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Sunday, February 22, 2009
Susan Sontag The Making of an Icon
CHAPTER ONE
Susan Sontag
The Making of an Icon
By CARL ROLLYSON and LISA PADDOCK
W. W. Norton & Company
Read the Review
My Desert Childhood
1933-1945
One of her earliest memories—she is about four—is set in a park. She listens to her Irish nanny talking to another giant in a starched white uniform: "Susan is very high-strung." Susan thinks: "That's an interesting word. Is it true?"
She is "remembering" an event that occurred circa 1937, an event she describes in her Paris Review interview of 1995. The park is in New York City, the nanny's name is Rose McNulty, and she is illiterate. It is Susan's impression that Rose does not know what to make of her temperamental charge. Sontag will spend her first five years in New York living with her grandparents and being cared for by relatives.
What Sontag wants to tell us is that she felt alone at a very early age, bored with her environment, and that her inner life—the only one she had control over—became paramount. Already at four, she claims, she was engaging in critical analysis, wondering about that word "high-strung." Sontag has preferred to use the word "restless" to describe her child self, one who felt that "childhood was a terrible waste of time."
Where were her parents? In China most of the time. Jack Rosenblatt had a fur-trading business, the Kung Chen Fur Corporation. When Susan was born, on January 16, 1933, in Woman's Hospital in Manhattan, her parents had a residence at 200 West Eighty-sixth Street. She was their first child. Mildred had been nervous about giving birth overseas, but not long after Susan was safely delivered, Mildred returned to China to be with her husband. Another pregnancy brought her back to Manhattan, where she gave birth to a second daughter, Judith, on February 27, 1936, in New York Hospital. By this time, the family had a home in Great Neck, Long Island.
Susan's parents had money, they were young, and they were very much involved in their business. Jack was only twenty-eight, and his wife Mildred, née Jacobson, only twenty-six, when Susan was born. On the company's books Mildred is listed as president-treasurer. Jack, or Jasky (as he was named on his birth certificate), had come a long way from 721 East Sixth Street in lower Manhattan, where his father, Samuel, and his mother, Gussie, née Kessler, both Jews from Austria, had begun a fur business and raised five children, two daughters and three sons. Mildred's family, Jews from Russian-occupied Poland, were also involved in the clothing trades. Her father, Isaac, a tailor, and his wife, Dora, née Glasskovitz, raised seven children. Mildred, born at home (139 Cook Street), was the second-youngest child and the only girl. She and Jack met at Grossinger's, a resort in the Catskills where Mildred had a waitressing job.
On October 19, 1938, just before midnight, Jack Rosenblatt died of pulmonary tuberculosis in the German American Hospital in Tientsin, China. He was not quite thirty-five. Mildred, staying at the Astor House Hotel in Tientsin, telegraphed his father and brother Aaron the next day, and she made arrangements to begin the journey back to New York a week later.
Sontag remembers that her mother waited several months to tell her that her father had died, and then was brief, saying only that he had died of pneumonia.
Then five-year-old Susan experienced her first asthma attack. Asthma is an alarming disease for anyone but is especially frightening in children. Coughing attacks usually occur at night, between the early hours of two and six; the child gasps for air and sometimes regurgitates a sticky mucus.
In 1939 Mildred decided to remove her small family from New York in search of a better climate for Susan, and a doctor recommended Miami. Recalling her family's brief residence in that city for an interviewer, Sontag presented brief vignettes: a house with coconut palms. She is in the front yard with a hammer and screwdriver trying to open the tropical fruit. An obese black cook takes her to a park and Susan notices a bench marked "For Whites Only." She turns to the cook and says, "We'll go sit over there and you can sit on my lap." It all seemed so nineteenth-century, Sontag told the interviewer. The city's humidity only made Susan's asthma worse, and after a few months the family left Miami.
Mildred was only thirty-one when she moved her family to Tucson. In interviews, Susan portrays Mildred as a vain, self-absorbed woman who did not know how to act like a mother, who worried instead about growing old and losing her looks. Mildred told Susan not to call her "Mother" in public because she did not want anyone to know she was old enough to have a child. Susan, puzzled, wondered what her mother did with her time, for even after Jack Rosenblatt's death Mildred would be absent from home for long periods, "parking" Susan and Judith with relatives.
It is likely that Mildred was depressed throughout Susan's earliest years. The massive change in lifestyle that accompanies mothering had to be especially hard on the peripatetic Mildred. Not only had she lost a husband, she had lost the income from their business, her employment, independence, and status—all of which were replaced by the insatiable demands of young children. Alcohol provided temporary relief, a cushion, perhaps even an elevation of feeling, although the image Sontag presents is of a phlegmatic mother, too drowsy or listless to read or comment on her child's all-A report cards. It is a familiar scene, repeated in the lives of many writers who begin writing as children, like the writer Anne Rice, moping at her alcoholic mother's bedside.
Sontag has said little about her upbringing in Tucson, although she remembers that as a young child she walked along the old Spanish Trail toward the Tanque Verde foothills, where she examined the "fiercest saguaros and prickly pears." She searched for arrowheads and snakes and pocketed pretty rocks. She imagined herself the last Indian, a lone ranger. Tucson in the late 1930s occupied nine square miles of broad desert valley, with rolling foothills, unusual colors, and stunning mountains with jagged peaks. The desert is no endless sea of sand dunes. There are thorny bushes and weeds, spiny saguaros, and other trees with bright red fruits and flaming orange, spiky flower buds. When it rains, the desert blooms, the sky spreads wide with double rainbows, and the landscape looks freshly scrubbed. The British writer J. B. Priestley, visiting Arizona in 1937, just two years before Mildred and Susan arrived, never forgot its haunting beauty: "Voices, faces, blue birds and scarlet birds, cactus and pine, mountains dissolving in the morning mirage or glowing like jewels in the sunset, the sweet clear air, the blaze of stars at midnight."
In 1939 these desert delights were close to home. The city had a population of less than forty thousand, although it was rapidly growing as a tourist and military site. It had only two radio stations. Walking down a street, residents heard the same radio programs coming from open windows in almost every house. There were five motion picture theaters, and a few combination book and stationery stores. There was a symphony orchestra, a little theater, music and art programs at the university, a state museum, and a Carnegie library. The pace was leisurely. The city attracted outdoor types and health seekers, with about thirty hospitals and sanitariums catering to sufferers of various respiratory illnesses. Susan's asthma improved in Tucson. She grew into a sturdily built, surprisingly sociable girl.
In September 1939 the school year began with a cloud of dust, and in this haze Susan started the first grade. In retrospect, it seemed a joke: "I was put in 1A on Monday when I was 6 years old. Then 1B on Tuesday. 2A on Wednesday. 2B on Thursday, and by the end of the week they had skipped me to third grade because I could do the work." There were no classes for gifted children then. Susan studied the same subjects as everyone else: writing, spelling, reading, music, art, arithmetic, social studies, health and physical education, and elementary science. Classmates accepted her. "I was born into a culturally democratic situation. It didn't occur to me that I could influence the way these kids were," Sontag later realized. She could always find common ground, saying things like "Gosh, your hair looks great today," or "Gee, those are nice loafers."
Even at the age of six, however, Susan felt a need to dramatize her sense of separation from the other students, telling them that she had been born in China. She wanted to make an impression and to establish her connection with faraway places, and China seemed, she later remarked, "as far as anyone can go."
Already, at seven, Sontag had established a lifelong habit of reading through an author's body of work. To begin with, there was Alfred Payson Terhune: Caleb Conover, Railroader (1907), A Dog Named Chips (1931), The Critter and Other Dogs (1936). Perhaps his most famous series focuses on Lad and his exploits in rural New Jersey. Terhune's themes touch on right and wrong and the abuse of authority, as in Further Adventures of Lad (1922), in which an ignorant, overbearing sheriff threatens to shoot Lad, whose adventures usually involve redressing injustice. Anger at the unfairness and insensitivity of the adult world has often stimulated young writers and readers, and it is what drew nine-year-old Susan to more substantial novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, which she read in her mother's six-volume set. The chapter in which Fantine sells her hair made the young Susan a socialist, she would later declare.
Even more important, however, was Susan's discovery of the travel writer Richard Halliburton. One only needs to look at his frontispiece photographs to understand why: in The Royal Road to Romance (1925), he stands in front of the Taj Mahal, turbaned, arms akimbo, his legs at ease, and a broad smile on his face; in The Flying Carpet (1932) he sits atop his two-seater plane, poised for adventure; in Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1937), a photograph of the handsome, thirtyish-looking author is set next to a letter to the reader explaining how as a boy his favorite book was filled with pictures of the "world's most wonderful cities and mountains and temples." He loved that book because it carried him away to "strange and romantic lands."
Asked what books had changed her life, Sontag later gave Halliburton pride of first place. He showed her how "privileged" a writer's life could be, full of "endless curiosity and energy and expressiveness, and countless enthusiasms." Halliburton described climbing Etna and Popocatépetl and Fujiyama and Olympus. He descended the Grand Canyon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge when it was still under construction. He visited Lenin's tomb in Moscow and the Great Wall of China. "Halliburton made me lustfully aware that the world was very big and very old; that its seeable wonders and its learnable stories were innumerable; and that I might see these wonders myself and learn the stories attached to them," Sontag recalled.
This remembrance evokes something of the excitement Susan felt as a seven-year-old, realizing how much larger the world was than Tucson—and how small-minded it was of her playmates, teachers, and other adults not to yearn for that larger world. Why were adults so cautious? Susan wondered. "When I grow up I've got to be careful that they don't stop me from flying through open doors," she thought.
Reading made much of the life around Susan shrink in size. She read about the war and about modern life. She had no place in her imagination for, say, Tucson's Pima Indians: "The folklore of the Southwest was static; picturesque even to the people who lived there," she later said.
If you were a small kid discovering George Eliot or Thackeray or Balzac or the great Russian novels, little Indian dolls with turquoise beads sure couldn't hold a candle to the nineteenth century novel—as far as being an experience which could blast you out of your narrow framework. If you're looking for something to take you somewhere, to expand your consciousness it's going to be a great world culture.
In her love of Halliburton, Sontag speaks as an enthusiast who sees a world of marvels. She longed for just that kind of companionable parent-writer—but instead, Mildred told her articulate daughter: "In China, children don't talk." Mildred might, in the right mood, reminisce, telling Susan that in China "burping at the table is a polite way of showing appreciation," but that did not mean Susan had permission to burp.
So much of Susan's early life seemed fragmented. In those early years in Tucson, before Susan reached the age of ten, Mildred moved her family several times and Susan attended several schools. What had gone before quickly disappeared.
In 1943 Mildred moved her two daughters to a neat, compact four-room stucco bungalow at 2409 East Drachman, then a dirt road. Sontag implies that her mother, pressed for money, had auctioned off many of her Chinese mementos. The house still stands, on one edge of the University of Arizona, looking exactly the same as it does in the photograph taken of it in 1943, when it was brand-new—except that now the road is paved. Susan, her sister, and her mother were its first occupants. How Mildred managed to afford the rent, support herself and her family, and pay for household help is not clear. Perhaps there was still money left from Jack Rosenblatt's business. Sontag has said her mother taught. There is no record of Mildred teaching in the Tucson public schools, though she may have been employed in one of the city's numerous private institutions.
In her backyard, Susan dug a hole with the suspiciously exact dimensions of six feet by six feet by six feet. "What are you trying to do," a maid asked, "dig all the way to China?" No, Susan replied, she only wanted "a place to sit in." She laid eight-foot-long planks over the backyard hole to keep out the intense sun. The landlord complained, saying it posed a hazard for anyone walking across the yard. Susan showed him the boards, and the entrance that she could just barely squeeze through. Inside she had dug a niche for a candle, but it was too dark to read, and she got a mouthful of dirt that came in through the cracks in her makeshift ceiling. The landlord told Mildred the hole had to be filled in within twenty-four hours, and Susan complied with the help of the maid. Three months later she dug another hole in the same spot. Taking her cue from Tom Sawyer, who got the neighborhood kids to do a chore for him—whitewash a fence—she conned three playmates into helping her, promising they could use the hole whenever she was not there.
Susan's hole was her hiding place, her miniature world. Her crude dugout also marked the border between "the scary and the safe," as she later put it in an article about grottoes. Her cave was the equivalent of the world elsewhere, of the China where her father had died. All Susan had of her father was a ring with JR on the signet, a white silk scarf with his initials embroidered in black silk, and a pigskin wallet with Jack Rosenblatt stamped in small gold letters. His record, in short, remained unwritten, an "unfinished pain" in her imagination. For this kind of pain, extroverted writers like Halliburton had no cure.
Fortunately, Sontag found her first literary father early on, before her tenth year. Sontag discovered Edgar Allan Poe. Like Halliburton, Poe conjured up a world of marvels. He wrote detective stories, hoaxes about trips to the moon and about other fantastic voyages of exploration—like The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But Poe also gave Susan her "first vision of inwardness, of melancholy, of obsessiveness, of the thrill of ratiocination, of morbidity, of a recklessly self-conscious temperament—another span of nascent avidities." Poe's writing is both adventurous and intellectual; his narrators are self-conscious and enclosed in their own worlds. Like the adult Sontag, his characters are devotees, metaphorically speaking, of grottoes—those caverns of the mind. As the narrator of "Berenice" confesses, "My passions always were of the mind."
Poe, like Sontag, is an American writer who sought his inspiration in Europe and in literature itself, and like her, he was obsessed with wasting diseases and death. It is not easy to catch your breath in Poe's Gothic tales, for the sense of doom is as unrelenting as his alliteration. "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year ..."—these sonorous, mesmerizing words in "The Fall of the House of Usher" are a literary narcotic. Poe's fiction confirmed what the therapeutic climate of Tucson tried to deny: the inescapable fact of mortality. If that seems like a morbid discovery, it was also a godsend to a child who sensed what those around her were denying.
If Richard Halliburton spoke to the extroverted pleasure of roaming the world and taking from it what you liked, Poe did the same for the introvert, demonstrating that literature could be a vehicle of transportation to other worlds, and—even better—that literature could be a destination in itself. He taught her to rely on her own sensibility, excluding whatever nonliterary environment she encountered.
