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The Following are Just
a Few Examples of the Kinds of Books and Information You'll Get from
Questia |
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Modern Critical Interpretations
Ernest Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor
of the Humanities Yale University
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Library by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Editor's Note
This book gathers together a representative selection of the best
criticism devoted to Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms.
The critical essays are reprinted here in the chronological order of
their original publication. I am grateful to Susan Beegel for her
erudition and judgment in helping me to edit this volume.
My introduction begins by seeking Hemingway's place in American
literary tradition and then relates A Farewell to Arms to the
aesthetic impressionism of Walter Pater and Joseph Conrad. Daniel J.
Schneider begins the chronological sequence with a study of the
poetic imagery or "imagism" of A Farewell to Arms.
An investigation of tragic structure in the novel by Robert
Merrill is followed by William Adair's Freudian account of A
Farewell to Arms as Hemingway's own interpretation of the dreams,
fantasies, and compulsions resulting from his early involvement in
war.
Michael S. Reynolds compares Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of
Courage to Farewell, and suggests that Hemingway, like Crane, relied
upon imagination and not upon the autobiographical experience of
battle. The palpable hostility of Hemingway toward women as the
image of desire is traced in Farewell by Judith Fetterley, who
confirms the earlier analysis by Leslie Fiedler which is cited in my
introduction.
In a textual study of the novel's much rewritten conclusion,
Bernard Oldsey attempts to illuminate Hemingway's choices among his
multiple possibilities. Scott Donaldson skeptically reads the
passivity and "innocence" of Frederic Henry as masking a wily self
that calls the narrator's stance into question.
In Millicent Bell's interpretation, A Farewell to Arms is a coded
system of feeling and judgment based upon Hemingway's war
experiences on the Italian front. In a previously unpublished essay
concluding this volume, Sandra Whipple Spanier sees Catherine
Barkley as the true exemplar of Hemingway's code of heroism, since
she manifests courage, loyalty, grace in confronting death, and a
true ability to teach Frederic Henry what he badly needs to know.
Spanier's argument is both feminist and shrewdly kind to Hemingway;
it provokes skepticism in me, but itself shares in some of the
qualities that Hemingway urged upon us.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Introduction
I
Hemingway freely proclaimed his relationship to Huckleberry Finn,
and there is some basis for the assertion, except that there is
little in common between the rhetorical stances of Twain and
Hemingway. Kipling's Kim, in style and mode, is far closer to
Huckleberry Finn than anything Hemingway wrote. The true accent of
Hemingway's admirable style is to be found in an even greater and
more surprising precursor:
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Or again:
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore drips, thinn'd with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with
whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
Hemingway is scarcely unique in not acknowledging the paternity
of Walt Whitman; T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are far closer to
Whitman than William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane were, but
literary influence is a paradoxical and antithetical process, about
which we continue to know all too little. The profound affinities
between Hemingway, Eliot, and Stevens are not accidental, but are
family resemblances due to the repressed but crucial relation each
had to Whitman's work. Hemingway characteristically boasted (in a
letter to Sara Murphy, February 27, 1936) that he had knocked
Stevens down quite handily: "... for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is
6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and . . . when he hits the ground it is
highly spectaculous." Since this match between the two writers took
place in Key West on February 19, 1936, I am moved, as a loyal
Stevensian, for statistics' sake to point out that the victorious
Hemingway was born in 1899, and the defeated Stevens in 1879, so
that the novelist was then going on thirty-seven, and the poet
verging on fifty-seven. The two men doubtless despised one another,
but in the letter celebrating his victory Hemingway calls Stevens "a
damned fine poet" and Stevens always affirmed that Hemingway was
essentially a poet, a judgment concurred in by Robert Penn Warren
when he wrote that Hemingway "is essentially a lyric rather than a
dramatic writer." Warren compared Hemingway to Wordsworth, which is
feasible, but the resemblance to Whitman is far closer. Wordsworth
would not have written, "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there," but
Hemingway almost persuades us he would have achieved that line had
not Whitman set it down first.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
II
It is now more than twenty years since Hemingway's suicide, and some
aspects of his permanent canonical status seem beyond doubt. Only a
few modern American novels seem certain to endure: The Sun Also
Rises, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49,
and at least several by Faulkner, including As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom,
Absalom! Two dozen stories by Hemingway could be added to the group,
indeed perhaps all of The First Forty-Nine Stories. Faulkner is an
eminence apart, but critics agree that Hemingway and Fitzgerald are
his nearest rivals, largely on the strength of their shorter
fiction. What seems unique is that Hemingway is the only American
writer of prose fiction in this century who, as a stylist, rivals
the principal poets: Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Hart Crane, aspects of
Pound, W C. Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop.This
is hardly to say that Hemingway, at his best, fails at narrative or
the representation of character. Rather, his peculiar excellence is
closer to Whitman than to Twain, closer to Stevens than to Faulkner,
and even closer to Eliot than to Fitzgerald, who was his friend and
rival. He is an elegiac poet who mourns the self, who celebrates the
self (rather less effectively) and who suffers divisions in the
self. In the broadest tradition of American literature, he stems
ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on the god within, which is
the line of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson.He arrives late and dark
in this tradition, and is one of its negative theologians, as it
were, but as in Stevens the negations, the cancellings, are never
final. Even the most ferocious of his stories, say "God Rest You
Merry, Gentlemen" or " A Natural History of the Dead," can be said
to celebrate what we might call the Real Absence. Doc Fischer, in
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," is a precursor of Nathanael West's
Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts, and his savage, implicit religiosity
prophesies not only Shrike's Satanic stance but the entire demonic
world of Pynchon's explicitly paranoid or Luddite visions. Perhaps
there was a nostalgia for a Catholic order always abiding in
Hemingway's consciousness, but the cosmos of his fiction, early and
late, is American Gnostic, as it was in Melville, who first
developed so strongly the negative side of the Emersonian religion
of self-reliance.
III
Hemingway notoriously and splendidly was given to overtly agonistic
images whenever he described his relationship to canonical writers,
including Melville, a habit of description in which he has been
followed by his true ephebe, Norman Mailer.In a grand letter (
September 6-7, 1949) to his publisher, Charles Scribner, he
charmingly confessed, "Am a man without any ambition, except to be
champion of the world, I wouldn't fight Dr. Tolstoi in a 20 round
bout because I know he would knock my ears off." This modesty passed
quickly, to be followed by, "If I can live to 60 I can beat him.
(MAYBE)." Since the rest of the letter counts Turgenev, de
Maupassant, Henry James, even Cervantes, as well as Melville and
Dostoyevski, among the defeated, we can join Hemingway, himself, in
admiring his extraordinary self-confidence. How justified was it, in
terms of his ambitions?
It could be argued persuasively that Hemingway is the best short-
story writer in the English language from Joyce's Dubliners until
the present. The aesthetic dignity of the short story need not be
questioned, and yet we seem to ask more of a canonical writer.
Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and not Ulysses, which is only to
say that his true genius was for very short stories, and hardly at
all for extended narrative. Had he been primarily a poet, his
lyrical gifts would have sufficed: we do not hold it against Yeats
that his poems, not his plays, are his principal glory.
Alas, neither Turgenev nor Henry James, neither Melville nor Mark
Twain provide true agonists for Hemingway. Instead, de Maupassant is
the apter rival. Of Hemingway's intensity of style in the briefer
compass, there is no question, but even The Sun Also Rises reads now
as a series of epiphanies, of brilliant and memorable vignettes.
Much that has been harshly criticized in Hemingway, particularly
in For Whom the Bell Tolls, results from his difficulty in adjusting
his gifts to the demands of the novel. Robert Penn Warren suggests
that Hemingway is successful when his "system of ironies and
understatements is coherent." When incoherent, then, Hemingway's
rhetoric fails as persuasion, which is to say, we read To Have and
Have Not or For Whom the Bell Tolls and we are all too aware that
the system of tropes is primarily what we are offered. Warren
believes this not to be true of A Farewell to Arms, yet even the
celebrated close of the novel seems now a worn understatement:
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the
light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Contrast this to the close of " Old Man at the Bridge," a story
only two and a half pages long:
There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the
Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro.It was a gray overcast day
with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact
that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck
that old man would ever have.
The understatement continues to persuade here because the
stoicism remains coherent, and is admirably fitted by the rhetoric.
A very short story concludes itself by permanently troping the mood
of a particular moment in history. Vignette is Hemingway's natural
mode, or call it hard-edged vignette: a literary sketch that somehow
seems to be the beginning or end of something longer, yet truly is
complete in itself. Hemingway's style encloses what ought to be
unenclosed, so that the genre remains subtle yet trades its charm
for punch. But a novel of three hundred and forty pages ( A Farewell
to Arms) which I have just finished reading again (after twenty
years away from it) cannot sustain itself upon the rhetoric of
vignette. After many understatements, too many, the reader begins to
believe that he is reading a Hemingway imitator, like the
accomplished John O'Hara, rather than the master himself.
Hemingway's notorious fault is the monotony of repetition, which
becomes a dulling litany in a somewhat less accomplished imitator
like Nelson Algren, and sometimes seems self-parody when we must
confront it in Hemingway.
Nothing is got for nothing, and a great style generates defenses
in us, particularly when it sets the style of an age, as the Byronic
Hemingway did. As with Byron, the color and variety of the artist's
life becomes something of a veil between the work and our aesthetic
apprehension of it. Hemingway's career included four marriages (and
three divorces); service as an ambulance driver for the Italians in
World War I (with an honorable wound); activity as a war
correspondent in the Greek-Turkish War (1922), the Spanish Civil War
(1937-39), the Chinese-Japanese War (1941) and the War against
Hitler in Europe (1944-45). Add big-game hunting and fishing,
safaris, expatriation in France and Cuba, bullfighting, the Nobel
prize, and ultimate suicide in Idaho, and you have an absurdly
implausible life, apparently lived in imitation of Hemingway's own
fiction. The final effect of the work and the life together is not
less than mythological, as it was with Byron and with Whitman and
with Oscar Wilde. Hemingway now is myth, and so is permanent as an
image of American heroism, or perhaps more ruefully the American
illusion of heroism. The best of Hemingway's work, the stories and
The Sun Also Rises, are also a permanent part of the American
mythology. Faulkner, Stevens, Frost, perhaps Eliot, and Hart Crane
were stronger writers than Hemingway, but he alone in this American
century has achieved the enduring status of myth.
IV
If A Farewell to Arms fails to sustain itself as a unified novel, it
does remain Hemingway's strongest work after the frequent best of
the short stories and The Sun Also Rises. It also participates in
the aura of Hemingway's mode of myth, embodying as it does not only
Hemingway's own romance with Europe but the permanent vestiges of
our national romance with the Old World. The death of Catherine
represents not the end of that affair, but its perpetual recurrence.
I assign classic status in the interpretation of that death to
Leslie Fiedler, with his precise knowledge of the limits of literary
myth: "Only the dead woman becomes neither a bore nor a mother; and
before Catherine can quite become either she must die, killed not by
Hemingway, of course, but by childbirth!"
Fiedler finds a touch of Poe in this, but Hemingway seems to me
far healthier. Death, to Poe, is after all less a metaphor for
sexual fulfillment than it is an improvement over mere coition,
since Poe longs for a union in essence and not just in act.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Any feminist critic who resents that too-lovely Hemingwayesque
ending, in which Frederic Henry gets to walk away in the rain while
poor Catherine takes the death for both of them, has my sympathy, if
only because this sentimentality that mars the aesthetic effect is
certainly the mask for a male resentment and fear of women.
Hemingway's symbolic rain is read by Louis L. Martz as the
inevitable trope for pity, and by Malcolm Cowley as a conscious
symbol for disaster. A darker interpretation might associate it with
Whitman's very American confounding of night, death, the mother, and
the sea, a fourfold mingling that Whitman bequeathed to Wallace
Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, among many others. The death
of the beloved woman in Hemingway is part of that tropological
cosmos, in which the moist element dominates because death the
mother is the true image of desire. For Hemingway, the rain replaces
the sea, and is as much the image of longing as the sea is in
Whitman or Hart Crane.
Robert Penn Warren, defending a higher estimate of A Farewell to
Arms than I can achieve, interprets the death of Catherine as the
discovery that "the attempt to find a substitute for universal
meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is
doomed to failure." Such a reading, though distinguished, seems to
me to belong more to the literary cosmos of T. S. Eliot than to that
of Hemingway. Whatever nostalgia for transcendental verities
Hemingway may have possessed, his best fiction invests its energies
in the representation of personal relationships, and hardly with the
tendentious design of exposing their inevitable inadequacies. If
your personal religion quests for the matador as messiah, then you
are likely to seek in personal relationships something of the same
values enshrined in the ritual of bull and bullfighter: courage,
dignity, the aesthetic exaltation of the moment, and an all but
suicidal intensity of being—the sense of life gathered to a crowded
perception and graciously open to the suddenness of extinction. That
is a vivid but an unlikely scenario for an erotic association, at
least for any that might endure beyond a few weeks.
Wyndham Lewis categorized Hemingway by citing Walter Pater on
Prosper Merimée: "There is the formula . . . the enthusiastic
amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women.... Painfully
distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they
stand." Around them, Pater added, what Merimée gave you was "neither
more nor less than empty space." I believe that Pater would have
found more than that in Hemingway's formula, more in the men and
women, and something other than empty space in their ambiance.
Perhaps by way of Joseph Conrad's influence upon him, Hemingway had
absorbed part at least of what is most meaningful in Pater's
aesthetic impressionism. Hemingway's women and men know, with Pater,
that we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Our
one chance is to pack that interval with the multiplied fruit of
consciousness, with the solipsistic truths of perception and
sensation. What survives time's ravages in A Farewell to Arms is
precisely Hemingway's textually embodied knowledge that art alone
apprehends the moments of perception and sensation, and so bestows
upon them their privileged status. Consider the opening paragraph of
chapter 16:
That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that
led onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over the
roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small
light of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but
hunted in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and watched
him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still. After he
went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam move
across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A breeze came
in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft gun on the
next roof talking. It was cool and they were putting on their capes.
I worried in the night about some one coming up but Catherine said
they were all asleep. Once in the night we went to sleep and when I
woke she was not there but I heard her coming along the hall and the
door opened and she came back to the bed and said it was all right
she had been downstairs and they were all asleep. She had been
outside Miss Van Campen's door and heard her breathing in her sleep.
She brought crackers and we ate them and drank some vermouth. We
were very hungry but she said that would all have to be gotten out
of me in the morning. I went to sleep again in the morning when it
was light and when I was awake I found she was gone again. She came
in looking fresh and lovely and sat on the bed and the sun rose
while I had the thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on
the roofs and then the coffee of the men at the gun on the next
roof.
The flight of the bat, the movement of the searchlight's beam and
of the breeze, the overtones of the antiaircraft gunners blend into
the light of the morning, to form a composite epiphany of what it is
that Frederic Henry has lost when he finally walks back to the hotel
in the rain. Can we define that loss? As befits the aesthetic
impressionism of Pater, Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Hemingway, it is
in the first place a loss of vividness and intensity in the world as
experienced by the senses. In the aura of his love for Catherine,
Frederic Henry knows the fullness of "It was dark" and "It was
cool," and the smell of the dew on the roofs, and the aroma of the
coffee being enjoyed by the anti-aircraft gunners. We are reminded
that Pater's crucial literary ancestors were the unacknowledged
Ruskin and the hedonistic visionary Keats, the Keats of the "Ode on
Melancholy." Hemingway too, particularly in A Farewell to Arms, is
an heir of Keats, with the poet's passion for sensuous immediacy, in
all of its ultimate implications. Is not Catherine Barkley a belated
and beautiful version of the goddess Melancholy, incarnating Keats's
"Beauty that must die"?
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical
Interpretations can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
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The Ethics of Abortion: Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice,
By Robert M. Baird, Stuart E. Rosenbaum
get the full version of this research at Questia Online Library by
clicking hereIntroduction
For at least twenty years now, the issue of abortion has grown
increasingly difficult. Few issues have more thoroughly fragmented
contemporary society. Operation Rescue and Rescue America, large
anti-abortion organizations, have organized thousands of protest
actions against clinics that perform or refer for abortions, against
physicians who perform abortions, and against organizations that
even indirectly are supportive of the practice of abortion. The
people in these anti-abortion groups act with the fervor of absolute
moral conviction. Likewise, women and men with equal fervor vow they
will not allow abortion again to become a "back alley" activity
requiring women to risk their fives to obtain what should be a safe
and simple surgical procedure. So far as one can estimate such
things apart from individual personal convictions, sincerity and
integrity appear in equal measure on both sides.
Sometimes, however, the judgment that
comparable integrity moves activists on both sides seems confounded
by the facts. When Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion activist,
allegedly shot and killed Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider, at a
clinic in Pensacola, Florida, on March 17, 1993, one could only
wonder what acts of violence might be next on the activists' agenda,
and what kind of moral or religious integrity could endorse killing
to achieve its ends. Nevertheless, Michael Griffin, according to
news reports, vowed to provide his own legal defense and to make the
Bible its primary source. However much one might be baffled by
Michael Griffin, the man himself apparently felt morally comfortable
with his action. Furthermore, public statements offered by those
commenting on behalf of Operation Rescue and Rescue America, while
regretting Griffin's action, did not neglect to mention the millions
of babies abortion providers like Gunn kill every year in America.
They did not say Griffin was justified in killing Gunn, but they
obviously thought Griffin's action was no worse morally than Gunn's
regular abortion of living fetuses. Was Griffin morally justified in
killing David Gunn? Was Gunn even more disreputable than Griffin
because he regularly and without compunction dispatched living
fetuses (what antiabortion advocates call innocent babies)? Was Gunn
so blind, morally speaking, that killing him was the only
responsible recourse? Or, was Griffin's idea of moral and religious
integrity just badly misguided? The deep perplexity many people feel
about these and related questions motivates this collection of
essays.
The society Margaret Atwood describes in The Handmaid's Tale looks
like one in which Michael Griffin might feel at home. Her imaginary
society of the future is an orderly, authoritarian society founded
on the Bible, a society in which women are slaves to the men who use
them only for pleasure and reproduction, a society in which abortion
is forbidden on penalty of death. Would contemporary societies be
better if they were more like Atwood's society to the extent of
being more "biblical" and, in the view of some, more respectful of
fife? Or would today's societies be worse because they are less
tolerant of divergent understandings of the "biblical," and less
tolerant of diversity in individual efforts to put together
meaningful fives? In particular, are contemporary societies better
or worse to accord women free choice in a aspects of their
reproductive lives, including free choice about unplanned
pregnancies?
An interesting analogue of Atwood's
anti-choice society appears in contemporary Communist China. Chinese
society is also antichoice, but instead of requiring women to
reproduce as much as possible the Chinese require women to reproduce
no more than once. The one-child mandate is rigidly enforced, and
women who become pregnant a second time face mandatory abortion.
Most women in contemporary Western societies likely find Communist
Chinese society no more desirable than Atwood's imaginary one. Most
women want control over their own reproductive powers, control
systematically denied in both of these anti-choice alternative
societies.
"Pro-choice" individual might naturally
find Atwood's imaginary society more objectionable than Communist
China, while "pro-life" individuals might find Communist China more
objectionable than Atwood's. What those alternative societies have
in common is the requirement that women accept "external" control of
their reproductive powers.
Different sorts of rationale seem to
authorize external control of women's reproductive powers. A
biblical rationale for an anti-choice position differs from a
population control rationale for the same position. Michael Griffin,
with his staunch biblical perspectives, would certainly not be
tolerant of the Chinese one-child-per-family policy mandating
abortion. Likewise, Communist Chinese planners would find Griffin's
biblical perspective, at best, oddly unrealistic. Most women in
contemporary Western societies would find both Griffin's and the
Communist Chinese positions to be unacceptably paternalistic. Where
on this confusing spectrum of alternatives is the view richest in
moral integrity, the wisest view, the view most worthy of allegiance
to be found? Again, these are the questions that motivate this
collection of essays.
This revised selection of essays and
opinions about abortion reflects the fact that the issue is now more
divisive than it was four years ago when we first focused our
attention on the topic of abortion. The social and political
landscape now looks significantly different. We have tried in this
revised volume to take into account the new look of that landscape.
We have also segmented the collection into clusters of essays, each
addressing a distinctively problematic aspect of the abortion issue.
An ideally "balanced" selection of
essays on this topic, along with an ideally "balanced" introduction,
is probably an impossible ideal. Anyone picking up a volume like
this one will inevitably look to see how their particular
predispositions are handled by the editors and authors. We, the
editors, do have our moral, political, religious, and professional
perspectives. We confess that those perspectives as a whole have
guided our choices about what to keep from the original edition and
what to add to create the present volume. In our opinion the
selections included here are incisive and informative, and anyone
who hopes to think coherently about the topic of abortion needs to
become familiar with them.
The first cluster of essays presents a
series of "snapshots." Richard Selzer focuses on the horror of the
killing in abortions; Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May, followed by
Anna Quindlen, call attention to the horrors of fife without safe,
legal abortion.
The second cluster concerns the
constitutional issue of abortion. Whether or not Roe v. Wade was a
legitimate use of judicial authority is a question judges and
scholars have debated extensively. We offer here edited versions of
each of the three major Supreme Court decisions dealing with
abortion: Roe v. Wade, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, and
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The
remaining selections mark out a route into the question whether or
not the Roe decision was constitutionally legitimate. Robert H.
Bork's brief essay deriding the "political activism" he sees in the
Casey decision is set alongside Melvin Wulf's response, and Ronald
Dworkin's applause for the decision.
get the full version of this research at Questia Online Library by
clicking here
1 Abortion
Richard Selzer
Horror, like bacteria, is everywhere. It
blankets the earth, endlessly lapping to find that one unguarded
entryway. As though narcotized, we walk beneath, upon, through it.
Carelessly we touch the familiar infected linen, eat from the
universal dish; we disdain isolation. We are like the newborn that
carry immunity from their mothers' wombs. Exteriorized, we are
wrapped in impermeable membranes that cannot be seen. Then one day,
the defense is gone. And we awaken to horror.
In our city, garbage is collected early
in the morning. Sometimes the bang of the cans and the grind of the
truck awaken us before our time. We are resentful, mutter into our
pillows, then go back to sleep. On the morning of August 6, 1975,
the people of 73rd Street near Woodside Avenue do just that. When at
last they rise from their beds, dress, eat breakfast and leave their
houses for work, they have forgotten, if they had ever known, that
the garbage truck had passed earlier that morning. The event has
slipped into unmemory, like a dream.
They close their doors and descend to
the pavement. It is midsummer. You measure the climate, decide how
you feel in relation to the heat and the humidity. You walk toward
the bus stop. Others, your neighbors, are waiting there. It is all
so familiar. All at once you step on something soft. You feel it
with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of
something unusual something marked by a special "give." It is a
foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct puts your foot away in an
awkward little movement. You look down, and you see . . . a tiny
naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its
mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its
nest. But there is no nest here on 73rd Street, no bird so big. It
is rubber, then. A model, a . . . joke. Yes, that's it, a joke. And
you bend to see. Because you must. And it is no joke. Such a gray
softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead. You cover
your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and
crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were. Years later
you will step from a sidewalk to a lawn, and you will start at its
softness, and think of that upon which you have just trod.
Now you look about; another man has seen it too. "My God," he
whispers. Others come, people you have seen every day for years, and
you hear them speak with strangely altered voices. "Look," they say,
"it's a baby." There is a cry. "Here's another!" and "Another!" and
"Another!" And you follow with your gaze the index fingers of your
friends pointing from the huddle where you cluster. Yes, it is true!
There are more of these . . . little carcasses upon the street. And
for a moment you look up to see if all the unbaptized sinless are
falling from Limbo.
Now the street is filling with people.
There are police. They know what to do. They rope off the area, then
stand guard over the enclosed space. They are controlled methodical,
these young policemen. Servants, they do not reveal themselves to
their public master, it would not be seemly. Yet I do see their
pallor and the sweat that breaks upon the face of one, the way
another bites the fining of his cheek and holds it thus. Ambulance
attendants scoop up the bodies. They scan the street; none must be
overlooked. What they place upon the fitter amounts to little more
than a dozen pounds of human flesh. They raise the fitter, and slide
it home inside the ambulance, and they drive away. You and your
neighbors stand about in the street which is become for you a
battlefield from which the newly slain have at last been bagged and
tagged and dragged away. But what shrapnel is this? By what
explosion flung, these fragments that sink into the brain and fester
there? Whatever smell there is in this place becomes for you the
stench of death. The people of 73rd Street do not then speak to each
other. It is too soon for outrage, too late for blindness. It is the
time of unresisted horror.
Later, at the police station, the
investigation is brisk, conclusive. It is the hospital director
speaking: ". . . fetuses accidentally got mixed up with the hospital
rubbish . . . were picked up at approximately eight fifteen A.M. by
a sanitation truck. Somehow, the plastic lab bag, labeled HAZARDOUS
MATERIAL, fell off the back of the truck and broke open. No, it is
not known how the fetuses got in the orange plastic NM labeled
HAZARDOUS MATERIAL. It is a freak accident." The hospital director
wants you to know that it is not an everyday occurrence. Once in a
lifetime, he says. But you have seen it, and what are his words to
you now?
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He grows affable, familiar, tells you
that, by mistake, the fetuses got mixed up with the other debris.
(Yes, he says other; he says debris.) He has spent the entire day,
he says, trying to figure out how it happened. He wants you to know
that. Somehow it matters to him. He goes on:
Aborted fetuses that weigh one pound or
less are incinerated. Those weighing over one pound are buried at a
city cemetery. He says this. Now you see. It is orderly. It is
sensible. The world is not mad. This is still a civilized society.
There is no more. You turn to leave. Outside on the street, men are
talking things over, reassuring each other that the right thing is
being done. But just this once, you know it isn't. You saw, and you
know.
And you know, too, that the Street of
the Dead Fetuses will be wherever you go. You are part of its
history now, its legend. It has laid claim upon you so that you
cannot entirely leave it--not ever.
I am a surgeon. I do not shrink from the
particularities of sick flesh. Escaping blood, all the outpourings
of disease--phlegm, pus, vomitus, even those occult meaty tumors
that terrify--I see as blood, disease, phlegm, and so on. I touch
them to destroy them. But I do not make symbols of them. I have
seen, and I am used to seeing. Yet there are paths within the body
that I have not taken, penetralia where I do not go. Nor is it lack
of technique, limitation of knowledge that forbids me these ways.
It is the western wing of the fourth
floor of a great university hospital. An abortion is about to take
place. I am present because I asked to be present. I wanted to see
what I had never seen.
The patient is Jamaican. She lies on the
table submissively, and now and then she smiles at one of the nurses
as though acknowledging a secret.
A nurse draws down the sheet, lays bare
the abdomen. The belly mounds gently in the twenty-fourth week of
pregnancy. The chief surgeon paints it with a sponge soaked in red
antiseptic. He does this three times, each time a fresh sponge. He
covers the area with a sterile sheet, an aperture in its center. He
is a kindly man who teaches as he works, who pauses to reassure the
woman.
He begins.
A little pinprick, he says to the woman.
He inserts the point of a tiny needle at
the midline of the lower portion of her abdomen, on the downslope.
He infiltrates local anesthetic into the skin, where it forms a
small white bubble.
The woman grimaces.
That is all you will feel, the doctor
says. Except for a little pressure. But no more pain.
She smiles again. She seems to relax.
She settles comfortably on the table. The worst is over.
The doctor selects a
three-and-one-half-inch needle bearing a central stylet. He places
the point at the site of the previous injection. He aims it straight
up and down, perpendicular. Next he takes hold of her abdomen with
his left hand, palming the womb, steadying it. He thrusts with his
right hand. The needle sinks into the abdominal wall.
Oh, says the woman quietly.
But I guess it is not pain that she feels. It is more a recognition
that the deed is being done.
Another thrust and he has speared the
uterus.
We are in, he says.
