
Office, Organic Style, Computer
Architectures, The Typologies of
Knowledge and an Epilogue titled: Hallucinations. This complex narrative and text is illustrated with over 120 fascinating
photographs, diagrams and
drawings. We are presented
with a complex route-map
through the corporate architecture that rose in the USA in the
immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The Capitalist
Organisational complex is best
represented by the Seagram
Building, the most ubiquitous
monolith of the 1960’s, other
minimal black boxes of communications theory, the black-space
slab of 2001: A Space Odyssey
and significantly The World
Trade Centre. In a frightening
representation of an Organised
Complex, we are shown a decentralised city plan from 1945,
indicating the geographical area
of an atom blast, all defensive
against the thermodynamic effects of nuclear bombs on
American Cities. The most prophetic plan is by Ralph Lapp of
New York City, From Must We
Hide (1949) showing a direct hit
on Grand Central Station.
Out of these Post- and Cold-War
fears grew the greatest developments in Corporate American
Architecture. In the 1950’s the
tall office building became a
focus of the artistic consideration of Progressive Architecture
when they republished an 1896
article by the proto-modernist
architect Louis Sullivan. Coupled
with articles on the economics
of high-rise real estate, techniques of curtain wall construction and the foreseeable effects
of automation of the workplace,
this comparative anatomy afforded a partial glimpse of what
had become, by the mid 1950’s,
the new science of the office
building. This new architecture
of corporate space was influenced by developments in digital computer laboratories, MIT
magnetic core memory, and
experimental and acoustic ceilings.
On the outside, the new physiognomy of the office was reflected in the curtain wall. Although there are numerous earlier examples of commercial
buildings with large expanses of
glass, The United Nations Secretariat, begun in 1948 and completed in 1950, was the first major office building of the post
war period to use a full-height
curtain wall suspended off the
structure for two of its main elevations.
In 1957 an entire issue of Progressive Architecture was devoted to the question of
‘modular assembly’ with quotations from Mies van der Rohe,
Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra
and Frank Lloyd Wright all supporting the desirability of standardized modular construction.
The new corporate architecture
developed a language of its own
comprising; curtain walls,
sheath walls, grid walls, mullion
walls and spandrel walls.
In the late 1950’s, the
‘modulation of signals’ began to
have an impact on computer
architectures. A series of luminous spirals were recorded as
representing the continuous
process of an analog machine,
whilst patterns of dots linked up
into similar lines registered the
discontinuous actions of a digital machine. The use of the
punched card, electronic devices
and atomic power were all anticipated as altering the environment, limited only by human
imagination. The International
Business Machines (IBM) Corporation became the first complex
global organisation to recognise
that any and all social transactions could be converted into
patterns of holes in a data base
on a punched card.
The ubiquitous grey curtain wall,
the ‘organisational man’ in the
grey suit and the IBM human
relations programme of white
collar offices and multi-use
space were all reflected in the
first new IBM 305 Random Access Memory Accounting Machine (RAMAC). A haphazard
collection of disparate components were articulated through
different simplified massing and
wrapped in two-tone grey metal
panels and chrome trim. In effect, this first mass produced
computer was submitted to the
industrial imperatives of a Mies
van der Rohe house.
The ‘thinking research’ and development behind the new computer architectures was also reflected in IBM manufacturing
and training facilities. During the
Cold-War period secret research
and development expanded and
was combined with the major
35
ivy-league universities; the military-industrial complex was
born. The Organisational Complex presents post-war American Architecture, Media and the
Corporate State in a period of
time ‘when mechanisation took
command.’ It presents a view
that ‘the people are missing.’
The ultimate symbol of American Architecture becomes the
Giant Black Monolith of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Monolith presides over the
earthly and cosmic state and is
the religious temple of the corporate society. When HAL, the
all knowing computer, crashes,
it is because the human brain is
no more a reasonable system
than the world is a rational one.
In Kubrick’s 2001, the history of
America is represented as the
re-birth of an astronaut; the organisational man has exchanged
grey for an orange space suit
and implicitly the logo IMB for
NASA.
The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space was published in
2003, twelve months before
Nine-Eleven. Since then, the
world has experienced the horror of the World Trade Centre
Twin Towers. This book is an
timely and important reference
for those students who seek to
uncover the secret logic of postwar American culture and perhaps why The Twin Towers
were sitting targets.
Sawhney, Deepak
Narang, ed Unmasking
L.A.: Third Worlds and
the City
Davis’s passion and his remarkable capacity to synthesise from
a diverse range of sources led to
an almost paradigmatic interpretation.
New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.
Davis himself is an interviewee
here, offering a series of rapidfire insights into developments
since his masterwork appeared
in 1990 and, somewhat incongruously, being quizzed on his
volume Late Victorian Holocausts. In the course of this interview (Chapter Two), in which
a semi-joking Davis proposes a
civil war against the well-to-do
residents of the Valley, it becomes apparent that the anthology will soon be suffering from
a heavy-handed editorial approach. In making parts of this
project into an overly personal
extension of his own preoccupations, Sawhney undermines its
potential. In the first instance
this produces a stream of gimmicks – a selection of poems, an
alphabetical list of translations
of the book’s title and a section
of the editor’s photographs –
which add little to the overall
book. While quirky and episodically charming, these sections
are given parity with the other
chapters, resulting in an uneven
feel to the volume.
ISBN 0-312-292899, pbk., PRICE, x +
266pp.
Reviewed by Graham
Barnfield.
University of East
London
Academic fields such as media
studies are developing pedagogical strategies for using nonfiction anthologies in the classroom, but this trend seems less
advanced in American studies.