What neither Poe nor Halliburton could give Sontag, though, was a sense of career—an important concept for a child who thought of herself as on her own and who had come to regard herself as her own authority, a common enough feeling in children who suffer from what has been variously called "father-thirst" and "father-hunger." She found her sense of mission in two books that have electrified many generations of young girls: Madame Curie: A Biography and Little Women.
By the age of ten, Susan had read Eve Curie's moving book about her mother. The first sentence of the biography's introduction is captivating: "The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend." Here is the complete Curie paradigm related in Eve's ecstatic version, a version that provides nearly a perfect blueprint for the arc of Sontag's life to come: Marie spends many years of poverty and solitude in the backwater of Poland. She is fired with a desire to "adore something very high and very great." Eve asks: "How is one to imagine the fervor of this girl of seventeen?" Marie becomes involved in Polish nationalism and socialism, desiring to free her country from Russian occupation and to build a better, a more just society. She aspires to an education in France, the seat of learning and liberty. She writes to her sister, "I dreamed of Paris as of redemption." When Marie's opportunity comes, Eve observes: "How young one felt in Paris, how powerful, trembling, and swelling with hope!" In Paris, Marie studied to a state of near exhaustion, living in spartan quarters, guided by her "will of iron." She attracts the attention of a great scientist, Pierre Curie. Like a novelist, Marie searches for new subjects of research, Together Marie and Pierre give birth to a "new science and a new philosophy." They become joint authors, embodying the "superior alliance of man and woman, the exchange was equal." They have children, and Marie is nearly as passionate about motherhood as she is about science. Her husband dies, and Marie dedicates herself to a "kind of perpetual giving," nursing the wounded in World War I and opening herself up to people around the world. She is excited by the world's mysteries and marvels that she must plumb. Above all, Marie has a sense of destiny. As Eve observes: "We must believe we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." She persisted with a "superhuman obstinacy." As Marie matured, she saw the need for an international culture and relied upon her "innate refusal of all vulgarity."
Curie's is a noble story as well, because Marie would, in her daughter's words, treat her honors with "indifference," with an "immovable structure of a character" and the "stubborn effort of an intelligence." Eve quotes Einstein's remark that "Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted."
It is not just that Sontag wanted to be like Marie Curie, or that she built a backyard chemistry laboratory, or that she decided she would try to combine careers as a writer and doctor like Chekhov. Imagining herself finding cures, discovering a new element like radium that would be used to treat diseases, was no stretch for Susan. More important is Eve's evocation of a selfless career—so selfless that Marie did not look upon it as a career but as a vocation. This Marie Curie resembled a mythic goddess, a figure of such austere purity that she seemed invulnerable, "intact, natural and very nearly unaware of her astounding destiny."
Susan strove to emulate the ideal Curie, the scientist who painstakingly stood over hot, heavy cauldrons refining ore and making her Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough. When Sontag later spoke of her writing, it would be in terms of agonizing labor, a concentration only on the work itself—not on the honors that might accrue, not on the machinery of self-promotion which she could have patented—and she reacted with hostility to any vulgar suggestion of careerism.
Susan would not entirely give up the idea of a medical/scientific career until she began college, but the idea of creating literature already beckoned to her. "What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive," she later said. The writer is free to invent and reinvent herself in a way the scientist or doctor cannot.
Susan fell in love not just with reading and writing but with the idea, the role of the writer. It was part of her self-consciousness project not merely to write but to be seen as a writer: "I did think of being published. In fact, I really thought that that's what being a writer was." The impulse to write was an act of emulation and homage to the great writers she had read: "People usually say they want to become a writer to express themselves or because they have something to say. For me it was a way of being. It was like enlisting in an army of saints.... I didn't think I was expressing myself. I felt that I was becoming something, taking part in a noble activity."
Where would a ten-year-old girl come upon the idea of a publishing world? From two novels: Little Women and Martin Eden. She identified with Louisa May Alcott's budding writer, Jo, although Sontag is quick to add that she did not want to write anything like Jo's sentimental, melodramatic stories. Rather, it is Jo's avidity that captures Susan: "I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what. I'm on the watch for it. I mean to astonish you all some day." Significantly, Jo's sense of greatness is connected to Europe: "Don't I wish I'd been there!" Jo cries. "Have you been to Paris?" Jo rejects Laurie, her childhood companion, for Professor Bhaer, an older European who welcomes her writing rather than seeing it as an eccentric tic. Susan surely spotted Jo's alienation from her family and community—in spite of all the talk of family togetherness. Sontag probably saw the David Selznick production of Little Women, in which Katharine Hepburn glamorized Jo's role. To be Jo, to be a writer, was to be a star.
There is more to Little Women than adolescent fantasies of becoming a writer. Jo becomes confused when she begins changing her stories to suit her family. The futility of trying to please and of expecting a consensus among readers is pointed up by reviewers' contradictory reactions to Jo's work. When Jo prostitutes her talent to produce a cheap magazine piece, her father scolds her: "You can do better than this. Aim for the highest and never mind the money." Indeed, Alcott could have been writing for all budding artists, demonstrating how the writer must find her own voice and integrity.
Even more directly, Jack London's Martin Eden presents a fable of the writer's life, a naturalist's grim yet exhilarating study of individual aspiration that appealed to Sontag's somber but determined sensibility. Eden forges his own identity largely through his reading of books, which are treated almost literally as the building blocks of his personality. They have a tangible, tactile, erotic appeal for him. He does not merely handle books; he caresses them.
Like Martin Eden, Susan wanted her writing to make some kind of impression on the world, no matter how indifferent that world seems to be. London's novel is still valuable as a kind of handbook for the freelance writer; it contains pages and pages describing Martin's feverish efforts to publish, constantly sending out manuscripts in self-addressed envelopes and constantly receiving rejections, and then sending out the stories and articles over and over again until something is accepted. The ratio of rejections to acceptances is daunting: for every piece that is accepted, dozens and dozens are rejected. Yet Martin persists.
What Martin cannot control, of course, is the means of production. Sontag tried to solve this problem at the age of nine or ten, as she later told students at the University of South Carolina, by starting her own four-page monthly newspaper, produced on a hectograph:
The cheapest way of reproducing anything: you need a stencil, a tray, and gelatin. You just put the stencil face down on the gelatin, after putting the ink on the stencil. You can then put about 20 pieces of paper onto the gelatin. It reproduces the stencil. It's wonderful to use in closets. At 10 I made a literary magazine of my own and sold it to neighbors for 5 cents.
Sontag smiled telling this story, recalling how this act of publishing emancipated her. She wrote poems, stories, and at least two plays, one inspired by Karel Capek's R.U.R., and another by Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo. Throughout the war she wrote articles on battles such as Midway and Stalingrad, condensing what she read in the newspapers.
By the age of twelve, she was simply biding her time, serving out what she calls in her essay-memoir "Pilgrimage" the "prison sentence" of her childhood. It was an ordeal, but she was a good actress, a good dissembler.
Then a disturbing event intruded into Susan's world. Her mother remarried. Mildred, still morose, but also still beautiful, had attracted a new mate. Susan quietly rejected him. But he did provide a new name that fit her emerging identity as a writer; and he brought with him the prospect of travel—away from the desert of her childhood and into the land of dreams: California.
(C) 2000 Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-393-04928-0
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Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
Susan Sontag
The Making of an Icon
By CARL ROLLYSON and LISA PADDOCK
W. W. Norton & Company
Read the Review
My Desert Childhood
1933-1945
One of her earliest memories—she is about four—is set in a park. She listens to her Irish nanny talking to another giant in a starched white uniform: "Susan is very high-strung." Susan thinks: "That's an interesting word. Is it true?"
She is "remembering" an event that occurred circa 1937, an event she describes in her Paris Review interview of 1995. The park is in New York City, the nanny's name is Rose McNulty, and she is illiterate. It is Susan's impression that Rose does not know what to make of her temperamental charge. Sontag will spend her first five years in New York living with her grandparents and being cared for by relatives.
What Sontag wants to tell us is that she felt alone at a very early age, bored with her environment, and that her inner life—the only one she had control over—became paramount. Already at four, she claims, she was engaging in critical analysis, wondering about that word "high-strung." Sontag has preferred to use the word "restless" to describe her child self, one who felt that "childhood was a terrible waste of time."
Where were her parents? In China most of the time. Jack Rosenblatt had a fur-trading business, the Kung Chen Fur Corporation. When Susan was born, on January 16, 1933, in Woman's Hospital in Manhattan, her parents had a residence at 200 West Eighty-sixth Street. She was their first child. Mildred had been nervous about giving birth overseas, but not long after Susan was safely delivered, Mildred returned to China to be with her husband. Another pregnancy brought her back to Manhattan, where she gave birth to a second daughter, Judith, on February 27, 1936, in New York Hospital. By this time, the family had a home in Great Neck, Long Island.
Susan's parents had money, they were young, and they were very much involved in their business. Jack was only twenty-eight, and his wife Mildred, née Jacobson, only twenty-six, when Susan was born. On the company's books Mildred is listed as president-treasurer. Jack, or Jasky (as he was named on his birth certificate), had come a long way from 721 East Sixth Street in lower Manhattan, where his father, Samuel, and his mother, Gussie, née Kessler, both Jews from Austria, had begun a fur business and raised five children, two daughters and three sons. Mildred's family, Jews from Russian-occupied Poland, were also involved in the clothing trades. Her father, Isaac, a tailor, and his wife, Dora, née Glasskovitz, raised seven children. Mildred, born at home (139 Cook Street), was the second-youngest child and the only girl. She and Jack met at Grossinger's, a resort in the Catskills where Mildred had a waitressing job.
On October 19, 1938, just before midnight, Jack Rosenblatt died of pulmonary tuberculosis in the German American Hospital in Tientsin, China. He was not quite thirty-five. Mildred, staying at the Astor House Hotel in Tientsin, telegraphed his father and brother Aaron the next day, and she made arrangements to begin the journey back to New York a week later.
Sontag remembers that her mother waited several months to tell her that her father had died, and then was brief, saying only that he had died of pneumonia.
Then five-year-old Susan experienced her first asthma attack. Asthma is an alarming disease for anyone but is especially frightening in children. Coughing attacks usually occur at night, between the early hours of two and six; the child gasps for air and sometimes regurgitates a sticky mucus.
In 1939 Mildred decided to remove her small family from New York in search of a better climate for Susan, and a doctor recommended Miami. Recalling her family's brief residence in that city for an interviewer, Sontag presented brief vignettes: a house with coconut palms. She is in the front yard with a hammer and screwdriver trying to open the tropical fruit. An obese black cook takes her to a park and Susan notices a bench marked "For Whites Only." She turns to the cook and says, "We'll go sit over there and you can sit on my lap." It all seemed so nineteenth-century, Sontag told the interviewer. The city's humidity only made Susan's asthma worse, and after a few months the family left Miami.
Mildred was only thirty-one when she moved her family to Tucson. In interviews, Susan portrays Mildred as a vain, self-absorbed woman who did not know how to act like a mother, who worried instead about growing old and losing her looks. Mildred told Susan not to call her "Mother" in public because she did not want anyone to know she was old enough to have a child. Susan, puzzled, wondered what her mother did with her time, for even after Jack Rosenblatt's death Mildred would be absent from home for long periods, "parking" Susan and Judith with relatives.
It is likely that Mildred was depressed throughout Susan's earliest years. The massive change in lifestyle that accompanies mothering had to be especially hard on the peripatetic Mildred. Not only had she lost a husband, she had lost the income from their business, her employment, independence, and status—all of which were replaced by the insatiable demands of young children. Alcohol provided temporary relief, a cushion, perhaps even an elevation of feeling, although the image Sontag presents is of a phlegmatic mother, too drowsy or listless to read or comment on her child's all-A report cards. It is a familiar scene, repeated in the lives of many writers who begin writing as children, like the writer Anne Rice, moping at her alcoholic mother's bedside.
Sontag has said little about her upbringing in Tucson, although she remembers that as a young child she walked along the old Spanish Trail toward the Tanque Verde foothills, where she examined the "fiercest saguaros and prickly pears." She searched for arrowheads and snakes and pocketed pretty rocks. She imagined herself the last Indian, a lone ranger. Tucson in the late 1930s occupied nine square miles of broad desert valley, with rolling foothills, unusual colors, and stunning mountains with jagged peaks. The desert is no endless sea of sand dunes. There are thorny bushes and weeds, spiny saguaros, and other trees with bright red fruits and flaming orange, spiky flower buds. When it rains, the desert blooms, the sky spreads wide with double rainbows, and the landscape looks freshly scrubbed. The British writer J. B. Priestley, visiting Arizona in 1937, just two years before Mildred and Susan arrived, never forgot its haunting beauty: "Voices, faces, blue birds and scarlet birds, cactus and pine, mountains dissolving in the morning mirage or glowing like jewels in the sunset, the sweet clear air, the blaze of stars at midnight."
In 1939 these desert delights were close to home. The city had a population of less than forty thousand, although it was rapidly growing as a tourist and military site. It had only two radio stations. Walking down a street, residents heard the same radio programs coming from open windows in almost every house. There were five motion picture theaters, and a few combination book and stationery stores. There was a symphony orchestra, a little theater, music and art programs at the university, a state museum, and a Carnegie library. The pace was leisurely. The city attracted outdoor types and health seekers, with about thirty hospitals and sanitariums catering to sufferers of various respiratory illnesses. Susan's asthma improved in Tucson. She grew into a sturdily built, surprisingly sociable girl.
In September 1939 the school year began with a cloud of dust, and in this haze Susan started the first grade. In retrospect, it seemed a joke: "I was put in 1A on Monday when I was 6 years old. Then 1B on Tuesday. 2A on Wednesday. 2B on Thursday, and by the end of the week they had skipped me to third grade because I could do the work." There were no classes for gifted children then. Susan studied the same subjects as everyone else: writing, spelling, reading, music, art, arithmetic, social studies, health and physical education, and elementary science. Classmates accepted her. "I was born into a culturally democratic situation. It didn't occur to me that I could influence the way these kids were," Sontag later realized. She could always find common ground, saying things like "Gosh, your hair looks great today," or "Gee, those are nice loafers."