He has felt the muscular wall of the
organ gripping the shaft of his needle. A further slight pressure on
the needle advances it a bit more. He takes his left hand from the
woman's abdomen. He retracts the filament of the stylet from the
barrel of the needle. A small geyser of pale yellow fluid erupts.
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We are in the right place, says the
doctor. Are you feeling any pain? he asks.
She smiles, shakes her head. She gazes
at the ceiling.
In the room we are six: two physicians,
two nurses, the patient, and me. The participants are busy, very
attentive. I am not at all busy--but I am no less attentive. I want
to see.
I see something! It is unexpected,
utterly unexpected, like a disturbance in the earth, a tumultuous
jarring. I see a movement--a small one. But I have seen it.
And then I see it again. And now I see
that it is the hub of the needle in the woman's belly that has
jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it
wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing fine nibbled by a sunfish.
Again! And I know!
It is the fetus that worries thus. It is
the fetus struggling against the needle. Struggling? How can that
be? I think: that cannot be. I think: the fetus feels no pain,
cannot feel fear, has no motivation. It is merely reflex.
I point to the needle.
It is a reflex, says the doctor.
By the end of the fifth month, the fetus
weighs about one pound, is about twelve inches long. Hair is on the
head. There are eyebrows, eyelashes. Pale pink nipples show on the
chest. Nails are present, at the fingertips, at the toes.
At the beginning of the sixth month, the
fetus can cry, can suck, can make a fist. He kicks, he punches. The
mother can feel this, can see this. His eyelids, until now closed,
can open. He may look up, down, sideways. His grip is very strong.
He could support his weight by holding with one hand.
A reflex, the doctor says.
I hear him. But I saw something in that
mass of cells understand that it must bob and butt. And I see it
again! I have an impulse to shove to the table-it is just a
step--seize that needle, pull it out.
We are not six, I think. We are seven.
Something strangles there. An effort,
its effort, binds me to it.
I do not shove to the table. I take no
little step. It would be . . . well, madness. Everyone here wants
the needle where it is. Six do. No, five do.
I close my eyes. I see inside of the
uterus. It is bathed in ruby gloom. I see the creature curled upon
itself. Its knees are flexed. Its head is bent upon its chest. It is
in fluid and gently rocks to the rhythm of the distant heartbeat.
It resembles . . . a sleeping infant.
Its place is entered by something. It is
sudden. A point coming. A needle!
A spike of daylight pierces the chamber.
Now the light is extinguished. The needle comes closer in the pool.
The point grazes the thigh, and I stir. Perhaps I wake from dozing.
The fight is there again. I twist and straighten. My arms and legs
push. My hand finds the shaft--grabs! I grab. I bend the needle this
way and that. The point probes, touches on my belly. My mouth opens.
Could I cry out? All is a commotion and a churning. There is a
presence in the pool. An activity! The pool colors, reddens,
darkens.
I open my eyes to see the doctor feeding
a small plastic tube through the barrel of the needle into the
uterus. Drops of pink fluid overrun the rim and spill onto the
sheet. He withdraws the needle from around the plastic tubing. Now
only the little tube protrudes from the woman's body. A nurse hands
the physician a syringe loaded with a colorless liquid. He attaches
it to the end of the tubing and injects it.
Prostaglandin, he says.
Ah well, prostaglandin--a substance
found normally in the body. When given in concentrated dosage, it
throws the uterus into vigorous contraction. In eight to twelve
hours, the woman will expel the fetus.
The doctor detaches the syringe but does
not remove the tubing.
In case we must do it over, he says.
He takes away the sheet. He places gauze
pads over the tubing. Over all this he applies adhesive tape.
I know. We cannot feed the great
numbers. There is no more room. I know, I know. It is a woman's
right to refuse the risk, to decline the pain of childbirth. And an
unwanted child is a very great burden. An unwanted child is a burden
to himself. I know.
And yet . . . there is the flick of that
needle. I saw it. I saw . . . I felt-in that room, a pace away, life
prodded, life fending off. I saw fife avulsed * -swept by flood,
blackening--then out.
"There," says the doctor. "It's all
over. It wasn't too bad, was it?" he says to the woman.
She smiles. It is all over. Oh, yes.
And who would care to imagine that from
a moist and dark commencement six months before there would ripen
the cluster and globule, the sprout and pouch of man?
And who would care to imagine that
trapped within the laked pearl and a dowry of yoke would fie the
earliest stuff of dream and memory?
It is a persona carried here as well as
a person, I think. I think it is a signed piece, engraved with a
hieroglyph of human genes.
I did not think this until I saw. The flick. The fending off.
Later, in the corridor, the doctor
explains that the law does not permit abortion beyond the
twenty-fourth week. That is when the fetus may be viable, he says.
We stand together for a moment, and he tells of an abortion in which
the fetus cried after it was passed.
What did you do? I ask him.
There was nothing to do but let it five,
he says. It did very well, he says. A case of mistaken dates.
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2 The Bad Old Days
Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May
CAROLINE
Caroline is a forty-four-year-old woman who is a librarian at a
college in a small rural town.
For a long time I think I drank to avoid
the feelings. And it wasn't until quite recently, five years ago,
after I had stopped drinking for a while, that I went through a
whole period of really reliving the terror of this experience. It
was in the summer, between my junior and senior years of college. I
was going to college in Cleveland, living there for the summer. And
somehow I just knew I was pregnant.
It was the first and only time that I
was ever sexually intimate with this man. He was a young artist whom
I had been seeing for some time. I wasn't particularly physically
attracted to him, but he was pressing me, and I just finally got to
the point where I couldn't struggle with it anymore. So I gave in.
Somehow I immediately had the sense that I was pregnant.
I really didn't know what to do. I knew,
though, that having a baby would ruin my whole life. The man
involved felt responsible and wanted to marry me, but I thought it
was a very weak reason for getting married. I spent a lot of time
just seeing my life in a shambles. Things at that time in Cleveland
were very tight. There had been several incidents reported in the
paper. An abortion ring had been broken up. It was 1963, and when I
followed up on the few leads there were, it seemed that it was
absolutely the worst possible time in about five years to have an
abortion in Cleveland.
In the meantime the weeks were going by
and I was more pregnant all the time and it was really getting to
the point that if I didn't do something soon it was going to be too
late. Being raised a good Catholic girl, abortion was not a thing
that I was very comfortable thinking about. But I didn't feel that I
had any other option. I was getting pretty desperate by this time
because I was nine weeks pregnant. I finally located an abortionist
in Youngstown, Ohio.
This so-called doctor was a bookie and
he was an abortionist. He was an elderly man in a ramshackle little
house in a disreputable, shabby part of Youngstown. It in no way fit
my image of a doctor's house and office. I think there was some
actual gambling going on while we were waiting.
He had a room with a chair and stirrups
set up. The money, one hundred dollars, had to be in cash, in
certain denominations, and it had to be given to him in an envelope.
He checked it very thoroughly to make sure it wasn't marked. He
explained he was doing a saline injection and that there should be
some cramping and the abortion would happen within twenty-four
hours. Nothing happened.
I don't know how many days passed; I did
a lot to block out this experience. But I do know that when I
finally aborted I was alone in my room in the dormitory at school. I
went through at least twelve hours of labor alone in my room.
It was more terrible than I ever
imagined, partly because I was alone, partly because I was scared. I
was timing the contractions and I just didn't think I could bear
anymore. I didn't feel I could cry out for help, and I just remember
thinking, "I'm going to get through this." I remember noticing that
the contractions were getting more and more frequent, five minutes,
then four minutes, then three minutes, and then there was a lot of
blood and there was a fetus. I was really beside myself, and
terrified. I didn't know what to do. There was more blood than I
ever imagined. I used one of these metal waste baskets we had in the
dorm rooms and I remember it being filled up. I think I had gone
through a whole night and it was now midmorning, and there weren't
many people around. I managed to get to the bathroom, very
surreptitiously. I was terrified of someone discovering me, of being
arrested.
I remember taking this fetus and not
knowing what else to do but flush it down the toilet. And I was
terrified that it wasn't going to go down, that they'd have to call
a plumber and then there would be this hunt to find out who did this
terrible thing in the dorm, and I'd be tracked down and prosecuted.
Somehow I thought then it would be over, but it wasn't over. It went
on and on. I kept hemorrhaging and it just wouldn't stop.
I had become pregnant in August, and the
abortion was in early November. I remember going home for
Thanksgiving and my mother kept saying, "I think you're anemic." And
I remember being very drained and wiped out.
Early in December, I became friendly
with a very gentle, brilliant but quite crazy college student who
had been hospitalized while he was suicidal. I found myself
confiding in him that I'd had this abortion, and was still bleeding.
He talked to the rector of the Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights,
and the rector, to whom I shall be forever grateful, called one of
the doctors in his congregation. He was so appalled at my condition
that he said, "Do you rearm you could have killed yourself?" He
admitted me to the hospital.
After they built me up they did a D & C.
I wasn't yet twenty-one, so the doctor called and spoke to my mother
and said there was nothing to be concerned about; the D & C was just
a routine procedure and would help. He said that I was quite anemic.
I must have been in the hospital five
days. The Episcopal Church paid my hospital bill and the doctor
never charged. I was very thankful, and totally done in at the end
of that ordeal.
I didn't feel guilty. I was determined
once I made the decision to go through with it, and I did.
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The Affirmative Action Debate
By George E. Curry, Addison Wesley
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clicking hereINTRODUCTION
A report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights provides the context
for today's contentious debate over affirmative action. It notes:
"Historically, discrimination against minorities and women was not
only accepted, but was also governmentally required. The doctrine of
white supremacy, used to support the institution of slavery, was so
much part of American custom and policy that the Supreme Court of
the United States in 1857 [in the Dred Scott decision] approvingly
concluded that both the North and the South regarded slaves 'as
beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with
the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far
inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to
respect.'"
Women, like African-Americans and other
racial minorities, were treated as less than full citizens
throughout much of American history, though to a different degree.
As Justice William J. Brennan observed, neither slaves nor women
could hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own
names, and married women traditionally were denied the legal
capacity to hold or convey property or to serve as legal guardians
of their own children.
Over the past three decades, the United
States has struggled valiantly to overcome that sordid legacy as it
moves toward what Manning Marable, in the opening selection in this
book, calls "the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality,
the uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization
of a truly democratic nation." Out of that struggle came the policy
of affirmative action.
Although the term "affirmative action"
is relatively new, the concept is not. The Civil Rights Commission
defines the contemporary term as encompassing any measure, beyond
simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the
consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along
with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities
to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or
actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the
recurrence of discrimination in the future. But well over a century
ago, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era that followed the
Civil War, the Freedman's Bureau was established to assist newly
freed slaves, providing for AfricanAmericans to receive clothing,
land, and education. More recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
to avert a march on Washington planned by A. Philip Randolph,
president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,
signed an executive order in 1941 forbidding federal contractors
from discriminating.
However, the pernicious problem of
racism still existed two decades later in 1961 when John F. Kennedy,
observing that the nation's top defense contractors employed few
blacks, signed Executive Order 10925. It invoked the term
"affirmative action" for the first time and established the
Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. President Lyndon B.
Johnson followed up in 1965 with Executive Order 11246, which
required federal contractors to take affirmative action to provide
equal opportunity without regard to a person's race, religion, or
national origin. Three years later, women were added to the
protected groups. In 1969, under President Richard M. Nixon, "goals
and timetables" were added as yet another component of affirmative
action.
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Now, a quarter of a century later,
affirmative action is more controversial than ever. It has been
credited by supporters with expanding the black middle class and
lowering barriers to equal opportunity, while its critics suggest
that this tool intended to eliminate discrimination is itself
discriminatory. The question has developed into a major wedge issue
in the 1996 presidential election. Affirmative action faces the
prospect of being sharply curtailed, if not eliminated, by Congress
and by voters in California, our largest state.
This collection of twenty-nine essays,
most of them published here for the first time, is not likely to end
this emotionladen debate. Nor would I want it to do so. Rather, my
goal from the outset has been to assemble some of the sharpest minds
in the country, provide a forum for them to express their personal
views on affirmative action, and hope that in the process we would
expand our knowledge of the issue and develop a deeper tolerance for
views with which we fervently disagree.
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEGINNING
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the color line -- the relation
of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in
America and the islands of the sea."
Affirmative action and other
race-conscious remedies were created to erase the differences in
rights and opportunities defined by that color line. In this
chapter, four essays trace how affirmative action has evolved in the
twentieth century. While all these authors favor affirmative action,
their essays raise important questions: What alternatives to
affirmative action did our country's political leaders see? Mat were
their aims? How much can rules that prohibit discrimination
accomplish? Do affirmative action programs go far enough? In
context, we see that the debate over affirmative action is not a
simple yes or no issue.
First, Manning Marable, director of the
Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia
University and author of Beyond Black and White: Transforming
AfricanAmerican Politics (1995), contrasts the efforts to prohibit
discrimination in the 1940s and the triumphs of the civil rights era
with the current political atmosphere. He also places affirmative
action in the context of a long debate within the African-American
community over the value of integration and inclusion.
More than sixty years after Du Bois
wrote about the color line, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a
southerner, observed that it remained clearly visible: "In far too
many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of
freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to
hope." Reprinted here is Johnson's commencement address at Howard
University in 1965, which set both the tone and the rationale for
affirmative action in the 1960s. The Johnson administration made
affirmative action national policy to help open the doors of hope
for racial and ethnic minorities (later expanded to include women
and other disadvantaged groups).
Appointed in 1969 as the nation's first
assistant secretary of labor for employment standards, Arthur A.
Fletcher has often been referred to as "the Father of Affirmative
Action." He is the author of the Philadelphia Plan to combat racism
in the construction industry. His essay is a behind-the-scenes
account of the earliest efforts to institutionalize affirmative
action. Despite the best intentions, however, the policy quickly
became a political orphan, never clearly codified in federal
statutes and owing its shaky existence to the generosity of the
executive branch.
The chapter concludes with an essay by
Dr. Cornel West, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University,
calls "the preeminent African-American intellectual of our
generation." Looking at affirmative action in the context of race
relations in the United States, he is surprised that the furor over
it is so intense. Affirmative action, he says, is a "weak response"
to the "legacy of white supremacy." It is interesting to consider
what other corrective measures our society might have tried.
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Staying on the Path to Racial Equality
Manning Marable
Instead of pleasant-sounding but
simplistic defenses of "affirmative action as it is," we need to do
some hard thinking about the reasons why several significant
constituencies that have greatly benefited from affirmative action
have done relatively little to defend it. We need to recognize the
critical theoretical and strategic differences that separate
liberals and progressives on how to achieve a nonracist society. And
we urgently need to reframe the context of the political debate,
taking the initiative away from the Right. The triumph of "Newtonian
Republicanism" is not a temporary aberration: it is the culmination
of a thirty-year ideological and political war against the logic of
the reforms of the 1960s. Advocates of affirmative action, civil
rights, and other policies reflecting left-of-center political
values must recognize how and why the context for progressive reform
has fundamentally changed.
The first difficulty in developing a
more effective progressive model for affirmative action goes back to
the concept's complex definition, history, and political evolution.
"Affirmative action" per se was never a law, or even a coherently
developed set of governmental policies designed to attack
institutional racism and societal discrimination. It was instead a
series of presidential executive orders, civil rights laws, and
governmental programs regarding the awarding of federal contracts
and licenses, as well as the enforcement of fair employment
practices, with the goal of uprooting the practices of bigotry.
At its origins, it was designed to
provide some degree of compensatory justice to the victims of
slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism. This was at
the heart of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated that "all
persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the
same right in every State and Territory, to make and enforce
contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and
equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of
persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. . . ."
The fundamental idea of taking the
proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for
more than a century.
During the Great Depression, the role of
the federal government in protecting the equal rights of black
Americans was expanded again through the direct militancy and
agitation of black people. In 1941, socialist and trade union leader
A. Philip Randolph mobilized thousands of black workers to
participate in the "Negro March on Washington Movement," calling
upon the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to carry out a
series of reforms favorable to civil rights. To halt this
mobilization, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which
outlawed segregationist hiring policies by defense-related
industries that held federal contracts. This executive order not
only greatly increased the number of African-Americans who were
employed in wartime industries, but expanded the political idea that
government could not take a passive role in the dismantling of
institutional racism.
This position was reaffirmed in 1953 by
President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Government Contract
Compliance, which urged the Bureau of Employment Security"to act
positively and affirmatively to implement the policy of
nondiscrimination in its functions of placement counseling,
occupational analysis and industrial services, labor market
information, and community participation in employment services."
Thus, despite the fact that the actual phrase "affirmative action"
was not used by a chief executive until President John F. Kennedy's
Executive Order 10925 in 1961, the fundamental idea of taking the
proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for
more than a century.
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PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS
What complicates the current discussion of affirmative action is
that liberals and progressives themselves were at odds historically
over the guiding social and cultural philosophy that should inform
the implementation of policies on racial discrimination.
Progressives like W E. B. Du Bois were convinced that the way to
achieve a nonracist society was through the development of strong
black institutions and the preservation of African-American cultural
identity. Du Bois's strategy was reflected in his concept of "double
consciousness," that black American identity was simultaneously
African and American, and that dismantling racism should not require
the aesthetic and cultural assimilation of blackness into white
values and social norms.
The alternative to the Du Boisian
position was expressed by integrationist leaders and intellectuals
like Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Baynard Rustin, and Kenneth B.
Clark. They too fought to destroy Jim Crow, but their cultural
philosophy for the Negro rested on inclusion rather than pluralism.
They deeply believed that the long-term existence of separate,
allblack institutions was counterproductive to the goal of a
"color-blind" society, in which racial categories would become
socially insignificant or even irrelevant to the relations of power.
Rustin, for instance, personally looked forward to the day when
Harlem would cease to exist as a segregated, identifiably black
neighborhood. Blacks should be assimilated or culturally
incorporated into the mainstream. My central criticism of the
desegregationist strategy of the inclusionists is that they
consistently confused "culture" with "race," underestimating the
importance of fostering black cultural identity as an essential
component of the critique of white supremacy. The existence of
separate black institutions or a self-defined, all-black community
was not necessarily an impediment to interracial cooperation and
multicultural dialogue.
Despite the differences between Du
Boisian progressives and inclusionist liberals, both
desegregationist positions from the 1930s onward were expressed by
the organizations and leadership of the civil rights movement. These
divisions were usually obscured by a common language of reform and a
common social vision that embraced color blindness as an ultimate
goal. For example, both positions are reflected in the main thrust
of the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared that
workplace discrimination should be outlawed on the basis of "race,
color, religion, sex, or national origin." However, the inclusionist
orientation of Wilkins, Rustin, and company is also apparent in the
act's assertion that it should not be interpreted as requiring
employers "to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to
any group."
Five years later, after Richard M.
Nixon's narrow victory for the presidency, it was the Republicans'
turn to interpret and implement civil rights policy. The strategy of
Nixon had a profound impact on the political culture of the United
States, which continues to have direct consequences within the
debates about affirmative action today. Through the
Counterintelligence Program of the FBI, the Nixon administration
vigorously suppressed the radical wing of the black movement.
Second, it appealed to the racial anxieties and grievances of George
Wallace voters, recruiting segregationists like Jesse Helms and
Strom Thurmond into the ranks of the Republican Party.
On affirmative action and issues of
equal opportunity, however, Nixon's goal was to utilize a liberal
reform for conservative objectives: the expansion of the
African-American middle class, which might benefit the Republican
Party. Under Nixon in 1969, the federal government authorized what
became known as the Philadelphia Plan, a program requiring federal
contractors to set specific goals for minority hiring. As a result,
the portion of racial minorities in the construction industry
increased from 1% to 12%. The Nixon administration supported
provisions for minority set-asides to promote black and Hispanic
entrepreneurship, and it placed Federal Reserve funds in black-owned
banks. Nixon himself publicly praised the concept of "Black Power,"
carefully interpreting it as "black capitalism."
It was under the moderate-conservative
aegis of the Nixon and Ford administrations of 1969-77 that the set
of policies which we identify with "affirmative action" was
implemented nationally in both the public and the private sectors.
Even after the 1978 Bakke decision, in which the Supreme Court
overturned the admissions policy of the University of California at
Davis which had set aside sixteen out of one hundred medical school
openings for racial minorities, the political impetus for racial
reform was not destroyed. What did occur, even before the triumph of
reaction under Reagan in the early 1980s, was that political
conservatives deliberately usurped the "colorblind" discourse of
many liberals from the desegregation movement.
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As conservatives retreated from the
Nixonian strategy of utilizing affirmative action tools to achieve
conservative political goals, they began to appeal to the latent
racist sentiments within the white population. They cultivated the
racist mythology that affirmative action was nothing less than a
rigid system of inflexible quotas which rewarded the incompetent and
the unqualified, who happened to be nonwhite, at the expense of
hardworking, taxpaying Americans, who happened to be white. White
conservatives were able to define "merit" in a manner that would
reinforce white male privilege, but in an inverted language that
would make the real victims of discrimination appear to be the
racists. It was, in retrospect, a brilliant political maneuver.
And the liberals were at a loss in
fighting back effectively precisely because they lacked a consensus
internally about the means and goals for achieving genuine equality.
Traditional liberals like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law
Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who favored an inclusionist,
colorblind ideology of reform, often ended up inside the camp of
racial reactionaries, who cynically learned to manipulate the
discourse of fairness.
SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
AT DIFFERENT LEVELS
These shifts and realignments within American political culture
about how to achieve greater fairness and equality for those who
have experienced discrimination had profound consequences by the
1990s. In general, most white Americans have made a clear break from
the overtly racist, Jim Crow segregationist policies of a generation
ago. They want to be perceived as being "fair" toward racial
minorities and women, and they acknowledge that policies like
affirmative action are necessary to foster a more socially just
society.
According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup
poll ( March 1719, 1995), when asked, "Do you favor or oppose
affirmative action programs?" 53% of whites polled expressed
support, compared to only 36% opposed. Not surprisingly,
AfricanAmericans expressed much stronger support, with 72% in favor
of affirmative action programs and only 21% against. Despite
widespread rhetoric that the vast majority of white males have
supposedly lost jobs and opportunities due to affirmative action
policies, the poll indicated that only 15% of all white males
believe that "they've lost a job because of affirmative action
policies."
However, there is severe erosion of
white support for affirmative action when one focuses more narrowly
on specific steps or remedies for addressing discrimination. For
example, the USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll indicates that only 30% of
whites favor the establishment of gender and racial "quotas" in
businesses, with 68% opposed. In contrast, two-thirds of all
African-Americans expressed support for quotas in business
employment, with only 30% opposed.
When asked whether quotas should be
created "that require schools to admit a certain number of
minorities and women," 61% of the whites were opposed, with 35% in
favor. Nearly two-thirds of all whites would also reject policies
that "require private businesses to set up specific goals and
timetables for hiring women and minorities if there were not
government programs that included hiring quotas," whereas two-thirds
of all African-Americans strongly favor affirmative action programs
with goals and timetables for private businesses. On issues of
implementing government-supported initiatives for social equality,
most black and white Americans still live in two distinct racial
universes.
It is not surprising that "angry white
men" form the core of those who are against affirmative action. What
is striking, however, is the general orientation of white women on
this issue. White women have been overwhelmingly the primary
beneficiaries of affirmative action: millions have gained access to
educational and employment opportunities through the implementation
and enforcement of such policies. But most of them clearly do not
share the political perspectives of AfricanAmericans and Hispanics
on this issue, nor do they perceive their own principal interests to
be at risk if affirmative action programs are abandoned by the
federal government or outlawed by the courts. In the same USA Today/
CNN/Gallup poll, only 8% of all white women stated that their
"colleagues at work or school privately questioned" their
qualifications because of affirmative action, compared to 19% of
black women and 28% of black men. Less than one in five white women
polled defined workplace discrimination as a "major problem,"
compared to 41% of blacks and 38% of Latinos. Forty percent of the
white women polled described job discrimination as "not being a
problem" at all. These survey results may help to explain why middle
class-oriented, liberal feminist leaders and constituencies have
been less vocal than African-Americans in the mobilization to defend
affirmative action.
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A quarter-century of affirmative action
programs, goals, and timetables has been clearly effective in
transforming the status of white women in the labor force. It is
certainly true that white men still dominate the upper ranks of
senior management: while constituting 47% of the nation's total
workforce, they make up 95% of all senior managerial positions at
the rank of vice president or above. However, women of all races now
constitute about 40% of the total workforce overall. As of the 1990
census, white women held nearly 40% of all middle management
positions. While their median incomes lag behind those of white men,
over the past twenty years white women have gained far greater
ground in terms of real earnings than black or Hispanic men in the
labor force. Black professional women have also gained ground in
recent decades, but blacks overall still remain significantly behind
white men in median incomes at all levels. In this context, civil
rights advocates and traditional defenders of affirmative action
must ask themselves whether the majority of white American women
actually perceive their material interests to be tied to the outcome
of the battle for income equity and affirmative action that most
blacks and Latinos, women and men alike, continue to fight.
We should also recognize that although
all people of color suffer in varying degrees from the stigma of
racism and economic disadvantage within American society, they do
not have the same material interests or identify themselves with the
same politics as the vast majority of African-Americans. For
example, here are mean on-the-job earnings, according to the 1990
census:
All American adults $15,105
Blacks $10,912
Native Americans $11,949
Hispanics $11,219
It is crucial to disaggregate social categories like "Hispanics" and
"Asian-Americans" to gain a true picture of the real material and
social conditions of significant populations of color. About half of
all Hispanics, according to the Bureau of the Census, identify
themselves as white, regardless of their actual physical appearance.
Puerto Ricans in New York City have lower median incomes than
African-Americans, while Argentines, a Hispanic group that claims
benefits from affirmative action programs, have mean on-the-job
incomes of $15,956 a year. The Hmong, immigrants from southeast
Asia, have mean on-the-job incomes of $3,194; by striking contrast,
the Japanese have annual incomes higher than those of whites.
None of these statistics negate the
reality of racial domination and discrimination in terms of social
relations, access to employment opportunities, or job advancement.
But they do tell us part of the reason why no broad coalition of
people of color has coalesced behind the political demand for
affirmative action. Various groups interpret their interests
narrowly and in divergent ways, looking out primarily for themselves
rather than addressing the structural inequalities within the fabric
of American society as a whole.
A DU BOISIAN STRATEGY TOWARD
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
So where do progressives and liberals go from here, given that the
Right has seized the political initiative in dismantling affirmative
action, minority economic set-asides, and the entire spectrum of
civil rights reforms? We must return to the theoretical perspectives
of Du Bois to begin some honest dialogue about why race relations
have soured so profoundly in recent years.
Affirmative action was largely
responsible for a significant increase in the size of the black
middle class; it opened many professional and managerial positions
to blacks, Latinos, and women for the first time. But in many other
respects, affirmative action can and should be criticized from the
Left, not because it was too liberal in its pursuit and
implementation of measures to achieve equality, but because it was
too conservative. It sought to increase representative numbers of
minorities and women within the existing structure and arrangements
of power, rather than challenging or redefining the institutions of
authority and privilege. As implemented under a series of
presidential administrations, liberal and conservative alike,
affirmative action was always more concerned with advancing remedies
for unequal racial outcomes than with uprooting racism as a system
of white power.
Rethinking progressive and liberal
strategies on affirmative action would require sympathetic whites to
acknowledge that much of the anti-affirmative action rhetoric is
really a retreat from a meaningful engagement on issues of race, and
that the vast majority of Americans who have benefited materially
from affirmative action have not been black at all. A Du Boisian
strategy toward affirmative action would argue that despite the
death of legal segregation a generation ago, we have not yet reached
the point where a color-blind society is possible, especially in
terms of the actual organization and structure of white power and
privilege. Institutional racism is real, and the central focus of
affirmative action must deal with the continuing burden of racial
inequality and discrimination in American life.