Rectifying this situation – if appropriate – will require good
anthologies to work with. Deepak Narang Sawhney’s Unmask-
ing L.A.: Third Worlds and the
City is a frustrating mixture of
useful and insightful essays and
works that offer little to a sixthform or undergraduate readership.
The stronger chapters
both provide excellent introductory pieces and update existing
scholarship, but others are more
problematic.
Copyright clearance permitting, this is the kind
of book where photocopied
chapters could make a big contribution to student understanding but the anthology as a whole
will rarely be recommended for
purchase.
Among the well-written, clearly
organised, and jargon-free chapters are those concerned with
the expanding prison population
(Christian Parenti), illegal immigration (Joseph Nevins), and the
use of Los Angeles imagery as a
moral fable in US political life
(Roger Keil). Addressing issues
of fear, representation and sentiment, each chapter is also
rooted in the real conditions
prevalent in the city and its
wider surroundings. Such writing is rooted firmly in the tradition of Mike Davis’s seminal City
of Quartz, a work which greatly
influences this anthology.
More seriously, too many of the
book’s polemical points, which
emanate directly from its editor,
rely too much on assertion
rather than explanation or evidence. When Sawhney interviews, his questions are often
longer than the answers and
shot through with incendiary
rhetoric, for instance when Davis
is asked to ‘put a price on lost
wages, the enslavement of the
majority of the world, the pain,
the suffering experienced at the
hands of Britain’s genocidal empire’ (p.44). This might be more
convincing had the logically
prior case for reparations been
made. Personally, I have few
problems with blood-curdling
anti-imperialist remarks, but
here they come across as indulgent rather than insightful. At
times I found myself, contra Voltaire, agreeing with what was
said while feeling provoked into
36
stopping it being said in this
way.
Conceptually, the notion of ‘third
worlds’ is an interesting organising principle for the editor to
work around. L.A. demographics and the city’s broad range of
migrant groups are both central
to the way the metropolis is represented and key to the ‘lessons’
other locales and their authorities attempt to learn by observing southern California. Likewise, it provides something of a
handle on recent developments
in the globalisation debate, not
least given the brief post-NAFTA
role of a sizeable, Spanishspeaking population in providing cheap labour (jobs that are
themselves gradually migrating
to China).
Whereas Samuel
Huntingdon’s recent essay ‘The
Hispanic Challenge’ identifies
problems, Sawhney celebrates
diversity. This reflects Sawhney’s use of the concept Third
World to discuss domestic social
relations, rather than Cold Warera developing countries. It is
an imaginative appropriation of
nativist rhetoric, but it is not always conceptually convincing,
while making a change from the
post-City of Quartz use of noir as
a key trope for investigating Los
Angeles.
A final point on anthologies in
the classroom: they also provide
an opportunity to place relevant
out-of-print documents back in
public view.
Here Sawhney
chooses the Situationist International’s response to the 1965
riots and Morrow Mayo’s 1933
piece, ‘The Birth of Los Angeles’.
Both provide an interesting supplement to the contemporary
essays here, which is no surprise, as they tend to confirm
the editor’s outlook. Unmasking
L.A. is a relevant yet frustrating
work, which would benefit from
its editor exercising more selfrestraint.
History
Ferling, John. Adams Vs.
Jefferson: The
Tumultuous Election of
1800 (Pivotal Moments
in American History).
New York: Oxford University
Press, August 28, 2004.
ISBN 0-19-5167716.
List
price
$15.60.
Reviewed by John
W e d g w o o d
Pound, Ph.D Student, University of
Birmingham.
Whilst the focus of
this work is on the events and
political machinations surrounding the fiercely contested Presidential election of 1800, it constitutes, also, an excellent study of
the political landscape during
the early national period. The
Election of 1800 is the climax of
a decade of political activity that
sees the destruction of the Revolutionary consensus, the growth
of factions and mobilisation of
ideologically driven and increasingly organised, political parties.
Ferling’s talent as a biographer
is clearly evident as he paints
vivid images of the key protagonists in the 1800 election: Adams, Jefferson, Pinckney and
Burr. He describes them in detail, fairly but not uncritically, as
politicians of varying talents.
The narrative is detailed and
engaging; the political imperatives of the time are precisely
described. The political questions raised by Hamilton’s financial programme and the growing
Republican opposition to the
power of commercial Federalist
interests and the power of the
Federal Government are well
explained. Washington bequeathed pressing foreign policy
issues to Adams who succeeded
him in 1796 – what should the
nature of America’s relationship
with Great Britain and France
be? It was these issues that were
key in the election.
Where this work is strongest is
in its account of the campaign,
the partisan vitriol cunning and
spin that characterised the contest. Ferling also does a first rate
job in describing the diverse
electoral practices that existed in
the states and the procedural
trial which ultimately decided
the election tie, Adams having
been defeated, between Jefferson and Burr.
This work is aimed primarily at
the undergraduate in detail and
in the depth of analysis, encompassing as it does a focused
study of the ideological and
electoral history of the period.
For A-Level and Access students
it would be a useful point of reference for an understanding of
the early Electoral College system and for biographical material on some of the less well
known figures of the age.
All the Way with JFK:
Britain, the US, and the
Vietnam War by Peter
Busch, Oxford UP 2003.
ISBN 019925639X
List price:£30.
Reviewed by Peter
J. Ling, School of
American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
History has a useful debunking function. For
teachers who feel that their pupils are a little too smug about
the mess America got herself
into in Vietnam, and more especially if they harbour the illusion
that the UK government was
more astute than Kennedy’s
Camelot, Peter Busch’s study is
a useful corrective. There is a
myth that the UK worked for
peace in South East Asia and
tried hard to convey its
“imperial” wisdom to its impetuous American successor.
Unfortunately, the archival record suggests that British diplomacy was more effective in be-
37
queathing imperialism than wisdom.