Even at the age of six, however, Susan felt a need to dramatize her sense of separation from the other students, telling them that she had been born in China. She wanted to make an impression and to establish her connection with faraway places, and China seemed, she later remarked, "as far as anyone can go."
Already, at seven, Sontag had established a lifelong habit of reading through an author's body of work. To begin with, there was Alfred Payson Terhune: Caleb Conover, Railroader (1907), A Dog Named Chips (1931), The Critter and Other Dogs (1936). Perhaps his most famous series focuses on Lad and his exploits in rural New Jersey. Terhune's themes touch on right and wrong and the abuse of authority, as in Further Adventures of Lad (1922), in which an ignorant, overbearing sheriff threatens to shoot Lad, whose adventures usually involve redressing injustice. Anger at the unfairness and insensitivity of the adult world has often stimulated young writers and readers, and it is what drew nine-year-old Susan to more substantial novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, which she read in her mother's six-volume set. The chapter in which Fantine sells her hair made the young Susan a socialist, she would later declare.
Even more important, however, was Susan's discovery of the travel writer Richard Halliburton. One only needs to look at his frontispiece photographs to understand why: in The Royal Road to Romance (1925), he stands in front of the Taj Mahal, turbaned, arms akimbo, his legs at ease, and a broad smile on his face; in The Flying Carpet (1932) he sits atop his two-seater plane, poised for adventure; in Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1937), a photograph of the handsome, thirtyish-looking author is set next to a letter to the reader explaining how as a boy his favorite book was filled with pictures of the "world's most wonderful cities and mountains and temples." He loved that book because it carried him away to "strange and romantic lands."
Asked what books had changed her life, Sontag later gave Halliburton pride of first place. He showed her how "privileged" a writer's life could be, full of "endless curiosity and energy and expressiveness, and countless enthusiasms." Halliburton described climbing Etna and Popocatépetl and Fujiyama and Olympus. He descended the Grand Canyon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge when it was still under construction. He visited Lenin's tomb in Moscow and the Great Wall of China. "Halliburton made me lustfully aware that the world was very big and very old; that its seeable wonders and its learnable stories were innumerable; and that I might see these wonders myself and learn the stories attached to them," Sontag recalled.
This remembrance evokes something of the excitement Susan felt as a seven-year-old, realizing how much larger the world was than Tucson—and how small-minded it was of her playmates, teachers, and other adults not to yearn for that larger world. Why were adults so cautious? Susan wondered. "When I grow up I've got to be careful that they don't stop me from flying through open doors," she thought.
Reading made much of the life around Susan shrink in size. She read about the war and about modern life. She had no place in her imagination for, say, Tucson's Pima Indians: "The folklore of the Southwest was static; picturesque even to the people who lived there," she later said.
If you were a small kid discovering George Eliot or Thackeray or Balzac or the great Russian novels, little Indian dolls with turquoise beads sure couldn't hold a candle to the nineteenth century novel—as far as being an experience which could blast you out of your narrow framework. If you're looking for something to take you somewhere, to expand your consciousness it's going to be a great world culture.
In her love of Halliburton, Sontag speaks as an enthusiast who sees a world of marvels. She longed for just that kind of companionable parent-writer—but instead, Mildred told her articulate daughter: "In China, children don't talk." Mildred might, in the right mood, reminisce, telling Susan that in China "burping at the table is a polite way of showing appreciation," but that did not mean Susan had permission to burp.
So much of Susan's early life seemed fragmented. In those early years in Tucson, before Susan reached the age of ten, Mildred moved her family several times and Susan attended several schools. What had gone before quickly disappeared.
In 1943 Mildred moved her two daughters to a neat, compact four-room stucco bungalow at 2409 East Drachman, then a dirt road. Sontag implies that her mother, pressed for money, had auctioned off many of her Chinese mementos. The house still stands, on one edge of the University of Arizona, looking exactly the same as it does in the photograph taken of it in 1943, when it was brand-new—except that now the road is paved. Susan, her sister, and her mother were its first occupants. How Mildred managed to afford the rent, support herself and her family, and pay for household help is not clear. Perhaps there was still money left from Jack Rosenblatt's business. Sontag has said her mother taught. There is no record of Mildred teaching in the Tucson public schools, though she may have been employed in one of the city's numerous private institutions.
In her backyard, Susan dug a hole with the suspiciously exact dimensions of six feet by six feet by six feet. "What are you trying to do," a maid asked, "dig all the way to China?" No, Susan replied, she only wanted "a place to sit in." She laid eight-foot-long planks over the backyard hole to keep out the intense sun. The landlord complained, saying it posed a hazard for anyone walking across the yard. Susan showed him the boards, and the entrance that she could just barely squeeze through. Inside she had dug a niche for a candle, but it was too dark to read, and she got a mouthful of dirt that came in through the cracks in her makeshift ceiling. The landlord told Mildred the hole had to be filled in within twenty-four hours, and Susan complied with the help of the maid. Three months later she dug another hole in the same spot. Taking her cue from Tom Sawyer, who got the neighborhood kids to do a chore for him—whitewash a fence—she conned three playmates into helping her, promising they could use the hole whenever she was not there.
Susan's hole was her hiding place, her miniature world. Her crude dugout also marked the border between "the scary and the safe," as she later put it in an article about grottoes. Her cave was the equivalent of the world elsewhere, of the China where her father had died. All Susan had of her father was a ring with JR on the signet, a white silk scarf with his initials embroidered in black silk, and a pigskin wallet with Jack Rosenblatt stamped in small gold letters. His record, in short, remained unwritten, an "unfinished pain" in her imagination. For this kind of pain, extroverted writers like Halliburton had no cure.
Fortunately, Sontag found her first literary father early on, before her tenth year. Sontag discovered Edgar Allan Poe. Like Halliburton, Poe conjured up a world of marvels. He wrote detective stories, hoaxes about trips to the moon and about other fantastic voyages of exploration—like The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But Poe also gave Susan her "first vision of inwardness, of melancholy, of obsessiveness, of the thrill of ratiocination, of morbidity, of a recklessly self-conscious temperament—another span of nascent avidities." Poe's writing is both adventurous and intellectual; his narrators are self-conscious and enclosed in their own worlds. Like the adult Sontag, his characters are devotees, metaphorically speaking, of grottoes—those caverns of the mind. As the narrator of "Berenice" confesses, "My passions always were of the mind."
Poe, like Sontag, is an American writer who sought his inspiration in Europe and in literature itself, and like her, he was obsessed with wasting diseases and death. It is not easy to catch your breath in Poe's Gothic tales, for the sense of doom is as unrelenting as his alliteration. "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year ..."—these sonorous, mesmerizing words in "The Fall of the House of Usher" are a literary narcotic. Poe's fiction confirmed what the therapeutic climate of Tucson tried to deny: the inescapable fact of mortality. If that seems like a morbid discovery, it was also a godsend to a child who sensed what those around her were denying.
If Richard Halliburton spoke to the extroverted pleasure of roaming the world and taking from it what you liked, Poe did the same for the introvert, demonstrating that literature could be a vehicle of transportation to other worlds, and—even better—that literature could be a destination in itself. He taught her to rely on her own sensibility, excluding whatever nonliterary environment she encountered.
What neither Poe nor Halliburton could give Sontag, though, was a sense of career—an important concept for a child who thought of herself as on her own and who had come to regard herself as her own authority, a common enough feeling in children who suffer from what has been variously called "father-thirst" and "father-hunger." She found her sense of mission in two books that have electrified many generations of young girls: Madame Curie: A Biography and Little Women.
By the age of ten, Susan had read Eve Curie's moving book about her mother. The first sentence of the biography's introduction is captivating: "The life of Marie Curie contains prodigies in such number that one would like to tell her story like a legend." Here is the complete Curie paradigm related in Eve's ecstatic version, a version that provides nearly a perfect blueprint for the arc of Sontag's life to come: Marie spends many years of poverty and solitude in the backwater of Poland. She is fired with a desire to "adore something very high and very great." Eve asks: "How is one to imagine the fervor of this girl of seventeen?" Marie becomes involved in Polish nationalism and socialism, desiring to free her country from Russian occupation and to build a better, a more just society. She aspires to an education in France, the seat of learning and liberty. She writes to her sister, "I dreamed of Paris as of redemption." When Marie's opportunity comes, Eve observes: "How young one felt in Paris, how powerful, trembling, and swelling with hope!" In Paris, Marie studied to a state of near exhaustion, living in spartan quarters, guided by her "will of iron." She attracts the attention of a great scientist, Pierre Curie. Like a novelist, Marie searches for new subjects of research, Together Marie and Pierre give birth to a "new science and a new philosophy." They become joint authors, embodying the "superior alliance of man and woman, the exchange was equal." They have children, and Marie is nearly as passionate about motherhood as she is about science. Her husband dies, and Marie dedicates herself to a "kind of perpetual giving," nursing the wounded in World War I and opening herself up to people around the world. She is excited by the world's mysteries and marvels that she must plumb. Above all, Marie has a sense of destiny. As Eve observes: "We must believe we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." She persisted with a "superhuman obstinacy." As Marie matured, she saw the need for an international culture and relied upon her "innate refusal of all vulgarity."
Curie's is a noble story as well, because Marie would, in her daughter's words, treat her honors with "indifference," with an "immovable structure of a character" and the "stubborn effort of an intelligence." Eve quotes Einstein's remark that "Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted."
It is not just that Sontag wanted to be like Marie Curie, or that she built a backyard chemistry laboratory, or that she decided she would try to combine careers as a writer and doctor like Chekhov. Imagining herself finding cures, discovering a new element like radium that would be used to treat diseases, was no stretch for Susan. More important is Eve's evocation of a selfless career—so selfless that Marie did not look upon it as a career but as a vocation. This Marie Curie resembled a mythic goddess, a figure of such austere purity that she seemed invulnerable, "intact, natural and very nearly unaware of her astounding destiny."
Susan strove to emulate the ideal Curie, the scientist who painstakingly stood over hot, heavy cauldrons refining ore and making her Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough. When Sontag later spoke of her writing, it would be in terms of agonizing labor, a concentration only on the work itself—not on the honors that might accrue, not on the machinery of self-promotion which she could have patented—and she reacted with hostility to any vulgar suggestion of careerism.
Susan would not entirely give up the idea of a medical/scientific career until she began college, but the idea of creating literature already beckoned to her. "What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive," she later said. The writer is free to invent and reinvent herself in a way the scientist or doctor cannot.
Susan fell in love not just with reading and writing but with the idea, the role of the writer. It was part of her self-consciousness project not merely to write but to be seen as a writer: "I did think of being published. In fact, I really thought that that's what being a writer was." The impulse to write was an act of emulation and homage to the great writers she had read: "People usually say they want to become a writer to express themselves or because they have something to say. For me it was a way of being. It was like enlisting in an army of saints.... I didn't think I was expressing myself. I felt that I was becoming something, taking part in a noble activity."
Where would a ten-year-old girl come upon the idea of a publishing world? From two novels: Little Women and Martin Eden. She identified with Louisa May Alcott's budding writer, Jo, although Sontag is quick to add that she did not want to write anything like Jo's sentimental, melodramatic stories. Rather, it is Jo's avidity that captures Susan: "I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what. I'm on the watch for it. I mean to astonish you all some day." Significantly, Jo's sense of greatness is connected to Europe: "Don't I wish I'd been there!" Jo cries. "Have you been to Paris?" Jo rejects Laurie, her childhood companion, for Professor Bhaer, an older European who welcomes her writing rather than seeing it as an eccentric tic. Susan surely spotted Jo's alienation from her family and community—in spite of all the talk of family togetherness. Sontag probably saw the David Selznick production of Little Women, in which Katharine Hepburn glamorized Jo's role. To be Jo, to be a writer, was to be a star.
There is more to Little Women than adolescent fantasies of becoming a writer. Jo becomes confused when she begins changing her stories to suit her family. The futility of trying to please and of expecting a consensus among readers is pointed up by reviewers' contradictory reactions to Jo's work. When Jo prostitutes her talent to produce a cheap magazine piece, her father scolds her: "You can do better than this. Aim for the highest and never mind the money." Indeed, Alcott could have been writing for all budding artists, demonstrating how the writer must find her own voice and integrity.
Even more directly, Jack London's Martin Eden presents a fable of the writer's life, a naturalist's grim yet exhilarating study of individual aspiration that appealed to Sontag's somber but determined sensibility. Eden forges his own identity largely through his reading of books, which are treated almost literally as the building blocks of his personality. They have a tangible, tactile, erotic appeal for him. He does not merely handle books; he caresses them.
Like Martin Eden, Susan wanted her writing to make some kind of impression on the world, no matter how indifferent that world seems to be. London's novel is still valuable as a kind of handbook for the freelance writer; it contains pages and pages describing Martin's feverish efforts to publish, constantly sending out manuscripts in self-addressed envelopes and constantly receiving rejections, and then sending out the stories and articles over and over again until something is accepted. The ratio of rejections to acceptances is daunting: for every piece that is accepted, dozens and dozens are rejected. Yet Martin persists.
What Martin cannot control, of course, is the means of production. Sontag tried to solve this problem at the age of nine or ten, as she later told students at the University of South Carolina, by starting her own four-page monthly newspaper, produced on a hectograph:
The cheapest way of reproducing anything: you need a stencil, a tray, and gelatin. You just put the stencil face down on the gelatin, after putting the ink on the stencil. You can then put about 20 pieces of paper onto the gelatin. It reproduces the stencil. It's wonderful to use in closets. At 10 I made a literary magazine of my own and sold it to neighbors for 5 cents.
Sontag smiled telling this story, recalling how this act of publishing emancipated her. She wrote poems, stories, and at least two plays, one inspired by Karel Capek's R.U.R., and another by Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo. Throughout the war she wrote articles on battles such as Midway and Stalingrad, condensing what she read in the newspapers.
By the age of twelve, she was simply biding her time, serving out what she calls in her essay-memoir "Pilgrimage" the "prison sentence" of her childhood. It was an ordeal, but she was a good actress, a good dissembler.
Then a disturbing event intruded into Susan's world. Her mother remarried. Mildred, still morose, but also still beautiful, had attracted a new mate. Susan quietly rejected him. But he did provide a new name that fit her emerging identity as a writer; and he brought with him the prospect of travel—away from the desert of her childhood and into the land of dreams: California.