There are many ways to measure the
powerful reality of contemporary racism. For example, a 1994 study
of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that
African-American federal employees are more than twice as likely to
be dismissed as their white counterparts. Blacks are especially
likely to be fired at much higher rates than whites in jobs where
they constitute a significant share of the labor force: for example,
black clerk-typists are 4.7 times more likely to be dismissed than
whites, and black custodians 4.1 times more likely to be fired.
Discrimination is also rampant in
capital markets. Banks continue policies of "redlining," denying
loans in neighborhoods that are largely black and Hispanic. In New
York City in 1992, for instance, blacks were turned down for
mortgage applications by banks, savings and loans, and other
financial institutions about twice as often as whites. And even
after years of affirmative action programs, blacks and Latinos
remain grossly underrepresented in a wide number of professions.
As Jesse Jackson observed in a speech
before the National Press Club, while native-born white males make
up only 41% of the U.S. population, they are 80% of all tenured
professors, 92% of the Forbes 400 chief executive officers, and 97%
of all school superintendents.
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If affirmative action should be
criticized, it might be on the grounds that it didn't go far enough
in transforming the actual power relations between black and white
within our society. More evidence for this is addressed by the
sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White
Wealth (1995). The authors point out that "the typical black family
has eleven cents of wealth for every dollar owned by the typical
white family." Even middle-class African-Americans, people who often
benefited from affirmative action, are significantly poorer than
whites who earn identical incomes. If housing and vehicles owned are
included in the definition of "net wealth," the median middle-class
African-American family has only $8,300 in total assets, as against
$56,000 for the comparable white family.
Why are blacks at all income levels much
poorer than whites in terms of wealth? African-American families not
only inherit much less wealth; they are hit daily by institutional
inequality and discrimination. For years, they were denied life
insurance policies by white firms. They are still denied home
mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants.
African-Americans have been less likely to receive government-backed
home loans.
Given the statistical profile of racial
inequality, liberals must reject the temptation to move away from
"race-conscious remedies" to "race-neutral" reforms defined by
income or class criteria. Affirmative action has always had a
distinct and separate function from antipoverty programs. Income and
social class inequality affect millions of whites, Asian-Americans,
Latinos, and blacks alike, and programs that expand employment,
educational access, and social service benefits based on economic
criteria alone are absolutely essential. But the impetus for racism
is not narrowly economic in origin. Racial prejudice is still a
destructive force in the lives of upper middle-class,
college-educated African-Americans as well as poor blacks, and
programs designed to address the discrimination they feel and
experience collectively every day must be grounded in the context of
race. However, affirmative action is legitimately related to class
questions, but in a different way. A truly integrated workplace,
where people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and
cultural identities learn to interact and respect each other, is an
essential precondition for building a broadly pluralistic movement
for radical democracy. The expanded implementation of affirmative
action, despite its liberal limitations, would assist in creating
the social conditions essential for pluralistic coalitions to
promote full employment and more progressive social policies.
What is required among progressives is
not a reflexive, uncritical defense of affirmative action, but a
recognition of its contradictory evolution and conceptual
limitations as well as its benefits and strengths. We need a
thoughtful and innovative approach in challenging discrimination
which, like that of Du Bois, reaffirms the centrality of the
struggle against racism within the development of affirmative action
measures. We must build on the American majority's continued support
for affirmative action, linking the general public's commitment to
social fairness with creative measures that actually target the real
patterns and processes of discrimination that millions of Utinos and
blacks experience every day. And we must not be pressured into a
false debate to choose between race and class in the development and
framing of public policies addressing discrimination. Moving toward
the long-term goal of a colorblind society, the deconstruction of
racism, does not mean that we become neutral about the continuing
significance of race in American life.
As the national debate concerning the
possible elimination of affirmative action comes to define the 1996
presidential campaign, black and progressive Americans must
reevaluate their strategies for reform. In recent years we have
tended to rely on elections, the legislative process, and the courts
to achieve racial equality. We should remember how the struggle to
dismantle Jim Crow segregation was won. We engaged in economic
boycotts, civil disobedience, teach-ins, freedom schools, and
freedom rides; we formed community-based coalitions and united
fronts. There's a direct relationship between our ability to
mobilize people in communities to protest and the pressure we can
exert on elected officials to protect and enforce civil rights.
Voting is absolutely essential, but it
isn't enough. We must channel the profound discontent, the
alienation and anger that currently exist in the black community
toward constructive, progressive forms of political intervention and
resistance. As we fight for affirmative action, let us understand
that we are fighting for a larger ideal: the ultimate elimination of
race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and
discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation.
To Fulfill These Rights
Lyndon B. Johnson1
Our earth is the home of revolution.
In every corner of every continent men
charged with hope contend with ancient ways in the pursuit of
justice. They reach for the newest of weapons to realize the oldest
of dreams; that each may walk in freedom and pride, stretching his
talents, enjoying the fruits of the earth.
Our enemies may occasionally seize the
day of change. But it is the banner of our revolution they take. And
our own future is linked to this process of swift and turbulent
change in many lands in the world. But nothing in any country
touches us more profoundly, nothing is more freighted with meaning
for our own destiny, than the revolution of the Negro American.
In far too many ways American Negroes
have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred,
the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
In our time change has come to this
nation too. The American Negro, acting with impressive restraint,
has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the
seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied.
The voice of the Negro was a call to action. But it is a tribute to
America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the
President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress.
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Thus we have seen the high court of the country declare that
discrimination based on race was repugnant to the Constitution, and
therefore void. We have seen in 1957, 1960, and again in 1964, the
first civil rights legislation in this nation in almost an entire
century.
As majority leader of the United States
Senate, I helped to guide two of these bills through the Senate. As
your President, I was proud to sign the third. And now very soon we
will have the fourth -- a new law guaranteeing every American the
right to vote.
No act of my entire administration will
give me greater satisfaction than the day when my signature makes
this bill too the law of this land.
The Voting Rights Bill will be the
latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories.
But this victory -as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for
freedom -"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
That beginning is freedom. And the
barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to
share fully and equally in American society -- to vote, to hold a
job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be
treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in
dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. You do not
wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go
where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years,
has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the
starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with
all the others," and still justly believe that you have been
completely fair.
Thus it is not enough to just open the
gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk
through those gates.
This is the next and more profound stage
of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but
opportunity -- not just legal equity but human ability -- not just
equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a
result.
For the task is to give twenty million
Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow,
to work and share in society, to develop their abilities --
physical, mental, and spiritual, and to pursue their individual
happiness.
To this end equal opportunity is
essential, but not enough. Men and women of all races are born with
the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of
birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family you live with,
and the neighborhood you live in, by the school you go to and the
poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a
hundred unseen forces playing upon the infant, the child, and the
man.
We seek not just freedom but opportunity
--
not just equality as a right and a theory,
but equality as a fact.
This graduating class of Howard
University is witness to the indomitable determination of the Negro
American to win his way in American life.
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The number of Negroes in schools of
higher learning has almost doubled in fifteen years. The number of
nonwhite professional workers has more than doubled in ten years.
The median income of Negro college women exceeds that of white
college women. And there are also the enormous accomplishments of
distinguished individual Negroes -- many of them graduates of this
institution, and one of them the first lady ambassador in the
history of the United States.
These are proud and impressive
achievements. But they tell only the story of a growing middle class
minority, steadily narrowing the gap between them and their white
counterparts.
But for the great majority of Negro
Americans -- the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the
dispossessed -- there is a much grimmer story. They still are
another nation. Despite the court orders and the laws, despite the
legislative victories and the speeches, for them the walls are
rising and the gulf is widening.Here are some of the facts of this
American failure. Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for
Negroes and whites was about the same. Today the Negro rate is twice
as high.
In 1948 the 8% unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually
less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23%,
as against 13% for whites.
Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men
declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the
median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped
from 57% to 53%.
In the years 1955 through 1957, 22% of experienced Negro workers
were out of work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963
that proportion had soared to 29%.
Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has
decreased 27%, while the number of poor nonwhite families decreased
only 3%.
The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70% greater than
whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90% greater.
Moreover, the isolation of Negro from
white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing, as Negroes
crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.
Of course Negro Americans as well as
white Americans have shared in our rising national abundance. But
the harsh fact of the matter is that in the battle for true equality
too many are losing ground every day.
We are not completely sure why this is.
The causes are complex and subtle. But we do know the two broad
basic reasons. And we do know that we have to act.
First, Negroes are trapped -- as many
whites are trapped -- in inherited, gateless poverty. They lack
training and skills. They are shut in slums, without decent medical
care. Private and public poverty combine to cripple their
capacities.
We are trying to attack these evils
through our poverty program, through our education program, through
our medical care and our other health programs, and a dozen more of
the Great Society programs that are aimed at the root causes of this
poverty.
We will increase, and accelerate, and
broaden this attack in years to come until this most enduring of
foes finally yields to our unyielding will. But there is a second
cause -- much more difficult to explain, more deeply grounded, more
desperate in its force. It is the devastating heritage of long years
of slavery; and of oppression, hatred, and injustice.
For Negro poverty is not white poverty.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are
differences -deep, corrosive, obstinate differences -- radiating
painful roots into the community, the family, and the nature of the
individual.
These differences are not racial
differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient
brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are
anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of
oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But
they must be faced and dealt with and overcome, if we are ever to
reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites
is the color of their skin.
Nor can we find a complete answer in the
experience of other American minorities. They made a valiant and a
largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and prejudice. The
Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly on his own
efforts. But he just can not do it alone. For they did not have the
heritage of centuries to overcome. They did not have the cultural
tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of
hatred and hopelessness. Nor were they excluded because of race or
color -- a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other
prejudice in society.
Nor can these differences be understood
as isolated infirmities. They are a seamless web. They cause each
other. They result from each other. They reinforce each other. Much
of the Negro community is buried under a blanket of history and
circumstance. It is not a lasting solution to lift just one corner
of that blanket. We must stand on all sides and raise the entire
cover if we are to liberate our fellow citizens.
One of the differences is the increased
concentration of Negroes in the cities. More than 73% of all Negroes
live in urban areas compared with less than 70% of the whites. Most
of the Negroes live in slums. Most of them live together -- a
separated people. Men are shaped by their world. When it is a world
of decay, ringed by an invisible wall -- when escape is arduous and
uncertain, and the saving pressures of a more hopeful society are
unknown -- it can cripple the youth and desolate the man.
There is also the burden that a dark
skin can add to the search for a productive place in society.
Unemployment strikes most swiftly and broadly at the Negro. This
burden erodes hope. Blighted hope breeds despair. Despair brings
indifference to the learning which offers a way out. And despair,
coupled with indifference, is often the source of destructive
rebellion against the fabric of society.
There is also lacerating hurt of early
collision with white hatred or prejudice, distaste, or
condescension. Other groups have felt similar intolerance. But
success and achievement could wipe it away. They do not change the
color of a man's skin. I have seen this uncomprehending pain in the
eyes of little Mexican-American school children that I taught many
years ago. It can be overcome. But for many, the wounds are always
open.
Perhaps most important -- its influence
radiating to every part of life -- is the breakdown of the Negro
family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept
responsibility.
It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro
man. It flows from long years of degradation and discrimination,
which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to provide
for his family.
This, too, is not pleasant to look upon.
But it must be faced by those whose serious intent is to improve the
life of all Americans.
Only a minority -- less than half -- of
all Negro children reach the age of eighteen having lived all their
lives with both of their parents. At this moment little less than
two-thirds are living with both of their parents. Probably a
majority of all Negro children receive federally aided public
assistance sometime during their childhood.
The family is the cornerstone of our
society. More than any other force it shapes the attitudes, the
hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. When the family
collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it
happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.
So unless we work to strengthen the
family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay
together -- all the rest: schools and playgrounds, public assistance
and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the
circle of despair and deprivation.
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Beowulf
THE OLDEST ENGLISH EPIC
Translated into Alliterative Verse with a Critical Introduction by
CHARLES W. KENNEDY
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford London New York
(The full version of Beowulf can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
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INTRODUCTION
THE Old English Beowulf holds a unique place as the oldest epic
narrative in any modern European tongue. Of unknown authorship, and
dating in all probability from the early eighth century, the poem
gives brilliant presentment of the spirit and embodiment of the
heroic tradition. Illuminating studies of the Beowulf, in
comparatively recent years, by Ker, Lawrence, Chambers, Klaeber,
Malone, and others, have brought increasing appraisal of the extent
to which Scandinavian backgrounds are reflected in its material,
literary tradition in its structure, and Christian influence in its
spirit.
Of the circumstances under which the Beowulf was composed we
actually know little, though it is possible to trace with some
degree of clearness the evolution of the material from which the
poem is shaped. Portions of this material must have originally
circulated by oral transmission. The poem itself may well have been
developed from an earlier series of epic lays, though no one of
these lays has survived. In any case, as Ker has pointed out, the
Beowulf , in the form in which it has come down to us, is a single,
unified poem. It is, he writes, 'an extant book, whatever the
history of its composition may have been; the book of the adventures
of Beowulf, written out fair by two scribes in the tenth century; an
epic poem, with a prologue at the beginning and a judgment
pronounced on the life of the hero at the end; a single book,
considered as such by its transcribers, and making a claim to be so
considered.'
In the light which modern critical scholarship has focussed upon the
Beowulf , it has come to be recognized that we have here a poem of
cultivated craftsmanship, sophisticated rather than primitive in
form, and definitely influenced by literary and religious tradition.
The influence of the Christian faith is marked and pervasive. There
are evidences, also, which seem to support opinion that the author
of the Beowulf was familiar with the works of Virgil, and that the
structure and development of the poem were influenced by epic
tradition as illustrated in the Aeneid.
The material of which the narrative is shaped is, in large measure,
the material not of primitive English, but of primitive Scandinavian
life. In the weaving of the narrative the warp is, in part at least,
fashioned from the stuff of Continental chronicle and legend. Names
of early Swedish kings, repeatedly mentioned in the Beowulf , have
correspondence to names of kings listed in the ninth-century
Ynglingatal . Names and incidents in the poem relating to the ruling
house of the Danes have their analogues in the Skjoldungasaga, and
in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. The disastrous expedition
against the Franks of 516, in which Beowulf's uncle, Hygelac, was
slain, is set forth in the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours,
who wrote within seventy years of the events described, and in the
eighth-century Liber Historiae Francorum .
Into this background are woven dark legends of savage feuds of the
Continental tribes, feuds of the Danes and Frisians, the Danes and
Heathobards, the Geats and Swedes. At Beowulf's death, the prophecy
of Swedish dominion over the Geats derives its tragic foreboding
from chanted memories of the bitter tribal battle at Ravenswood. The
songs of the minstrel in Hrothgar's hall were fashioned from ancient
Continental lays: the dragon-fight of Sigemund, the Volsung; the
disastrous battle of Danes and Frisians at Finnsburg.
In a setting shaped of these elements the poet has developed a
narrative, the material of which is derived from Continental
folk-tale. The haunting of Hrothgar's hall by the night-prowling
monster, Grendel, and the troll-wife, his mother; the adventurous
journey of Beowulf, the Geat, to Dane-land, and his triumph over the
monsters; these central themes in the narrative have their analogues
in various versions of the European folk-tale of 'The Bear's Son.'
Certain Scandinavian tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the Grettissaga , the Samsonssaga , the Hrolfssaga , and
others, include elements which show resemblance to this basic
material of the Beowulf , and the resemblance is sufficiently
unmistakable to indicate dependence of both the Beowulf and the
sagas upon the same or similar Scandinavian sources.
(The full version of Beowulf''s Introduction can be
found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for BEOWULF).
BEOWULF
[The Danish Court and the Raids of Grendel]
Lo! we have listened to many a lay
of the Spear-Danes' fame, their splendor of old,
Their mighty princes, and martial deeds!
Many a mead-hall Scyld, son of Sceaf,
Snatched from the forces of savage foes.
From a friendless foundling, feeble and wretched,
He grew to a terror as time brought change.
He throve under heaven in power and pride
Till alien peoples beyond the ocean
Paid toll and tribute. A good king he!
To him thereafter an heir was born,
A son of his house, whom God had given
As stay to the people; God saw the distress
The leaderless nation had long endured.
The Giver of glory, the Lord of life,
Showered fame on the son of Scyld;
His name was honored, Beowulf known,
To the farthest dwellings in Danish lands.
So must a young man strive for good
With gracious gifts from his father's store,
That in later seasons, if war shall scourge,
A willing people may serve him well.
'Tis by earning honor a man must rise
In every state. Then his hour struck,
And Scyld passed on to the peace of God.
(The full version of Beowulf can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for BEOWULF, THE OLDEST
ENGLISH EPIC).
As their leader had bidden, whose word was law
In the Scylding realm which he long had ruled,
His loving comrades carried him down
To the shore of ocean; a ring-prowed ship,
Straining at anchor and sheeted with ice,
Rode in the harbor, a prince's pride.
Therein they laid him, their well-loved lord,
Their ring-bestower, in the ship's embrace,
The mighty prince at the foot of the mast
Amid much treasure and many a gem
From far-off lands. No lordlier ship
Have I ever heard of, with weapons heaped,
With battle-armor, with bills and byrnies.
On the ruler's breast lay a royal treasure
As the ship put out on the unknown deep.
With no less adornment they dressed him round,
Or gift of treasure, than once they gave
Who launched him first on the lonely sea
While still but a child. A golden standard
They raised above him, high over head,
Let the wave take him on trackless seas.
Mournful their mood and heavy their hearts;
Nor wise man nor warrior knows for a truth
Unto what haven that cargo came.
Then Beowulf ruled o'er the Scylding realm,
Beloved and famous, for many a year --
The prince, his father, had passed away --
Till, firm in wisdom and fierce in war,
The mighty Healfdene held the reign,
Ruled, while he lived, the lordly Scyldings.
Four sons and daughters were seed of his line,
Heorogar and Hrothgar, leaders of hosts,
And Halga, the good. I have also heard
A daughter was Onela's consort and queen,
The fair bed-mate of the Battle-Scylfing.
To Hrothgar was granted glory in war,
Success in battle; retainers bold
Obeyed him gladly; his band increased
To a mighty host. Then his mind was moved
To have men fashion a high-built hall,
A mightier mead-hall than man had known,
Wherein to portion to old and young
All goodly treasure that God had given,
Save only the folk-land, and lives of men.
His word was published to many a people
Far and wide o'er the ways of earth
To rear a folk-stead richly adorned;
The task was speeded, the time soon came
That the famous mead-hall was finished and done.
To distant nations its name was known,
The Hall of the Hart; and the king kept well
His pledge and promise to deal out gifts,
Rings at the banquet. The great hall rose
High and horn-gabled, holding its place
Till the battle-surge of consuming flame
Should swallow it up; the hour was near
That the deadly hate of a daughter's husband
Should kindle to fury and savage feud.
(The full version of Beowulf can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for BEOWULF, THE OLDEST
ENGLISH EPIC).
Then an evil spirit who dwelt in the darkness
Endured it ill that he heard each day
The din of revelry ring through the hall,
The sound of the harp, and the scop's sweet song.
A skillful bard sang the ancient story
Of man's creation; how the Maker wrought
The shining earth with its circling waters;
in splendor established the sun and moon
As lights to illumine the land of men;
Fairly adorning the fields of earth
With leaves and branches; creating life
In every creature that breathes and moves.
So the lordly warriors lived in gladness,
At ease and happy, till a fiend from hell
Began a series of savage crimes.
They called him Grendel, a demon grim
Haunting the fen-lands, holding the moors,
Ranging the wastes, where the wretched wight
Made his lair with the monster kin;
He bore the curse of the seed of Cain
Whereby God punished the grievous guilt
Of Abel's murder. Nor ever had Cain
Cause to boast of that deed of blood;
God banished him far from the fields of men;
Of his blood was begotten an evil brood,
Marauding monsters and menacing trolls,
Goblins and giants who battled with God
A long time. Grimly He gave them reward!
Then at the nightfall the fiend drew near
Where the timbered mead-hall towered on high,
To spy how the Danes fared after the feast.
Within the wine-hall. he found the warriors
Fast in slumber, forgetting grief,
Forgetting the woe of the world of men.
Grim and greedy the gruesome monster,
Fierce and furious, launched attack,
Slew thirty spearmen asleep in the hall,
Sped away gloating, gripping the spoil,
Dragging the dead men home to his den.
Then in the dawn with the coming of daybreak
The war-might of Grendel was widely known.
Mirth was stilled by the sound of weeping;
The wail of the mourner awoke with day.
And the peerless hero, the honored prince,
Weighed down with woe and heavy of heart,
Sat sorely grieving for slaughtered thanes,
As they traced the track of the cursed monster.
From that day onward the deadly feud
Was a long-enduring and loathsome strife.
Not longer was it than one night later
The fiend returning renewed attack
With heart firm-fixed in the hateful war,
Feeling no rue for the grievous wrong.
'Twas easy thereafter to mark the men
Who sought their slumber elsewhere afar,
Found beds in the bowers, since Grendel's hate
Was so baldly blazoned in baleful signs.
He held himself at a safer distance
Who escaped the clutch of the demon's claw.
So Grendel raided and ravaged the realm,
One against all, in an evil war
Till the best of buildings was empty and still.
'Twas a weary while! Twelve winters' time
The lord of the Scyldings had suffered woe,
Sore affliction and deep distress.
And the malice of Grendel, in mournful lays,
Was widely sung by the sons of men,
The hateful feud that he fought with Hrothgar --
Year after year of struggle and strife,
An endless scourging, a scorning of peace
With any man of the Danish might.
No strength could move him to stay his hand,
Or pay for his murders; the wise knew well
They could hope for no halting of savage assault.
Like a dark death-shadow the ravaging demon,
Night-long prowling the misty moors,
Ensnared the warriors, wary or weak.
No man can say how these shades of hell
Come and go on their grisly rounds.
(The full version of Beowulf can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for BEOWULF, THE OLDEST
ENGLISH EPIC).
With many an outrage, many a crime,
The fierce lone-goer, the foe of man,
Stained the seats of the high-built house,
Haunting the hall in the hateful dark.
But throne or treasure he might not touch,
Finding no favor or grace with God.
Great was the grief of the Scylding leader,
His spirit shaken, while many a lord
Gathered in council considering long
In what way brave men best could struggle
Against these terrors of sudden attack.
From time to time in their heathen temples
Paying homage they offered prayer
That the Slayer of souls would send them succor
From all the torment that troubled the folk.
Such was the fashion and such the faith
Of their heathen hearts that they looked to hell,
Not knowing the Maker, the mighty Judge,
Nor how to worship the Wielder of glory,
The Lord of heaven, the God of hosts.
Woe unto him who in fierce affliction
Shall plunge his soul in the fiery pit
With no hope of mercy or healing change;
But well with the soul that at death seeks God,
And finds his peace in his Father's bosom.
The son of Healfdene was heavy-hearted,
Sorrowfully brooding in sore distress,
Finding no help in a hopeless strife;
Too bitter the struggle that stunned the people,
The long oppression, loathsome and grim.
(The full version of Beowulf can be found at
Questia's Online Libary by
clicking here and searching for BEOWULF, THE OLDEST
ENGLISH EPIC).

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Banned in the
Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press, Motion
Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet,
By Herbert N. Foerstel
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clicking hereIntroduction
The 1996 Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines the "media" as
"the main means of mass communication (esp. newspapers and
broadcasting)." The 1995 Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia ( David
Crystal , ed., 2d ed., 1995) says "media" is "a collective term for
television, radio, cinema, and the press." This book will use these
standard definitions, with one modification: the inclusion of the
Internet, the newest and most controversial form of mass
communication.
There is little doubt that the media have overwhelmed books as
the preferred source of information and entertainment worldwide, and
the United States is both the primary producer and the primary
consumer of the media product. A recent study conducted by the U.S.
Census Bureau and the New York communications investment house,
Veronis Suhler, produced some startling figures. The media business
has become one of the twelve largest industries in the United
States. Profits are high; operating margins range from 5.4 percent
for the emerging interactive digital media to more than 16 percent
for broadcasters. Several of the big newspapers do even better. The
expectation is that the growth rate of newspaper revenues will
double between 1995 and the year 2000, and the other media will do
almost as well. 1
More interesting is the data indicating the stranglehold that the
media have on the American public. The ordinary American spends
3,400 hours a year consuming the media output. That represents
almost 40 percent of our lives, more time than we spend sleeping and
far more time than we spend working. Radio and television represent
80 percent of our media consumption. Our reading occupies about an
hour a day, half of it for newspapers. By the year 2000, according
to the study, we will be reading even less, watching television even
more, and spending more time on the Internet. 2
Little wonder, then, that we hear so much about the power of the
media and its influence on everything from morality to politics. The
current problem is not the growing media power, but the narrowing
corporate cabal that wields it. In 1983 Ben Bagdikian, then
journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, published
The Media Monopoly, which revealed that at least half of all media
business was controlled by just fifty corporations. By 1987, when
his second edition appeared, he reported that just twenty-nine
corporations exercised that power, and by the time of his fourth
edition in 1992, that number had shrunk to twenty. Bagdikian noted a
similar evolution in newspapers and magazines. Of the 1,700 daily
newspapers in this country, 98 percent were local monopolies and
most of their combined circulation was controlled by fewer than
fifteen corporations. Among magazines, Time, Inc., alone was
responsible for 40 percent of industry revenues. 3
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Bagdikian wrote,
[A] shrinking number of large media corporations now regard
monopoly, oligopoly, and historic levels of profit as not only
normal, but as their earned right. In the process, the usual
democratic expectations for the media -- diversity of ownership and
ideas -- have disappeared as the goal of official policy, and worse,
as a daily experience of a generation of American viewers and
readers. . . . It's no way to maintain a lively marketplace of
ideas, which is to say it is no way to maintain a democracy. 4
Bagdikian's trailblazing research and widely praised 1987 edition
of The Media Monopoly were virtually ignored by the media. His
explanation of why the major media had failed to discuss the
disadvantages of media consolidation was simple: editors were not
interested in these problems because they were all in the newspaper
consolidation business themselves.
Indeed, the media's failure to address the most significant
problem in its industry caused that very issue to be declared the
"most censored news story of 1987" by the prestigious Project
Censored. Every year since 1977, Project Censored, based at Sonoma
State University, has published its list of the news issues or
"stories" that have been most heavily suppressed during the previous
year. The judges who selected the media monopoly story as the "most
censored" during 1987 included John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Moyers,
and Judith Krug. Communications professor Carl Jensen, originator of
Project Censored, said the judges selected the media monopoly story
because it was the root cause for underreporting generally. "We have
fewer sources, fewer outlets and more control by fewer people," said
Jensen. 5
The problem of media monopolies has worsened in recent years, but
it continues to be ignored by the media. Project Censored's latest
edition, Censored 1997. The News That Didn't Make the News, featured
an article, "Free the Media," that literally mapped out the four
giant corporations that control the major television news divisions:
the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the American Broadcasting
Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the Cable
News Network (CNN). Author Mark Miller notes that two of the four
holding corporations are defense contractors (both involved in
nuclear production), and the other two purvey entertainment. Miller
concludes that we are thus the subjects of a "national entertainment
state," in which the news and much of our amusement are provided by
the two most powerful industries in the United States.
Miller presents an elaborate chart that maps the tentacles of
General Electric, Time Warner, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse,
the four media giants. He says a glance at each chart reveals why,
say, Tom Brokaw might have difficulty covering stories critical of
nuclear power, or ABC News will no longer be likely to do an exposé
of Disney's policies, or, indeed, why none of the media is willing
to touch the biggest story of them all -- the media monopoly itself.
Miller says such maps "suggest the true causes of those enormous
ills that now dismay so many Americans: the universal sleaze and 'dumbing
down,' the flood tide of corporate propaganda, the terminal inanity
of U.S. politics." He warns that "the same gigantic players that
control the elder media are planning shortly to absorb the Internet,
which could be transformed from a thriving common wilderness into an
immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests, with all
the dissident voices exiled to sites known only to the activists."