Busch’s main points are that
either directly through its contacts with Washington or indirectly through the Canadian and
Indian members of the International Control Commission on
Vietnam, the British not only
opposed negotiations but
strengthened the view that military force was the only way to
stop the dominos toppling in
Indo-China.
There is a troubling echo of the
present in Busch’s account of
how British ministers and officials convinced themselves that
the only way to maintain British
influence in the world was to
woo the US administration
through offers of support and
emphasizing a common outlook
and a common enemy. Again it
is unclear what Britain gained
from this approach, but it certainly did not provide the basis
in trust or influence for Harold
Wilson’s later attempts to advise
Lyndon Johnson. Like most
monographs, this is perhaps
best suited for the teachers’ library rather than for A level students, but it could bolster a
good long essay on Kennedy
and Vietnam.
Pursell, Carroll W.
American Technology
(Blackwell Readers in
American Social and
Cultural History).
Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell Publishers,
2000.
ISBN 0-631-21997-8. List price
$37.95.
Reviewed by Dr
Tatiana
Rapatzikou, School of
English, Dept of
American Literature and Culture,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
American Technology by Carroll
Pursell comprises ten thematic
sections and examines the social
history of technology in America
from the eighteenth century up
until the present day. In collaboration with other social historians – Judith McGaw, Theodore
Steinberg, Arthur McEvoy, Rachel Maines, Bruce Sinclair,
Kristine Kleinegger, Michael
Smith, Venus Green and Andrew
Ross – Pursell has succeeded in
putting together a thorough,
compact and highly accessible
book. Teachers who are designing A Level or Access survey
courses on American History
and American Studies, as well
as university and college lecturers who are working in the same
area of research, will find that
this book nicely complements
the primary textbooks and reading material assigned to their
students. In particular, the present study approaches technology from a variety of perspectives: cultural, social and political. Each chapter contains a
chronological table, an introduction by the editor, an essay by
one of the contributing authors,
supporting primary documents
and further reading lists. Also,
the narrative is embellished by
statistical data, newspaper clippings and illustrations.
Throughout the book, emphasis
is placed on an array of themes:
technological determinism, the
machine, the workplace as an
ecological system, technology
and gender, the culture of engineers, the consumer acceptance
of certain technological innovations (nuclear energy), technology and race as well as technoliteracy. In each section, every
contributing author highlights
his or her analysis with dates,
figures and examples as well as
references to a range of literary,
sociological, scientific and periodical sources. In addition, every
writer’s comments and critical
evaluations are supplemented
by a series of judicial, accounting, journalistic, medical, technical, epistolary and legislative
documents. Having combined in
the same volume information
that is only published in specialized journals with cutting-edge
scholarship, Pursell has man-
aged to produce a book whose
interdisciplinary character helps
students appreciate the complexity as well as richness of the
theme which is to be considered
in each section.
With the examination of past as
well as current technological
practices, Pursell’s aim has been
to influence the way American
history and culture students approach and understand technological progress and development. This well-organized and
clearly-written book puts students in the place of a historian
by encouraging them to compare and contrast sources, examine the material in-depth as
well as gain an insight in the
predominant role that technology has played within the
American social context.
Hanhimaki, Jussi M. The
Flawed Architect: Henry
Kissinger and American
Foreign Policy. New
York: Oxford University
Press, August 1, 2004.
ISBN
0-19517221-3.
List
price $22.05.
Reviewed
by
Christopher
McKinlay, Dept
of
Am e r i c a n
Studies, University of Dundee
The Flawed Architect provides a
vivid and timely reappraisal of
Henry Kissinger and his role as
architect of American foreign
policy. Focussing principally on
Kissinger’s political career, it
allows an insight into the making of foreign strategy during
America’s most controversial
presidency. The relationship
between President Nixon and
Kissinger provided the shaping
forces for policy beyond their
terms in office. This important
period for American foreign relations is discussed in detail, making use of many declassified
documents to highlight historical inaccuracies and further the
academic discussion.
38
Hanhimaki takes the opportunity
to consolidate the existing literature and newly declassified
documents into an excellent
account of Kissinger’s time in
office, whilst providing an understanding of the man himself.
Providing much more than a
biography or appraisal of American foreign policy during his
White House years, Hanhimaki
presents the topic with dynamic
arguments, providing an intuitive understanding of the man,
the time and policies. It manages to do this without focussing on emotive political issues.
The topic is presented without
the constraints of immediacy
which in the past clouded many
issues. Hanhimaki is able to respond to important issues with
far reaching consequences. The
author analyses Kissinger as the
architect of American foreign
policy rather than as an alleged
war criminal, although he ensures that the war crimes allegations are discussed. The book
discusses Kissinger’s achievements and his award of the Nobel Prize. Including his negotiations with Vietnam, the relationship with China, détente with the
Soviet Union, and most controversially the secret bombing of
Cambodia and his role in the
overthrow of Chilean President
Salvador Allende.
This book provides an excellent
insight into Kissinger and the
making of American foreign policy. It will undoubtedly become
an essential text for any student
or teacher wishing to understand the foreign relations during the cold war and beyond.
The book illustrates how decisions were made which influenced the development of America’s role in the wider world. As
a study of Kissinger and foreign
policy, Hanhimaki has produced
an outstanding text of the highest quality in scholarly research
and in presenting complex periods of history in an accessible
fashion. This book is highly recommended to students and
scholars alike.
Newman, Mark. The
Civil Rights Movement
(British Association for
American Studies
(BAAS) Paperbacks). :
Edinburgh University
Press, July 1, 2004.
ISBN 0-7486-15938. List price £12.95.