(C) 2000 Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-393-04928-0
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I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich.
Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.
ROBERT B. REICH
August 4, 2002
'I'll Be Short'
By
August 4, 2002
'I'll Be Short'
By ROBERT B. REICH
t is far too early to know what historians will see when they look back on the years 2000 to 2002 from their perches in the future, but it's likely they will chronicle a profound change in America. The years leading up featured almost breathless excitement about getting rich quick in dot-coms, irrational exuberance in the stock market, and boundless confidence about the nation's power and place in the world. Then, in rapid succession, the dot-com bubble burst, the economy drifted into recession, and terrorists attacked with a deadliness and ferocity never known or even imagined before. Then one of our most successful corporations suddenly imploded, revealing a sham of accounting gimmicks and regulatory lapses; investors and employees lost big while top executives walked off with fortunes.
What have we learned, other than humility? We remain a blessedly optimistic people. But these two years have shaken our certainty about some things we had begun to take for granted—especially, I think, the idea that each of us can make it solely on our own. The get-rich-quick exuberance of the late nineties may have temporarily blinded us to how dependent we are on one another. Subsequent events serve as reminders that the strength of our economy and the security of our society rest on the bonds that connect us. But what, specifically, are these bonds? What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
This is a small book about these large questions. Some of the observations recorded here are culled from my writing during these fitful years. In collecting and fitting them together, my hope is to reveal a larger perspective on what is at stake and what we can do about it.
One of my themes concerns politics, and the heightened importance now of a politically active and engaged citizenry. As this volume goes to press, I am heeding my own advice in the extreme by running for governor of Massachusetts. By the time you get around to reading it, I may have succeeded—or else have returned to the far safer ground of commenting from the sidelines. If it's the former, I hope I can put some of those principles into action; if the latter, I hope others will.
Chapter One
Not since World War II have Americans felt so unified. We're fighting a war against terrorism and we're fighting to get the economy moving again. And we're all in this together. Except when it comes to paying the bill.
Add the cost of fighting the war to the biggest military buildup in two decades and extra security at home, and you're talking real money—hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The Bush administration has also enacted a mammoth tax cut—$1.35 trillion over the next ten years. At this writing, the president is proposing almost $600 billion in additional cuts in income taxes and capital-gains taxes. The bulk of these cuts—those already enacted and those proposed—benefit large corporations and people who are already wealthy.
So who's going to pay? Take a guess. Middle- and lower-income Americans.
Most Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Payroll taxes include Social Security and Medicare payments. You pay these taxes on the first $80,000 or so of your income (the ceiling rises slightly every year). After that you're home free. Bill Gates stops paying payroll taxes at a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.
None of the enacted or proposed tax cuts affect payroll taxes, even temporarily. To the contrary, they increase the odds that payroll taxes will have to be hiked. That's because the tax cuts, combined with the military buildup, will drain so much money out of the Treasury that there won't be enough money to pay for Social Security and Medicare by the time the early baby boomers begin retiring, about a decade from now. So payroll taxes probably will have to rise in order to fill the gap.
Get it? Income and capital-gains tax cuts for the rich now, payroll tax hikes on middle- and lower-income Americans to come.
Americans like to think we're all in this together, but the fact is that the economic fallout from terrorism is hitting some Americans much harder than others. When the slowdown began, layoffs and pay cuts hit hardest at manufacturing workers, white-collar managers, and professionals. Since the terrorist attacks, a different group is experiencing the heaviest job losses: the low-paid. Many are service workers in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or other tourist-industry businesses that have been hard hit. Others are caregivers—social workers, hospital workers, elder-care workers—whose jobs and wages are on the line as public budgets are trimmed. The economy may be rebounding, but these people aren't.
Government is less helpful this time around. Safety nets are in tatters. Welfare-to-work programs made sense when work was plentiful, but without work, those no longer eligible for welfare have nowhere else to turn. Even job losers who still qualify find that welfare payments in most states are worth less than before.
Unemployment insurance is also harder for them to get. Since part-time workers, temps, the self-employed, and people who have moved in and out of employment often don't qualify, a large portion of the lower-wage workforce is excluded. Many who don't qualify are women with young children.
Meanwhile, federal programs for job training and low-income housing have been shrunk by budget cuts. State and local governments are in no position to step in. They're already strapped by rapidly declining tax revenues. Rather than beefing up social services, they're cutting them. Rather than improving our schools by reducing class size and offering all-day kindergartens and after-school programs, they're paring back. Instead of making higher education more affordable, it's getting out of reach for many families. Meanwhile, more Americans are in danger of losing health care or are paying more for the care they get.
In short, the fat years of the nineties left us woefully unprepared for a slower economy that's taking a particularly large toll on hardworking families and the poor.
In the past, when Americans faced a common problem—the Depression, a hot war, a cold war—we understood intuitively that we were all in it together. Someone's misfortune could be anyone's: "There but for the grace of God go I." Social insurance was a natural impulse, a first cousin to patriotism. It was not difficult to sense mutual dependence and to agree on a set of responsibilities shared by all members, exacting certain sacrifices for the common good.
But that sense of commonality is endangered as we drift into separate worlds of privilege and insecurity. I can't help asking, if you'll pardon me for questioning our newfound unity, whatever happened to the social contract?
The sobering news is that even our ten years of economic expansion didn't do much for the bottom half. Sure, they had jobs, but they had jobs before the last recession, too. The fact is, the median wage—the real take-home pay of the worker smack in the middle of the earnings ladder—is not much higher than it was in 1989. In my home state of Massachusetts, the typical household ended the roaring nineties $4,700 poorer (adjusted for inflation) than it began. And health and pension benefits for the bottom half continue to shrivel.
Many families have made up for the steady decline by working longer hours. The average middle-income married couple with children works almost 4,000 hours a year for pay—about seven weeks more than in 1990. But for most mortals who do not relish what they do for pay, more hours at work does not translate into a higher standard of living. On top of that, jobs are less secure. Health care is more expensive. Working families are shelling out huge bucks for good child care. And if you've got elderly parents who also need help, it's even rougher. At the same time, the upper reaches of America have never had it so good. Their pay and benefits have continued to rise.
Look, I don't begrudge anyone a fat paycheck or a big dividend check. But the worrier in me won't let go. I don't want my boys to grow up in a two-tiered society where they'll have to live in gated communities. Yet that's the direction we're heading in.
The problem is not that some of us are getting rich. That's the good news. The problem is that most of us are getting nowhere, even though we're working harder than ever before. We are hurtling toward a society composed of a minority who are profiting from changes in the economy and a majority who are not.
The consequence of this erosion extends beyond economics. It helps explain why hard-pressed parents can't find the time to raise their kids the way they themselves were raised and to pass on the values they grew up with; why voters whose family budgets pinch so tightly are outraged about government inefficiency and waste; why even instinctively generous Americans find their compassion toward the less fortunate flagging; why our politics have become so angry, even sometimes ugly.
Perhaps most important are the moral consequences. Put simply, it just isn't right. The glaring, grotesque wrongness of what's happening to hardworking American families spawns despair and cynicism. It affronts our values, mocking the American bargain linking effort and reward. It makes people feel like suckers and gnaws away at the precious ethic of responsibility. It closes the gate to the very poor. Ultimately, the hollowing-out of the middle class and the creation of a two-tiered society pose a mortal threat to what's always been special about our country.
Why isn't this being talked about? My guess is that Republicans don't feel comfortable with the topic because they don't have any solutions they'd find palatable. The right wing of the Democratic party has drifted toward a flaccid Republicanism, where the basic philosophy is that everyone is on his or her own. Corporate America isn't particularly eager to talk about it, or to sponsor television programs or advertise in magazines that do. But the fact is, as we proceed with the war on terrorism, our domestic agenda is in shambles. We need to make the case that we can only be a strong nation if the working middle class and the less fortunate are brought along. True national security begins with economic security.
Millions of Americans—myself included—were raised to believe in a simple bargain: Anybody who worked hard could earn a better life for themselves and their family. That's anybody—not just the wellborn, not just the well connected. Anybody with the drive and discipline to make the most of their opportunities had a decent chance to make it. Corporate America backed the bargain, too. Employees who worked hard and gave it their all could share in the company's success. If the company did well, their jobs were reasonably secure, and their wages and benefits rose.
In the 1950s, my mother and father worked six days a week in their small clothing shop, selling skirts and dresses to the wives of factory workers. I remember making signs when they had special sales: COTTON DRESSES, $2.99; BLOUSES, $1.00. As factory wages went up, local families had a bit more to spend every year, and my parents' little business grew less precarious. They went upscale. We all did better together. Growing together was the way it worked in America.
America has got off that track. We're growing apart—and at a quickening pace. My parents retired before the new economy elbowed out the old. Most of those factory jobs are now gone. Jobs like them accounted for over a third of all American jobs in the 1950s; now, fewer than 16 percent. Many of the old service jobs have disappeared as well. Telephone operators have been replaced by automated switching equipment, bank tellers by automated teller machines, gas station attendants by self-service pumps that accept credit cards, and secretaries by computers and voice mail. Any job that can be done more cheaply by a computer is now gone, or pays far less than before.
We can't bring back the old economy, and shouldn't try. But that doesn't leave us helpless. What we can do is create a new economy in which many more succeed.
Earnings began splitting between the have-mores and the have-lesses largely because of two revolutions—one in computer technology, the other in global economic integration. The combined effect has been to shift demand in favor of workers with the right education and skills to take advantage of these changes, and against workers without them. Meanwhile, the unionized segment of the workforce has shrunk. Today, fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are unionized. In 1955, 35 percent were unionized. At the same time, the real value of the minimum wage has declined. The drop in unionization has taken a toll on the wages of men without college degrees. The drop in the minimum wage has taken the biggest toll on the wages of working women without college degrees.
The real puzzle is why in recent years we've let this happen. If the right education and skills are so important, why haven't we done more for our schools? Why is the federal government cutting back on job training? Why is college becoming less affordable? If family incomes are under greater and greater stress, why have we let unions wither and the minimum wage decline? Why haven't we widened the circle of prosperity so that more Americans have a decent shot at it? In short, why has the social contract come undone? In the world's preeminent democratic-capitalist society, one might have expected just the reverse: As the economy grew through technological progress and global integration, the "winners" from this process would compensate those who bore the biggest burdens, and still come out far ahead. Rather than being weakened, the social contract would be strengthened.
Nations are not passive victims of economic forces. Citizens can, if they so choose, assert that their mutual obligations extend beyond their economic usefulness to one another, and act accordingly. Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.
Every society and culture possesses a social contract—sometimes implicit, sometimes spelled out in detail, but usually a mix of both. The contract sets out the obligations of members of that society toward one another. Indeed, a society or culture is defined by its social contract. It is found within the pronouns "we," "our," and "us." We hold these truths to be self-evident; our peace and freedom is at stake; the problem affects all of us. A quarter of a century ago, when the essential provisions of the American social contract were taken for granted by American society, there was hardly any reason to state them. Today, as these provisions wither, they deserve closer scrutiny.
To the extent that there's been a moral core to American capitalism, it's consisted of three promises.
First, as companies did better, their employees would too. As long as a company was profitable, employees knew their jobs were secure. When profits rose, wages and benefits (health care and pensions) rose, too. In harder times, companies accepted lower profits to retain their workers. At worst, if a recession hit hard, companies laid workers off temporarily and then hired them back as soon as the economy turned up. The communities where most employees lived were also part of the contract: As long as the company was profitable, it remained in the community—often underwriting charities and responding to community needs.
"The job of management," proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address typical of the era, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups ... stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining in professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized in theirs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich. Copyright © 2002 by Robert B. Reich. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
t is far too early to know what historians will see when they look back on the years 2000 to 2002 from their perches in the future, but it's likely they will chronicle a profound change in America. The years leading up featured almost breathless excitement about getting rich quick in dot-coms, irrational exuberance in the stock market, and boundless confidence about the nation's power and place in the world. Then, in rapid succession, the dot-com bubble burst, the economy drifted into recession, and terrorists attacked with a deadliness and ferocity never known or even imagined before. Then one of our most successful corporations suddenly imploded, revealing a sham of accounting gimmicks and regulatory lapses; investors and employees lost big while top executives walked off with fortunes.
What have we learned, other than humility? We remain a blessedly optimistic people. But these two years have shaken our certainty about some things we had begun to take for granted—especially, I think, the idea that each of us can make it solely on our own. The get-rich-quick exuberance of the late nineties may have temporarily blinded us to how dependent we are on one another. Subsequent events serve as reminders that the strength of our economy and the security of our society rest on the bonds that connect us. But what, specifically, are these bonds? What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
This is a small book about these large questions. Some of the observations recorded here are culled from my writing during these fitful years. In collecting and fitting them together, my hope is to reveal a larger perspective on what is at stake and what we can do about it.
One of my themes concerns politics, and the heightened importance now of a politically active and engaged citizenry. As this volume goes to press, I am heeding my own advice in the extreme by running for governor of Massachusetts. By the time you get around to reading it, I may have succeeded—or else have returned to the far safer ground of commenting from the sidelines. If it's the former, I hope I can put some of those principles into action; if the latter, I hope others will.
Chapter One
Not since World War II have Americans felt so unified. We're fighting a war against terrorism and we're fighting to get the economy moving again. And we're all in this together. Except when it comes to paying the bill.
Add the cost of fighting the war to the biggest military buildup in two decades and extra security at home, and you're talking real money—hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The Bush administration has also enacted a mammoth tax cut—$1.35 trillion over the next ten years. At this writing, the president is proposing almost $600 billion in additional cuts in income taxes and capital-gains taxes. The bulk of these cuts—those already enacted and those proposed—benefit large corporations and people who are already wealthy.
So who's going to pay? Take a guess. Middle- and lower-income Americans.
Most Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Payroll taxes include Social Security and Medicare payments. You pay these taxes on the first $80,000 or so of your income (the ceiling rises slightly every year). After that you're home free. Bill Gates stops paying payroll taxes at a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.
None of the enacted or proposed tax cuts affect payroll taxes, even temporarily. To the contrary, they increase the odds that payroll taxes will have to be hiked. That's because the tax cuts, combined with the military buildup, will drain so much money out of the Treasury that there won't be enough money to pay for Social Security and Medicare by the time the early baby boomers begin retiring, about a decade from now. So payroll taxes probably will have to rise in order to fill the gap.