Only a new, broad-based antitrust movement can save the media,
according to Miller. 6
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The media have always been the captive of religion and politics,
scorned and manipulated by both in ways beyond anything suffered by
book publishers. A recent example of the former is the boycott
launched by Baptists against the Walt Disney Company. On June 18,
1997, the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas
overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging the denomination's 15.7
million members to boycott all presentations and products bearing
the Disney name and everything produced by the vast Disney
conglomerate that includes Miramax Films, ABC television, ESPN, E!
and Disney cable channels and Hyperion Books. The primary objection
expressed by the Baptists was Disney's support for homosexuals, as
represented by ABC's sitcom "Ellen," whose star is an admitted
lesbian and Disney's willingness to grant health benefits to the
partners of homosexual employees.
The Baptists admit that the effectiveness of the boycott may not
be immediately evident, but Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian
Film and Television Commission, said, "The Crusades were not a high
point in public relations for the church, but they give people a
feeling of accomplishment, and this boycott may do the same for many
Americans." 7
Banned in the U.S.A. ( 1994) examined censorship in book
publishing, but only in the context of schools and libraries. This
book may be regarded as a sequel to Banned in the U.S.A., but there
are significant differences. Banned in the Media examines censorship
in six formats -newspapers, magazines, radio, television, motion
pictures and the Internet-in a wide variety of contexts. Whereas
individual books can be plucked from school classrooms or library
shelves by nervous school or library officials, much of the media
product is ephemeral, and its censorship is wielded with a broader
brush.
An important distinction between my methodologies for analyzing
books and the media is the manner in which incidents of censorship
are tallied and compared. The number of times a particular book
title is banned from school curricula or removed from library
shelves can be tallied and a list of the most banned books can be
assembled, but much of the media does not admit to such
particularization. The wide and disparate variety of media formats
make it impossible to analyze statistically and rank incidents
across the entire media. Frequently, it is even difficult to isolate
and identify the origin of media censorship.
Serial publications, particularly magazines, are uniquely
vulnerable to newsstand or convenience store boycotts. They also
suffer censorship of individual articles or issues. Motion pictures,
like books, have been banned in ways that allow statistical
analysis, but the monolithic
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THE DEATH PENALTY:
A WORLD-WIDE PERSPECTIVE
By ROGER HOOD
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clicking here1 Overview
The Present Status of the Abolitionist Movement
Despite the fact that the movement to abolish the death penalty got
under-way in the mid-nineteenth century, by 1965 when Norval Morris
reported to the United Nations, only 12 countries (plus a few
constituent states) had completely abolished it, and a further 11
countries had abolished it for ordinary crimes in peacetime. Since
then the abolitionist position has been embraced by an ever
increasing number of countries.
Any review of the situation with regard to the abolition of the
death penalty on a world-wide basis over the last thirty years is
complicated by the fact that, during this period, the political map
of the world has changed considerably. In particular, many newly
independent states have emerged, some of them, of course, being
fragmentary parts of formerly unified states. During the thirty
years since 1965, 58 countries have abolished capital punishment: 46
of them absolutely for all crimes, and 12 of them for 'ordinary
crimes'. Several of these countries had been, at the time they
abolished the death penalty, abolitionist de facto, meaning that
they had not executed anybody for at least ten years.
The pace of change towards abolition has further increased in the
six years since the first edition of this survey was published in
1989. Since then, 25 countries have abolished capital punishment, 23
for all crimes, whether in peacetime or in war. In comparison, 35
countries abolished the death penalty (25 absolutely and 10 for
ordinary crimes) in the 23 years between the survey undertaken for
the United Nations by Norval Morris, and that carried out in 1988
for the first edition of this report. In other words, the annual
average rate at which countries have abolished the death penalty has
increased from 1.5 to 4 per year, or nearly three times as many. A
list of all abolitionist and retentionist countries with the date of
abolition and of the last execution, in those which are abolitionist
or abolitionist de facto, can be found in Appendix 1.
Amongst the retentionist states, at least 30 have not executed
anybody during the last ten years, and often far longer. Thirteen of
these countries have reached this abolitionist de facto status only
since 1989. However, 10 countries which had been previously
considered de facto abolitionist moved in the opposite direction by
resuming executions and were still considered to be retentionist in
1995. Three more countries, and two states of the United States of
America, which had abolished the death penalty, re-instated it,
although none of them have yet carried out any executions.
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Although the world-wide movement towards abolition has proceeded
at an increasing pace, it has to be recognized that this has not
occurred evenly across the globe. Many of the recent abolitionist
states are in Africa south of the Sahara, with some in Asia--regions
where very few countries were abolitionist six years ago. On the
other hand, there has been a marked resistance to appeals for
change, indeed official support for capital punishment, in various
parts of the world. Furthermore, the creation of 15 independent
states, all but one of them retaining the death penalty, within the
boundaries of the former Soviet Union, inevitably distorts any
comparisons between 1988 and 1995.
By the end of December 1995 there were 58 totally abolitionist
countries, 14 abolitionist for ordinary crimes, 30 abolitionist de
facto, and 90 still retentionist (see Appendix 1). Bearing in mind
that the countries are not necessarily the same in 1988 as they were
in 1995.
Even though, by the end of 1995, less than a third of all
separate political entities had completely abolished the death
penalty de jure, more than half had abolished it either in law or in
practice.
Of great significance has been the adoption of protocols to
conventions on human, civil, and political rights which endorse the
abolition of the death penalty as an international goal. In December
1982 the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted
Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR),
article 1 of which provides for the abolition of the death penalty
in peacetime. Article 2, however, does allow a state to make
provision in its law for the death penalty in time of war or of
imminent threat of war. Seven years later, in December 1989, the
United Nations General Assembly adopted the Second Optional Protocol
to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Article 1 of the Optional Protocol states: 'No one within the
jurisdiction of a State party to the present Optional Protocol shall
be executed'. Although article 2, like the Sixth Protocol to the
ECHR, allows a reservation to be made 'which provides for the
application of the death penalty in time of war pursuant to a
conviction for a most serious crime of a military nature committed
during wartime', the reservation can only be made at the time of
ratification or accession. In June 1990, the General Assembly of the
Organisation of American States adopted the Protocol to the American
Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty (ACHR).
Article 1 calls upon states to abstain from the use of the death
penalty, but does not impose an obligation on them to erase it from
the statute book. Thus de facto abolitionist countries may also
ratify the Protocol. None of these instruments, of course, fully
endorse the complete abolition of the death penalty.
However, a significant move was made in this direction when, in
1994, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
recommended that a further Protocol to the European Convention on
Human Rights should be established. This would provide for the
complete abolition of the death penalty with no possibility of
reservations being entered for its retention in any special
circumstances. In addition, the Assembly resolved that 'the
willingness to ratify the [Sixth Protocol] be made a prerequisite
for membership of the Council of Europe'. The importance of these
international developments is discussed further in paras 87-89
below.
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Mahatma Gandhi:
Peaceful Revolutionary
By Haridas T. Muzumdar
(get the full version of this research and other sources
for your paper on Gandhi at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
PREFACE
"THE LIGHT has gone out of our lives," said Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, in an impromptu radio address upon Gandhi's
martyrdom; "there is darkness everywhere." Could it really be that
Gandhi's light ceased to shine since he was no longer with us in his
puny bundle of flesh and bones? Correcting himself, Nehru continued:
"I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no
ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these
many years will illumine this country for many more years; and a
thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country, and
the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.
For that light represented something more than the immediate
present; it represented the living truth . . . the eternal truths,
reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this
ancient country to freedom."1
Gandhi may truly be said to be the prophetic voice of the
twentieth century. Violence inflicts upon its practitioners physical
and spiritual wounds; the way of non-violence, said Gandhi, "blesses
him who uses it and him against whom it is used."2 Again,
"non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of
the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and he knows no law
but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to
a higher law -- to the strength of the spirit."3
Let us be sure we do not misunderstand the philosophy of
non-violence embodied in Gandhi's life and teachings. A practitioner
of the non-violent way of life, far from being passive, is the most
active person in the world. He is ready to join the fray
-non-violently -- wherever and whenever there is injustice or wrong.
He neither tolerates nor compromises with injustice, wrong, tyranny,
authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship. His task in life is
not to destroy the evildoer but to redeem and to convert the
evildoer by love. " 'With malice toward none, with charity for all;
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right," he is
ever ready to "bind up" humanity's "wounds," to minister to the
underprivileged and to the misguided. The constant concern of the
follower of non-violence is, in the words of Lincoln, to "achieve
and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations."
The spirit of India's Gandhi as well as of America's Lincoln is
today sorely needed by a generation madly dancing over a precipice.
We have learned to fathom the secrets of the atom, we have learned
to master nature, but we have not yet learned to master our inner
selves. Our scientists can predict with accuracy the long-range
behavior and movements of stars and planets millions of miles away
-- but we are unable to foretell our nextdoor neighbor's behavior
and movements the very next moment.
The world has become a small neighborhood. Therefore, we are
called upon to understand and appreciate our neighbors across the
Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as across the Great Lakes and the
Gulf. To understand other nations, we must know their values and
their historical development. This requires a sympathetic approach
to other nations, cultures, and religions. By understanding Gandhi
we may build a bridge of understanding between ourselves and India,
between ourselves and the Orient, between ourselves and noble free
spirits the world over.
What is Gandhi's message for our small neighborhood world divided
into two camps -- democratic and totalitarian? First of all, Gandhi
would have us set our course by the twin stars of Truth and
Non-Violence; which means, we must approach other peoples with
charity and sympathy. Second, Gandhi would have us stand on a
platform of values to which we must be faithful unto death; which
means, we must act in accordance with principles, not expediency.
Appeasement, even for the sake of peace, must be ruled out, because
appeasement implies sacrifice of principles. Third, Gandhi would
have us work ceaselessly for the realization of "common-human"
values, as the sociologists say, for the triumph of the common-human
way of life.
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Gandhi did not believe in imposing his values or his way of life
upon others; by the same token, he resisted even to death the
attempts of others to impose upon him or his people their values and
way of life. To be true to the Gandhi spirit, we may not, we cannot,
think of imposing our democratic values and way of life upon the
nations behind the iron curtain; nor would we permit those nations
to impose their totalitarian values and way of life upon us. At the
same time, the Gandhi way of life imposes upon us the obligation to
share our democratic values and way of life with the peoples behind
the iron curtain by open and non-violent methods.
According to Gandhi, there are three types of human beings: (1)
the coward, (2) the brave, (3) the superior. The coward, in order to
save his skin, supinely acquiesces in injustice and wrong. The brave
hero, on the other hand, violently resists injustice and wrong in
order to re-establish justice and right. The superior person is he
who, in the fullness of his strength, forgives the wrongdoer and
tries to redeem him and convert him to the ways of doing good.
As Americans we hold the first type -- the despicable, cowardly
type -- in low esteem. Our choice today and tomorrow must be between
the second and third alternatives. Let each one decide, in the light
of his conscience, in terms of his definition of the situation,
which alternative he must adopt in the present crisis.
Our generation is doomed to live in a state of perpetual crisis.
You and I are called upon to be on the alert every moment of our
lives. Truly, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance; but
ceaseless effort and continuous vigilance, untempered by inner
poise, are apt to lead to nervous prostration. Hence inner serenity
in the midst of crisis must be cultivated if we are to safeguard our
personal integrity, national freedom, and universal human values.
In Mahatma Gandhi we have a sure guide to a happy, rich, and
meaningful life. A self-disciplinarian, he embodied the Hindu
concept of the superior man -- of the Mahatma, the Great Soul.
Any one of us can become a Mahatma if we make a vocation of living
the good life -- putting principle above expediency, duty above
pleasure, service above profit, God above the world, conscience
above fleeting rewards.
Throughout the text, except in quoted passages, the word Hindese
(derived from Hinda or Hind anglicized into India) has been
preferred to the word Indian in order to obviate confusion between
the Indians of India and the Indians of America.
The literature on Gandhi is growing apace. The very first
biographical sketch of Gandhi to appear in any language was a work
by Rev. Joseph J. Doke, entitled M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot (
London: London Indian Chronicle, 1909). My book, Gandhi the Apostle
( Chicago: Universal, 1923), was the first full-length portrait of
the Mahatma to appear in any language of the world. My second book,
Gandhi Versus the Empire ( New York: Universal, 1932), was banned
from India by the British Raj. In Gandhi Triumphant ( New York:
Universal, 1939), I set forth Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of the
fast and the story of his victorious struggle with the Prince of
Rajkot. Sermon on the Sea, sometimes entitled Indian Home Rule or
Hind Swaraj, written by Gandhi in South Africa in 1909, and edited
by the present writer in this country ( Chicago: Universal, 1924),
reveals Gandhi's views on civilization and on soul force.
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For a comprehensive biography the reader may refer to The Life of
Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer ( New York: Harper and Brothers,
1950). For a commendable interpretation of the mystic in Gandhi,
read Lead, Kindly Light by Vincent Sheean ( New York: Random House,
1949). C. F. Andrews's trilogy: Mahatma Gandhi -- His Own Story (
1930), Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas ( 1930), Gandhi at Work ( 1931), all
published by The Macmillan Co., New York, are indispensable to an
understanding of the man. Nehru on Gandhi ( New York: The John Day
Co., 1948) is a splendid little book which everyone should be
familiar with. Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography for Young People by
Catherine Owens Peare ( New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1950) should
be helpful especially to High School teachers and pupils. The
Navajivan Press, Ahmedabad, India, is getting out a uniform series
of topical books containing the Mahatma's voluminous writings over
the past forty years. The two volumes containing Gandhi's writings
in Young India, Ahmedabad, published in this country by B. W.
Huebsch, Inc., New York, and by The Viking Press, New York,
respectively, as Young India 19191922 ( 1923), and Young India
1924-1926 ( 1927), are a veritable gold mine for the researcher.
Gandhi's autobiography: My Experiments with Truth, recently
published in full in this country ( Washington: Public Affairs
Press, 1948), is a must reading. Two books published in India have
been particularly helpful to me: Gandhiji, edited by D. G. Tendulkar
and others ( Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House, 1944, 2nd ed.,
1945), and The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi by R. K. Prabhu and U. R. Rao
( Madras: Oxford University Press, 1945, 2nd ed., 1946). To Messrs.
K. R. Kripalani, Gulzarilal Nanda, and M. R. Masani I am indebted
for fresh material, respectively, on "Gandhi and Tagore," "A Charter
for Labor," and "Is Gandhi a Socialist?" appearing in Gandhiji.
Portions of my chapter on "Gandhi's Pedagogy" had appeared in School
and Society ( Lancaster, Pa.), Unity ( Chicago), and The Social
Frontier ( New York). I am indebted to the authors and publishers
named, to Dr. Hiram Haydn, editor of this series, and to countless
others not named. Full credit is given in footnotes. So far as
possible, references, listed at the end, have been made to books
published in America. In addition to my three books on Gandhi
mentioned, I have drawn freely from my book, The United Nations of
the World ( New York: Universal, 1942; 2nd ed., 1944), especially
for material embodied in Chapters III and VII.
When all is said and done, my greatest debt is to the Saint of
Sabarmati, my association with whom at the Satyagraha Ashram, on the
Dandi March, and in London, I count among the greatest privileges in
life.
HARIDAS T. MUZUMDAR.
CORNELL COLLEGE MT. VERNON, IOWA MAY, 1952
CHAPTER ONE
A CHILD OF ONE WORLD
1. THE UNIVERSAL IN GANDHI
MAHATMA GANDHI belongs not to India alone but to the whole world. He
belongs not to our generation alone, not to the twentieth century
alone, but to posterity as well. In life as in death Gandhi has been
revered by millions of his compatriots in India and millions abroad.
Most of us of the present generation look upon him as a great
political leader. As such, Gandhi would no doubt be classified with
the great makers and moulders of nations -- Cromwell, Napoleon,
Mazzini, Washington, and Lincoln. Future generations, however, will,
I believe, recognize in Gandhi one of the greatest spiritual forces
of all times.
Whether we knew much or little about him, this man in a
loin-cloth somehow reminded the men of the present generation, and
will continue to remind future generations, of the great heights
which the spirit of man can scale. In him we see an image of our
higher self, of that nobler self which recognizes nonviolence and
truth as the law of our species.
A proper understanding of Gandhi requires recognition of two
strands woven in the makeup of his personality as of every human
being: the universal and the particular.
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Every human organism is subject to the universal biophysical
processes of birth, growth, maturation, senescence, disintegration.
Every human being, endowed with original nature, becomes human only
as the original nature is transformed into human nature through
socialization, through social interaction within a cultural context.
This, too, is a universal process in which all human beings become
involved immediately upon birth. Mind, intelligence, intellect,
emotion, insight, all rooted in the organism, come to flowering as a
result of interaction with nature, with fellow human beings, with
culture. In this process, the heart, a physiological organ, is
spiritualized into a special instrument of insight; notice, for
instance, Gandhi's frequent use of the idea: "Ultimately we are
guided not so much by the intellect as by the heart." He made that
statement upon our arrival at Dandi Beach, a forlorn, forsaken
place, with few trees or habitations to relieve the monotony of the
open, sun-baked landscape. In this process of interaction, too, the
human potential, in contrast to the subhuman potential, becomes
realized as the soul or spirit of man. Upon man's animal ancestry is
superimposed a certain attribute, which distinguishes the world of
human beings from the animal world. To the extent that man, by
deliberate effort, achieves a way of living in which animal traits
are subordinated to the distinctively human, to that extent does he
realize his entelechy, his implicit destiny, a Greek concept -- or
his dharma, a Hindu concept. Such a way of living brings man near
unto God. The realization of his soul, his self, becomes tantamount
to realization of the Supreme Soul, the Supreme Self, or God.
This mode of reasoning, implicit in Hindu thinking, should not be
unacceptable to social scientists. At any rate, Gandhi accepted the
theory of the distinctively human traits differentiating man from
the subhuman creation. "Non-violence," he affirmed, "is the law of
our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies
dormant in the brute and he knows no law but that of physical might.
The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law -- to the
strength of the spirit." 1
The distinctively human, or rather common-human, nature of man is
succinctly described by Hindu seers in the formula: Tat-Twam-Asi --
That thou art. You are part of That, part of the Godhead. You have
within you some of the divine attributes. In. deed, you have, as the
Quakers say, that of God within you. Thus man is a complex of
animal-human-divine attributes. In some the animal traits
predominate, in others the human, and in others again the divine: in
the language of the Bhagavad Gita, some men are dominated by the
Tamas quality, some by the Raids quality, and some by the Sattva
quality.
Man, a specific person, as a complex of animal-humandivine
attributes, may be best understood if from his behavior patterns we
get a clue to the dominant and recessive qualities of his being.
Gandhi belonged to the company of those in whom Sattva or the divine
attribute is dominant and the other two attributes are recessive.
Gandhi made much of conscience. He used to quote with approval a
verse from the Mahabharata:
The individual may be sacrificed for the sake of the family;
The family may be sacrificed for the sake of the village;
The village may be sacrificed for the sake of the province;
The province may be sacrificed for the sake of the country;
For the sake of conscience, however, sacrifice all.
What is this thing called conscience? The unsophisticated Polish
peasant defined conscience as one's own voice but somebody else's
words. We may look upon conscience as a highly developed instrument
in the inner recesses of man's heart, a subtle part of evolving
human nature specializing in sensitive reactions to the world round
about oneself. Conscience manifests itself in terms of sensitivity
to sufferings and injustices, to right and wrong. Thus conscience is
the internalized experience of the mores of a given society.
Non-totalitarian societies exalt freedom of conscience alike for
atheists and for theists; for non-conformists as well as
conformists; for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews; for Hindus,
Muslims, Parsees, Christians, Jews, and Sikhs.
The history of the human species eloquently bears testimony to
the fact that those who are especially sensitive to the sufferings
of others and, being sympathetic, are impelled by an inner urge to
redeem their sufferings, are peculiarly exalted not only by those
who benefit from the ministry of service but also by society at
large. At the age of 24, when Gandhi landed in South Africa as legal
retainer for a Muslim Hindese firm, he was no better and no worse
than many a contemporary barrister-at-law, Hindese or non-Hindese.
But when his conscience was shocked by the injustices done to his
people, when he espoused the cause of the underprivileged and the
downtrodden with utter abandon, without the slightest notion of
monetary reward, he began to enmesh himself in a process that was to
give him inner satisfaction and raise him to the pinnacle of glory
successively as "our Bhai," our Brother; as "the Mahatma," Great
Soul; as "Gandhiji," revered Gandhi; as "Bapuji," Dear Father.
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The Politics of
Gun Control,
Book by Roberst J. Spitzer
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Introduction
THE furor over gun control has raged across the American landscape
for decades, with a sustained intensity and intractability found
among few other issues. Despite all that has been written on the
subject, no comprehensive political and policy analysis on gun
control exists, even though the gun debate is precisely a political
dispute over the proper scope and consequences of government policy.
At its heart, the gun debate is a question about the relationship
between the citizen, the state's power to regulate, and the
maintenance of public order. All these relationships come together
under the public policy umbrella and are thus amenable to a policy
analysis that has as its central question: should gun possession and
use be significantly regulated? In raising this question, I am not
primarily concerned with the efficacy of each and every regulatory
alternative, although most receive treatment here, but with the
regulation principle as it applies to the gun issue. This is no
esoteric exercise; every political dispute over some new effort to
regulate guns invokes broader questions of government regulation.
The regulatory question is given coherence and context within a
larger framework of policy analysis. Far from being an idiosyncratic
issue that defies generalized analysis, the gun issue fits into a
broader policy pattern, labeled social regulatory policy, that
provides considerable predictive and explanatory power for the
observed political trends.
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I come from a State where half the folks have hunting and
fishing licenses. I can still remember the first day when I was a
little boy out in the country putting a can on top of a fencepost
and shooting a .22 at it. I can still remember the first time I
pulled a trigger on a .410 shotgun because I was too little to hold
a .12 gauge.... This is part of the culture of a big part of
America.... I live in a place where we still close schools and
plants on the first day of deer season, nobody is going to show up
anyway.... We have taken this important part of the life of millions
of Americans and turned it into an instrument of maintaining
madness. It is crazy.
-- President Bill Clinton, comments at 30 November 1993 signing
ceremony for the "Brady bill"
1. Policy Definition and Gun Control
THE controversy over gun control revolves around two related
questions of government authority: does the government have the
right to impose regulations; and, assuming the existence of such a
right, should the government regulate guns? It is perfectly obvious
that numerous gun control regulations already exist, from the
national to the local level. Indeed, gun control opponents are quick
to point out that thousands of gun laws exist throughout the
country, a fact usually quoted to underscore their belief that such
regulation is futile. A pamphlet produced by the National Rifle
Association (NRA) mentions "an estimated 20,000 local, state, and
federal firearms laws," the vast majority of which are local codes.
1 Gun control opponents also argue that further gun restrictions
could impinge on constitutional rights and the innate rights of the
citizenry in a free nation. Before proceeding with these key
questions, we must begin with the role and purpose of government
regulation.
Regulation, Public Order, and Public Policy
The fundamental purpose of government--indeed, its first purpose--is
to establish and maintain order. As many political thinkers have
noted, human existence before the establishment of governments was
chaotic and anarchic. Writing in the seventeenth century, the
British political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan noted that
life in such a "state of nature" was "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short." The only "law" in this situation was that of
self-preservation, when one could expect only the "war" of "every
man, against every man." To stave off such an anarchic condition,
people formed governments, to which citizens traded some of their
freedom, including the "freedom" to kill or be killed, in exchange
for the order of civil society. In such a "civil state," according
to Hobbes, "there is a power set up to constrain those that would
otherwise violate their faith."
Writing several decades after Hobbes, the British political
thinker John Locke in his Of Civil Government concurred, noting that
"God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality
and violence of men. I easily grant that civil government is the
proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature." That
we in America largely take the value of order for granted is a
testament to the remarkable stability of American life. 2 Order is
not the only priority for government, of course, since democratic
nations value freedom and the protection of basic rights as well and
must continually strive to strike an appropriate balance between
these values. 3 Nevertheless, order is the first purpose of
government because without order there can be no freedom in society
(aside from the "freedom" of anarchy to which Hobbes and Locke
referred). As the political scientist Samuel Huntington once noted,
"men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot
have liberty without order." 4 And, as James Madison wrote to Thomas
Jefferson, "It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be
equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or
too little power."
The maintenance of public order by governments occurs through
public policy, defined most simply as "whatever governments choose
to do or not to do." 5 The close link between order and public
policy is underscored by the interesting semantic fact that "policy"
has the same linguistic root as "police." 6 Note the link between
the two in this definition of public policy offered by the British
constitutionalist William Blackstone in 1769: "the due regulation
and domestic order of the kingdom, whereby the inhabitants of the
State, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform
their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood,
and good manners, and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in
their respective stations."
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The techniques or tools of public policy take many forms, from
the dispensing of benefits to strict regulation of individual
conduct. Yet basic questions of public order usually involve direct
regulation--power exercised by the government "for the protection of
the health, safety, and morals of their citizens." 7 Beyond the
simple maintenance of order, "government is the guarantor of the
public good. Ideally, this is achieved as government regulates
private functions to maximize public welfare." 8 The regulation of
individual conduct may include that considered harmful to others,
such as driving under the influence of alcohol, or conduct
considered immoral, such as gambling or prostitution. 9
This returns us to the question of the regulation of firearms.
(In this analysis, "guns" and "firearms" are treated as synonymous.)
The fierce and protracted debate over gun control raises a variety
of issues about individual behavior and the role of the government.
Nevertheless, the gun debate at its core turns on a single, central
question of public policy as it relates to both order and personal
conduct: should gun possession and use be significantly regulated?
This central question of public policy guides the organization of
this book.
Guns and Regulation
Why has gun control been such a difficult, controversial, and
intractable issue in American politics? The first answer is because
of the nature of regulation. Whenever the government seeks to apply
its coercive powers directly to shape individual conduct, the
prospect of controversy is great, especially in a nation with a long
tradition of individualism. According to the policy analyst Theodore
J. Lowi, when the likelihood of government coercion 10 is
immediate--that is, when the behavior of individual citizens is
directly affected, as in the case of regulation--the prospect of
controversy is high. When the likelihood of government coercion is
remote--that is, when the primary purpose of the policy in question
is, say, to provide benefits rather than regulate individual
conduct--the prospect of controversy is low. Examples of policies
where government coercion is low include public works projects
(construction of roads, harbors, buildings, etc.) and subsidies to
farmers (labeled "distributive"; see figure 1.1, p. 4). Government
can influence behavior by providing these benefits, but the primary
emphasis is on the awarding of benefits, not the shaping of conduct.
In addition to immediate coercion, regulatory policy shares a
characteristic that fans the flames of political controversy: it
seeks to control individual conduct. When the government imposes
highway safety regulations, pure food and drug requirements, cable
television rates, criminal laws, or laws regulating abortions, it is
regulating the conduct of individuals (not only individual citizens,
but individual companies or other entities). Because of these direct
consequences to individuals, regulatory policies are more
controversial than policies that seek to shape the "environment of
conduct," such as fiscal and monetary policy, the progressive income
tax, and welfare programs.
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Black, White, and
Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream,
By Harry Mensh, Elaine Mensh
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Trespassers
I
On September 4, 1957, National Guard troops ringed Little Rock's
Central High School, which had been ordered to desegregate. They had
been called up by the governor, who predicted, or promised, that
"blood would run in the streets" if black children tried to enter.
When eight of the children arrived, accompanied by two black and two
white clergymen, they were confronted by the troops and a howling
mob of men and women. The children were pushed and shoved, then
informed by a National Guard captain that on orders of the governor
they would not be allowed to enter. Escorted by the president of the
State Conference of NAACP branches, a black woman, the children
proceeded to the offices of the United States Attorney and the FBI.