Reviewed
George Rehin
by
The Civil Rights
Movement intro-
duces a complex
phenomenon; the
narrative
covers
the phases, campaigns, events
and organisations that made up
the movement. While there are
omissions and emphases other
historians might avoid, the major flaw is the attempt to familiarise
readers
with
" hi st or i o gr a p hi cal i s sue s "
(historians' disagreements).
Some are big issues - did the
movement continue, or depart
from, the 19th and early 20th
century black struggle? - and
some minor, even trivial (see
references to SCLC below). The
author claims his "chronological
arrangement" - integrating issues "into the text as they arise
in … the narrative" - allows readers to "bypass" them and "still
gain an understanding of … development, composition and
impact". Segregated disagreements are avoidable, but issues
mixed with, or arising at the end
of, narrative passages are intrusive and distracting. For example, a discussion of the movement's origins and SCLC's role
ends: "Whereas Morris regards
the SCLC as an effective force …
developing a mass movement
through its affiliates … Fairclough argues, more convincingly, that during its first five
years … [it] was little more than
a paper organisation." Readers
must return to previous text to
clarify this confusion, an extreme instance, perhaps, of failure to achieve a more focussed,
consistent and coherent narrative.
Sources too are inconsistently
cited; sometimes one gets several separate endnotes while
relatively lengthy expositions,
such as the Montgomery Bus
Boycott story, have none.
If
"further reading" were better
conceived, such gaps might not
matter, but much is missing, e.g.
King's autobiographical Stride
Toward Freedom, JoAnn Robinson's memoir The Montgomery
Bus Boycott and the Women
Who Started It and other specific
bus boycott sources (although
biographical histories like Garrow's Bearing the Cross, cited
and suggested, are likely
sources for Newman's account).
Fiction and autobiography, genres appealing to beginning students, are ignored (apart from
Malcolm X's Autobiography,
mentioned and cited once) and
not found in suggested reading.
This book does not encourage
students to read primary
sources such as Ann Moody's
Coming of Age in Mississippi or
insightful novels such as Alice
Walker's Meridian. In general
the arts are missing; a brief, unsourced, paragraph on the Harlem Renaissance interacting
with the Garvey movement is all
there is.
The book features a 41/2-page
1896 - 1989 chronology, and a
14-page index.
Bibliographic
details are in chapter endnote
citations.
Nine pages of
"Suggestions for Further Reading" perhaps compensate for an
absent general bibliography.
Two pages listing abbreviations,
too much to memorise, needlessly including infrequent usages, demonstrate alphabetisation of numerous organisations
(SCLC = Southern Christian
Leadership Conference) and programmes.
Several significant
typographic errors are negligible
in weighing this text, which is
too imbalanced in other departments to be recommended unreservedly.
39
Cogliano, Francis D..
Revolutionary America,
1763-1815: A Political
History. London ; New
York: Routledge,
December 1, 1999.
ISBN
0-41518058-9. List price
$36.29.
R e vi e w e d
by
John Wedgwood
Pound Ph.D Student, University
of Birmingham.
Francis Cogliano’s objective was
to produce an accessible synthesis of modern secondary literature on this subject, aimed primarily at the undergraduate.
Whilst this work would be of use
to an undergraduate as a basis
for much deeper study (should
they avail themselves of the
comprehensive and instructive
bibliographic essay included in
the volume) – for an A-level or
Access Student it would be an
invaluable text for understanding the key themes and events
of the period.
He takes a broad-brush approach; the narrative is accessible and engaging, taking the
student from the early stages of
colonial discontent at the time of
the Stamp Act through to the
Boston Tea Party, the War, Declaration of Independence and
the Constitutional Settlement.
The focus is on the political history of the United States; he
concentrates on the ideas behind, and the context of, these
familiar events.
Cogliano deals particularly well
with the 1780s and 1790s; the
rise of the Federalist and Republican-Democrat parties the partisan fissures exposed by the
French Revolution and the radical ideas which it spawned. This
analysis continues as he succinctly examines the pivotal
election of 1800 and the
“reclaiming of the revolution”
by Jefferson. Taking the study to
1815 allows Cogliano to deal
appropriately, within the scope
of the work, with the new more
democratic era helping the student to understand the political
development and changes
wrought by the generation that
followed the break with the
mother country.
A determined effort has been
made to embrace in this history
the stories of two marginalised
groups – women and blacks.
This is somewhat clumsily
achieved in the main body of the
book, limited as it is to rather
predictable asides about exclusion and oppression expressed
with what A.J.P. Taylor called
the “condescension of posterity”. However this is somewhat
redressed by the two thoughtful
chapters focused on their experiences and contributions at the
end of the book. The misnomic
term “African-American” in this
context grates to English ears
but otherwise these themes are
usefully included, in particular
the plight of Black Loyalists
which is seldom considered in
works of this scope.
Students will find the clear
chronological approach, inchapter sub-divisions and clearly
expressed conclusion sections
useful as they explore the subject. This should be regarded as
a key text for the political history
of the period.
Clinton, Catherine.
Southern Families at
War: Loyalty and
Conflict in the Civil War
South. Oxford ; New
York: Oxford University
Press, June 1, 2000.
ISBN 0-19-5136845.
List
price
$25.00.
Reviewed by Gary
Smith,
Department of History,
University of Dundee
Although the blood and thunder
of the Civil War battlefield continues to fire the imagination of
historians, recent years have
seen a rapid increase in the
number of social histories pro-
duced. Catherine’s Clinton’s new
collection seeks to continue this
trend by focusing on individuals
and families, groups that many
Civil War buffs overlook in favour of regiments and battle
formations.