Get it? Income and capital-gains tax cuts for the rich now, payroll tax hikes on middle- and lower-income Americans to come.
Americans like to think we're all in this together, but the fact is that the economic fallout from terrorism is hitting some Americans much harder than others. When the slowdown began, layoffs and pay cuts hit hardest at manufacturing workers, white-collar managers, and professionals. Since the terrorist attacks, a different group is experiencing the heaviest job losses: the low-paid. Many are service workers in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or other tourist-industry businesses that have been hard hit. Others are caregivers—social workers, hospital workers, elder-care workers—whose jobs and wages are on the line as public budgets are trimmed. The economy may be rebounding, but these people aren't.
Government is less helpful this time around. Safety nets are in tatters. Welfare-to-work programs made sense when work was plentiful, but without work, those no longer eligible for welfare have nowhere else to turn. Even job losers who still qualify find that welfare payments in most states are worth less than before.
Unemployment insurance is also harder for them to get. Since part-time workers, temps, the self-employed, and people who have moved in and out of employment often don't qualify, a large portion of the lower-wage workforce is excluded. Many who don't qualify are women with young children.
Meanwhile, federal programs for job training and low-income housing have been shrunk by budget cuts. State and local governments are in no position to step in. They're already strapped by rapidly declining tax revenues. Rather than beefing up social services, they're cutting them. Rather than improving our schools by reducing class size and offering all-day kindergartens and after-school programs, they're paring back. Instead of making higher education more affordable, it's getting out of reach for many families. Meanwhile, more Americans are in danger of losing health care or are paying more for the care they get.
In short, the fat years of the nineties left us woefully unprepared for a slower economy that's taking a particularly large toll on hardworking families and the poor.
In the past, when Americans faced a common problem—the Depression, a hot war, a cold war—we understood intuitively that we were all in it together. Someone's misfortune could be anyone's: "There but for the grace of God go I." Social insurance was a natural impulse, a first cousin to patriotism. It was not difficult to sense mutual dependence and to agree on a set of responsibilities shared by all members, exacting certain sacrifices for the common good.
But that sense of commonality is endangered as we drift into separate worlds of privilege and insecurity. I can't help asking, if you'll pardon me for questioning our newfound unity, whatever happened to the social contract?
The sobering news is that even our ten years of economic expansion didn't do much for the bottom half. Sure, they had jobs, but they had jobs before the last recession, too. The fact is, the median wage—the real take-home pay of the worker smack in the middle of the earnings ladder—is not much higher than it was in 1989. In my home state of Massachusetts, the typical household ended the roaring nineties $4,700 poorer (adjusted for inflation) than it began. And health and pension benefits for the bottom half continue to shrivel.
Many families have made up for the steady decline by working longer hours. The average middle-income married couple with children works almost 4,000 hours a year for pay—about seven weeks more than in 1990. But for most mortals who do not relish what they do for pay, more hours at work does not translate into a higher standard of living. On top of that, jobs are less secure. Health care is more expensive. Working families are shelling out huge bucks for good child care. And if you've got elderly parents who also need help, it's even rougher. At the same time, the upper reaches of America have never had it so good. Their pay and benefits have continued to rise.
Look, I don't begrudge anyone a fat paycheck or a big dividend check. But the worrier in me won't let go. I don't want my boys to grow up in a two-tiered society where they'll have to live in gated communities. Yet that's the direction we're heading in.
The problem is not that some of us are getting rich. That's the good news. The problem is that most of us are getting nowhere, even though we're working harder than ever before. We are hurtling toward a society composed of a minority who are profiting from changes in the economy and a majority who are not.
The consequence of this erosion extends beyond economics. It helps explain why hard-pressed parents can't find the time to raise their kids the way they themselves were raised and to pass on the values they grew up with; why voters whose family budgets pinch so tightly are outraged about government inefficiency and waste; why even instinctively generous Americans find their compassion toward the less fortunate flagging; why our politics have become so angry, even sometimes ugly.
Perhaps most important are the moral consequences. Put simply, it just isn't right. The glaring, grotesque wrongness of what's happening to hardworking American families spawns despair and cynicism. It affronts our values, mocking the American bargain linking effort and reward. It makes people feel like suckers and gnaws away at the precious ethic of responsibility. It closes the gate to the very poor. Ultimately, the hollowing-out of the middle class and the creation of a two-tiered society pose a mortal threat to what's always been special about our country.
Why isn't this being talked about? My guess is that Republicans don't feel comfortable with the topic because they don't have any solutions they'd find palatable. The right wing of the Democratic party has drifted toward a flaccid Republicanism, where the basic philosophy is that everyone is on his or her own. Corporate America isn't particularly eager to talk about it, or to sponsor television programs or advertise in magazines that do. But the fact is, as we proceed with the war on terrorism, our domestic agenda is in shambles. We need to make the case that we can only be a strong nation if the working middle class and the less fortunate are brought along. True national security begins with economic security.
Millions of Americans—myself included—were raised to believe in a simple bargain: Anybody who worked hard could earn a better life for themselves and their family. That's anybody—not just the wellborn, not just the well connected. Anybody with the drive and discipline to make the most of their opportunities had a decent chance to make it. Corporate America backed the bargain, too. Employees who worked hard and gave it their all could share in the company's success. If the company did well, their jobs were reasonably secure, and their wages and benefits rose.
In the 1950s, my mother and father worked six days a week in their small clothing shop, selling skirts and dresses to the wives of factory workers. I remember making signs when they had special sales: COTTON DRESSES, $2.99; BLOUSES, $1.00. As factory wages went up, local families had a bit more to spend every year, and my parents' little business grew less precarious. They went upscale. We all did better together. Growing together was the way it worked in America.
America has got off that track. We're growing apart—and at a quickening pace. My parents retired before the new economy elbowed out the old. Most of those factory jobs are now gone. Jobs like them accounted for over a third of all American jobs in the 1950s; now, fewer than 16 percent. Many of the old service jobs have disappeared as well. Telephone operators have been replaced by automated switching equipment, bank tellers by automated teller machines, gas station attendants by self-service pumps that accept credit cards, and secretaries by computers and voice mail. Any job that can be done more cheaply by a computer is now gone, or pays far less than before.
We can't bring back the old economy, and shouldn't try. But that doesn't leave us helpless. What we can do is create a new economy in which many more succeed.
Earnings began splitting between the have-mores and the have-lesses largely because of two revolutions—one in computer technology, the other in global economic integration. The combined effect has been to shift demand in favor of workers with the right education and skills to take advantage of these changes, and against workers without them. Meanwhile, the unionized segment of the workforce has shrunk. Today, fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are unionized. In 1955, 35 percent were unionized. At the same time, the real value of the minimum wage has declined. The drop in unionization has taken a toll on the wages of men without college degrees. The drop in the minimum wage has taken the biggest toll on the wages of working women without college degrees.
The real puzzle is why in recent years we've let this happen. If the right education and skills are so important, why haven't we done more for our schools? Why is the federal government cutting back on job training? Why is college becoming less affordable? If family incomes are under greater and greater stress, why have we let unions wither and the minimum wage decline? Why haven't we widened the circle of prosperity so that more Americans have a decent shot at it? In short, why has the social contract come undone? In the world's preeminent democratic-capitalist society, one might have expected just the reverse: As the economy grew through technological progress and global integration, the "winners" from this process would compensate those who bore the biggest burdens, and still come out far ahead. Rather than being weakened, the social contract would be strengthened.
Nations are not passive victims of economic forces. Citizens can, if they so choose, assert that their mutual obligations extend beyond their economic usefulness to one another, and act accordingly. Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.
Every society and culture possesses a social contract—sometimes implicit, sometimes spelled out in detail, but usually a mix of both. The contract sets out the obligations of members of that society toward one another. Indeed, a society or culture is defined by its social contract. It is found within the pronouns "we," "our," and "us." We hold these truths to be self-evident; our peace and freedom is at stake; the problem affects all of us. A quarter of a century ago, when the essential provisions of the American social contract were taken for granted by American society, there was hardly any reason to state them. Today, as these provisions wither, they deserve closer scrutiny.
To the extent that there's been a moral core to American capitalism, it's consisted of three promises.
First, as companies did better, their employees would too. As long as a company was profitable, employees knew their jobs were secure. When profits rose, wages and benefits (health care and pensions) rose, too. In harder times, companies accepted lower profits to retain their workers. At worst, if a recession hit hard, companies laid workers off temporarily and then hired them back as soon as the economy turned up. The communities where most employees lived were also part of the contract: As long as the company was profitable, it remained in the community—often underwriting charities and responding to community needs.
"The job of management," proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address typical of the era, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups ... stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining in professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized in theirs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich. Copyright © 2002 by Robert B. Reich. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
'I'll Be Short'
By
August 4, 2002
'I'll Be Short'
By ROBERT B. REICH
t is far too early to know what historians will see when they look back on the years 2000 to 2002 from their perches in the future, but it's likely they will chronicle a profound change in America. The years leading up featured almost breathless excitement about getting rich quick in dot-coms, irrational exuberance in the stock market, and boundless confidence about the nation's power and place in the world. Then, in rapid succession, the dot-com bubble burst, the economy drifted into recession, and terrorists attacked with a deadliness and ferocity never known or even imagined before. Then one of our most successful corporations suddenly imploded, revealing a sham of accounting gimmicks and regulatory lapses; investors and employees lost big while top executives walked off with fortunes.
What have we learned, other than humility? We remain a blessedly optimistic people. But these two years have shaken our certainty about some things we had begun to take for granted—especially, I think, the idea that each of us can make it solely on our own. The get-rich-quick exuberance of the late nineties may have temporarily blinded us to how dependent we are on one another. Subsequent events serve as reminders that the strength of our economy and the security of our society rest on the bonds that connect us. But what, specifically, are these bonds? What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
This is a small book about these large questions. Some of the observations recorded here are culled from my writing during these fitful years. In collecting and fitting them together, my hope is to reveal a larger perspective on what is at stake and what we can do about it.
One of my themes concerns politics, and the heightened importance now of a politically active and engaged citizenry. As this volume goes to press, I am heeding my own advice in the extreme by running for governor of Massachusetts. By the time you get around to reading it, I may have succeeded—or else have returned to the far safer ground of commenting from the sidelines. If it's the former, I hope I can put some of those principles into action; if the latter, I hope others will.
Chapter One
Not since World War II have Americans felt so unified. We're fighting a war against terrorism and we're fighting to get the economy moving again. And we're all in this together. Except when it comes to paying the bill.
Add the cost of fighting the war to the biggest military buildup in two decades and extra security at home, and you're talking real money—hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The Bush administration has also enacted a mammoth tax cut—$1.35 trillion over the next ten years. At this writing, the president is proposing almost $600 billion in additional cuts in income taxes and capital-gains taxes. The bulk of these cuts—those already enacted and those proposed—benefit large corporations and people who are already wealthy.
So who's going to pay? Take a guess. Middle- and lower-income Americans.
Most Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Payroll taxes include Social Security and Medicare payments. You pay these taxes on the first $80,000 or so of your income (the ceiling rises slightly every year). After that you're home free. Bill Gates stops paying payroll taxes at a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.
None of the enacted or proposed tax cuts affect payroll taxes, even temporarily. To the contrary, they increase the odds that payroll taxes will have to be hiked. That's because the tax cuts, combined with the military buildup, will drain so much money out of the Treasury that there won't be enough money to pay for Social Security and Medicare by the time the early baby boomers begin retiring, about a decade from now. So payroll taxes probably will have to rise in order to fill the gap.
Get it? Income and capital-gains tax cuts for the rich now, payroll tax hikes on middle- and lower-income Americans to come.
Americans like to think we're all in this together, but the fact is that the economic fallout from terrorism is hitting some Americans much harder than others. When the slowdown began, layoffs and pay cuts hit hardest at manufacturing workers, white-collar managers, and professionals. Since the terrorist attacks, a different group is experiencing the heaviest job losses: the low-paid. Many are service workers in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or other tourist-industry businesses that have been hard hit. Others are caregivers—social workers, hospital workers, elder-care workers—whose jobs and wages are on the line as public budgets are trimmed. The economy may be rebounding, but these people aren't.
Government is less helpful this time around. Safety nets are in tatters. Welfare-to-work programs made sense when work was plentiful, but without work, those no longer eligible for welfare have nowhere else to turn. Even job losers who still qualify find that welfare payments in most states are worth less than before.
Unemployment insurance is also harder for them to get. Since part-time workers, temps, the self-employed, and people who have moved in and out of employment often don't qualify, a large portion of the lower-wage workforce is excluded. Many who don't qualify are women with young children.
Meanwhile, federal programs for job training and low-income housing have been shrunk by budget cuts. State and local governments are in no position to step in. They're already strapped by rapidly declining tax revenues. Rather than beefing up social services, they're cutting them. Rather than improving our schools by reducing class size and offering all-day kindergartens and after-school programs, they're paring back. Instead of making higher education more affordable, it's getting out of reach for many families. Meanwhile, more Americans are in danger of losing health care or are paying more for the care they get.
In short, the fat years of the nineties left us woefully unprepared for a slower economy that's taking a particularly large toll on hardworking families and the poor.
In the past, when Americans faced a common problem—the Depression, a hot war, a cold war—we understood intuitively that we were all in it together. Someone's misfortune could be anyone's: "There but for the grace of God go I." Social insurance was a natural impulse, a first cousin to patriotism. It was not difficult to sense mutual dependence and to agree on a set of responsibilities shared by all members, exacting certain sacrifices for the common good.
But that sense of commonality is endangered as we drift into separate worlds of privilege and insecurity. I can't help asking, if you'll pardon me for questioning our newfound unity, whatever happened to the social contract?
The sobering news is that even our ten years of economic expansion didn't do much for the bottom half. Sure, they had jobs, but they had jobs before the last recession, too. The fact is, the median wage—the real take-home pay of the worker smack in the middle of the earnings ladder—is not much higher than it was in 1989. In my home state of Massachusetts, the typical household ended the roaring nineties $4,700 poorer (adjusted for inflation) than it began. And health and pension benefits for the bottom half continue to shrivel.