1
A ninth child had not been informed that the students were to
come as a group. When she arrived alone, there were shouts from the
mob, which now numbered about five hundred: "They're here! The
niggers are coming!""Get her! Lynch her!" The student tried several
times to pass through the troops; on her last try, she was stopped
with bayonets. The mob yelled, "No nigger bitch is going to get in
our school." With the troops standing by impassively, someone
screamed, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree." A
white-haired woman fought her way through the mob, shouting: "Leave
this child alone! Why are you tormenting her? Six months from now
you will hang your heads in shame." The mob hollered, "Another
nigger-lover. Get out of here!"
The woman, a professor at a Little Rock college, stayed with the
child until she could get her away on a bus. Joining with her to
protect the child during the wait was the New York Times education
editor, who was threatened as a "dirty New York Jew." In the next
weeks, there were attacks on black men and women and on their homes,
as well as assaults on black and white journalists. Finally,
confronted with the Little Rock black community, which refused to
surrender to the authorities or the mob, and also challenged by
national and world opinion, the president acted to enforce the
desegregation order; he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and
directed the secretary of defense to send in regular troops as
needed. 2
The incident at Little Rock had myriad consequences, explicit and
tacit. One of the latter appears to be an action taken by the New
York Board of Education. Just eight days after the confrontation at
Central High, the New York Times reported, in a front-page story,
that the board had "quietly dropped" Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
from approved textbook lists for elementary and junior high schools.
The novel, the Times also related, could still be purchased for
school libraries and used as a textbook in high schools. The story
linked the board's action to objections from the NAACP. The NAACP
denied having protested to the board, but acknowledged that it
"strongly objected to the 'racial slurs' and 'belittling racial
designations' in Mark Twain's works." 3
Although there is no evidence that the NAACP protested directly
to the board, objections from one or another source certainly
reached the board. But the official in charge of curriculum
development stated that no objections had come to her attention. She
said the novel had been taken off the approved textbook list
because, as the Times put it, it was "not really a textbook." 4 In
giving this explanation, which was notable only for its surrealism
(a book approved as a textbook was removed for not being a
textbook), New York City school officials apparently believed they
had converted a controversial move into an administrative
correction, and so could escape responsibility for their own action.
5
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That there was little resemblance between an official story and the
truth is hardly news, but the extreme ineptitude revealed in this
story raises questions. Why was the board of education so utterly
unprepared to offer even a remotely credible, let alone factual,
explanation for its action on Huck Finn? One answer seems to be that
school officials had been readied for the wrong battle, that is, for
a skirmish essentially won by the time Huck Finn became required
reading.
II
"Once we understand how they arose, we no longer see literary canons
as objets trouvés washed up on the beach of history," observes Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. 6 The point is aptly illustrated by Huckleberry
Finn's journey into the schools' literary canon. The journey, which
spanned more than two decades, began with a study whose stated aim
was to determine "the most effective ways of utilizing" the novel in
junior high schools. 7 The study was followed, in 1931, by an
edition published especially for junior high schools. In the
introduction, the editors--speaking with the quaintness then deemed
appropriate for addressing children--wrote: "In those early days
Huck had but one friend who dared openly to seek his company, . . .
Tom Sawyer. But today how different! . . . Then the parents tabooed
Huck as a companion for their sons, but today the most respected of
mothers open their doors to welcome in this wanderer." 8
Since these lines descend from a supposedly more innocent time,
it might seem they really were intended for children. But not only
is it quite illogical to expect that children would be delighted by
Huck's newfound respectability, it also seems odd to contrast the
novel's respectability in the eyes of real parents with Huck's lack
of it with fictional ones. Clearly, when the editors spoke of Huck's
ostracism in his "early days," they had in mind not Huck's status in
Tom Sawyer, but Huck Finn's expulsion from the Concord Public
Library in 1885 as the "veriest trash," "rough, coarse, and
inelegant," 9 unfit for "our pure-minded lads and lasses," 10 and
the copycat expulsions that followed.
The editors were Emily Fanning Barry, an English teacher at
Teachers College, and Herbert B. Bruner, who headed its Curriculum
Construction Laboratory. Under the aegis of the publisher, Harper &
Brothers, they conducted the study, which involved "thousands" of
reports obtained from an unspecified number of teachers and pupils.
The editors describe the student participants according to class,
nationality, and location. Since they do not mention race, it is
quite safe to assume "children" meant "white children." 11
That this study undoubtedly included white children only does not
mean the editors consciously sought to exclude black children. Their
apparent absence from the study simply mirrored the exclusion of
blacks from vast areas of American life. And even if the editors had
been amazingly ahead of their time and wondered how black children
might feel about Huck Finn, there would have been no reason to
pursue the daring thought. Certainly it would have had no value for
the publisher, given that black schools were likely to receive books
handed down from white ones.
While the study, the classroom edition, and growing support from
educators laid the groundwork for Huck Finn to become required
reading, something more was needed to bring the effort to fruition.
This arrived in the form of essays by Lionel Trilling ( 1948) and T.
S. Eliot ( 1950) that provided the novel with the "academic
respectability and clout" that assured its entry into the nation's
classrooms, points out Peaches Henry. 12 Trilling, who launched what
Jonathan Arac calls the "hypercanonization" of Huck Finn, 13 spoke
of it as "one of the world's great books and one of the central
documents of American culture." 14 Eliot termed it a "masterpiece."
15 Both, however, were concerned with defending it against the by
now largely anachronistic morality charge. Eliot made the point
fairly subtly by stating he had not read the book as a boy because
his parents considered it unsuitable, while he also spoke of things
in it that would delight boys. The matter is, though, handled quite
explicitly by Trilling, who remarks that Huck is "really a very
respectable person." 16
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2 Marginal Boy
I
On the fiftieth anniversary, in 1935, of Huckleberry Finn's
publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Huckleberry Finn took the
first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic
from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that
ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas.
There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than
mountains to look at with his restive eyes--he wanted to find out
about men and how they lived together. And because he turned back we
have him forever." 1 Fitzgerald's remarks, with their lyrically
imaginative leap that Huck made it to the territory and looked back,
are clearly evocative. Certainly they evoke an American dream. Not
the new arrivals' dream of freedom awaiting at the American shore,
but a variant--the dream of Americans who had been here awhile, that
freedom (not to mention riches) lay ever further West. In other
respects, what the remarks evoke is not as clear as it might once
have seemed. How, for instance, should Fitzgerald's "us" be
interpreted? Inclusively, or exclusively? Were the first eyes that
looked at us objectively actually from overseas? And what of
Fitzgerald's belief in Huck's objectivity?
If Huck is objective (as other commentators have also held), 2 he
speaks faithfully for an author who can be unequivocally relied
upon. In fact, though, Huckleberry Finn presents an author-narrator
relationship of quite a different kind. That Twain's perspective is
antislavery and Huck's is not, and that the concept of racial
prejudice, meaningful to Twain, would be meaningless to Huck--these
preclude any possibility of a consistently objective narrator. And,
too, while Twain often purposefully clouded Huck's "restive eyes"
with ideas received from the society Huck lived in, there is, again,
the question of the degree to which Twain's own eyes, clear and
penetrating as they could be, were not also thus shadowed.
Fitzgerald's remarks also illustrate the role of commentators in
creating a legendary Huck. Although some of the myths around Huck
Finn have not traveled beyond critical circles (for instance,
Trilling's myth of Huck as "the servant of the river-god," who
"comes very close to being aware of the divine nature of the being
he serves"), 3 others occupy a favored place in the national
consciousness. One of these is the myth of Huck-the-rebel. It is not
that this myth is entirely devoid of truth, but rather that it
favors lesser truths over greater ones.
The distinction between Huck as legendary rebel and the Huck that
Twain created can already be detected in The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer. There Twain describes Huck as a "romantic outcast," but even
this phrase does not express Twain's own attitude. It is instead
that of the properly-brought-up village boys: "everything that goes
to make life precious, [Huck] had. So thought every harassed,
hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg." 4 These boys see a
Huck who can come and go as he pleases, is not expected to attend
school or church, is free to swear and to fight if he feels like it.
Twain, though, allows us to see that it is the boys' vision of Huck
that is romantic, not Huck's life: if he can do as he pleases, it is
only because his father is the town drunk and his mother dead. So it
is not surprising to learn, in Huckleberry Finn, that Huck is prone
to melancholy, is sometimes so sad he almost wants to die.
If most readers of Tom Sawyer, despite Twain's signals to the
contrary, see Huck as a rebel, one explanation may be that they have
allowed Huck's deeds to eclipse his motives. Take, for instance,
Huck's first violation of a taboo in white-black relations. In a
passage in Tom Sawyer that prefigures Huck's relationship with Jim,
Tom asks the homeless boy where he will sleep. Huck replies: "In Ben
Rogers's hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man,
Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and
any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can
spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I
don't ever act as if I was above him. Sometimes I've set right down
and eat with him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do
things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady
thing." 5 On the one hand, Huck--whom Twain described as a boy with
a "sound heart and a deformed conscience"--is humanly appreciative
of help from Uncle Jake and reciprocates by giving Uncle Jake what
help he can. He is also perceptive enough to recognize that the
black man wouldn't like him if he acted as if he were above him. Yet
Huck does consider himself above Uncle Jake--not as an objective
matter of social station, but because the man is black and Huck is
white. (Although Huck never doubts that Uncle Jake, who remains
offstage, is taken in by his pretense, a reader may wonder whether
an Uncle Jake would not be wary of a white boy who, even in his
innermost thoughts, cordons him off as "nigger.")
It was not unusual for the young sons of slaveholders to have a
relationship with a slave (traditionally known as "Uncle") in which
the man would tell the boy stories ( Twain himself had such a
connection with an "Uncle Dan'l"). Where these boys would go to a
black man in search of diversion, Huck goes to Uncle Jake out of
need. As a result, the white boy's role is determined by the black
man rather than the other way around. But the need that drives Huck
to Uncle Jake is also a source of shame, making him do something he
"wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." Still, it does not seem
that Huck would have any objection to sitting down to eat with Uncle
Jake were it not for a mind's eye that looks on censoriously. No
incident could better suggest the vast social and emotional distance
that separated even the poorest whites from the blacks than this
one, which finds Huck--a boy who dresses in rags and sleeps in
barrels, whose reputation is so disgraceful that the schoolmaster
punishes Tom Sawyer for talking to him--desperate about what people
will think if they find out he ate with a black man. 6
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J.R.R. Tolkien and
His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-Earth,
By George Clark, Daniel Timmons
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Tolkien the Bard: His Tale Grew in the Telling
C. W. Sullivan III
"There is something about Tolkien's art which eludes the
conventional strategies of contemporary criticism, even when these
are deployed with sympathy and patience." This view from Brian
Rosebury in Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (4) is insightful. The
key words are, of course, "conventional" and "contemporary," for
what Tolkien was doing, for all his contemporary popularity, was
anything but writing a contemporary--or modern--novel. Given that he
was not writing a modern novel, it is quite typical that
conventional criticism can make little of Hobbit and LR other than
reduce them to World War II allegories or mere escapist yearnings
for a passing rural England (the sort of criticism continually aimed
at The Wind in the Willows, among others). What was Tolkien doing,
then? As a student of traditional narrative, I have returned to
Tolkien's two most famous books from time to time and have begun an
argument that I would like to continue here. 1 I believe that
Tolkien committed a traditionally patterned oral narrative to paper,
and that we can understand Hobbit and LR better if we look at them
not through the lenses of modern critical methods but through lenses
developed for the study of earlier works. 2
Clearly, Tolkien drew his inspiration from the older literatures
of the north and west of Europe and from other writers, such as (and
especially, perhaps) William Morris, who made fiction based on those
ancient narratives. Many critics, myself among them, have commented
on the traditional Märchen plot that structures both of Tolkien's
novels. 3 Other primary evidence for traditionality includes the
dwarf names taken from the Elder Edda, a dragon kin to the one
described in Beowulf a wizard from the Merlin/Druidic tradition, a
dragon slayer with the requisite magic arrow, elves and dwarves and
trolls from northern European lore in general, a ring of
invisibility, a band of sleeping warriors, a mirror of seeing, a
throne of power, a greedy town mayor, a magical healing draught,
plant seeds of exceptional fertility, a dragon's missing
breastplate, and a host of other familiar motifs--and not all of
them fantastic--from myth, legend and folktale. 4
Tolkien did not "borrow" these materials from ancient prose and
poetry any more than any traditional artist borrows his or her
material, be it a ballad or a quilt pattern. Like traditionally
recognized folk performers, Tolkien was using material that he had
been conversant with, quite literally, from childhood. He may have
learned much of it in more formal circumstances than a ballad singer
or a quilter does, but those were the only places--that is,
classrooms and books--where that material was available to him.
Thus, when he came to write Hobbit and LR, it was after many years'
apprenticeship in the halls of academe; and when he wrote about the
dwarves, he knew their names and the pattern of their story from a
lifetime of experience, just as a ballad singer knows the verses or
the quilt maker knows the pattern. He made this traditional story
his own by creating the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and by splitting the
heroics, almost at the last minute, between two characters: Bilbo,
who finds the answers, and Bard, of the Royal Line of Dale, who
slays the dragon. The same split, this time between Frodo and
Aragorn, occurs much earlier and is developed more fully in LR. And
even that split may have been influenced by tradition.
I am not about to assert that Tolkien was a folk performer and
that Hobbit and LR are folktale and legend, respectively--although
Katharyn Crabbe 1981 J.R.R. Tolkien does analyze them quite
profitably as fairy tale and legend (the literary forms of the
traditional folktale and legend). What I can provide is some
evidence that Tolkien was exposed early to the dragon slayer tale, a
tale that figures as a central motif in most of his later fiction,
and that he was influenced by other authors, perhaps most especially
William Morris, who were also attempting to write fiction patterned
after older oral forms. In addition, I can offer some comments about
ancient northern European literature in general and the Icelandic
family sagas in particular, which will be clearly applicable to
Tolkien's writing--much more applicable, in fact, than Aristotelian
poetics or the theory of the properly structured novel.
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Humphrey Carpenter remarks that Tolkien found that William
Morris's view of literature was very like his own, and that in the
prose-verse romance The House of the Wolfings "Morris had tried to
recreate the excitement he himself had found in the pages of early
English and Icelandic narratives" ( 70 ). And that is exactly what
Tolkien would later do in his narratives. As T. A. Shippey suggests,
"[l]ike Walter Scott or William Morris before him, [ Tolkien] felt
the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from
bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story
about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete
ones left" ( 54 ). Indeed, Tolkien himself remarked that the "prime
motive [for writing LR] was the desire of a tale-teller to try his
hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of
readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or
deeply move them" ( FR11).
Shippey and Tolkien both use the word "story," and this term is yet
another stumbling block to which critics have yet to pay enough
attention. 5 C. S. Lewis warned us about that problem some time ago:
Those'hose forms of literature in which Story exists merely as a
means to something else--for example, the novel of manners where the
story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of
social conditions--have had full justice done to them; but those
forms in which everything else is there for the sake of the story
have been given little serious attention. ( 3 )
Lewis points in a direction in which mythology-in-literature
scholar John Vickery continues when Vickery argues that most
mythology-in-literature critics would agree that "myth forms the
matrix out of which literature emerges both historically and
psychologically" (ix). That is, the Story came first, even though
all of the uses to which it has been put and all of the critical
means by which it has been interpreted have overshadowed story of
late ( Sullivan 18 ).
Furthermore, understanding the nature of traditional narrative,
of story, can also put us on the road to understanding rather more
complex issues in contemporary fiction: issues of story that have
been overlooked in the critical rush to deconstruct the modern
forest into its component postmodern trees; issues of story that
have been lost in the critical study of the novel (an essentially
reality-based narrative, ultimately Aristotelian in its structure
and well-made according to its nineteenth-century aesthetic); issues
of story that have been ignored as literature was separated into
elite and popular (primarily by the New York establishment and
university English departments); issues of story that have become
confused as realism was championed over fantasy and then the
designation "magic realism" was coined so that no one would have to
admit that Borges is writing a kind of fantasy and Theroux is
stealing ideas, and old ones at that, from science fiction; issues
of story that have been pushed aside as literary criticism has
privileged novel over narrative, privileged writer over teller, and
(most recently) privileged criticism over fiction.
The inadequacy of contemporary criticism to deal with Tolkien's
novels was reinforced, as I researched for this essay, by Icelandic
scholar Theodore M. Andersson, who commented on the same critical
situation in regard to the Icelandic family sagas.
[T]he sagas stand outside of the ironic or intellectual tradition
to which the reader of prose narrative has been accustomed since the
advent of modern fiction. The saga is plane [sic] narrative with no
vertical dimensions; the sagateller does not manipulate the
complicated set of mirrors used by the modern author to catch and
bind together himself, his subject, and his reader. ( 1967, 31 - 32
)
Andersson concludes that section of his book with a very telling
comment: "In short, the saga comes very close to pure narrative" (
32 ). In other words, what the saga is about is the story.
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Andersson study The Icelandic Family Saga contains a great deal
that might illuminate Tolkien's art. The structure of the plots of
Tolkien's novels corresponds quite nicely to the structural pattern
Andersson articulates for the Icelandic family saga, with the
obvious exception of the revenge element; however, the second
section of his book, "The Rhetoric of the Saga," is particularly
interesting. In that section, Andersson argues that the "arrangement
of the material and the progress of the narrative are governed by
certain principles and techniques, which may almost be formulated as
saga laws and which combine to give the saga its peculiar
complexion" ( 32 - 33 ). The rhetorical structure that Andersson
advances for the saga applies to Tolkien's novels as well. 6
The first principal Andersson advances is one of unity: "The saga
has a brand of unity not unlike the classical injunction against the
proliferation of plot in drama. . . . The story is seen only in
terms of the climax. Everything that precedes the climax is
conceived as preparation for it and everything that follows is
conceived as a logical consequence" ( 33 ). Quite clearly the
unilinear plot of Hobbit can be described this way, but so also can
the multilinear plot of LR. Even after the Nine Walkers become
sundered and various hobbits, men, dwarves, and elves follow several
plotlines to the climax, all are headed inexorably in that
direction, each following his own path. "What is unique," Andersson
says of the saga, "is the deliberate and single-minded way in which
the story is related to the high point and the peak of the pyramid
is achieved" ( 35 ).
Andersson describes the progress of individual and sequential
narrative events as scaffolding: "The episodes leading to the climax
necessarily all tend in that direction, but they can be unrelated to
each other" ( 35 ), and each episode "is an independent drama" ( 38
). This is less true of Hobbit, as its plot is basically sequential,
but it is certainly descriptive of the several plots in LR after the
breakup of the Fellowship. The three main plots--Frodo and Sam,
Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli--are not dependent
upon one another; each set of characters succeeds on its own, and
the only thing the three sets of characters have in common is that
they are all headed toward the same end, the narrative's climax.
"Although . . . these episodes are related," Andersson concludes,
"each is an independent action" ( 38 ).
Within the scaffolding structure, Andersson delineates several
techniques by which the saga author "guides the action toward a
conclusion." One such is escalation, "the technique of staggering
the episodes. . . . in order of jeopardy; each succeeding adventure
is more provocative or perilous than its predecessor" ( 38 ). This
is certainly the case in both of Tolkien's novels. In Hobbit, the
confrontations escalate from the almost-Cockney trolls to that most
fearsome of beasts, the dragon; along the way, Bilbo develops to
match the increasingly formidable challenges. In LR, even the
secondary characters take on increasingly difficult challenges as
Frodo moves from a vague fear of the Black Riders to the final
confrontation with Sauron. Andersson suggests that escalation can be
achieved by "an increase of danger, a multiplying of portents, a
deterioration of behavior, [or] a quickening of the pace" ( 40 ).
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Balancing the escalation of episodes in the saga, Andersson sees
something he calls retardation, "a meaningful slackening of the
pace" ( 40 ). This retardation "arrests the pace and leads to the
anticipated climax obliquely and slowly" ( 42 ). Such breaks in the
action occur in both novels. There are two major respites in Hobbit:
the stay at the Last Homely House, a pause before heading off into
the "real" wilderness, and the refuge with Beorn, a pause before
beginning the last stage of the journey. There are more such
respites in LR, but the major ones are the passage through
Bombadil's enchanted wood, a stop at the Last Homely House, where
the Fellowship is assembled, and the stay in Lothlórien--all three
incidents in which the pace of the story is dramatically slowed and
the characters are able to rest. This retardation, Andersson
comments, functions "to delay the climax and concentrate interest" (
42 ). And in Tolkien, it often serves, as does the stay in
Lothlórien, to concentrate interest on the climax by showing what
may be lost if Sauron triumphs.
The balance between escalation and retardation is one indication of
what Andersson calls the symmetry of the saga. Further, he notes
that the "saga authors have a fondness for the use of pairs and
series in their plot structures" ( 43 ). This element of structuring
is very common in traditional narratives of all kinds; for example,
the number three--three sisters, three wishes, and so on--appears in
a variety of legends and folktales. Tolkien's narratives are full of
pairs: Bilbo and Frodo, for example, the latter enacting a plot
similar to the former's adventures. The Frodo/Sam duality is set off
by the Frodo/Gollum and the Gollum/Sméagol dualities, forming a
triangle of dualities or series of pairs. Strider becomes Aragorn,
Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White, Saruman is a small
Sauron, the smaller spiders in Hobbit prefigure Shelob in LR, and so
on. Even the humorous series that Andersson finds characteristic of
saga symmetry ( 48 - 49 ) is reflected in Tolkien's books, most
obviously in the arrival of the dwarves at Bilbo's hobbit-hole and
later in its parallel at Beorn's home.
Andersson suggests that the "most obvious and ubiquitous
rhetorical device in the sagas is foreshadowing" ( 49 ; my italics).
Foreshadowing is certainly prevalent in both of Tolkien's novels;
early in each, Gandalf sits with the main character, and, in Hobbit,
some others, and outlines the general course of the action to follow
and the challenge to be confronted. This initial foreshadowing is
followed, in each work, by a more complete explication of the
problem and a more detailed discussion of each quest at the Last
Homely House. In addition, there are various signs, portents, maps,
prophecies, and other elements that indicate, in Andersson's words,
"the goal of the story" ( 49 ). By setting out the story, and
prefiguring the climax, foreshadowing helps distribute "interest
over the whole text and prevents the otherwise heavily stressed
climax from eclipsing the rest of the story" ( 49 ).
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Constitution
Making: Conflict and Consensus in the Federal Convention of 1787,
By Calvin C. Jillson
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Preface
This study explores both the empirical and the substantive validity
of the traditional historical and philosophical interpretations of
the creation of the American Constitution. Advocates of differing
interpretations of the Constitution's drafting have taken two
distinct views, some arguing that the Convention created the
Constitution out of a commitment to ideas and political principles,
others arguing that the participants designed the Constitution to
aid and protect their social, political, and economic interests.
This study looks more closely at the roll-call voting record of the
Constitutional Convention than any previous study and concludes that
an accurate understanding of the constitution-making process must
acknowledge that both philosophical and material concerns were at
work in the Federal Convention.
I will demonstrate that constitution making is an elaborate and
delicate, yet elegantly simple, process in which the participants
refer to distinctly different sources of knowledge and information
to reach judgments about two fundamental aspects of constitutional
design. Thus, I will show that the Founding Fathers acted out of
broad, though distinct and competing, philosophical perspectives
concerning the working relationships between human nature,
particular political institutions, and the resulting social order,
when they struggled to design the general institutional structure
for the new national government. On these issues of basic
governmental organization and design, the nationalist delegates from
the Middle Atlantic states, generally supporting Madison's vision of
an "extended" republic, opposed the delegates from New England and
the lower South, who held tenaciously to Montesquieu's warning that
free institutions could survive only in "small" republics.
The delegates, on the other hand, pursued narrow material
interests when they voted on specific mechanisms for implementing
various aspects of the constitutional design. When debate touched
upon the distribution of power and influence within the institutions
of the new government, coalitions based upon interest posed the
large states against the small, the northern states against the
southern, and the states with large claims to the lands in the West
against the states that had no such claims to future wealth and
power. This movement from the consideration of broad principles to a
concern with narrow interests conforms to the general expectation of
modern social choice theory, particularly in the work of James
Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Vincent Ostrom. I will argue, however,
that there was more frequent movement back and forth from
philosophical principles to material interests than social choice
theory would seem to anticipate. Such recurring movement indicates
that constitution making is a more delicate and complex process than
either the traditional historical analysts or the contemporary
social choice theorists have realized. This complexity arises from
the broad range of issues raised in constitution making, the lack of
a single natural majority coalition across all issues, and the
consequent tendency of delegates and state delegations to realign
during constitution making as the Convention moved from one set of
critical and controversial issues to another set.
Underlying the complexity of the constitution-making process in
the Federal Convention of 1787, there nonetheless existed a very
simple and widely shared goal. The delegates, though drawn from
different cultural and material contexts, sought to create a common
constitutional framework through which representative
decision-making could resolve their legitimate political
differences. They disagreed on the appropriate design of the
Constitution, and on the distribution of political power and
influence within and across particular institutions, but the general
goal of a representative constitution united them and led to a
sophisticated and sincere decision process that continues to stand
as a model of democratic constitution making.
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In elaborating this thesis, I attempt to accomplish three goals.
First, I supply an empirical description of the voting coalitions,
the stable patterns of cooperation and conflict among the delegates
and their state delegations as voting units, that characterized the
Convention's work. Particular attention is dedicated to changes in
voting coalitions and to the implications of these changes for the
substantive issues before the Convention. The goal here is to
establish the traditional historical and philosophical discussion of
the debates and decisions of the Federal Convention on a firm
empirical footing.
Second, I advance an explanation of the underlying rationale
(philosophical, sociocultural, economic, or regional) for each
division of the states. I will describe the Convention
chronologically as a series of confrontations between stable
coalitions of states and their delegates over the major issues that
confronted the Convention from its opening on May 25 to its final
adjournment on September 17, 1787. Questions such as the following
will be addressed: What were the major issues that spawned each
alignment? What were the theoretical justifications and the
practical power implications of each of the principal positions
adopted by the delegates? Who finally prevailed and why?
Third, I will demonstrate that the long-standing division in the
secondary literature on the Convention between those analysts who
stress the impact of philosophical principles and those who stress
the influence of political and economic interests is misleading. In
fact, a dynamic relationship of mutual interdependence existed—and,
in fact, had to exist—between philosophical and material influences
in the Convention. I will show that the principled or ideological
conflicts that arose in the Convention were generated by the clash
of regionally based variations in the republican political culture
of the new nation, while the conflicts over power and policy were
generated by differences in political and economic interests
relating to state size and to region.
The key to my interpretation of the politics of the Federal
Convention is the contention that debate moved between two distinct
but interrelated levels of constitutional construction and that the
relative influence of the delegates' political principles and their
material interests on the Convention's debates and decisions was
quite different at each level. My thesis is that principles guided
action on distinguishable types of questions, while on other sets of
questions, personal, state, and regional interests encroached upon,
and in some cases overwhelmed and subordinated, the independent
impact of ideas. I will argue that questions of each general type
dominated the Convention's attention during particular phases of its
work, so that at some stages, the dominant voting coalitions were
organized around shared principles, while at other times, the
dominant coalitions were organized around conflicting material
interests.
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In developing this revisionist interpretation, I argue that
intellectual divisions in the Convention had their basis in regional
variations in the republican political culture of the American
founding period. This argument is based on the work of Daniel Elazar,
Robert Kelley, and many others. Elazar, for instance, has described
three related but distinct political subcultures: moralistic in New
England, individualistic in the Middle Atlantic states, and
traditionalistic in the South. Kelley, while calling his regional
subcultures by different names and finding two distinct subcultures
active in the Middle Atlantic states, has provided very similar
substantive descriptions of the ideas and values at the center of
each regional subculture.
Further, I will support this argument by demonstrating—both
empirically, through analysis of roll-call voting data, and
substantively, through analysis of the Convention's voluminous
debates—that when the Convention concentrated on "higher" level
questions of constitutional design, voting coalitions among the
state delegations formed along lines of intellectual cleavage.
