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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 In a previously unpublished essay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.
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