Many families have made up for the steady decline by working longer hours. The average middle-income married couple with children works almost 4,000 hours a year for pay—about seven weeks more than in 1990. But for most mortals who do not relish what they do for pay, more hours at work does not translate into a higher standard of living. On top of that, jobs are less secure. Health care is more expensive. Working families are shelling out huge bucks for good child care. And if you've got elderly parents who also need help, it's even rougher. At the same time, the upper reaches of America have never had it so good. Their pay and benefits have continued to rise.
Look, I don't begrudge anyone a fat paycheck or a big dividend check. But the worrier in me won't let go. I don't want my boys to grow up in a two-tiered society where they'll have to live in gated communities. Yet that's the direction we're heading in.
The problem is not that some of us are getting rich. That's the good news. The problem is that most of us are getting nowhere, even though we're working harder than ever before. We are hurtling toward a society composed of a minority who are profiting from changes in the economy and a majority who are not.
The consequence of this erosion extends beyond economics. It helps explain why hard-pressed parents can't find the time to raise their kids the way they themselves were raised and to pass on the values they grew up with; why voters whose family budgets pinch so tightly are outraged about government inefficiency and waste; why even instinctively generous Americans find their compassion toward the less fortunate flagging; why our politics have become so angry, even sometimes ugly.
Perhaps most important are the moral consequences. Put simply, it just isn't right. The glaring, grotesque wrongness of what's happening to hardworking American families spawns despair and cynicism. It affronts our values, mocking the American bargain linking effort and reward. It makes people feel like suckers and gnaws away at the precious ethic of responsibility. It closes the gate to the very poor. Ultimately, the hollowing-out of the middle class and the creation of a two-tiered society pose a mortal threat to what's always been special about our country.
Why isn't this being talked about? My guess is that Republicans don't feel comfortable with the topic because they don't have any solutions they'd find palatable. The right wing of the Democratic party has drifted toward a flaccid Republicanism, where the basic philosophy is that everyone is on his or her own. Corporate America isn't particularly eager to talk about it, or to sponsor television programs or advertise in magazines that do. But the fact is, as we proceed with the war on terrorism, our domestic agenda is in shambles. We need to make the case that we can only be a strong nation if the working middle class and the less fortunate are brought along. True national security begins with economic security.
Millions of Americans—myself included—were raised to believe in a simple bargain: Anybody who worked hard could earn a better life for themselves and their family. That's anybody—not just the wellborn, not just the well connected. Anybody with the drive and discipline to make the most of their opportunities had a decent chance to make it. Corporate America backed the bargain, too. Employees who worked hard and gave it their all could share in the company's success. If the company did well, their jobs were reasonably secure, and their wages and benefits rose.
In the 1950s, my mother and father worked six days a week in their small clothing shop, selling skirts and dresses to the wives of factory workers. I remember making signs when they had special sales: COTTON DRESSES, $2.99; BLOUSES, $1.00. As factory wages went up, local families had a bit more to spend every year, and my parents' little business grew less precarious. They went upscale. We all did better together. Growing together was the way it worked in America.
America has got off that track. We're growing apart—and at a quickening pace. My parents retired before the new economy elbowed out the old. Most of those factory jobs are now gone. Jobs like them accounted for over a third of all American jobs in the 1950s; now, fewer than 16 percent. Many of the old service jobs have disappeared as well. Telephone operators have been replaced by automated switching equipment, bank tellers by automated teller machines, gas station attendants by self-service pumps that accept credit cards, and secretaries by computers and voice mail. Any job that can be done more cheaply by a computer is now gone, or pays far less than before.
We can't bring back the old economy, and shouldn't try. But that doesn't leave us helpless. What we can do is create a new economy in which many more succeed.
Earnings began splitting between the have-mores and the have-lesses largely because of two revolutions—one in computer technology, the other in global economic integration. The combined effect has been to shift demand in favor of workers with the right education and skills to take advantage of these changes, and against workers without them. Meanwhile, the unionized segment of the workforce has shrunk. Today, fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are unionized. In 1955, 35 percent were unionized. At the same time, the real value of the minimum wage has declined. The drop in unionization has taken a toll on the wages of men without college degrees. The drop in the minimum wage has taken the biggest toll on the wages of working women without college degrees.
The real puzzle is why in recent years we've let this happen. If the right education and skills are so important, why haven't we done more for our schools? Why is the federal government cutting back on job training? Why is college becoming less affordable? If family incomes are under greater and greater stress, why have we let unions wither and the minimum wage decline? Why haven't we widened the circle of prosperity so that more Americans have a decent shot at it? In short, why has the social contract come undone? In the world's preeminent democratic-capitalist society, one might have expected just the reverse: As the economy grew through technological progress and global integration, the "winners" from this process would compensate those who bore the biggest burdens, and still come out far ahead. Rather than being weakened, the social contract would be strengthened.
Nations are not passive victims of economic forces. Citizens can, if they so choose, assert that their mutual obligations extend beyond their economic usefulness to one another, and act accordingly. Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.
Every society and culture possesses a social contract—sometimes implicit, sometimes spelled out in detail, but usually a mix of both. The contract sets out the obligations of members of that society toward one another. Indeed, a society or culture is defined by its social contract. It is found within the pronouns "we," "our," and "us." We hold these truths to be self-evident; our peace and freedom is at stake; the problem affects all of us. A quarter of a century ago, when the essential provisions of the American social contract were taken for granted by American society, there was hardly any reason to state them. Today, as these provisions wither, they deserve closer scrutiny.
To the extent that there's been a moral core to American capitalism, it's consisted of three promises.
First, as companies did better, their employees would too. As long as a company was profitable, employees knew their jobs were secure. When profits rose, wages and benefits (health care and pensions) rose, too. In harder times, companies accepted lower profits to retain their workers. At worst, if a recession hit hard, companies laid workers off temporarily and then hired them back as soon as the economy turned up. The communities where most employees lived were also part of the contract: As long as the company was profitable, it remained in the community—often underwriting charities and responding to community needs.
"The job of management," proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address typical of the era, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups ... stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining in professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized in theirs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich. Copyright © 2002 by Robert B. Reich. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
t is far too early to know what historians will see when they look back on the years 2000 to 2002 from their perches in the future, but it's likely they will chronicle a profound change in America. The years leading up featured almost breathless excitement about getting rich quick in dot-coms, irrational exuberance in the stock market, and boundless confidence about the nation's power and place in the world. Then, in rapid succession, the dot-com bubble burst, the economy drifted into recession, and terrorists attacked with a deadliness and ferocity never known or even imagined before. Then one of our most successful corporations suddenly imploded, revealing a sham of accounting gimmicks and regulatory lapses; investors and employees lost big while top executives walked off with fortunes.
What have we learned, other than humility? We remain a blessedly optimistic people. But these two years have shaken our certainty about some things we had begun to take for granted—especially, I think, the idea that each of us can make it solely on our own. The get-rich-quick exuberance of the late nineties may have temporarily blinded us to how dependent we are on one another. Subsequent events serve as reminders that the strength of our economy and the security of our society rest on the bonds that connect us. But what, specifically, are these bonds? What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
This is a small book about these large questions. Some of the observations recorded here are culled from my writing during these fitful years. In collecting and fitting them together, my hope is to reveal a larger perspective on what is at stake and what we can do about it.
One of my themes concerns politics, and the heightened importance now of a politically active and engaged citizenry. As this volume goes to press, I am heeding my own advice in the extreme by running for governor of Massachusetts. By the time you get around to reading it, I may have succeeded—or else have returned to the far safer ground of commenting from the sidelines. If it's the former, I hope I can put some of those principles into action; if the latter, I hope others will.
Chapter One
Not since World War II have Americans felt so unified. We're fighting a war against terrorism and we're fighting to get the economy moving again. And we're all in this together. Except when it comes to paying the bill.
Add the cost of fighting the war to the biggest military buildup in two decades and extra security at home, and you're talking real money—hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The Bush administration has also enacted a mammoth tax cut—$1.35 trillion over the next ten years. At this writing, the president is proposing almost $600 billion in additional cuts in income taxes and capital-gains taxes. The bulk of these cuts—those already enacted and those proposed—benefit large corporations and people who are already wealthy.
So who's going to pay? Take a guess. Middle- and lower-income Americans.
Most Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. Payroll taxes include Social Security and Medicare payments. You pay these taxes on the first $80,000 or so of your income (the ceiling rises slightly every year). After that you're home free. Bill Gates stops paying payroll taxes at a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.
None of the enacted or proposed tax cuts affect payroll taxes, even temporarily. To the contrary, they increase the odds that payroll taxes will have to be hiked. That's because the tax cuts, combined with the military buildup, will drain so much money out of the Treasury that there won't be enough money to pay for Social Security and Medicare by the time the early baby boomers begin retiring, about a decade from now. So payroll taxes probably will have to rise in order to fill the gap.
Get it? Income and capital-gains tax cuts for the rich now, payroll tax hikes on middle- and lower-income Americans to come.
Americans like to think we're all in this together, but the fact is that the economic fallout from terrorism is hitting some Americans much harder than others. When the slowdown began, layoffs and pay cuts hit hardest at manufacturing workers, white-collar managers, and professionals. Since the terrorist attacks, a different group is experiencing the heaviest job losses: the low-paid. Many are service workers in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or other tourist-industry businesses that have been hard hit. Others are caregivers—social workers, hospital workers, elder-care workers—whose jobs and wages are on the line as public budgets are trimmed. The economy may be rebounding, but these people aren't.
Government is less helpful this time around. Safety nets are in tatters. Welfare-to-work programs made sense when work was plentiful, but without work, those no longer eligible for welfare have nowhere else to turn. Even job losers who still qualify find that welfare payments in most states are worth less than before.
Unemployment insurance is also harder for them to get. Since part-time workers, temps, the self-employed, and people who have moved in and out of employment often don't qualify, a large portion of the lower-wage workforce is excluded. Many who don't qualify are women with young children.
Meanwhile, federal programs for job training and low-income housing have been shrunk by budget cuts. State and local governments are in no position to step in. They're already strapped by rapidly declining tax revenues. Rather than beefing up social services, they're cutting them. Rather than improving our schools by reducing class size and offering all-day kindergartens and after-school programs, they're paring back. Instead of making higher education more affordable, it's getting out of reach for many families. Meanwhile, more Americans are in danger of losing health care or are paying more for the care they get.
In short, the fat years of the nineties left us woefully unprepared for a slower economy that's taking a particularly large toll on hardworking families and the poor.
In the past, when Americans faced a common problem—the Depression, a hot war, a cold war—we understood intuitively that we were all in it together. Someone's misfortune could be anyone's: "There but for the grace of God go I." Social insurance was a natural impulse, a first cousin to patriotism. It was not difficult to sense mutual dependence and to agree on a set of responsibilities shared by all members, exacting certain sacrifices for the common good.
But that sense of commonality is endangered as we drift into separate worlds of privilege and insecurity. I can't help asking, if you'll pardon me for questioning our newfound unity, whatever happened to the social contract?
The sobering news is that even our ten years of economic expansion didn't do much for the bottom half. Sure, they had jobs, but they had jobs before the last recession, too. The fact is, the median wage—the real take-home pay of the worker smack in the middle of the earnings ladder—is not much higher than it was in 1989. In my home state of Massachusetts, the typical household ended the roaring nineties $4,700 poorer (adjusted for inflation) than it began. And health and pension benefits for the bottom half continue to shrivel.
Many families have made up for the steady decline by working longer hours. The average middle-income married couple with children works almost 4,000 hours a year for pay—about seven weeks more than in 1990. But for most mortals who do not relish what they do for pay, more hours at work does not translate into a higher standard of living. On top of that, jobs are less secure. Health care is more expensive. Working families are shelling out huge bucks for good child care. And if you've got elderly parents who also need help, it's even rougher. At the same time, the upper reaches of America have never had it so good. Their pay and benefits have continued to rise.
Look, I don't begrudge anyone a fat paycheck or a big dividend check. But the worrier in me won't let go. I don't want my boys to grow up in a two-tiered society where they'll have to live in gated communities. Yet that's the direction we're heading in.
The problem is not that some of us are getting rich. That's the good news. The problem is that most of us are getting nowhere, even though we're working harder than ever before. We are hurtling toward a society composed of a minority who are profiting from changes in the economy and a majority who are not.
The consequence of this erosion extends beyond economics. It helps explain why hard-pressed parents can't find the time to raise their kids the way they themselves were raised and to pass on the values they grew up with; why voters whose family budgets pinch so tightly are outraged about government inefficiency and waste; why even instinctively generous Americans find their compassion toward the less fortunate flagging; why our politics have become so angry, even sometimes ugly.
Perhaps most important are the moral consequences. Put simply, it just isn't right. The glaring, grotesque wrongness of what's happening to hardworking American families spawns despair and cynicism. It affronts our values, mocking the American bargain linking effort and reward. It makes people feel like suckers and gnaws away at the precious ethic of responsibility. It closes the gate to the very poor. Ultimately, the hollowing-out of the middle class and the creation of a two-tiered society pose a mortal threat to what's always been special about our country.
Why isn't this being talked about? My guess is that Republicans don't feel comfortable with the topic because they don't have any solutions they'd find palatable. The right wing of the Democratic party has drifted toward a flaccid Republicanism, where the basic philosophy is that everyone is on his or her own. Corporate America isn't particularly eager to talk about it, or to sponsor television programs or advertise in magazines that do. But the fact is, as we proceed with the war on terrorism, our domestic agenda is in shambles. We need to make the case that we can only be a strong nation if the working middle class and the less fortunate are brought along. True national security begins with economic security.
Millions of Americans—myself included—were raised to believe in a simple bargain: Anybody who worked hard could earn a better life for themselves and their family. That's anybody—not just the wellborn, not just the well connected. Anybody with the drive and discipline to make the most of their opportunities had a decent chance to make it. Corporate America backed the bargain, too. Employees who worked hard and gave it their all could share in the company's success. If the company did well, their jobs were reasonably secure, and their wages and benefits rose.