The 12 essays in this work address the theme of how southern families coped with the impact of armed conflict and the
social and political division
within the wartime south. What
emerges is a compelling portrayal of a society in flux, with
the conflicts on the home front
proving every bit as engaging as
those on the battlefield. The
south that existed in 1860, the
plantation south of slavery and a
strict social order, had vanished
by the end of the war, with
southerners having to adapt to a
strange new world in which the
south was no longer invincible.
This change was not restricted
to just one group. Issues such as
emancipation, poverty and religion reached over gender and
racial boundaries and this work
reflects that, looking at blacks
and whites, males and females,
Jews and Christians. This helps
to broaden the scope of this
work beyond the traditional image of the plantation house, and
helps illustrate the diversity and
conflict within the Civil War
south.
With all 12 essays being of a
high standard, it is hard to pick
out highlights. However, the
essays by Michelle A. Krowl and
Henry Walker are of particular
note, examining how the conflict
affected gender roles in the marriages of both blacks and whites.
Krowl shows the stresses that
black military service placed
upon wives, while Walker uses
convincing examples to argue
that changing gender roles
brought about a shift in the
power dynamics within the
white family.
There is much to commend in
this work, and family historians,
gender historians and labour
historians, to name but a few
groups, will all find much of interest. Each essay is concise,
40
well argued and illuminating,
and provides an accessible view
into some interesting topics. The
reader is left with the final impression that the southern home
front had its own conflicts, redefining notions of gender, power
and race, and altering the very
face of everyday society.
Support Any Friend:
Kennedy’s Middle East
and the Making of the
US-Israel Alliance by
Warren Bass.
Oxford UP, 2003.
ISBN 0195165802.
£18.99
Reviewed by Peter
Ling, American &
Canadian Studies,
Nottingham
In a recent episode
of The West Wing,
everybody’s favorite alternative,
liberal President Josiah Bartlett
asks for a more detailed intelligence briefing on the rise of
Flemish nationalism in Belgium.
In doing so, he is deftly portrayed as a statesman who realizes that the gravest threats can
materialize on the periphery of
current foreign policy concerns.
A New England Catholic intellectual with initially undisclosed
health problems and unresolved
issues with his demanding father, Bartlett is a fictional figure
who owes more than a little to
the historical JFK. As another
New Englander, John Francis
Kerry prepares to contest the
presidency, it is worthwhile considering how the Middle East—
an area of the world not usually
associated with the Kennedy
presidency—developed into a
central concern of foreign policy
for his successors.
Warren Bass warns that his
readers that the twin assumptions that US Middle Eastern
policy was unswervingly proIsraeli or that the Jewish lobby
exerted compelling pressure on
Democratic presidents are mistaken. He summarizes the development of US policy under Tru-
man and Eisenhower, stressing
that the former was not exclusively concerned with JewishAmerican voters and that the
latter was mistrustful of any policy that might jeopardize access
to the oil-rich Arab states. By the
time Kennedy took office in
1961, neither Israeli nor Arab
saw Washington as a friend. The
second Eisenhower term had
seen Israel threatened with UN
sanctions, accused of endangering Western interests, and scrutinized as a rogue nuclear state.
At the same time, Jamal Nasser’s United Arab Republic
seemed at odds with the Eisenhower Doctrine whose anticommunism favored the conservative Arab monarchies who
had been made jumpy by the
1958 palace revolution in Iraq
and the instability in Lebanon.
Such divisions inside the Arab
ranks were sharpened further by
regime change in Syria in 1961,
which reduced Nasser’s UAR to
little more than his Egyptian
homeland.
The core of Bass’s beautifully
written study is his argument
that these Arab fissures frustrated Kennedy’s attempts to
cultivate the disparate Arab nations as allies. In contrast, Israel’s relative unity and eagerness to cement a US alliance
ensured that by 1963, the new
Israeli-American entente had
been cemented by the sale of
Hawk missiles. As momentous
for subsequent US foreign policy as Kennedy’s support for the
overthrow of the Diem regime in
South Vietnam, the missile sale
in the wake of America’s refusal
to supply arms to Arab states
ensured that the US was already
committed at the time of 1967
war and has remained suspect
ever since in its attempts to broker a settlement of the Palestinian question. As an example of
first-rate history for A/AS candidates, and of how truly international history can illuminate US
foreign policy past and present,
Bass’s study cannot be bettered.
Freehling, William W.
The South Vs. the
South: How AntiConfederate
Southerners Shaped the
Course of the. Civil War:
Oxford University Press, February 1, 2001.
ISBN 0-19-5130278. List price $7.50.
Reviewed by Gary
Smith,
Department of History,
University of Dundee
When discussing
an issue as complex and colourful as the Civil War, it is easy to
generalise, to focus on main
themes and paint broad strokes
rather than be bogged down in
the minutia. However, such a
focus has helped to create a
form of historical shorthand that
makes it easy to misinterpret the
course of the war. In The South
vs. the South William Freehling
seeks to address two of these
common myths: that the conflict
was one of northerners vs.
southerners and that it involved
slave states vs. free. By highlighting disunion in the southern
states, Freehling’s work convincingly shows how the failure of
all southerners to commit to the
Confederate cause eventually
led to its downfall.
Where the work shines is in its
discussion of the Border States,
Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland
and Missouri. As slave states
within the Union their allegiance
was crucial to the war effort, the
prospect of their secession dictating Lincoln’s slave policy for
the first years of war. Despite
this, these states have been frustratingly underdeveloped by
historians. This work helps to
redress the balance by highlighting how, far from being a unified
region, the border south, upper
south and lower south all had
their own distinct characters,
and differing levels of attachment to the Confederate cause.
The text also impresses by em-
41
phasising the role of southern
blacks in the conflict. While the
importance of black soldiers is
recognised, Freehling also convincingly shows how the actions
of slaves on the southern home
front – whether flight, resistance,
or disobedience – all contributed
to the decline of slavery and the
dissolution of traditional southern racial roles.