During these phases of the Convention's work, the delegates from the
more nationally oriented Middle Atlantic states opposed the more
locally oriented delegates representing the northern and southern
periphery. When the focus shifted to "lower" level choices among
specific decision rules, each of which represented an alternative
distribution of authority within and over the institutions of
government, the states split along lines defined by economic and
geographic interest, state size (large versus small), and region
(North versus South). But perhaps most importantly, I will show that
coalitions, whether based on political principles or on material
interests, consistently undercut, disrupted, and weakened one
another as debate and decision ranged across the fundamental issues
that were the Convention's daily business. What is more, the
interplay between coalitions effectively checked and limited the
long-term cohesion that any alignment of states could maintain and
resulted in the politics of bargaining, compromise, and
accommodation for which the Convention is so justly famous.
The ultimate impact of shifting cleavages generating new patterns of
allegiance among the participants was that no major group was
radically dissatisfied with the product of the Convention's long
deliberations. In Charles Warren's words, "One of the most fortunate
features of the Constitution was that it was the result of
compromises and adjustments and accommodation.... It did not
represent the complete supremacy of the views of any particular man
or set of men, or of any State or group of States.The claims and
interests of neither the North nor the South prevailed.... Moreover,
it represented neither an extreme Nationalist point of view nor an
extreme States' Rights doctrine. The adherents of each theory had
been obliged to yield" ( Warren, 1928, p. 733). Thus, the delegates,
almost to a man, departed the Convention convinced that their
constitutional glass was at least half full as opposed to half
empty.
The impact of factional politics, political compromises, and
shifting coalitions has, however, been less happy for scholars
seeking to understand and interpret the Convention. Because no
consistent set of political principles, no region, no social or
economic class interest dominated the Convention's business, and
though each of these sources of influence was visibly present and
was clearly felt, no simple description of divisions in the
Convention or of their sources is available. This has greatly
embarrassed most of the sweeping dichotomies—nationalists against
federalists, large republic men against small republic men, large
states against small states, northern states against southern
states, commercial interests against agrarian interests, and many
others—that have traditionally been used to explain the work of the
Convention. Consequently, we have been inundated by a wealth of
contradictory claims concerning divisions within the Convention and
their effects, with no firm basis for choice among them. I will
attempt throughout this book to explain in some detail, both
empirically and substantively, who won (in factional terms), when
(at what stage in the Convention's business), and why (in terms of
intellectual or practical political advantage) on the major issues
faced by the delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787.
Ultimately, a conceptually sophisticated and empirically accurate
understanding of the politics of constitution making in the Federal
Convention will allow us to see the democratic politics of our own
age in clearer perspective.
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Muhammad
By Michael Cook
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Introduction
The Muslim world extends continuously from Senegal to Pakistan, and
discontinuously eastwards to the Philippines. In 1977 there were
some 720 million Muslims, just over a sixth of the world's
population. The proportion might have been a great deal higher if
the Muslims of Spain had applied themselves more energetically to
the conquest of Europe in the eighth century, if the sudden death of
Timur in 1405 had not averted a Muslim invasion of China, or if
Muslims had played a more prominent role in the modern settlement of
the New World and the Antipodes. But they have remained the major
religious group in the heart of the Old World. In terms of sheer
numbers they are outdone by the Christians, and arguably also by the
Marxists. On the other hand, they are considerably less affected by
sectarian divisions than either of these rivals: the overwhelming
majority of Muslims belong to the Sunni mainstream of Islam.
There are many Muslims at the present day whose ancestors were
infidels a thousand years ago; this is true by and large of the
Turks, the Indonesians, and sizeable Muslim populations in India and
Africa. The processes by which these peoples entered Islam were
varied, and reflect a phase of Islamic history when different parts
of the Muslim world had gone their separate ways. Yet the core of
the Islamic community owes its existence to an earlier and more
unitary historical context. Between the seventh and ninth centuries
the Middle East and much of North Africa were ruled by the
Caliphate, a Muslim state more or less coextensive with the Muslim
world of its day. This empire in turn was the product of the
conquests undertaken by the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in
the middle decades of the seventh century.
The men who effected these conquests were the followers of a
certain Muhammad, an Arab merchant turned prophet and politician who
in the 620s established a theocratic state among the tribes of
western Arabia.
I Background
Monotheism
Muhammad was a monotheist prophet. Monotheism is the belief that
there is one God, and only one. It is a simple idea; and like many
simple ideas, it is not entirely obvious.
Over the last few thousand years it has probably been the general
consensus of human societies that there are numerous gods (though
men have certainly held very different views as to who these gods
are and what they do). The oldest societies to have left us written
records, and hence direct evidence of their religious beliefs, were
polytheistic some five thousand years ago; by the first millennium
BC there is enough evidence to indicate that polytheism was the
religious norm right across the Old World.
It did not, however, remain unchallenged. In the same millennium
ideas of a rather different stamp were appearing among the
intellectual élites of the more advanced cultures. In Greece,
Babylonia, India and China there emerged a variety of styles of
thought which were noticeably more akin to our own abstract and
impersonal manner of looking at the world. The tendency was to see
the universe in terms of grand unified theories, rather than as the
reflection of the illcoordinated activities of a plurality of
personal gods. Such ways of thinking rarely led to denial of the
actual existence of the gods, but they tended to tidy them up in the
interests of coherence and system, or to reduce them to a certain
triviality. (Consider, for example, the view of some Buddhist sects
that the gods are unable to attain enlightenment owing to the
distracting behaviour of the goddesses.) What they did not do was to
pick out from the polytheistic heritage a single personal god, and
discard the rest.
This development was to be the contribution of a conceptually
less sophisticated people of the ancient Near East, the Israelites.
Like other peoples of their world, the Israelites possessed a
national god who was closely identified with their political and
military fortunes. Like others, they experienced the desolation of
defeat and exile at the hands of more powerful enemies. Their
distinctive reaction to this history was to develop an exclusive
cult of their national god, eventually proclaimed as the only god in
existence -- in a word, as God.
Had monotheism remained a peculiarity of the Israelites (or as we
can now call them, the Jews), it would not have ranked as more than
a curiosity in the history of the world at large. As it happened,
this situation was drastically changed by a minor Jewish heresy
which became a world religion: Christianity. Its primary spread was
within the Roman Empire. By the fourth century after Christ it had
been adopted as the state religion; by the sixth century the Roman
Empire was more or less solidly Christian. At the same time
Christianity had spread unevenly in several directions beyond the
imperial frontiers. There were, for example, Christian kingdoms in
Armenia and Ethiopia; and although the Persian Empire held fast to
its ancestral Zoroastrian faith, it contained within its borders a
significant Christian minority, particularly in Mesopotamia. West of
India, no major society was unshaken by the rise of monotheism, and
only the Persians stood out against it.
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Arabia
South of the Roman and Persian Empires lay the world's largest
desert. This area is divided into two unequal portions by the Red
Sea: to the west lies the Sahara, and to the east Arabia. The
Arabian peninsula is a vast rectangle, some 1,300 miles long and 750
wide, stretching south-east from the Fertile Crescent (i.e. Syria
and Mesopotamia). Its predominant feature is its aridity. This is
slightly offset in the north, where desert gives way to semi-desert
and even to steppe, and still more in the south, where a mountainous
terrain receives a measure of summer rain. But between these
marginal zones lies the bulk of Arabia, and for the most part it is
desert relieved only by scattered oases.
In comparison with the Fertile Crescent, Arabia was accordingly a
land of deprivation. Agriculture, the basic economic activity of
mankind between the neolithic and industrial revolutions, was
largely confined to the oases; and even the rainfall agriculture of
the Yemen was derisory by comparison with what could be achieved
across the Red Sea in Ethiopia. Much of Arabia was fit only for
pastoralism, and a nomadic pastoralism at that.
These conditions did much to shape the character of Arabian
society. Civilisation, with its cities, temples, bureaucracies,
aristocracies, priesthoods, regular armies, and elaborate cultural
heritages, requires a substantial agricultural base. With the
partial exception of the Yemen, such an edifice could not be built
in Arabia. Arabian society was tribal, in the oases as much as in
the desert. There were pariah groups excluded from tribal society,
and 'kings' who were almost but not quite above it; but by the
standards of the Fertile Crescent, Arabian society was egalitarian
and anarchic. By the same standards the culture of Arabia was
simple, if not threadbare; its principal legacy is its poetry.
The isolating peninsular geography of Arabia, and the mobility of
pastoralists within it, contributed to another significant feature
of Arabian society, its homogeneity. To a surprising extent, the
Arabian desert was the land of a single people, the Arabs, speaking
a single language, Arabic. This cannot always have been so. The
Arabs do not appear by name before the ninth century BC, and were
not the first nomadic pastoralists of the area; but by the time of
Muhammad, any earlier diversity had been obliterated north of the
Yemen.
Although Arabian society was very different from the settled
societies, of the Fertile Crescent and beyond, it was by no means
deprived of contact with the outside world. Yet these contacts,
though ancient, had wrought no transformation on either side; their
effects were most pronounced in the border areas where the two
patterns interacted.
We may begin by looking at the military and political aspect of
this relationship. A nomadic tribal society is warlike and highly
mobile; but it is also allergic to large-scale organisation. As
raiders, the tribesmen of Arabia were accordingly a persistent
nuisance to the settled world; but they were rarely a serious
military threat. The Nabatean Arabs built up a kingdom on the edge
of the desert which in 85 BC occupied Damascus, and an Arab queen of
the later fourth century invaded Palestine; but such events were
exceptional. They might lead to the creation of Arab statelets, and
encourage penetration by Arab settlers, but they initiated no
massive and enduring conquests. A state governing a settled society,
by contrast, is capable of organised military effort on a large
scale, and may adopt a more or less forward policy of frontier
defence against nomadic raiders. It has, however, neither the means
nor the motive for conquering a desert. An eccentric Babylonian king
had once spent several years in the western Arabian oases, and a
Roman expedition had blundered through the Arabian desert on its way
to the Yemen; but again such episodes were exceptional. Under normal
conditions, the political influence of outside powers was confined
to frontier areas, where it might lead to the formation of Arab
client principalities and the use of their troops as auxiliaries. It
is true that a certain departure from this pattern seems to have
arisen from the imperial rivalries of the centuries preceding the
career of Muhammad. In this period the Persians established a
hegemony over the Arabs on an unprecedented scale. They were
entrenched in the east and south, and even had some presence in the
oases of central Arabia. But it is hard to imagine this yoke as a
heavy one in inner Arabia, least of all in the west, and it scarcely
appears in the story of Muhammad's life.
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Another significant form of contact with the outside world was
trade. The Islamic sources remember a trade in silver to Persia from
south and central Arabia, in close connection with the Persian
political hegemony. In the west they describe an Arab trade with
southern Syria of which the staple commodity would seem to have been
leather. By the standards of the international trade of the day,
both the silver and, still more, the leather trades were doubtless
rather trivial. Frankincense, the great Arabian export of antiquity,
had long ago lost its market in the Roman Empire; and coffee, the
only other Arabian export of consequence before the arrival of oil,
had not yet appeared. At the same time the bulk of the peninsula
played no part in international transit trade; it was naturally
cheaper to ship goods round the peninsula than to transport them
across it. But such trade as there was sufficed to ensure that a
knowledge of the civilised world and its proceedings existed far
into Arabia.
Arabia and monotheism
The Arabs were polytheists. The pattern of their religion was simple
-- the Arabs did not, for example, provide their gods with expensive
housing such as was standard in the Fertile Crescent, and so far as
we know they developed little in the way of a religious mythology.
But simple as it was, such indications as we have suggest that it
had been remarkably stable over a long period; thus Allat, a goddess
prominent in the time of Muhammad, is already attested by Herodotus
in the fifth century BC. In the centuries preceding the life of
Muhammad, however, external influences were beginning to disturb
this ancient polytheism. Predominantly, this influence was
monotheist; despite the Persian hegemony, the impact of
Zoroastrianism seems to have been slight outside the north-east.
As might be expected, the Arabs were affected by the rise of
Christianity, and more particularly by the sects which came to
predominate among their settled neighbours. In Syria, the prevailing
doctrine from the fifth century was that of the Monophysites; this
sect achieved a considerable following among the Arab tribes of the
northern desert. In the Persian Empire the Christian population was
mainly Nestorian, and to a lesser extent this sect held an analogous
position among the neighbouring Arabs. It was also active along the
Arab side of what in political terms was very much the Persian Gulf.
In the Yemen we hear most of Monophysites, matching as it happened
the form of Christianity which prevailed in Ethiopia.
There was also a considerable, and probably much older, Jewish
presence in western Arabia. The Islamic tradition describes
substantial Jewish populations in several of the western oases, in
the region known as the Hijaz, and this has some confirmation from
archaeology. In the Yemen a Jewish presence is likewise attested.
There is evidence that it was in contact with the Jews of Palestine,
and it seems to have achieved some local influence; in the early
sixth century a Yemeni king martyred Christians in the name of
Judaism.
Despite this Christian and Jewish penetration, Arabian society was
still predominantly pagan; but an awareness of monotheism in one or
other of its forms must have been widespread.
If we imagine ourselves for a moment in sixth-century Arabia,
what long-term expectations could we reasonably have entertained?
First, that if the Arabs had never in the past been a serious
military threat to the outside world, they were unlikely to become
one now. Second, that the escalating rivalry between the leading
foreign powers, the Romans and the Persians, would lead if anything
to a tightening of their grip on whatever was worth controlling in
Arabia. And third, that despite the persistence of paganism and the
presence of Judaism, it was only a matter of time before Arabia
became more or less Christian. In the event, the triumph of
monotheism in Arabia took a form which rendered each of these
plausible expectations false.
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Images and
Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism
By Mircea Eliade, Philip Mairet; Sheed Andrews and McMeel
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I Symbolism of the "Centre"
THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF RELIGIONS
Many laymen envy the vocation of the historian of religions. What
nobler or more rewarding occupation could there be than to frequent
the great mystics of all the religions, to live among symbols and
mysteries, to read and understand the myths of all the nations? The
layman imagines that a historian of religions must be equally at
home with the Greek or the Egyptian mythology, with the authentic
teaching of the Buddha, the Taoist mysteries or the secret rites of
initiation in archaic societies. Perhaps laymen are not altogether
wrong in thinking that the historian of religions is immersed in
vast and genuine problems, engaged in the decipherment of the most
impressive symbols and the most complex and lofty myths from the
immense mass of material that offers itself to him. Yet in fact the
situation is quite different. A good many historians of religions
are so absorbed in their special studies that they know little more
about the Greek or Egyptian mythologies, or the Buddha's teaching,
or the Taoist or shamanic techniques, than any amateur who has known
how to direct his reading. Most of them are really familiar with
only one poor little sector of the immense domain of religious
history. And, unhappily, even this modest sector is, more often than
not, but superficially exploited by the decipherment, editing and
translation of texts, historical monographs or the cataloguing of
monuments, etc. Confined to an inevitably limited subject, the
historian of religions often has a feeling that he has sacrificed
the fine spiritual career of his youthful dreams to the dull duty of
scientific probity.
But the excessive scientific probity of his output has ended by
alienating him from the cultured public. Except for quite rare
exceptions, the historians of religions are not read outside the
restricted circles of their colleagues and disciples. The public no
longer reads their books, either because they are too technical or
too dull; in short because they awaken no spiritual interest. By
force of hearing it repeated--as it was, for instance, by Sir James
Frazer throughout some twenty thousand pages--that everything
thought, imagined or desired by man in archaic societies, all his
myths and rites, all his gods and religious experiences, are nothing
but a monstrous accumulation of madnesses, cruelties and
superstitions now happily abolished by the progress of mankind--by
dint of listening almost always to the same thing, the public has at
last let itself be convinced, and has ceased to take any interest in
the objective study of religions. A portion, at least, of this
public tries to satisfy its legitimate curiosity by reading very bad
books--on the mysteries of the Pyramids, the miracles of Yoga, on
the "primordial revelations", or Atlantis--in short, interests
itself in the frightful literature of the dilettanti, the
neospiritualists or pseudo-occultists.
To some degree, it is we, the historians of religions, who are
responsible for this. We wanted at all costs to present an objective
history of religions, but we failed to bear in mind that what we
were christening objectivity followed the fashion of thinking in our
times. For nearly a century we have been striving to set up the
history of religions as an autonomous discipline, without success:
the history of religions is still, as we all know, confused with
anthropology, ethnology, sociology, religious psychology and even
with orientalism. Desirous to achieve by all means the prestige of a
"science", the history of religions has passed through all the
crises of the modern scientific mind, one after another. Historians
of religions have been successively--and some of them have not
ceased to be--positivists, empiricists, rationalists or
historicists. And what is more, none of the fashions which in
succession have dominated this study of ours, not one of the global
systems put forward in explanation of the religious phenomenon, has
been the work of a historian of religions; they have all derived
from hypotheses advanced by eminent linguists, anthropologists,
sociologists or ethnologists, and have been accepted in their turn
by everyone, including the historians of religions!
The situation that one finds today is as follows: a considerable
improvement in information, paid for by excessive specialisation and
even by sacrificing our own vocation (for the majority of historians
of religions have become orientalists, classicists, ethnologists,
etc.), and a dependence upon the methods elaborated by modern
historiography or sociology (as though the historical study of a
ritual or a myth were exactly the same thing as that of a country or
of some primitive people). In short, we have neglected this
essential fact: that in the title of the "history of religions" the
accent ought not to be upon the word history, but upon the word
religions. For although there are numerous ways of practising
history--from the history of technics to that of human
thought--there is only one way of approaching religion--namely, to
deal with the religious facts. Before making the history of
anything, one must have a proper understanding of what it is, in and
for itself. In that connection, I would draw attention to the work
of Professor Van der Leeuw, who has done so much for the
phenomenology of religion, and whose many and brilliant publications
have aroused the educated public to a renewal of interest in the
history of religions in general.
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In an indirect way, the same interest has been awakened by the
discoveries of psychoanalysis and depth-psychology, in the first
place by the work of Professor Jung. Indeed, it was soon recognised
that the enormous domain of the history of religions provided an
inexhaustible supply of terms of comparison with the behaviour of
the individual or the collective psyche, as this was studied by
psychologists or analysts. As we all know, the use that
psychologists have made of such socio-religious documentation has
not always obtained the approval of historians of religions. We
shall be examining, in a moment, the objections raised against such
comparisons, and indeed they have often been too daring. But it may
be said at once that if the historians of religions had only
approached the objects of their study from a more spiritual
standpoint, if they had tried to gain a deeper insight into archaic
religious symbolisms, many psychological or psychoanalytic
interpretations, which look all too flimsy to a specialist's eye,
would never have been suggested. The psychologists have found
excellent materials in our books, but very few explanations of any
depth--and they have been tempted to fill up these lacunae by taking
over the work of the historians of religions by putting forward
general--and too often rash--hypotheses.
In few words, the difficulties that have to be overcome today are
these: (a) on the one hand, having decided to compete for the
prestige of an objective "scientific" historiography, the history of
religions is obliged to face the objections that can be raised
against historicism as such; and (b) on the other hand, it is also
obliged to take up the challenge lately presented to it by
psychology in general--and particularly by depth-psychology, which,
now that it is beginning to work directly upon the
historicoreligious data, is putting forward working hypotheses more
promising, more productive, or at any rate more sensational, than
those that are current among historians of religion.
To understand these difficulties better, let us come now to the
subject of the present study: the symbolism of the "Centre". A
historian of religions has the right to ask us: What do you mean by
these terms? What symbols are in question? Among which peoples and
in what cultures? And he might add: You are not unaware that the
epoch of Tylor, of Mannhardt and Frazer is over and done with; it is
no longer allowable today to speak of myths and rites "in general",
or of a uniformity in primitive man's reactions to Nature. Those
generalisations are abstractions, like those of "primitive man" in
general. What is concrete is the religious phenomenon manifested in
history and through history. And, from the simple fact that it is
manifested in history, it is limited, it is conditioned by history.
What meaning, then, for the history of religions could there be in
such a formula as, for instance, the ritual approach to immortality?
We must first specify what kind of immortality is in question; for
we cannot be sure, a priori, that humanity as a whole has had,
spontaneously, the intuition of immortality or even the desire for
it. You speak of the "symbolism of the Centre"--what right have you,
as a historian of religions, to do so? Can one so lightly generalise?
One ought rather to begin by asking oneself: in which culture, and
following upon what historical events, did the religious notion of
the "Centre", or that of immortality become crystallised? How are
these notions integrated and justified, in the organic system of
such and such a culture? How are they distributed, and among which
peoples? Only after having answered all these preliminary questions
will one have the right to generalise and systematise, to speak in
general about the rites of immortality or symbols of the "Centre".
If not, one may be contributing to psychology or philosophy, or even
theology, but not to the history of religions.
I think all these objections are justified and, inasmuch as I am
a historian of religions, I intend to take them into account. But I
do not regard them as insurmountable. I know well enough that we are
dealing here with religious phenomena and that, by the very fact
that they are phenomena--that is, manifested or revealed to us--each
one is struck, like a medal, by the historical moment in which it
was born. There is no "purely" religious fact, outside history and
outside time. The noblest religious message, the most universal of
mystical experiences, the most universally human behaviour--such,
for instance, as religious fear, or ritual, or prayer--is
singularised and delimited as soon as it manifests itself. When the
Son of God incarnated and became the Christ, he had to speak
Aramaic; he could only conduct himself as a Hebrew of his times--and
not as a yogi, a Taoist or a shaman. His religious message, however
universal it might be, was conditioned by the past and present
history of the Hebrew people. If the Son of God had been born in
India, his spoken message would have had to conform itself to the
structure of the Indian languages, and to the historic and
prehistoric tradition of that mixture of peoples.
In the taking up of this position one can clearly recognise the
speculative progress that has been made, from Kant--who may be
regarded as a precursor of historicism--down to the latest
historicist or existentialist philosophers. In so far as man is a
historic, concrete, authentic being, he is "in situation". His
authentic existence is realising itself in history, in time, in his
time --which is not that of his father. Neither is it the time of
his contemporaries in another continent, or even in another country.
That being so, what business have we to be talking about the
behaviour of man in general? This man in general is no more than an
abstraction: he exists only on the strength of a misunderstanding
due to the imperfection of language.
This is not the place to attempt a philosophical critique of
historicism and historicist existentialism. That critique has been
made, and by more competent authors. Let us remark, for the present,
that the view of human spiritual life as historically conditioned
resumes, upon another plane and using other dialectical methods, the
now somewhat outmoded theories of environmental determinism,
geographical, economic, social and even physiological. Everyone
agrees that a spiritual fact, being a human fact, is necessarily
conditioned by everything that works together to make a man, from
his anatomy and physiology to language itself. In other words, a
spiritual fact presupposes the whole human being --that is, the
social man, the economic man, and so forth. But all these
conditioning factors together do not, of themselves, add up to the
life of the spirit.
What distinguishes the historian of religions from the historian
as such is that he is dealing with facts which, although historical,
reveal a behaviour that goes far beyond the historical involvements
of the human being. Although it is true that man is always found "in
situation", his situation is not, for all that, always a historical
one in the sense of being conditioned solely by the contemporaneous
historical moment. The man in his totality is aware of other
situations over and above his historical condition; for example, he
knows the state of dreaming, or of the waking dream, or of
melancholy, or of detachment, or of œsthetic bliss, or of escape,
etc.--and none of these states is historical, although they are as
authentic and as important for human existence as man's historical
existence is. Man is also aware of several temporal rhythms, and not
only of historical time--his own time, his historical
contemporancity. He has only to listen to good music, to fall in
love, or to pray, and he is out of the historical present, he
re-enters the eternal present of love and of religion. Even to open
a novel, or attend a dramatic performance, may be enough to
transport a man into another rhythm of time--what one might call
"condensed time"--which is anyhow not historical time. It has been
too lightly assumed that the authenticity of an existence depends
solely upon the consciousness of its own historicity. Such historic
awareness plays a relatively minor part in human consciousness, to
say nothing of the zones of the unconscious which also belong to the
make-up of the whole human being. The more a consciousness is
awakened, the more it transcends its own historicity: we have only
to remind ourselves of the mystics and sages of all times, and
primarily those of the Orient.
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To Die Or Not to
Die? Cross-Disciplinary, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives on the
Right to Choose Death,
By Joyce Berger
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clicking here1 The Right to Die: Perspectives of the
Patient, the Family, and the Health Care Provider
David V. Schapira
Possibly the most neglected aspect of patient care is the medical
and psychological management of a patient's death. The existence of
a deficiency may seem surprising. One would think that either
patients would have reached a conclusion regarding their deaths and
resuscitative measures prior to serious illness, or a discussion by
the physician with the patient and family would result in a decision
on how to handle resuscitation.
When addressing how aggressively to manage and treat serious
illness, implications that lie outside the boundaries of human
rights and a person's quality of life should be considered.
Approximately two million Americans die each year and, because of an
increase in the population and particularly an increase in the
number of elderly citizens, the annual number of deaths is rising.
Eighty percent of the health care dollar is spent on people who
survive less than one year. The care of nonsurvivors is
approximately double that of survivors ( Scotto and Chiazze, 1974).
Only 10 percent of patients who require admission to an intensive
care unit because of complications of their disease or treatment
leave the hospital. In the past fifteen years the cost of health
care has risen from 8 percent to over 13 percent of the gross
national product--more than a 50 percent increase. These statistics
should encourage health care providers to address the issue of
resuscitation and aggressive management of life-threatening or
terminal illnesses.
By addressing such issues at an appropriate time, the use of
expensive medical care in the pursuit of prolonging a patient's life
would be averted. It is particularly important that the decision of
whether or not to implement heroic measures be resolved at a time
when the patient is able to make a decision.
Despite our best intentions to grapple with and resolve the
issues of a patient's right to die, there are obstacles that can
render arriving at a solution difficult, if not impossible. I would
like to describe these obstacles from the perspective of the
patient, family, and health care provider.
THE PATIENT'S PERSPECTIVE
Patients may not wish to decide how aggressively their illness
should be managed; they may wish to relinquish the decision to the
physician. The severity of the illness can affect a patient's desire
to participate in active decision making. Increasing severity of
illness increases a patient's dependence on the physician. As the
severity of illness increases, the fear of dying may alter a
patient's decision whether or not to be resuscitated. The reality
may be too overwhelming. Additionally, medications such as potent
analgesics may alter a patient's mental state and reduce his or her
capacity for judgment.
Although the physician may attempt to inform patients about the
severity of their illnesses, patients may employ an appreciable
amount of denial. In a study of 315 cancer patients ( Eidinger and
Schapira, 1984) being treated with chemotherapy or radiation therapy
for advanced cancer, only 50 percent of the patients correctly
responded that their cancer had spread and was in an advanced stage.
All the patients had been informed of their condition prior to the
study. This lack of knowledge was not due to an unwillingness to
seek information, as over 90 percent of the participants wished to
learn all information regarding their disease, irrespective of
whether the information was pleasant or unpleasant. We asked the
participants what they felt their prognosis was. The majority of
patients felt they would live at least three years or longer, and an
appreciable percentage felt they would "beat the cancer." In fact,
over 75 percent of the patients expired within a year of
participating in the study. If patients have a very optimistic view
of their prognosis, discussions regarding resuscitation may seem
incongruous.
If patients deny the severity of their condition, they may not
make a rational and realistic decision about how the process of
dying should be medically managed. Patients may also feel that
making a decision not to be resuscitated may result in abandonment
by the health care team and enhance a feeling of hopelessness. It is
of interest that only 14 percent of patients who had a "do not
resuscitate" order on their chart left the hospital alive at the end
of the admission.
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Factors other than denial may affect the patient's decision
regarding resuscitation. A patient may make a decision not to be
resuscitated based on erroneous information, emotion, or mood. A
patient may become depressed with the side affects associated with
the disease and feel that "life is not worth living." If, however,
the symptoms can be alleviated, the patient's quality of life may be
markedly improved and the desire to be aggressive with medical
management may change.