In the 1950s, my mother and father worked six days a week in their small clothing shop, selling skirts and dresses to the wives of factory workers. I remember making signs when they had special sales: COTTON DRESSES, $2.99; BLOUSES, $1.00. As factory wages went up, local families had a bit more to spend every year, and my parents' little business grew less precarious. They went upscale. We all did better together. Growing together was the way it worked in America.
America has got off that track. We're growing apart—and at a quickening pace. My parents retired before the new economy elbowed out the old. Most of those factory jobs are now gone. Jobs like them accounted for over a third of all American jobs in the 1950s; now, fewer than 16 percent. Many of the old service jobs have disappeared as well. Telephone operators have been replaced by automated switching equipment, bank tellers by automated teller machines, gas station attendants by self-service pumps that accept credit cards, and secretaries by computers and voice mail. Any job that can be done more cheaply by a computer is now gone, or pays far less than before.
We can't bring back the old economy, and shouldn't try. But that doesn't leave us helpless. What we can do is create a new economy in which many more succeed.
Earnings began splitting between the have-mores and the have-lesses largely because of two revolutions—one in computer technology, the other in global economic integration. The combined effect has been to shift demand in favor of workers with the right education and skills to take advantage of these changes, and against workers without them. Meanwhile, the unionized segment of the workforce has shrunk. Today, fewer than 10 percent of private-sector employees are unionized. In 1955, 35 percent were unionized. At the same time, the real value of the minimum wage has declined. The drop in unionization has taken a toll on the wages of men without college degrees. The drop in the minimum wage has taken the biggest toll on the wages of working women without college degrees.
The real puzzle is why in recent years we've let this happen. If the right education and skills are so important, why haven't we done more for our schools? Why is the federal government cutting back on job training? Why is college becoming less affordable? If family incomes are under greater and greater stress, why have we let unions wither and the minimum wage decline? Why haven't we widened the circle of prosperity so that more Americans have a decent shot at it? In short, why has the social contract come undone? In the world's preeminent democratic-capitalist society, one might have expected just the reverse: As the economy grew through technological progress and global integration, the "winners" from this process would compensate those who bore the biggest burdens, and still come out far ahead. Rather than being weakened, the social contract would be strengthened.
Nations are not passive victims of economic forces. Citizens can, if they so choose, assert that their mutual obligations extend beyond their economic usefulness to one another, and act accordingly. Throughout our history the United States has periodically asserted the public's interest when market outcomes threatened social peace—curbing the power of the great trusts, establishing pure food and drug laws, implementing a progressive federal tax, imposing a forty-hour workweek, barring child labor, creating a system of social security, expanding public schooling and access to higher education, extending health care to the elderly, and so forth. We did part of this through laws, regulations, and court rulings, and part through social norms and expectations about how we wanted our people to live and work productively together. In short, this nation developed and refined a strong social contract, which gave force to the simple proposition that prosperity could include almost everyone.
Every society and culture possesses a social contract—sometimes implicit, sometimes spelled out in detail, but usually a mix of both. The contract sets out the obligations of members of that society toward one another. Indeed, a society or culture is defined by its social contract. It is found within the pronouns "we," "our," and "us." We hold these truths to be self-evident; our peace and freedom is at stake; the problem affects all of us. A quarter of a century ago, when the essential provisions of the American social contract were taken for granted by American society, there was hardly any reason to state them. Today, as these provisions wither, they deserve closer scrutiny.
To the extent that there's been a moral core to American capitalism, it's consisted of three promises.
First, as companies did better, their employees would too. As long as a company was profitable, employees knew their jobs were secure. When profits rose, wages and benefits (health care and pensions) rose, too. In harder times, companies accepted lower profits to retain their workers. At worst, if a recession hit hard, companies laid workers off temporarily and then hired them back as soon as the economy turned up. The communities where most employees lived were also part of the contract: As long as the company was profitable, it remained in the community—often underwriting charities and responding to community needs.
"The job of management," proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address typical of the era, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups ... stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining in professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized in theirs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'LL BE SHORT by Robert B. Reich. Copyright © 2002 by Robert B. Reich. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement
Divided Minds
Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement
By CAROL POLSGROVE
W. W. Norton & Company
Read the Review
"Go Slow"
On a waning afternoon in late January 1953, some five hundred writers, editors, reviewers, reporters, literary agents, and booksellers seated themselves in rows of chairs in a Manhattan hotel. It was time for Harper's editor Frederick Lewis Allen to introduce the winners of the 1952 National Book Awards—among them, Ralph Ellison's first novel, Invisible Man. Not since Richard Wright's Native Son had a novel by a Negro writer so captured the interest of the white publishing world. Reviewers fixed their attention on Ellison's unflattering treatment of the Communist Party, although they noted, too, his unconventional narrative approach. Accepting the ten-carat gold medal at the awards ceremony, Ellison, a formal man on such public occasions, himself touched on his experimental approach, and the political point he had hoped to make with it: "I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly...."
As Ellison spoke, the Supreme Court had before it a set of appeals that did confront the very inequalities most on Ellison's mind: the inequalities of race. One of the Supreme Court justices considering the appeals in Brown v. Board of Education, William O. Douglas, followed Ellison as the main speaker at the awards program. Ellison's allotted five minutes over, Douglas delivered a twenty-minute speech on the need for unity in Asia to withstand the power of the Soviet Union. After that, as The New Yorker lightly noted in its account of the occasion, "the audience applauded, and in a trice the chairs we had been sitting on were whisked away, two bars were going like blast furnaces on either side of the room, and what is known in literary circles as a reception was under way." In the milling about that followed, Ralph Ellison got lost in the crowd. There were so many more celebrated to attend to, including Justice Douglas himself, who told his listeners how much easier it was to write accounts of his travels than Supreme Court decisions. He described a Malayan shadow play he had come across: "There's this puppet, you see, and a light behind the screen...." The "lion of the afternoon," The New Yorker said, was the great southern writer William Faulkner, "who, very small and very handsome, with a voice that never rose above a whisper, stood with his back to the wall and gamely took on all comers."
No southern novelist had done more to shape literate Americans' impression of the South than William Faulkner. Since the 1920s, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner had poured out a stream of narrative—novels differently titled but all of a piece: the patch of South that Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha County. "If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South," Ellison himself once said, "of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don't go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren."
Both Warren and Ellison had abandoned the South, departing for the more cosmopolitan North. Faulkner stayed on, living at the edge of Oxford in an antebellum house, too small and plainly built to be rightly called a mansion, although it could pass for one at a distance. Faulkner called the house Rowan Oak, after a mythical tree, but lanky cedars actually lined the narrow drive up to his door. The house's first owner had hired a landscaper to lay out hedges in formal, concentric circles in the front yard. The place must have had grandeur then, but it had something else in the 1950s: a lived-in quality so worn that Faulkner felt free to write out the chronology of his newest novel, A Fable, on the walls of his study.
Faulkner imagined Mississippi in his novels with more passion than most places have bestowed upon them. His Mississippi had a supernal glow, like a paradise lit by the fires of hell. Slavery loomed large as the region's original sin. Again and again, Faulkner raised the question of race. His novels were, however, convoluted and hard to read, although Intruder in the Dust was straightforward enough even for Hollywood, which made it into a movie filmed on Oxford's own streets. Outside of fiction Faulkner put Mississippi's flaws down even more plainly, telling readers of Holiday magazine (speaking of himself in the third person), "But most of all he hated the intolerance and injustice: the lynching of Negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black ...; the inequality: the poor schools they had then when they had any, the hovels they had to live in unless they wanted to live outdoors...."
If this comment was more direct than white southerners were accustomed to, so were the letters Faulkner wrote to the nearest big-city newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, in the spring of 1955, the year after the Supreme Court ruled school desegregation unconstitutional. As white officials in Mississippi struggled for ways to evade the ruling, Faulkner wrote that Mississippi schools were "not even good enough for white people." Why, then, did Mississippians imagine they could afford two school systems good enough for whites and Negroes?
So unexpected was Faulkner's stand that it traveled all the way to New York. The New Leader, a New York magazine on the right wing of the Socialist Party, reprinted it, while Masses & Mainstream—a communist magazine—ran an account of it that had been sent in from Memphis:
That William Faulkner has shown willingness to carry on this verbal battle in the public forum of as influential a paper as the Memphis Commercial Appeal is noteworthy in itself—that he has taken a stronger position each week and has been able to win adherents amongst white Mississippians is outstanding. A few years ago no one would have dared to come to his defense. That the Commercial Appeal has been willing to print as many letters on the subject is also newsworthy and indicates a significant change.
The writer expressed surprise at the lack of Red-baiting in the letters. Had the Brown decision made advocating desegregation respectable? "The South's most famous author, William Faulkner, has taken a step forward in the fight for humanity. The rest of our American intellectuals could well follow in his path."
What a strange phrase that would seem in later years—"our American intellectuals." Their ranks included novelists, literary critics, even academic historians—all writing for readers outside the academy and beyond the narrow circles of the avant-garde. They held forums and conferences; they published books through commercial presses. Their names might not be quite household words, but they appeared in household magazines—in Life, Look, Time—as well as little intellectual and political magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary. They constituted a leadership class, not known to everyone but known widely enough to make their opinions felt. How would they respond to the challenge the Supreme Court had thrown down to the country?
As one of the first to respond, William Faulkner soon learned the price of courage. After his letters to the Memphis newspaper, anonymous phone calls and critical letters, signed and unsigned, flooded in to Rowan Oak. "Since none of us agreed with Bill's views," Faulkner's brother later observed, "we said, `It serves him right.'" Life became so difficult that before Faulkner left on a trip to Japan, he worried he might have to abandon Mississippi for good.
In Japan, Faulkner was freed for a while from confronting Mississippi's racial problem close at hand. Another problem pressed harder: the challenge of getting through all the appearances scheduled for him. An intensely private man, Faulkner found public speaking difficult. Only a few years earlier, most of his books were out of print and there was no demand for them, but winning the Nobel Prize in 1950 had made of him a public figure, internationally known and traveling abroad as a representative of his country. Like the jazz bands that the State Department sent around to show that Negroes did have a place in American culture, Faulkner was sent around to show that all white southerners were not bigoted; some could even write.
He did not wear the statesman's robes comfortably. At this point in his life—he was in his late fifties—the South's most famous novelist was an unabashed alcoholic. He could barely set foot in a crowded room without alcohol to hold him up. Even then he sometimes collapsed, pulled down by that which was meant to support him. His Japanese tour was almost cut short near the start: he was drinking so hard that the U.S. ambassador was ready to ship him home. His State Department managers, unwilling to give up so easily, took him in hand, and Faulkner, seeing the difficulties he was causing them, drew himself up and performed honorably and well.
Still, the racial problem remained on his mind. It reemerged in late-night talks with the State Department official accompanying him. He talked of it as they sat on the balcony of their hotel listening to water drip in the garden. Meeting with a group of Japanese professors, he read to them a manuscript, "On Fear," from a book he had begun on the American Dream. Economic fear underlay resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling, he said—fear that the Negro would "take the white man's economy away from him." Explaining that fear, he did not justify it: Americans had to practice freedom if they were going to talk about it to everybody else. Outside of the United States, traveling under the auspices of the U.S. government, Faulkner had become a spokesman not for Mississippi but for his entire country.
On his way home from Japan, another opportunity for public statement opened up. On a stop in Rome, United Press International asked him to comment on a terrible event that had occurred in Mississippi. The body of Emmett Till, a Negro teenager from Chicago who had engaged in a trivial exchange with a white woman at a country store, had been pulled from the Tallahatchie River. Although most southern white brutality passed unremarked by the world, this particular murder did not. Asked by the press to comment, Faulkner wrote out a 400-word statement that would reach a broader audience. U.S. Information Service staff in Rome looked it over; then Faulkner gave the statement to the press.
Fresh from his visit to an Asian country, Faulkner pointed out, practically, the minority status of whites in the world. "The white man can no longer afford, he simply does not dare, to commit acts which the other three-fourths of the human race can challenge him for." Calling up the devastation the Japanese had wreaked on Pearl Harbor only fifteen years earlier, he raised the specter of a prospect even more dire, if all the peoples of color joined with "peoples with ideologies different from ours"—that is, with the communists. America would survive only if Americans presented to the world a united front.
Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
Masses & Mainstream, so pleased by Faulkner's earlier letters to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, liked his Emmett Till statement, too, and reprinted it in full.
In the longer span of his life, Faulkner's political statements of the mid-1950s would appear to some of his biographers an aberration, and in a sense they were. He had not made a practice of public comment, although from time to time he did write letters to the editor, including letters on racial problems. But if it had not been for these journeys abroad under the auspices of the State Department, Faulkner's comments on Mississippi's racial scene might have stayed within the borders of his own state. They might also not have taken on the Cold War tinge they did—the hint of apocalypse: the undercurrent of final struggle between the democratic countries and the communist world. If the United States wanted to survive its battle with the communists, it needed the world's people of color on its side.
According to Faulkner's Oxford friend Jim Silver, a lanky history professor at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner was a "non-Marxist egalitarian" who had picked up the "Cold War rhetoric" around him on his journeys. Making his "patriotic pilgrimages," Silver said, Faulkner "became alarmed at the powerful influence of racism in the propaganda of the Cold War." Putting himself at the service of the federal government in the international arena, speaking to foreign audiences and the foreign press, Faulkner offered at least a small measure of evidence to the critical world that one white southerner favored racial desegregation. At a time when so many white southerners considered the federal government the enemy, Faulkner's partnership with the federal government was an interesting alliance, and not one that would last.
Memphis, Tennessee, a biracial river city, was just up the road from Oxford, Mississippi. Despite the ease of getting there, Faulkner had not been especially eager to speak to historians gathered at the venerable Peabody Hotel for the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (SHA) in the fall of 1955. The spring before the meeting, with the hope of getting Faulkner to speak, Jim Silver had paid frequent visits to Rowan Oak to persuade Faulkner to come. The two men had talked in the side yard while Faulkner worked on a sailboat he had bought, and Silver tried to wrest a commitment from him. "He wouldn't say yes and he didn't say no, so in late summer I placed his name on the program that had a printer's deadline," Silver recalled. "It seemed a good bet that he would appear, not so much out of friendship but because he had something to say to the South and Nation."