Freehling’s writing style is entertaining and readable, with the
straightforward narrative clearly
presenting the author’s ideas.
The book is also well illustrated
with a large variety of photos,
diagrams and maps. Perhaps the
main criticism with the work is
that for such a slim volume
there is too much information.
Freehling covers a huge variety
of topics, from slavery to battles,
to sectional allegiance, and
while the information uncovered
is always impressive it does give
the work a slightly disjointed
feel, ricocheting from one idea
to the next.
Despite this minor quibble, this
is an impressive work, wellwritten and engaging, and providing new insights into a familiar area. With its focus on the
overlooked Border States and
the new insights offered, it
would benefit any student of the
Civil War
Schulzinger, Robert D..
U.S. Diplomacy Since
1900.
New York: Oxford University
Press, December 1, 2001. ISBN
0-19-514221-7. List price $34.95.
Reviewed
by
Jonathan
Colman,
Department of International
Politics,
Prifysgol Cymru,
University
of
Wales, Aberystwyth
The original version of US Diplomacy Since
1900 was published in 1984, and
it is a testimony to the quality of
the book that it has now reached
its fifth edition. Modern American diplomacy, Schulzinger ar-
gues, dates from the defeat of
Spain in 1898, which in addition
to leading to the acquisition of
territories such as Cuba, enabled
the United States to compete
equally with the European powers in the race for international
pre-eminence. Entry into the
First World War in 1917 indicated that the United States had
become a great power like all
the others. President Wilson’s
self-designated mission at the
Versailles conference of 1919 to
create a more moral international order left him a broken
man and led to the more introspective American foreign policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Participation in the Second World
War from 1941 and triumphant
victory four years later finally
saw the United States become
the world’s foremost power,
although the subsequent ‘Cold
War’ with the Soviet Union necessitated abandoning the traditional approach of avoiding
peacetime alliances. The debacle
of Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s
imbued the United States with a
greater reluctance to take up
arms to maintain the global balance of power, but the demise of
the Soviet Union in 1991 vindicated the broad thrust of American Cold War policies.
As the twentieth century drew to
an end, however, US foreign
policy lacked the clarity of purpose it had shown at the height
of the East-West conflict, and the
very complexity of American
attempts to navigate the postCold War environment demonstrated the complexity of this
new terrain. The September 11
2001 terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington DC led to
a widespread view that a further
transfor mation had been
wrought in international affairs.
In addressing issues such as
these, Schulzinger pays due attention to historiographical debates, examines the making of
US foreign policy, discusses
public ideas about foreign relations, and places US foreign
relations in the context of the
growing interdependence and
globalisation of international
affairs. US Diplomacy Since
1900 is a lucid, accessible and
compelling work, and remains
the leading introduction to the
history of American foreign policy for A-level, Access to HE and
for undergraduate level study.
Literature
Matterson, Stephen.
American Literature:
The Essential Glossary.
Arnold
2003.
Publishers,
March
1,
ISBN 0-340-807040.
List
price
$24.95.
Reviewed
by
Louise Munton
Despite
its
title,
American Literature: The Essential
Glossary is less a glossary of
literature and more a list of
terms that can be found within
American literature. Matterson
explains his choices and the
aims of this book in the introduction, careful to indicate several times that The Glossary is a
means to further study, rather
than the end result.
The title is therefore slightly misleading, but the Glossary does
fulfil Matterson’s stated purpose
of providing a reliable reference
guide on traditions and events
that typically feature within
American literature. Written in
an easily accessible style that
clearly indicates areas for further
study, this book is undoubtedly
aimed at students of literature
who have little to no knowledge
of American history or culture.
The choices he has made do
seem somewhat incongruous,
however. Entries include an item
on alcoholism comprising of a
list of American authors who
were alcoholics and many entries on magazines and journals
such as the Union Magazine of
Literature and Art which, we are
told, published contributions
from authors such as Edgar
Allan Poe and Henry David Thoreau and very little other information. Of course, there are
42
plenty of other books which
trace American literature, so
perhaps it is just as well that
Matterson’s book highlights
other, less easily recognisable
aspects of the field; though how
far this knowledge would stretch
for commonly assigned A-level
texts is debatable. Matterson
makes no pretence to be providing an exhaustive list (the Vietnam War for example takes up
two paragraphs) and his approach of intermingling historical data and literary definitions
does reflect the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of American
Studies.
American Literature: An Essential Glossary is therefore an adequate guide for A-level students
reading American texts who
may come across reference to
the Jim Crow laws and need to
seek out a brief description, so
that they understand the vague
concept behind it, but it would
be of little help for an in-depth
analysis of the subject. The Biography does appear extensive,
though, and would perhaps be a
better resource than the Glossary as a whole for A-level students. Overall, a satisfactory
textbook, which should be used
in conjunction with other, similarly themed books and not as a
stand-alone reference guide.
Hayes, Kevin J. (Editor).
The Cambridge
Companion to Edgar
Allan Poe (Cambridge
Companions to
Literature).
Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, April 25,
2002.
ISBN 0-521-797276.
List
price
$23.99.
burgh
Reviewed by Dr
Keith
Hughes,
School of Literature, Languages
and Culture, University of Edin-
This is an uneven collection. Far
from inspiring the reader with
interest for Poe’s various literary
interventions, too many of the
essays here become bogged
down in mere biographical
speculation or with too close a
reading of the text. The opening
essay by Kent Ljungquist gives
important space to Poe ‘as critic’
without really engaging the
reader in Poe’s iconoclastic
world-view; his insistence upon
newness in American writing;
William Carlos Williams’s In the
American Grain is not referenced anywhere in this book,
which is indicative of a lack of
attention paid to Poe’s interest
in language itself. Rachel Polonsky’s essay on “Poe’s Aesthetic
Theory” is very convincing, with
a rewarding focus on the muchneglected “The Literary Life of
Thingum Bob”; thankfully, like
Baudelaire, Polonsky recognises
“The Philosophy of Composition” for the confidence-trick it is,
astutely identifying this trickery
as the key to Poe’s ‘aesthetic
theory’.