Patients who feel they have not received a desired amount of
attention and emotional support from spouse, family members, or
friends may express a desire not to be resuscitated in an attempt to
engender sympathy and emotional support from these individuals.
Patients may even go so far as to attempt suicide to achieve the
desired outcome.
Patients may have preconceived unpleasant illusions about the
aspects of resuscitation. They may fear the trauma of intensive care
units, tubes and intravenous lines inserted into the body,
respirators, or the cardiac arrest procedure. Impressions of these
traumatic measures may lead patients to decide to make a more
passive decision.
These feelings of depression or fear that lead to a decision not
to be resuscitated may be implemented by the health care team unless
the reasons underlying the decision are examined. The situation can
arise in which the patient's quality of life and desire for life is
not dealt with appropriately. This is exemplified when an elderly
patient with a terminal disease is admitted to an intensive care
unit. The medical staff may view the admission and intensity of care
to be inappropriate. They may be unaware that the patient wishes to
remain alive for a few more weeks or months to see the birth of a
grandchild or wedding of a child.
A somewhat similar philosophical decision was presented to a
Massachusetts court ( Brophy vs. New England Mt. Sinai Hospital).
The court authorized the withdrawal of nutrition from an adult in a
chronic vegetative state. While healthy, he had stated that he would
not want his life sustained if he were permanently unconscious. The
court rejected the view that a decision to withdraw life-supporting
measures could be made on the basis of a quality of life that was
determined by individuals other than the patient. The decision
should not be perceived as a step toward euthanasia for those
patients who lack the capacity to satisfy someone else's vision of a
satisfactory quality of life or are deemed to be a social burden.
THE FAMILY'S PERSPECTIVE
For reasons of grief or guilt, the family may press for
disproportionately aggressive management. One can observe this
phenomenon in patients undergoing treatment for advanced cancer.
When all conventional treatments, usually chemotherapeutic drugs,
have been exhausted and the patient and family have been told that
nothing more can be done to prolong survival significantly, the
family may persuade the patient to turn to unconventional therapies
as a last resort. These therapies may not have demonstrated
objective tumor shrinkage, but guilt or grief may drive the patient
to try these treatments in desperation. Unfortunately, this decision
can have disastrous economic results as the travel to the clinics
and treatments are not covered by insurance. Thus the surviving
family may expend an appreciable amount of its savings.
Families are placed in a similarly uncomfortable position when
the patients are gravely ill and unable to make their wishes known
due to decreased consciousness. Families may express a desire for
inappropriately aggressive management because of guilt. A physician
may attempt to educate a family with an objective presentation of
the medical facts surrounding the case. Many families are
uncomfortable with this amount of education and participation. They
may not understand and assimilate the information at such an
emotional time and may lack the objectivity to make such an
important decision concerning a loved one. In order to avoid the
responsibility and guilt associated with adopting a passive
approach, they choose a safe course of action and request that
"everything be done" for the patient. This situation can be
rectified by the physician's explaining why a passive approach is in
the patient's best interest; this can alleviate the family's guilt
when they agree with the physician's decision.
Cultural or ethnic factors can make a decision regarding
resuscitation almost impossible. Hispanic families prefer to shield
the patient from unnecessary anxiety and depression and may ask the
physician not to tell the patient anxiety-provoking information such
as a diagnosis of cancer. Throughout the patient's course, the
family protects the patient from any depressing information;
therefore a discussion about dying and resuscitative measures
between the physician and the patient is obstructed.
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Although the situation of not informing the patient may seem
inconceivable, one must be careful not to impose one's belief system
as regards health, disease, treatment, and death on patients from a
different ethnic or cultural background. If one attempts to impose
one's wishes and values on patients, the response is often denial,
resistance, and decreased compliance. In fact, although we feel that
we are open in telling patients their prognoses, physicians often
collude with patients in not correcting optimistic misconceptions of
prognoses.
Because of their cultural or religious beliefs, and indeed their
personality, some patients may wish to take a passive role in the
decision making regarding the circumstances of their deaths. To
disregard the wishes and beliefs of the family and to confront the
patient with the decision will probably not be fruitful, and indeed
may lack understanding and not be in the patient's best interest.
Such a confrontation may impair the patient's quality of life and
future communication with the physician.
Although such an approach may still seem untenable, I would like to
illustrate how the traditional approach of Western medicine can be
unsuccessful. A Haitian man may present to an emergency room with
palpitations. This is usually a benign condition called paraxysmal
atrial tachycardia, and can be aborted by stimulating the vagus
nerve, whether by manually massaging the carotid body in the neck or
by having the patient swallow ice or attempt to blow air out of the
mouth with the mouth closed. The condition can be precipitated by
drinking excessive amounts of coffee, tea, or alcohol. Having
corrected the abnormal rhythm, the physician could warn the patient
not to consume the stimulants that precipitate the condition, teach
the patient the cardiac-slowing maneuvers, and possibly prescribe a
B-blocker, a medication that slows the heart. Such an approach would
most likely be ineffective and the patient would not take the
medication. The reason is that the Haitians call this condition
battement de coeur, or beating of the heart, and believe it to be
due to weak blood. They would expect to receive a liquid tonic to
build up the blood. If a Haitian did not receive a tonic, it is
unlikely that the patient would return to a practitioner of
traditional Western medicine. Lest this example seem too primitive
and far-fetched, one only has to remember that almost half of the
population of the United States takes at least one vitamin pill per
day for no justifiable reason--certainly not to avoid vitamin
deficiency. A study I made (with others) revealed that over 90
percent of vitamin takers are unaware of the recommended daily
allowance of any of the vitamins. Indeed, attempting to persuade the
members of this sophisticated population to stop taking a vitamin
has, in my experience, been extremely difficult.
Unfortunately, medical anthropology and thanatology are not part
of the curriculum of most medical schools. Without a knowledge of
these areas, physicians may lack awareness and sensitivity toward
alternate belief systems relating to health, disease, and death. The
physician can only be left to impose his or her belief system and
values on the patient, the result being an unsatisfactory outcome.
THE PHYSICIAN'S PERSPECTIVE
Dealing with ill patients exacts a toll on physicians, particularly
if they deal with chronic diseases in which dramatic improvement is
not often seen. A physician may have a tendency to equate a
patient's death with professional failure, or unrealistic
expectations. Having to impart unfavorable information to patients
on a continual basis tends to lead to a feeling of being "burned
out." The physician finds that it is easier not to become engaged in
a discussion with the patient over topics that will be emotionally
draining and time consuming. Thus physicians may avoid discussing
topics such as prognosis or resuscitation unless approached directly
by the patient or the family.
Apart from their desire to avoid discussing emotionally laden
issues, physicians vary in their communication skills. Some may lack
directness or honesty or may use technical language that is beyond
the understanding of the patient and family. In this situation a
facilitator, such as a psychiatrist attached to the health care
team, nurse, social worker, or chaplain, can act as an intermediary
and resolve any difficulties in understanding the issues. I find
this approach very effective as patients and families may not want
to ask physicians questions for fear of interrupting their busy
schedules or for fear that certain questions are too simple or
inappropriate. Members of a psychological team may be able to
discuss and allay a patient's or family's fears because of their
training and the fact that patients may find them less intimidating
than the physician. In a study by Bedell et al. ( 1983), 95 percent
of physicians felt it was appropriate to discuss the patient's
wishes regarding resuscitation, yet in only 19 percent of cases did
the physician discuss the subject of resuscitation with the patient,
and in only 33 percent of cases did the physician discuss
resuscitation with the family.
Fear of legal liability may interfere with a physician's ability
to make the best choice for the patient. A physician may have a
primary objective of minimizing liability, real or imagined. This
strategy may be at the expense of humane treatment and may be at
odds with the family's wishes. There is only one case (as of 1984)
in which two physicians were charged with murder for withholding
life support from a comatose patient. The charges were dropped by
the California Court of Appeals. The fear of litigation following
the withholding of life support is grossly exaggerated by
physicians. If the conversation with, and wishes of, the patient and
family are documented in the hospital records, it is extremely
unlikely that a physician will be sued. In spite of legal
uncertainties, appropriate and compassionate care should have
priority over undue fear of liability.
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WHAT CONSTITUTES RESUSCITATION?
It appears that most members of the public understand resuscitation
to involve cardiopulmonary arrest maneuvers. They may be aware that
these maneuvers involve the mechanical stimulation of the heart by
manual compression of the chest, ventilation by a small ventilatory
bag, and the insertion of intravenous fluids and cardiac stimulus.
Although this is certainly a valid impression of the scenario that
surrounds the final event of a cardiac arrest, there are other
interventions in medical management that, if withheld, would lead to
the death of the patient. These more subtle areas of medical
management that the public is often not aware of lead to problems of
interpretation when a patient has written a living will. These
subtler areas of "resuscitation" are frequently not included in the
conditions or scenarios of a living will; they include the
withholding of antibiotics from a patient with a terminal disease
who has a life-threatening infection; the withholding of steroids
for patients with cerebral metastases; withholding of intravenous
fluids or hyperalimentation; and not performing laboratory tests to
correct electrolyte disorders. All of these instances obviously
assume that patients are unable to transmit their wishes because of
decreased consciousness. Although these situations do not directly
involve the saving of life, they can, when implemented, appreciably
prolong a patient's life. If patients are not conscious and cannot
make their wishes known, implementing these interventions would seem
to be uneconomical and contrary to the patients' interests.
The living will is a document, distributed nationally, that
outlines patients' wishes regarding medical management should they
subsequently become incompetent to decide ( Society for the Right to
Die, Living Will, New York, 1985). This document is not binding in
some states, but it does clearly outline a patient's desires and
expectations. At the present, thirty-eight states have enacted
living will or "natural death" legislation ( Jonsen, 1978).
CONCLUSION
There are no simple solutions when attempting to elicit a patient's
request for withholding resuscitation and granting that request. The
most important point to be made is that the patient has the ultimate
right to control all aspects of medical care and resuscitation, and
the family and health care team must abide by the patient's wishes.
If patients are unable to make a decision, their spouse or close
family may decide what course should be taken. It is hoped that
their decisions would be based on prior discussion with patients
regarding their opinions and wishes concerning resuscitation.
The medical team in a hospital is often faced with a situation in
which a patient has a life-threatening episode such as cardiac
arrhythmia or cardiac arrest, and there is no statement in the
patient's chart regarding resuscitation. Under these circumstances
the medical team has to make every effort to resuscitate the
patient, even though resuscitation seems inappropriate and would
have been against the patient's wishes. This not uncommon situation
can be frequently averted if the attending physician discusses
resuscitation measures with the patient either before admission or
on the first day of admission to the hospital. This discussion
should not be held with every patient, but only with those patients
deemed to have limited survival or a serious life-threatening
condition.
I doubt that this practice will become widespread, as it involves
many emotionally draining and time-consuming discussions. I do not
state this opinion with any degree of cynicism because I realize the
very appreciable increased amount of time and emotion that
physicians would have to give to engage in such discussions on
almost a daily basis.
Another approach would be to educate patients regarding their
rights to make a living will, and to make the drawing up of such a
will a relatively simple and inexpensive exercise. Living wills
drawn up by patients attempt to extend patients' authority to
decline certain therapeutic measures that may be involved in their
death. This attempt would be made at a time when the patient was
capable of entering into decision making. A standardized document
could be obtained from a doctor's office or hospital that would
describe the various levels of resuscitative measures with
explanations. Patients could then make informed decisions as to the
level of resuscitative procedures that they would want to have
invoked should they become critically ill.
A third approach would be to have certain criteria for the entry
of patients with terminal illness into intensive care units. There
is considerable evidence ( Cullen et al., 1974) that an appreciable
portion of the cost of caring for terminally ill patients is
associated with treatment in intensive care units. There are
standards that cover the admission of patients to intensive care
units. The bill for such an admission may not be totally covered by
the insurance company and the surviving family may be left having to
pay a considerable amount of money. A more stringent application of
admission guidelines would reduce expenditures for the health care
system and family, which is important when the admission of a
patient to such a unit is inappropriate and unsuccessful.
A very reasonable alternative in caring for terminal patients who
do not wish an aggressive approach to their management is the
hospice movement. Hospices provide an alternative form of care for
the dying. They allow terminally ill patients a choice of dying at
home or in facilities other than the hospital. Hospices are often a
more appropriate form of care, as they are designed for palliation
and caring rather than curing. Patient autonomy and dignity are
enhanced.
In 1982 Congress ensured that hospice care would be covered by
Medicare. It is not clear that hospice care will reduce the cost of
health care, but the system allows terminal illness to be more
bearable for the patient and family if a decision has been made not
to follow an aggressive course.
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The Crusade
against Slavery, 1830-1860,
By Louis Filler
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IN THE 1830's and after the winds of reform shook the United States
more furiously than ever they had since the Revolution. Not only
were there more causes than before, but, in an era of "the rise of
the common man," they affected more people. In such an atmosphere of
unrest, the status of the Negro, both enslaved and free, became an
increasingly urgent and pre-eminent issue, and, in the end, divided
the nation.
The abolition and reform movements were complex by nature,
carrying emotional overtones, and associated with spectacular
events. It was not possible to present disinterested analyses of
their content and direction, either in their time or for a long time
thereafter. The growth of free soil and the struggle to preserve the
Union made reform seem less important, and confused the definition
of abolition. In the post-Civil War period the reformers, once bound
together by concern for the slave, by free speech, temperance,
education, woman's rights, and other causes, tended to separate,
each to pursue his own specialty. This growing emphasis on
"specialists" made it increasingly difficult to accept the fact that
one could agitate for woman's rights, and education, and the rights
of the individual all at once--that many Americans had once done so.
Hence, although there have been numerous biographies of pre-Civil
War reformers, and monumental histories of woman's rights,
temperance, education, and other crusades, their relevance to each
other has been less persistently sought. The central hub of
reform--abolition--has received fragmented consideration, for the
most part, in the interest of one or another major figure.
It has been too readily assumed that the "moral struggle" against
slavery in the 1830's became transformed, from 1840 to 1860, into a
"political struggle" which diminished the value of the
abolitionists. Whether true or false, the thesis requires
re-examination. The present volume traces the relationship of
antislavery to abolition, and probes their connection with the
several reforms which dominated the period. It attempts to avoid
merely mentioning names, to say nothing of name-calling. It seeks,
rather, to discriminate among individuals and inquire into their
purposes and worth. It endeavors to recapture a sense of the
contemporary consequence which reformers enjoyed; and it may well be
that such an attempt affects our judgment of their relevance to our
own times.
The available materials are as numerous, as complex as our "densepack'd
cities," as broad as our "myriad fields." The investigator who seeks
to rise above the level of partisanship has a delicate task in
seeking out representative materials intended to open inquiry,
rather than to close it, while at the same time satisfying the
reader's right to know how the author feels about his own findings.
My appreciation is due Antioch College, the American
Philosophical Society, and the Social Science Research Council,
which, at strategic points, provided grants in aid of research and
for related expenses. Antioch College's fine library staff helped
keep materials coming during the long preparation of the manuscript,
and its excellent sabbatical policy enabled me to complete the work.
Many more people than can be conveniently mentioned have given aid
and comfort, suggestions and advice. Thanks are due, first, to my
editors, Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, who gave this
work the benefit of their long experience and understanding.
Numerous persons read the manuscript in part, and many more
influenced the formulation of passages and ideas. It is a pleasure
to note, among my colleagues, Professors Bernard A. Weisberger of
the University of Chicago, the late Robert S. Fletcher of Oberlin
College, Harry R. Stevens of Ohio University, Wesley M. Gewehr,
emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland,
Lawrence A. Cremin of Teachers College, Columbia University, C.
Stanley Urban of Park College, Mary E. Young of Ohio State
University, Dean Lloyd E. Worner of The Colorado College, and
Bernard Mandel of Cleveland. Mr. Boyd B. Stutler of Charleston, West
Virginia, not only gave freely from his great store of information
about John Brown and related topics, but contributed a warm interest
which was welcome during stonier stages of investigation. Librarians
are friendly folks, and one is grateful to them as a class. Helpful
beyond the strict call of duty were Mrs. Alene Lowe White of the
Western Reserve Historical Society, Miss Lelia F. Holloway of the
Oberlin College Library, and Miss Louise F. Kampf of The Colorado
College, as well as Dr. Henry J. Caren, Associate Editor of the Ohio
Historical Quarterly.
CHAPTER 1
The Challenge of Slavery
THROUGHOUT the colonial period and after the American Revolution,
slavery was accepted by most Americans as a normal and inevitable
aspect of their affairs. True, it became more and more confined, as
a working institution, to the southern states. True, also,
relatively few Americans had a direct economic stake in its
perpetuation. These few, however, included some of the most
respected elements of society. They bought and sold slaves, rented
them as laborers, and otherwise lived by money gained from their
use. To no small degree, they involved in their fortunes
non-slaveholding Northerners from whom they purchased goods and
services and for whom they felt friendship. They enjoyed the good
will of humbler classes of Southerners and Northerners who despised
the Negro for his color or feared him as a possible competitor.
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Yet curiously enough, during the decades which preceded the
reform era, slavery inspired not one notable literary or legal
defense. Many influential leaders of society assumed that it must
ultimately give way to a more democratic order. Others deplored its
workings and sought to hasten its end. Their compassion sometimes
extended to the Indian, as well, who had also been marked for
enslavement, though he was less tractable than the black man. In New
England, back in the seventeenth century, John Eliot, "apostle to
the Indians," had been stirred to his saintly labors of Indian
conversion. In the South, the following century, Christian Priber,
from Saxony, adopted the Cherokees in western Carolina; he died a
prisoner of Oglethorpe, English reformer and founder of Georgia. 1
Among others, Samuel Sew. all, notable Massachusetts diarist and
penitent judge of the Salem witchcraft hysteria, had been concerned
over the right and wrong of slavery, and had undertaken to pay his
own slave for services rendered. Theirs were literally voices crying
in the wilderness.
It would later become a major assumption in American history that
the frontier had fostered freedom. There is, indeed, persuasive
evidence that the frontier encouraged the creation of democratic
ideas and attitudes and helped push democratic leaders to the fore,
but it did not, on the other hand, help to undermine slavery. The
frontier tended to reflect the prejudices and expectations of those
who settled it. It permitted them almost unbounded opportunity, so
that practical and experimental, progressive and patently
reactionary, modes of behavior flourished according to the strength
of their sponsors. Cosmopolitan Cincinnati in Ohio and Mormon Nauvoo
in Illinois, Natchez with its Old South ways and atheistic New
Harmony in Indiana--all were made possible by the open terrain. 2 It
was part of the tragedy of the South that its rapidly tightening
social system should have so dominated its own frontier as not to
have permitted a leavening process between the new areas being
developed in the South and the original states. Western
Virginia--hilly, with few slaves, with large numbers of poor whites
and individualists--was not able to modify Old Virginia's ways.
Ultimately, they separated. 3
The American Revolution and the years following excited new
expectations that slavery must soon dwindle in strength and
prestige. Such actual plans for ending it as maintaining high
tariffs on the slave trade, or permitting slaves to buy their own
freedom, were impractical. 4 But the spirit of the times seemed to
favor an expansion of civil and other liberties. Leading Southerners
freely expressed abhorrence of the foreign slave trade and domestic
slavery. Not a few rewarded loyal slaves with manumissions for
services during the Revolutionary War. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, noted
theologian and a disciple of the great Jonathan Edwards, expressed
himself in behalf of the slave, and contributed a vital Dialogue
Concerning the Slavery of the Africans ( 1776) to the Revolutionary
debate. After the Revolution had been fought and won, it continued
to influence the American imagination; identification with it would
strengthen a demand for a specific reform. The Negro's cause was
seen as aided by his association with the Revolutionary effort,
which was regarded as the most favorable era in Negro-white
relations. In due course, antislavery views of the Revolutionary
Fathers would be carefully collected and widely quoted. 5
But with the war over, popular interest in the slave declined.
Abolitionist petitions to the first Federal Congress were, according
to one caustic observer, received "with a sneer" by John Adams,
presiding, and with hostility by distinguished senators. Such acts
as Virginia's, officially manumitting Negroes who had served the
Revolution, did not contribute to a landslide of manumissions,
although well into the nineties it was customary for slaveowners to
manumit some of their faithful Negroes by will. 6
The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 made
slavery profitable in cotton cultivation; thereafter, the southern
leadship became more assertive in defense of its rights.
Representative Northerners unequivocally expressed their antislavery
sentiments, but they did not speak for a section united on the
issue, nor were they themselves clear about what should be done.
Sensibilities on the subject took time to form in the North. William
Jay, soon to be one of the most distinguished of abolitionists, was
proud of the career of his father, John Jay, and of the latter's
services as president of the pioneer Society for Promoting the
Manumission of Slaves. His biography of the first Chief Justice of
the United States Supreme Court placed Jay's ownership of slaves in
a special category:
In the year 1798, being called upon by the United States marshal
for an account of his taxable property, [ John Jay] accompanied a
list of his slaves with the following observations:
"I purchase slaves, and manumit them at proper ages, and when
their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable
retribution."
As free servants became more common, he was gradually relieved
from the necessity of purchasing slaves; and the last two which he
manumitted he retained for many years in his family, at the
customary wages. 7
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Thus, in this early period, antislavery leaders resorted to
slaveowning for "humane" ends.
By 1825, North and South were clearly distinguishable in their
attitude toward slavery, but not in their attitude toward the Negro.
The celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, in that year,
helped underscore how far the new nation had fallen from earlier
expectations. The eminent Frenchman received an appeal from a
publicspirited citizen to speak out against slavery, the latter
having "a recollection of the notices in my early youth of thy
generous efforts in the Cause of American liberty," and being
convinced that the General's views would be received with
enthusiasm. 8 But Lafayette himself was dismayed by the amount of
anti-Negro prejudice he observed, in the North as well as in the
South, and remarked that during the Revolution "black and white
soldiers messed together without hesitation." 9
Theodore Dwight and John Sergeant were typical of many
Northerners who were sincerely antislavery in sentiment, but who
inadvertently fell into the posture of mere sectionalists. Theodore
Dwight, editor of the New York Daily Advertiser, not only favored
the abolition of slavery; he denounced the flogging of soldiers, and
cruelty toward Negroes, Indians, Eskimos, mental patients, and even
lobsters. But besides being a reformer he was also an ardent
Federalist, whose strictures on the virtues and vices of Thomas
Jefferson were far from dispassionate. 10 John Sergeant was an
outstanding Philadelphia lawyer and congressman who earned the
denunciation of Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina as being "a
distinguished advocate of the Missouri restriction, an acknowledged
abolitionist." There is no evidence, however, that Sergeant had any
regard for Negroes as individuals or as a people. 11 Having little
firsthand knowledge of slavery's workings, such partisans failed to
acquire the information which would have added sinews to their
arguments opposing it. Of different mettle was Benjamin Lundy,
greatest of the pioneer abolitionists, who noted in 1826 that the
governor of South Carolina had recommended that the custom of
burning slaves in capital cases be stopped. "Is it possible that
this has not been done long ago?" Lundy asked. "Will the cruelties
of slaveholders hence be denied, as they have, by slaveite editors?"
12
The majority of Lundy's fellow Northerners remained indifferent
to such practices; in fact, not a few of them were actively
proslavery. The line between anti-Negro sentiment and proslavery
feeling was sometimes shadowy, but Major Mordecai Manuel Noah,
picturesque and popular Jacksonian, did not beat about the bush.
Noah preached the rights of man, but also defended enslavement for
the Negro. His point of view was shared by numerous elements
throughout the North. 13
Daniel Webster, in his greatest peroration, pleading in 1830 for
"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable," observed
that suspicion had been fostered in the South against the North for
political reasons. The North was represented as "disposed to
interfere with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns."
The charge was untrue, Webster averred: "Such interference has never
been supposed to be within the power of government; nor has it been,
in any way, attempted." Many other Northerners adopted an equally
virtuous stand regarding their willingness to live with slavery as a
system. 14 Their insensitivity was a major challenge, not only to
abolitionists, but to other antislavery partisans now coming to be
frustrated in their hopes that southern spokesmen would support
programs for freeing slaves. But as Theodore Parker was to point out
in sermon after sermon, the supporter of the slave system would not
let the North alone. Horace Greeley was one day to sum up the
problem brilliantly:
"Why can't you let Slavery alone?" was imperiously or querulously
demanded at the North, throughout the long struggle preceding [the
bombardment of Fort Sumter], by men who should have seen, but would
not, that Slavery never left the North alone, nor thought of so
doing. "Buy Louisiana for us!" said the slaveholders. "With
pleasure." "Now Florida!" "Certainly." Next: "Violate your treaties
with the Creeks and Cherokees; expel those tribes from the lands
they have held from time immemorial, so as to let us expand our
plantations." "So said, so done." "Now for Texas!" "You have it."
"Next, a third more of Mexico!" "Yours it is." "Now, break the
Missouri Compact, and let Slavery wrestle with Free Labor for the
vast region consecrated by that Compact to Freedom!" "Very good.
What next?" "Buy us Cuba, for One Hundred and Fifty Millions." "We
have tried; but Spain refuses to sell it." "Then wrest it from her
at all hazards!" And all this time, while Slavery was using the
Union as her catspaw--dragging the Republic into iniquitous wars and
enormous expenditures, and grasping empire after empire
thereby--Northern men (or, more accurately, men at the North) were
constantly asking why people living in the Free States could not let
Slavery alone, mind their own business, and expend their surplus
philanthropy on the poor at their own doors, rather than on the
happy and contented slaves! 15
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Feminist
Interpretation of the Bible,
Book by Letty M. Russell
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Introduction: Liberating the Word
In 1976 The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of
the Bible was published by a small NCCC Task Force on Sexism in the
Bible. In the introduction to that book I wrote that the message of
the Bible can become a liberating word for those who hear and act in
faith but that this same message also needs to be liberated from
sexist interpretations which continue to dominate our thoughts and
actions. This small book was a "premature" guide to feminist
interpretation of the Bible. 1 As the contributions to feminist
interpretation have continued to grow in volume and maturity, it has
become abundantly clear that the scriptures need liberation, not
only from existing interpretations but also from the patriarchal
bias of the texts themselves. The more we learn about feminist
interpretation, the more we find ourselves asking, with Katharine
Sakenfeld, "How can feminists use the Bible, if at all? What
approach to the Bible is appropriate for feminists who locate
themselves within the Christian community? How does the Bible serve
as a resource for Christian feminists?" [ 55 ]. 2
This collection of essays does not pretend to have the answer.
Rather, it continues the tradition of the earlier book by inviting a
wide readership of women and men to share in discussion of these
questions. Discussions of feminist perspectives are not taking place
in the academy alone. In all parts of the church, many women and not
a few men seek ways of liberating the word to speak the gospel in
the midst of the oppressive situations of our time. It is hoped that
FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE will provide resources for
collective discussion in Bible study, teaching, and preaching as
well as personal study and meditation. As we join together in our
study of the Bible, we may even be surprised by the fresh insights
and challenges that arise as we search out the meaning of the texts
for our own lives.
Fresh insights are needed as the rising consciousness of women
and people in the Third World or in other oppressed circumstances
leads them to challenge accepted biblical interpretations that
reinforce patriarchal domination. From this perspective the Bible
needs to be liberated from its captivity to one-sided white,
middle-class, male interpretation. It needs liberation from
privatized and spiritualized interpretations that avoid God's
concern for justice, human wholeness, and ecological responsibility;
it needs liberation from abstract, doctrinal interpretations that
remove the biblical narrative from its concrete social and political
context in order to change it into timeless truth.
Feminist and liberation theologians and biblical scholars have
begun working on this process of liberating the word. Reading the
Bible from the perspective of the oppressed, they note the bias in
all biblical interpretation and call for clear advocacy of those who
are in the greatest need of God's mercy and help: the dominated
victims of society. These scholars lift up not only the personal but
also the social, political, and economic dimensions of the biblical
narratives, as they try to reconstruct the hidden history of the
"losers." Thus they seek to keep the prophetic and liberating story
of God's concern for the oppressed and for the mending of creation
alive among communities of faith and faithfulness.