‘Humour’ is a notoriously difficult subject to analyse academically, running the inherent risks
of missing the joke, or sapping
the life out of it. Unfortunately,
Daniel Royot’s piece on “Poe’s
Humour” does precisely this,
mainly, I think, because it conflates “humour” with “irony”.
Scott Peeple’s essay on “Usher”
is serious, structuralist and, happily, quizzing in its approach to
that tale’s serially-analysed construction. Peeple points to contradictions between what Poe
says writing should do, and
what his writing actually does: I
fear too many students will –
perhaps rightly – think “so
what?” when confronted with
such a straightforwardly structuralist account of one of the
masterpieces of the short story
genre, but parts of Peeple’s account could be usefully employed as classic examples of a
kind of critical approach.
The most rewarding essays in
this collection are those which
look as the ideological baggage
carried by Poe’s writing: Geoffrey Sanborn on Pym avoids the
character-based approach too
often taken with this antiRomantic novel; whereas Peter
Thoms’s reading of the Dupin
stories might offer teachers the
opportunity to introduce comparative readings in the
“detective” genre. The greatest
thing about the Dupin stories is
also the strangest thing: they are
simultaneously the first detective stories, and the first to deconstruct the detective story
genre. It’s as if Tristram Shandy
were the first novel. Thoms eloquently conveys the wonder of
these tales.
In his essay on “popular culture”, Mark Neimeyer provides
enough material for students to
use Poe as a ‘case study’ of
sorts; and Poe’s insistent boundary crossing makes his writing,
and his ‘persona’, a suitable
case for such treatment. Best of
all, though, is Teresa A. Goddu
on “Poe, sensationalism, and
slavery”, in which the most exciting and ambiguous elements
of Poe’s writing are read
through the most disturbing and,
at times, repulsive elements.
Poe’s often inadvertent exposure of the machinations of misogyny and racism provide effective textual resources for
studying how ideologies are
created and recreated.
An uneven collection, with one
or two original and provocative
pieces.
Weinstein, Cindy
(Editor). The Cambridge
Companion to Harriet
Beecher Stowe
(Cambridge
Companions to
Literature).
Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, July 15,
2004.
ISBN 0-521-533090. List price $23.99.
Reviewed by Holly
Farrington
As
part
Cambridge
of
the
Com-
43
panions to Literature series,
Cindy Weinstein has brought
together twelve new essays
dealing with various aspects of
the life and writing of Harriet
Beecher Stowe. It is of course to
be expected that many of these
will deal with her most famous
work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852),
but there are also useful contextual essays such as ‘Stowe and
Regionalism’ by Marjorie Pryse,
and more general essays such
as Ronald G. Walters’s ‘Harriet
Beecher Stowe and the American Reform Tradition’. Further
essays draw comparisons between and provide contexts for
Stowe’s other works. Lawrence
Buell’s ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe
and the dream of the great
American novel’, for example,
discusses Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and Stowe’s less famous work,
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal
Swamp (1856).
The essays in this book deal
with themes and contexts which
would certainly be challenging
for student at access /A-level,
and some, such as the complex
theoretical position of Michael T.
Gilmore’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and the American Renaissance:
the sacramental aesthetic of Harriet Beecher Stowe’, may be
more suited to undergraduates.
However, it is a useful tool for
those students wishing to look
beyond the text, either to examine the historical and social contexts of literature, or to compare
and contrast Stowe’s work with
that of other writers. Carolyn L.
Karcher’s essay ‘Stowe and the
Literature of Social Change’, for
example, draws fascinating parallels between Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and other contemporary
protest novels and narratives,
such as the ever-popular autobiographies by Frederick Douglass.
This book does not offer crib
notes, nor will it appeal to lowerability students, but for those
who wish to progress to university-level American Studies
courses, it offers a persuasive
taste of what will greet them
there.
Politics
Robin, Corey, Fear: The
History of a Political
Idea
(Oxford University Press, 2004)
Hardback, $28.00 ISBN 019515702-8; pp. 316
Reviewed by Colin Harrison,
Liverpool John Moores University
In a time of growing public
awareness about the extent to
which a threat from Iraq was
imagined by intelligence services on either side of the Atlantic, and when personal and national security concerns increasingly dominate electoral campaigns, the notion that fear is a
highly valuable political commodity is becoming more and
more frequently acknowledged.
Adam Curtis’s BBC television
documentary The Power of
Nightmares recently argued that
neo-conservatism and Islamic
fundamentalism are both best
understood as militant forms of
a politics of fear; other commentators have focused on the role
that fears play in modern western culture from histories of
phobia (Joanne Bourke) to studies of risk and safety (Frank
Furedi), or analyses of surveillance society (Mike Davis).
Corey Robin’s book is a valuable
addition to this growing field
since it places fear in the context
of political thought, and traces
the close relationship it has had
with liberalism from the outset.
In the first section of the book,
Robin argues that fear has preoccupied philosophers from
Hobbes to Arendt, whether it is
seen as an integral part of human nature that must be harnessed by the state or as an outgrowth of democracy that liberalism must seek to alleviate.
Hobbes’s view that fear of others and of death was a socially
cohesive emotion (and that a
heroic fearlessness was much
more of a danger to society) is
contrasted with Montesquieu’s
account of despotism, heralding
a more contemporary notion of
tyranny as a rule by fear against
which liberalism defines itself.
From Tocqueville comes an
early image of the lonely crowd:
a democratic society no longer
in thrall to a despotic sovereign
power, but overwhelmed by the
speed of change and the absence of social norms to the extent that it becomes afraid of its
own freedoms, and seeks security in the mass. This description of anomie is reiterated by
Arendt in her analysis of totalitarianism, but - in what for me is
the best part of the book - Robin
goes on to show how she moves
away from it during her observation of the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1961.
As it was
ultimately more empowering for
her to see the evil of the man as
merely banal rather than glamorously demonic, so she preferred to reduce Nazism to a
specific politics of terror that
could be fought against, rather
than see it as the expression of
generalised modern anxieties.
The value of Robin’s approach is
the way it shows how fear is
deeply embedded in liberalism,
fuelling its sense of purpose as
the medium of freedom both at
home and abroad. He plots a
movement between moods of
anxiety - often occurring in the
aftermath of periods of radical
activity when ideals seem watered down in compromise and
the business of government and terror, when those fears are
displaced onto a new object.
This of course sees its most recent manifestation in the state of
permanent war called the “war
on terror”, the attraction of
which is its promise to “remake
liberalism, which had seen such
hard times since the 1960s, as a
fighting faith; restore to a fraying society its sense of collective
and individual purpose; unite
conservatives and liberals behind a worldwide crusade for
the Enlightenment.” (160) In the
meantime, of course, attention is
drawn away from the task that
fear performs within society –
44
most of all in the workplace –
stifling dissent and undermining
personal liberties. What seems
absent from Robin’s critique at
this point is a fuller analysis of
the dissemination of fear across
American culture – taking in the
rise of private security, economic uncertainties, and the
periodic cycle of media scare
stories on anything from internet predators to bird flu - which
might have shown the degree of
commercial as well as political
investment in fear, and the way
one serves to legitimate the
other.
This notwithstanding,
Fear is a powerful rebuttal of a
politics based on insecurity and
an appeal to a recovery of convictions, if not ideological certainties – in other words, an appeal for things worth fighting
for, rather than things worth
fighting against.
Singh, Robert (Editor)
Governing America: The
Politics of a Divided
Democracy
Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0199250499
reviewed by Lee Rudin
An innovative textbook, designed for first-time students of
American politics, this volume
offers an accessible and comprehensive examination of American politics both before and after September 11. Governing
America covers the foundations
of modern American politics, the
structure of American governing
institutions, domestic and foreign public policies and a series
of contemporary controversies.
With the acclaim that the contributors’ hold, it was most implausible, I felt, that there would
be room enough for dissatisfaction. Yet, this is not always so.
Conversely, the ilk of Michael
Cox, John Owens, Desmond
King and, of course, Rob Singh
pool together a pioneering manual - easily referred to at a moment’s notice with regard to
whichever point of American
‘Governance’ is required. Boxes,
‘key-points’, a ‘further reading’
list and web-links render this the
most inclusive, shrewd, scholarly yet manageable print on the
bookshelves.
Singh provides a most paradoxical disposition, arguing that after the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001, many academics outside America lamented
the decline of ‘area studies’ in
universities. This had contributed to the failure of public life
to generate an informed and
broad understanding of the reasons for the attacks. An important area of the world had been
neglected, so much so that it
remained unfamiliar to millions.
As such, the public image of the
diverse peoples of the region
was distorted. To some, it was
ironic that the area these commentators had in mind was the
Middle East, since similar observations could likewise have been
made regarding the United
States of America! Accordingly,
Singh brings America to the
forefront for the equitable study
of ‘Americanism’ it deserves.
Leonard Dinnerstein,
Roger L. Nichols and
David M. Reimers.
Natives and Strangers,
A Multicultural History
Of Americans.
Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0195090845
reviewed
by
Joanne Daniels
This fascinating
and
extremely
detailed text explores
various
aspects of immigration and minority group history within
America. Beginning in the
1600’s, the text opens by focusing on the first wave of British
immigrants, explaining the conflicts they encountered with the
Native Americans, and the suspicions they had of these
‘savage and backward people’.
The development of the north
and south of the country is then
considered, highlighting how
the two areas had few similari-
ties in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries, with slavery taking the
predominant role in the south
and urban and industrial growth
in the north. The authors then
begin to trace immigration chronology throughout the book,
including Irish, Japanese and
Korean immigration, and end by
reflecting on where America
stands as an ethnically and racially diverse society.
The text provides an understanding of the different and
often difficult conditions the immigrants faced when they first
arrived in America. It identifies
the conflicts that often arose
between American immigrants
and natives, and also the influence America had on their culture as well as the effect they
had on their new country. The
authors also thoroughly describe the conditions many of
them lived in including detailed
descriptions of the tenements
many inhabited and the unbearable conditions within them. The
authors’ use of pictures throughout the text is of value to the
reader. A drawing used of a family living in a tenement allows a
visual experience and the reader
can therefore relate on a greater
level to the material. In addition
to pictures, the authors have
also included maps, graphs and
tables to present data in an engaging way, again all helping
the reader to gain a detailed
knowledge of the subject. The
text also includes figures from
the 2000 U.S Census Report,
allowing the reader to compare
ethnicity in modern day America
to that of years gone by.
The text incorporates a vast section of American history into a
compact edition, covering almost all aspects of immigration
as well as the history of ethnic
groups. Issues such as the Ku
Klux Klan and the treatment of
Japanese Americans during
World War Two are all covered
in a detailed fashion that doesn’t
become overpowering; thus
making it an ideal source for
undergraduates studying American Immigration, American social history and American ethnic
groups.
Printed by Rhodes Printing, Boundary Road, St Helens WA10 2QA