Feminists find that even here the going is difficult, for the
biblical texts were written in the context of patriarchal cultures.
It is not even clear that the category of the oppressed is "generic"
in the worldview of patriarchy [ 118 ]. Thus the issue continues to
be whether the biblical message can continue to evoke consent in
spite of its patriarchal captivity.
The Liberating Word
Perhaps those who wrote The Liberating Word were overly optimistic
about the possibility of nonsexist interpretation, but they were
certainly not so about the growing concern for feminist
interpretation in church and school. In the last ten years, such
biblical scholars as Phyllis Trible and Elisabeth Fiorenza have
published major volumes of interpretation. 3 All the bibliographical
references in a book such as this can hardly do justice to the
ever-increasing number of books and articles related to this topic.
The urgency felt by the original task force in sharing some early
reflections with the wider community of faith has been felt by women
and men who consider the Bible authoritative for their faith, as
well as by those who wish to challenge the impact of patriarchal
tradition on the lives of women.
(get the full version of this research and other sources for your
paper on the Bible at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
Feminist biblical interpretation has developed into two
interdependent areas of research: inclusive language and inclusive
interpretation. Both areas have one thing in common: They are
carried forward by cooperating groups of women and men who see their
work not only as a scholarly enterprise but also as a collective
effort to bring about change in the thoughts, values, and actions of
religious groups in the United States and abroad. The original task
force was created because of a concern for the interpretation of the
Bible that takes place through translation. The National Council of
the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. holds the copyright for the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible and continues to sponsor the
committee on revisions. Concern for representation of feminist
scholarship on the translation committee has led to the appointment
of Phyllis Bird, Cheryl Exum, and Katharine Sakenfeld to the
committee currently at work on revisions of the Hebrew scriptures.
At the same time, subsequent NCCC task forces have developed An
InclusiveLanguage Lectionary for use in worship and preaching.
Like the publication of the RSV before it, the Lectionary has
sparked a storm of protest. It has made substitutions for key
biblical words and concepts: God the Father [and Mother]; God the
SOVEREIGN ONE; Realm of God. 4 These may or may not turn out to be
the most imaginative renderings, but the greatest outcry has to do
with "changing the canon" and thus weakening its "authority."
Detractors seldom notice that The Living Bible and The Good News
Bible are also paraphrases, or that the Reader's Digest version is
also an alteration by deletion of the RSV. The difference is that
inclusive changes have to do with imaging God as transcendent of
male sexual characteristics or as inclusive of both male and female
characteristics. The Lectionary confronts the seemingly divinely
sanctioned patriarchal view of the world that is the basis of
religious security for many people [ 64 ].
This book is the fruit of the second stream, cooperative research
relative to the inclusive interpretation of the Bible. It seeks
particularly to affirm women so that they are acknowledged as fully
human partners with men, sharing in the image of God.
Liberating the Word
A group of feminists in the American Academy of Religion and the
Society of Biblical Literature decided to make use of the annual
meetings to develop a project of feminist hermeneutics (theories of
interpretation), seeking to clarify for themselves and for others
the distinctive character of feminist interpretation. The
participants in the project represented women and men who were
concerned about liberating the word from its patriarchal bondage.
The question of liberation hermeneutics has been on the agenda of
the Liberation Theology Working Group of the American Academy of
Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature for some time. It
was the theme of the papers in 1979 and has been the central
research topic since 1981. In 1980 a particular focus on feminist
hermeneutics was added after an SBL centennial session on "The
Effects of Women's Studies on Biblical Studies," moderated by
Phyllis Trible. The recognition of the marginalization of women in
the biblical field provided an impetus for cooperation among
feminist and liberation scholars in asking one another how they do
or do not do biblical interpretation differently from the mainstream
of biblical study and interpretation.
The published papers from this 1980 meeting 5 indicate that there
is a second marginality experienced by feminist biblical scholars:
They are marginal to a great deal of feminist scholarship because
they continue to uphold the value of the biblical materials in spite
of their patriarchal bias against women. For this reason it was
important to work together as biblical scholars and theologians to
reflect on a particular area of activity: feminist interpretation of
the Bible. There had been considerable activity. Some members of
this 1981 session had been at work in this area for more than ten
years and welcomed a chance to reflect together on this action. They
were asking, "What is it that we are doing as feminists when we
interpret the Bible? Is there something distinctive about this
interpretation? If so, what is it?"
Perhaps the one area that could be agreed upon from the beginning
was that, like the nineteen women suffragists who worked with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton from 1895 to 1898 to publish The Woman's
Bible, these women are searching today for a feminist interpretation
of the Bible that is rooted in the feminist critical consciousness
that women and men are fully human and fully equal. This
consciousness is opposed to teachings and actions that reinforce the
social system that oppresses women and other groups in society. In
her contribution to the centennial session, Dorothy Bass reminded us
that Stanton published The Woman's Bible because the keystone of
misogynist religion and of women's oppression is the Bible. 6 Then
as now, there are those who find the Bible irrelevant or hopelessly
sexist and others who find feminist critique ungodly, but many women
and men struggle to combine a feminist consciousness and serious
consideration of the biblical witness with the story of God's
presence in the lives of women and men.
(get the full version of this research and other sources for your
paper on the Bible at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
The meeting in Dallas in 1981 was preceded by a number of papers
seeking to situate the issues of feminist hermeneutic and to examine
the options for dealing with the biblical material. Katharine
Sakenfeld summarized the options as: (1) looking to texts about
women to counteract famous texts "against" women, (2) rejecting the
Bible as not authoritative and/or useful, (3) looking to the Bible
generally for a liberation perspective, and (4) looking to texts
about women to learn from the intersection of the stories of ancient
and modern women living in patriarchal cultures [ 56 ]. 7
In order to learn about feminist hermeneutics through reflection
on action, two feminist exegetical papers were prepared and
discussed at the Dallas meeting. (These papers were later published
in revised form in the Fall 1983 issue of Semeia, devoted to
feminist hermeneutics and the Bible, edited by Mary Ann Tolbert.)
Sharon Ringe says that her paper on the transfiguration, " Luke
9:28-36: The Beginning of an Exodus," is an elaboration of
Sakenfeld's third option; it looks at a particular pericope from a
liberation perspective. Her conclusion is that the exegesis is
feminist, not in the way she used techniques of historical and
literary criticism but in "the concerns, questions, and
sensitivities" she brought to the task.
In contrast, Cheryl Exum's paper, "You Shall Let Every Daughter
Live: A Study of Exodus 1:8-2:10," was on a text specifically chosen
because the courageous action of women is the beginning of the
liberation of Israel from Egypt (fourth option). The actions of the
midwives and Pharaoh's daughter become extraordinary as we see the
risks they took in opposing patriarchy and hear this old story of
liberation in new ways.
What did we learn from reflection on these concrete actions of
exegesis by feminist scholars? One thing is that, in the words of
Phyllis Trible, "feminist hermeneutics embraces a variety of
methodologies and disciplines." 8 A second is that the
interpretative bias and understanding is built into the exegesis
itself, so that it is impossible to delay the feminist or liberation
critical perspective until the exegesis is finished, as a sort of
theological afterthought about meaning or relevance. 9 Third, as
Fiorenza has pointed out, we must seek feminist hermencutics not
just in ways of dealing with the biblical material but in the
criteria for evaluating one's approach to scripture. 10
The New York meeting in 1982 was based on a series of responses
to Fiorenza's own proposals for evaluating one's approach to
scripture. We attempted to move beyond feminist critical perspective
and options for biblical exegesis to the issue of criteria for
feminist interpretation. In addition to Fiorenza's chapter
(published in The Challenge of Liberation Theology) and the
circulated responses of the panel, we also considered Rosemary
Ruether's first chapter from Sexism and God Talk, entitled "Feminist
Theology: Methodology, Sources, and Norms." The criteria were not
spelled out in great detail, but it is possible to identify what
Ruether calls the "critical feminist principle" as it is found in
these two papers. For Ruether, the "critical principle of feminist
theology is the affirmation and promotion of the full humanity of
women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of
women is, therefore, to be appraised as not redemptive" [ 115 ]. 11
Fiorenza maintains that "only the nonsexist and nonandrocentric
traditions of the Bible and the nonoppressive traditions of biblical
interpretation have the theological authority of revelation" [ 128
]. 12
Both statements immediately raise the issue of our understanding
of biblical authority and canon, as the panelists were quick to
point out. The whole canon is to be taken seriously, especially
because of the possibility of the Bible's use as a tool for the
oppression of women. But it is not considered to function as the
Word of God, evoking consent or faith, if it contributes to the
continuation of racism, sexism, and classism. In her "Response to
the Responders" in New York, Fiorenza asserted that this was not an
issue of authority but rather of the political struggles of women
against oppression. 13 She seeks to shift the criteria of biblical
criticism from a focus on what is adequate to the human condition
and appropriate to scriptures to what is adequate to
historical-literary methods and appropriate to the struggle of the
oppressed for liberation. 14
From a feminist liberation perspective, feminist theory of
interpretation begins with a different view of reality, asking what
is appropriate in light of "personally and politically reflected
experience of oppression and liberation." 15 Interpretation does not
begin with dogmatic statements about the authority of scripture and
canon but rather--as we did in the hermeneutic project--with
feminist perspective and praxis. Nevertheless, as we arrive at a
critical feminist perspective that says the biblical text can only
be considered to function as God's word, compelling our faith, when
it is nonsexist, we ourselves have raised the question of authority
[ 137 ]. The dogmatic and patriarchal view of authority, as timeless
truth handed down, is being challenged by what Fiorenza calls a
"paradigm of emancipatory praxis." 16
Issues that have been raised in areas of experience, biblical
authority, and models of interpretation need to be pursued in a
continuing search, not for an abstract synthesis but for a theory of
interpretation that is rooted in the concrete particularities of
oppression and liberation, such as those expressed by Jewish
feminist writers and writers from Black, Hispanic, and Asian
perspectives [ 30 , 111 ]. 17 There is much to learn about paradigms
of authority from communities of oppressed people such as the Black
community, whose members listened to the Bible not for doctrinal
propositions but for "experiences which could inspire, convince and
enlighten." 18 What is needed is not the old questions and paradigms
of authority but the development of new questions and paradigms of
authority, which are functional in the communities of struggle
wrestling with the biblical text.
(get the full version of this research and other sources for your
paper on the Bible at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
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Theses and
Dissertations: A Guide to Planning, Research, and Writing
By R. MURRAY THOMAS and DALE L. BRUBAKER
Traditionally in academia, the two main purposes of master's-degree
and doctoral projects are (a) to provide graduate students guided
practice in conducting and presenting research and (b) to make a
contribution to the world's fund of knowledge or to improve the
conduct of some activity.
The practice aspect goes well beyond the demands of a typical term
paper or individual-study assignment, since the aim is to equip
students to do research and writing of respectable, publishable
quality in the future.
The contribution-to-knowledge aspect is intended to make the
student's study more than just a learning exercise by using this
opportunity to produce valued information or to introduce a point of
view not available before. This aspect is what usually distinguishes
a master's thesis from a doctoral dissertation, in that the
contribution of the dissertation is expected to be of greater
magnitude than that of the thesis.
Sources of Guidance
"If I'd known he'd be too busy to be of much help, I would have
tried to find a better advisor."
At the outset of your project, it is well to identify potential
sources of help and to recognize the advantages and limitations of
each. Those sources of most value are usually academic advisors,
fellow graduate students, experts outside of your own department or
institution, you yourself, and the professional literature.
ACADEMIC ADVISORS
Policies for assigning faculty members to supervise students' thesis
and dissertation projects can vary from one institution to another
and even across departments within the same institution.
In some cases, the advisor who guides a student's general academic
progress automatically becomes the supervisor of the candidate's
work on the thesis or dissertation. Under such a policy, students
are relieved of the responsibility of choosing a mentor, but they
may unfortunately end up with less than optimal help. In other
cases, an academic advisor will not automatically be assigned, but
he or she will be only one of a group of several faculty members
from whom a student can choose a guide.
Under these circumstances, before students announce their choice
of a mentor they can profitably collect several kinds of information
about the professors who form the pool of potential advisors.
Included among the sources of information are fellow students, the
professors within the pool, other faculty members, secretaries,
research assistants, and the professors' publications.
Institutions and departments can also differ in the number of
faculty members assigned to supervise and evaluate a student's
research. One common pattern at the master's level is to have a
three-member committee for each thesis, with the committee
chairperson acting as the candidate's principal supervisor. However,
in colleges and universities with large numbers of master's degree
students, the entire master's project may be directed and assessed
by a single faculty member. At the doctoral level, the supervising
committee often consists of three to five professors.
In the following paragraphs, we describe kinds of information to
seek about potential advisers. We then suggest useful sources of
each kind.
(The rest of this book can be found at
Questia's online libary by
clicking here and searching for Theses and
Dissertations: A Guide to Planning, Research, and Writing By R.
MURRAY THOMAS and DALE L. BRUBAKER)
Kinds of Information to Collect
In learning about the professors in your pool of potential
mentors, you will likely find it helpful to discover their (a)
fields of interest and expertise, (b) style of advising, and (c)
attitudes about appropriate research topics and methods of research.
Fields of interest and expertise
Obviously, the closer an advisor's area of expertise is to your
research problem, the better equipped she or he will be to identify
difficulties you may encounter, recommend sources of information
pertinent to your topic, and guide your choice of methods for
gathering and interpreting data. There are several ways to learn
about faculty members' specializations--the titles and contents of
classes they teach, their published books and articles, the topics
of theses and dissertations produced under their guidance, other
staff members' opinions, and other students' experiences with those
faculty members.
The task of deciding how well a potential advisor's interests and
skills suit your needs is likely easiest if you already have a
specific research problem in mind, or at least if you have
identified the general realm you hope to explore. If you have no
inkling of the kind of topic on which your study will focus, then
the next of our selection criteria--style of advising--may become
your primary concern.
Style of advising
Professors vary greatly in how they work with students on theses
and dissertations. Those at one end of a monitoring scale closely
control each phase of the student's effort, in some cases dictating
what is to be done at every step, then requiring the student to hand
in each portion of material for evaluation and correction. Advisors
at the opposite end of the scale tell students to work things out
pretty much by themselves and to finish a complete draft of the
project before handing it in for inspection.
Advisors also vary in how available they are when students need
them. Some are frequently away from the campus. Some require
students to make an appointment with a department secretary several
days or weeks ahead of time in order to confer about the
individual's research. Others allow students to drop by the office
or to phone any time they need help. Some answer queries only in
their office. Others permit students to phone them at home.
Professors also differ in the way they offer advice and
criticism. Some are blunt about the shortcomings of a student's
effort, perhaps derisive and abusive. Others are direct in pointing
out weaknesses in the candidate's work, but they do so in a kindly,
understanding manner, recognizing that doing serious research is a
new endeavor for the student and that mistakes along the way are not
only expected but can function as valuable learning opportunities.
Yet others are so cautious about potentially hurting a student's
feelings that they are reluctant to point out weaknesses in the
project and thereby fail to guide their advisees toward correcting
the shortcomings of their efforts.
Consequently, you will likely find it useful to learn ahead of
time about faculty members' styles of directing theses and
dissertations--about how closely they monitor steps in the process,
how available they are to offer help, and how skillfully they
identify deficiencies and suggest solutions without unduly damaging
students' egos.
Your best sources of information about advising styles are
usually (a) fellow graduate students who are farther along than you
are in the thesis or dissertation process and (b) other professors
whom you know personally and who are willing to talk about their
colleagues' modes of guidance.
(The rest of this book can be found at
Questia's online libary by
clicking here and searching for Theses and
Dissertations: A Guide to Planning, Research, and Writing By R.
MURRAY THOMAS and DALE L. BRUBAKER)
Attitudes toward topics and methodology
Faculty members often disagree about what constitutes proper
research. Consequently, you might end up with an advisor whose
notions of suitable research topics and methods of investigation are
at odds with your own beliefs. Therefore, three types of information
you may wish to seek are your potential advisors' views of (a)
quantitative-versus-qualitative methods, (b) positivism-versuspostmodernism
perspectives, and (c) basic-versus-applied research.
Quantitative-versus-qualitative methods: As these terms are
generally used, quantitative research involves amounts, which are
usually cast in the form of statistics, but qualitative research
does not involve amounts in any strict sense. Here are titles of
projects that might be categorized under each type:
Quantitative:
Germany's Economic Growth, 1950-2000
Rural and Urban Educational Achievement in Oregon
Amounts of Public and Private Finance for Welfare Programs
Generational Height and Weight Comparisons--Japan and the USA
The Growth of Tourism--Florida and Alabama
Short-Term Effects of Three Antidepressant Drugs
Qualitative:
The Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis
Silverado--The History of a Frontier Town
A Theory of Political Participation
One Week in the Life of a Deaf-Mute
Judaic Foundations of Islamic Doctrine
The Present-Day Relevance of William James's Pragmatism
Professors who locate themselves exclusively in the quantitative
camp demand that students' research involve the compilation of data
in the form of amounts. Hence, they reject historical chronicles,
philosophical analyses, a line of logic leading to a conclusion, a
comparison of the qualities of different societies, the detailed
description of an individual's or group's style of life, and the
like. Furthermore, adherents of quantitative studies sometimes
prefer studies that focus on rather large numbers of people,
schools, cities, or political constituencies so that broadly
inclusive generalizations can be drawn from the research results.
Such adherents thus disapprove of studies focusing on one autistic
person (singlesubject research) or only a few subjects (three
autistic children, two schools, four candidates for political
office, five neighborhoods) whose results cannot, with confidence,
be generalized to a wide range of people or events. Proponents of
quantitative studies tend to prefer such research methods as
controlled experiments and surveys that employ interviews, tests,
systematic observations, questionnaires, and quantitative content
analysis. (For arguments supporting the quantitative position, see
the following references: Howell, 1997; Shavelson, 1996.)
In contrast, professors who subscribe strictly to qualitative
methodology tend to belittle research that involves what they may
refer to as "no more than number crunching" which they feel
oversimplifies complex causes, dehumanizes evidence, and fails to
recognize individual differences among people, among environments,
and among events. Advocates of qualitative studies tend to favor
such research techniques as historical and philosophical analyses,
descriptive observation, case studies, ethnography, and
hermeneutics. (For rationales supporting the qualitative stance,
see: Bogdan & Knopp, 1992; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994.)
There are, in addition to the foregoing two polar positions, a
great many faculty members who will accept a wide array of research
approaches, quantitative and qualitative alike. We would count
ourselves among their number because, in our opinion, the
quantitative-versus-qualitative controversy is really off target.
The issue, in our minds, should not be: Are quantitative methods
better than qualitative, or vice versa? Instead, the issue should
be: Which approach-quantitative, qualitative, or some combination of
both--will be the most suitable for answering the particular
research question being asked? This point of view, which respects
the contributions that can be made by all sorts of methods, is the
one we espouse throughout this book.
However, to be practical about your own situation as a student
pursuing a degree in a particular department, what we as the authors
of this book believe about the quantitative-qualitative debate is
really not important. What is important is how well your own beliefs
match those of the advisors with whom you might conduct your
research. Thus, a useful twofold question to ask is: Which research
methodologies do the potential members of my research-project
committee prefer or even accept? And how well do my own preferences
match the opinions of those professors? In effect, establishing a
good match promotes efficiency, effectiveness, and goodwill in your
work with advisors.
The rest of this book can be found at
Questia's online libary by
clicking here and searching for Theses and
Dissertations: A Guide to Planning, Research, and Writing By R.
MURRAY THOMAS and DALE L. BRUBAKER
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Toni
Morrison: Solo Flight Through Literature into History,
Journal article by Trudier Harris
(get the full version of this research and other sources
for your paper on Toni Morrison at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)By any standard of
literary evaluation, Toni Morrison is a phenomenon, in the classic
sense of a once-in-a-lifetime rarity, the literary equivalent of
Paul Robeson, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Chris Evert, or Martina
Navratilova, the superstar whose touch upon her profession makes us
wonder if we shall ever see her like again. The indelible word
portraits she has created, the unforgettable mythical and imaginary
places, the exploration of the psychological trauma of slavery,
racism, and war, and the sheer beauty of prose that frequently reads
like poetry have assured Morrison a place in the canons of world
literature. Her impact upon our world and her recognition as one of
America's greatest writers have exceeded the sum total of six
novels, a play, a short story, a collection of critical essays, and
several edited volumes.1 America, she has brought new life to
American literature classes, new energy to traditional convention
sessions, and new directions for study to hundreds of scholars and
students writing books, theses, and dissertations. Around the world,
she has offered a new lens through which to view American literature
and African American experience. Morrison's is the rare case in
which popularity and quality are commensurate.
As early as 1982, long before Beloved or the Pulitzer Prize,
Morrison's works were available in Japanese. I saw the
advertisements when I was in residence at the Mary Ingraham Bunting
Institute at Radcliffe/ Harvard just as I was beginning to focus on
my book-length study of Morrison's novels. I had plans that, if I
could complete the work in a timely fashion, it would be the first
published study of the author and her works. Few scholars, it seemed
to me then, were recognizing the extraordinary genius of this woman,
who, in four novels by that date, had offered such dramatically
different portraits of black communities and black women that it was
impossible not to notice her talent. Although Morrison had appeared
on the cover of Newsweek when Tar Baby was published in 1981, she
was not generally a household name. When my Fiction and Folklore:
The Novels of Toni Morrison appeared in 1991, it had missed being
the first booklength study of her works, but it fit solidly into the
establishment of a body of critical commentary on a much-deserving
writer.
By 1990, when Italy awarded Morrison the Chianti Ruffino Antico
Fattore literary award, its highest literary honor, there were few
scholars, students, or general American readers who were unfamiliar
with her work. It was the first time the Italian prize, the
equivalent of the American Book Award, was granted to a black person
or to a woman. By 1990 Beloved had been translated into Norwegian,
and in March of 1993 Morrison was in Barcelona for the publication
of the Spanish edition of Jazz; one of her hostesses, Angels Carabi,
was the Spanish professor who had recently published a critical
study of Morrison's fiction. I charted this international
appreciation of Morrison's work from my position as Professor of
English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where,
in 1990, a Fulbright scholar from Algeria undertook a directed
reading on Morrison with me. A student from New Delhi came to
interview me about the dissertation work he was completing on
contemporary black American women writers, Toni Morrison among them.
Graduate students in South America requested that I forward critical
commentary on Morrison's works to them in 1992. In July of 1993,
after my move to Emory University, two well-known French scholars,
Claudine Raynaud and Geneviève Fabre, sought permission to reprint a
section of Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison in an
anthology of criticism on Beloved, for that text had just been
selected for inclusion on the syllabus for the agrégation, "a
national competitive examination which helps the French government
recruit college teachers"--which means that the novel will be taught
"in all French universities. "2 More recently, a Polish friend of
mine wrote to inquire where he should begin in the reading of
Morrison's works. If my small encounters with people from around the
world are duplicated in the lives of other Morrison scholars, I can
only begin to imagine the impact her works are having.
Morrison's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, therefore,
was the official inscripting of a worldwide recognition and
appreciation of the intellectual stimulation and awesome power of
her writing. As probably the most well known of African American
writers and perhaps even of all contemporary American writers,
Morrison has provided for international readers an entree into
American culture and specifically into African American culture.
Readers testify that it is because of her treatment of slavery in
Beloved that they became interested in reading about that period in
American history. Or they find the beauty of the writing in Sula,
along with the title character, too compelling not to know more of
Morrison. Or the power of Morrison's writing led them to more
expansive explorations of African American and/or American writers.
(get the full version of this research and other sources for your
paper on Toni Morrison at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
The Nobel Prize in Literature will mean that Morrison's works
will, be ever more popular and ever more available. It means that an
African American writer who may once have been viewed as writing
against the grain of American literature will be more centrally
incorporated into it, indeed claimed in a variety of ways. It means
that a woman, writing in English, has been recognized as equal to
the best writers worldwide. It means that Morrison will become even
more the representative artist/spokesperson for African American
writers, as Richard Wright was in the 1940s, James Baldwin after
him, Ralph Ellison briefly thereafter, and Alice Walker in the
1980s. In the best of worlds, Morrison's success could open doors
for young writers following after her, something that she has
indicated in interviews is important to her. Most important, her
success signals the permanent arrival of the African American
literary canon onto the stage of American and world literature, a
development that will make it impossible for future exclusion. The
recognition of her works is simultaneously a recognition of the
cultural nationalism implicit in them, another centering of African
American life, culture, and philosophy.
For American literature, viewed perhaps too long as an upstart,
derivative tradition, Morrison's success marks the peak of
individuality even within the larger national group. Morrison's
claim to Southern and Midwestern soil, her focus on African
Americans and American history, and her expanding of the boundaries
of topics acceptable for inclusion in literary treatments have added
dimensions to the emphasis on freedom and democracy that
characterizes so much of the national literature. Indeed, Morrison
has written a national epic with a twist, firmly rooting black
people in the polluted American soil of their slave heritage and
transforming that soil to a garden of possibility through the
tremendous force of the human will to survive and to thrive. She has
thereby reclaimed America for the best of itself.
The literary establishment and the not-so-established have heaped
awards upon Morrison like Parisians heaping compliments upon the
beauty of Jadine Childs, and the enthusiasm with which she has been
greeted would rival that of Milkman's upon the discovery that his
great-grandfather could fly. Each time a student expresses wonder at
a black man running "lickety split" into the myth of his African
ancestry, we owe a debt to Toni Morrison. Each time a reader
struggles with the difficulty of passing judgment on Sula and raises
issues about his or her own place in a forced scheme of morality, we
owe a debt to Toni Morrison. Each time a public library holds a
discussion of poverty and rejection in The Bluest Eye, or members of
a community reading group or in a senior-citizens' center want to
know about ghost stories in Beloved, we owe a debt to Toni Morrison.
Readers appreciate Morrison for a variety of reasons. Some
applaud her for daring to explore the complexities of intraracial
prejudice, as she did in The Bluest Eye in 1970. Others focus on her
unforgettable characters, such as Sula in the 1974 novel of the same
title; or Pilate Dead, the conjurer and converser with spirits in
Song of Solomon, published in 1977; or the blind Thérèse, whose
sight beyond sight enables her to guide Son Green to the land of
myth in Tar Baby, which appeared in 1981. Perhaps readers are drawn
to the haunted Sethe, the haunting Beloved, or the hauntingly
eloquent Baby Suggs in Beloved ( 1987 ), or perhaps the photograph
of a teenage girl killed by an older lover in Jazz ( 1992 ) provides
the same bone-gnawing lack of release for readers as for Morrison.
In a time when African Americans, in a wonderful surge of
historical and racial pride, were moving from their designation as
"Negroes" to their designation as "black" or "Afro-American,"
Morrison maintained that we should pause and focus on a little black
girl in Lorain, Ohio, for whom that movement had no significance.
Believing her blackness is the source of her ugliness, Pecola
Breedlove finds no pathway to an inner core of salvation or an
outward reflection of acceptance. She can imagine reversing her
rejection only by acquiring the bluest eyes of all, bluer even than
those of her idol, Shirley Temple. Neglected by her mother, scorned
by her peers and teachers, raped and impregnated by her father,
Pecola believes desperately that blue eyes will save her. Her
journey from self-rejection to ultimate insanity in The Bluest Eye
charts the course of the individual who finds herself outside
community norms, basically outside community caring. Although the
adolescent Claudia, who alternately narrates the tale, and her
sister Frieda do care about Pecola, their efforts, exemplified in
the "magic" of sacrificing money earned from selling seeds in a
childish attempt to alter Pecola's fate, are insufficient to save
her.
(get the full version of this research and other sources for your
paper on Toni Morrison at
Questia Online Library by clicking here)
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Regan Latta, L.U.T.C.F.

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