In the end, Faulkner came, and the timing of his appearance could hardly have been better. White Citizens Councils formed to oppose desegregation were springing up across the South. They had originated in Mississippi but were spreading as fast as kudzu vines. Forswearing violence, the councils meant to strangle Negroes' efforts to enroll their children in white schools by retaliating economically. Parents who tried to act on the promise of Brown lost their jobs, their credit, their homes. Meanwhile, white southern liberals had proved disappointing, their support fading the moment resistance appeared. Washington had done little more. President Dwight Eisenhower, preferring to let the states work things out for themselves, had refused to throw the weight of his office and personal popularity behind the Supreme Court ruling. Congress, caught in the grip of powerful southern Democrats, predictably did no better. With so little support from other quarters, encouraging words from the South's leading novelist would be welcome. But given his eccentricity and his drinking, could he be depended on?
Anticipation had run so high that Faulkner's session had been switched from the afternoon to the dinner meeting, and Faulkner arrived early. Bennett Wall, secretary treasurer of the association, invited the great man up to his hotel room and sat with him most of the day, doling out bourbon in small amounts in the hope of keeping him sober enough to speak. The change to the dinner meeting presented another difficulty. The SHA had trouble talking the hotel management into seating Faulkner's fellow speaker Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College and a Negro, at the head table in the main ballroom. The management was so worried about how racial mixing might affect the hotel's reputation that it kept photographers out of the ballroom, lest they pick up images of Mays or the thirty other Negroes present. Instead, the press met Faulkner beforehand on the balconied mezzanine above the grand lobby.
As it turned out, William Faulkner was nearly a sideshow. Long a forthright leader in racial affairs, Benjamin Mays could be expected to rise to the occasion, and he did, speaking so eloquently that the audience broke in several times with applause. Addressing "the moral aspects of segregation," Mays did not mince words. Segregation was "a great evil," and if Americans did not follow the Supreme Court's lead and abolish it, then they might as well confess to the world that they did not believe the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In fact, Mays said, ratcheting up his argument, they might as well confess that they did not believe that the Old and New Testaments were meant for peoples of color. They might as well resign themselves to losing their "moral leadership in the world." Would the South "accept the challenge of the Supreme Court" and "make America and the South safe for democracy"? Mays believed so. The stakes were high in the Cold War world. "If we lose this battle for freedom for 15 million Negroes we will lose it for 145 million whites and eventually we will lose it for the world. This is indeed a time for greatness." The five hundred historians rose to their feet in thunderous applause. It was the first standing ovation Jim Silver had ever seen them give.
Faulkner's "slight remarks," by contrast, were a letdown. Recycling his essay "On Fear," he, too, mounted his argument on the Cold War platform. If white people wanted to remain free, they could no longer deny equality to Negroes. He whispered his remarks so softly that Silver, sitting only a few feet away, could barely hear him. Historian C. Vann Woodward wrote a friend that Mays's remarks were better than Faulkner's. Faulkner's comments were, however, the ones featured by the New York Times from an Associated Press dispatch. In a one-paragraph article, the Times, picking up the Cold War theme, reported that "William Faulkner said last night that continued racial segregation was as great a threat to world peace as communism."
The Memphis Commercial Appeal ran Faulkner's speech in full, and the governing council of the SHA voted to publish the three speeches from the session—Faulkner's, Mays's, and a third by Nashville lawyer Cecil Sims. Emory professor Bell Wiley, president of the SHA that year, contributed the introduction. This pamphlet, he said, would show that there was a "liberal South": "soft-spoken and restrained, but articulate and powerful—that is earnestly pledged to moderation and reason."
"Moderation and reason"—this became the mantra of liberals, North and South. They wanted to speak out for desegregation without stirring up too much opposition. But even such a moderate and reasonable effort as the little pamphlet of speeches stirred opposition within the ranks of the SHA. Two members of the council, worried about the response from the association's more conservative members, vigorously opposed publication. In the end, the speeches did not appear under the SHA imprint, and the book's introduction noted carefully that they did not represent the association's official views.
The pamphlet came out instead under the name of the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a moderate interracial organization formed in the 1940s and based in Atlanta. The SRC had been slow to speak out against segregation in its earlier days. Like most southerners, those who ran the SRC would speak out for racial justice but not against segregation outright. With its moderate, southern past, the SRC was a safe publisher for the Memphis talks. A northern organization, the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, covered the cost. The fund's support was kept quiet because Faulkner feared, apparently, that if white southerners knew that northerners had paid for the pamphlet, they might pay less attention to it. Here, writ small, was the state of free speech in the South: on the racial issue, there was not much of it.
Given the difficulty of opposing segregation in white southern publications, all the more important, then, was whatever might be said in the national magazines. Only in Life were most white southerners likely to hear support for desegregation. But when Faulkner asked his agent, Harold Ober, to place his essay "On Fear" in a magazine, Faulkner said he would rather it not appear in the "slick mags," since southerners assumed their reports on segregation were biased, and "doubt as propaganda anything they print." He particularly did not want Life to have the piece. Against his wishes, Life had published a long feature on him that had delved into his private affairs. Anything in Life would seem to him "automatically befouled and not credible." The Saturday Evening Post might have it, if the Post would present it "simply and without fanfare or headlines, pictures, etc. as an editorial." Faulkner wanted "On Fear" to be taken seriously. He hoped it would help the South "in a dilemma whose seriousness the rest of the country seems incapable not only of understanding but even of believing that to us it is serious."
Not a man who had made a career out of political punditry, or a man who needed to write essays to enhance his career, Faulkner sought publication out of that rarest of motivations: he had something to say that he wanted to be heard. At his suggestion, the piece went to Harper's, where he had published before, and Harper's, a magazine for a more intellectual and smaller audience than Life's, accepted it. But Harper's, a monthly, had a lead time of several months. Before the issue carrying "On Fear" appeared on the stands in June 1956, Faulkner's public position on race had begun to cloud over.
In public arenas, Faulkner had couched his plea for racial equality in the political terms of the Cold War. Privately, writing to Mississippians, Faulkner cut his cloth differently, to fit his correspondent. "Since there is so much pressure today from outside our country to advance the Negro," he wrote to the president of the Lions Club in Glendora, "let us here give the Negro a chance to prove whether he is or is not competent for educational and economic and political equality, before the Federal Government crams it down ours and the Negro's throat too."
Faulkner took an even cruder line to a white segregationist named W. C. Neill, who was corresponding with Faulkner in the hope that the great man ("the prime literary figure of our generation") might swing over to his side. "If you will excuse the symbolism," Faulkner wrote Neill on January 23, 1956, "we are like the man whose bed was infested. He has three choices: 1. Burn the bed (i.e., kill the bugs) 2. Move away. 3. Draw their teeth. We can't kill them: against the law. We can't move: we live here. We can draw the teeth: give them such schools that they wont [sic] want to enter ours." It was an ugly argument.
The ambivalence that underlay Faulkner's support for desegregation spilled into his public statements when a series of violent events at the start of 1956 touched off his fear that things were moving too fast for white southerners to adapt. The Brown decision itself had left the speed of change open to question; so had the implementation decision that followed a year later. The Supreme Court ordered the South to desegregate its schools with "deliberate speed," which might have meant anything, especially as interpreted by white southern judges. When Negro parents began filing suits and judges actually ruled in their favor, resistance erupted. In Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott leaders' homes were bombed. At the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, a riot blocked the entry of Negro student Autherine Lucy. Preventing racial violence had long served as an excuse for the race barrier. Remove it, South Carolina attorney John W. Davis had said in argument before the Supreme Court, and reap an outcome "one cannot contemplate with any equanimity." That prediction appeared to be coming unpleasantly true.
(Continues...)
Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement
By CAROL POLSGROVE
W. W. Norton & Company
Read the Review
"Go Slow"
On a waning afternoon in late January 1953, some five hundred writers, editors, reviewers, reporters, literary agents, and booksellers seated themselves in rows of chairs in a Manhattan hotel. It was time for Harper's editor Frederick Lewis Allen to introduce the winners of the 1952 National Book Awards—among them, Ralph Ellison's first novel, Invisible Man. Not since Richard Wright's Native Son had a novel by a Negro writer so captured the interest of the white publishing world. Reviewers fixed their attention on Ellison's unflattering treatment of the Communist Party, although they noted, too, his unconventional narrative approach. Accepting the ten-carat gold medal at the awards ceremony, Ellison, a formal man on such public occasions, himself touched on his experimental approach, and the political point he had hoped to make with it: "I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly...."
As Ellison spoke, the Supreme Court had before it a set of appeals that did confront the very inequalities most on Ellison's mind: the inequalities of race. One of the Supreme Court justices considering the appeals in Brown v. Board of Education, William O. Douglas, followed Ellison as the main speaker at the awards program. Ellison's allotted five minutes over, Douglas delivered a twenty-minute speech on the need for unity in Asia to withstand the power of the Soviet Union. After that, as The New Yorker lightly noted in its account of the occasion, "the audience applauded, and in a trice the chairs we had been sitting on were whisked away, two bars were going like blast furnaces on either side of the room, and what is known in literary circles as a reception was under way." In the milling about that followed, Ralph Ellison got lost in the crowd. There were so many more celebrated to attend to, including Justice Douglas himself, who told his listeners how much easier it was to write accounts of his travels than Supreme Court decisions. He described a Malayan shadow play he had come across: "There's this puppet, you see, and a light behind the screen...." The "lion of the afternoon," The New Yorker said, was the great southern writer William Faulkner, "who, very small and very handsome, with a voice that never rose above a whisper, stood with his back to the wall and gamely took on all comers."
No southern novelist had done more to shape literate Americans' impression of the South than William Faulkner. Since the 1920s, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner had poured out a stream of narrative—novels differently titled but all of a piece: the patch of South that Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha County. "If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South," Ellison himself once said, "of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don't go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren."
Both Warren and Ellison had abandoned the South, departing for the more cosmopolitan North. Faulkner stayed on, living at the edge of Oxford in an antebellum house, too small and plainly built to be rightly called a mansion, although it could pass for one at a distance. Faulkner called the house Rowan Oak, after a mythical tree, but lanky cedars actually lined the narrow drive up to his door. The house's first owner had hired a landscaper to lay out hedges in formal, concentric circles in the front yard. The place must have had grandeur then, but it had something else in the 1950s: a lived-in quality so worn that Faulkner felt free to write out the chronology of his newest novel, A Fable, on the walls of his study.
Faulkner imagined Mississippi in his novels with more passion than most places have bestowed upon them. His Mississippi had a supernal glow, like a paradise lit by the fires of hell. Slavery loomed large as the region's original sin. Again and again, Faulkner raised the question of race. His novels were, however, convoluted and hard to read, although Intruder in the Dust was straightforward enough even for Hollywood, which made it into a movie filmed on Oxford's own streets. Outside of fiction Faulkner put Mississippi's flaws down even more plainly, telling readers of Holiday magazine (speaking of himself in the third person), "But most of all he hated the intolerance and injustice: the lynching of Negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black ...; the inequality: the poor schools they had then when they had any, the hovels they had to live in unless they wanted to live outdoors...."
If this comment was more direct than white southerners were accustomed to, so were the letters Faulkner wrote to the nearest big-city newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, in the spring of 1955, the year after the Supreme Court ruled school desegregation unconstitutional. As white officials in Mississippi struggled for ways to evade the ruling, Faulkner wrote that Mississippi schools were "not even good enough for white people." Why, then, did Mississippians imagine they could afford two school systems good enough for whites and Negroes?
So unexpected was Faulkner's stand that it traveled all the way to New York. The New Leader, a New York magazine on the right wing of the Socialist Party, reprinted it, while Masses & Mainstream—a communist magazine—ran an account of it that had been sent in from Memphis:
That William Faulkner has shown willingness to carry on this verbal battle in the public forum of as influential a paper as the Memphis Commercial Appeal is noteworthy in itself—that he has taken a stronger position each week and has been able to win adherents amongst white Mississippians is outstanding. A few years ago no one would have dared to come to his defense. That the Commercial Appeal has been willing to print as many letters on the subject is also newsworthy and indicates a significant change.
The writer expressed surprise at the lack of Red-baiting in the letters. Had the Brown decision made advocating desegregation respectable? "The South's most famous author, William Faulkner, has taken a step forward in the fight for humanity. The rest of our American intellectuals could well follow in his path."
What a strange phrase that would seem in later years—"our American intellectuals." Their ranks included novelists, literary critics, even academic historians—all writing for readers outside the academy and beyond the narrow circles of the avant-garde. They held forums and conferences; they published books through commercial presses. Their names might not be quite household words, but they appeared in household magazines—in Life, Look, Time—as well as little intellectual and political magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary. They constituted a leadership class, not known to everyone but known widely enough to make their opinions felt. How would they respond to the challenge the Supreme Court had thrown down to the country?
As one of the first to respond, William Faulkner soon learned the price of courage. After his letters to the Memphis newspaper, anonymous phone calls and critical letters, signed and unsigned, flooded in to Rowan Oak. "Since none of us agreed with Bill's views," Faulkner's brother later observed, "we said, `It serves him right.'" Life became so difficult that before Faulkner left on a trip to Japan, he worried he might have to abandon Mississippi for good.
In Japan, Faulkner was freed for a while from confronting Mississippi's racial problem close at hand. Another problem pressed harder: the challenge of getting through all the appearances scheduled for him. An intensely private man, Faulkner found public speaking difficult. Only a few years earlier, most of his books were out of print and there was no demand for them, but winning the Nobel Prize in 1950 had made of him a public figure, internationally known and traveling abroad as a representative of his country. Like the jazz bands that the State Department sent around to show that Negroes did have a place in American culture, Faulkner was sent around to show that all white southerners were not bigoted; some could even write.
He did not wear the statesman's robes comfortably. At this point in his life—he was in his late fifties—the South's most famous novelist was an unabashed alcoholic. He could barely set foot in a crowded room without alcohol to hold him up. Even then he sometimes collapsed, pulled down by that which was meant to support him. His Japanese tour was almost cut short near the start: he was drinking so hard that the U.S. ambassador was ready to ship him home. His State Department managers, unwilling to give up so easily, took him in hand, and Faulkner, seeing the difficulties he was causing them, drew himself up and performed honorably and well.
Still, the racial problem remained on his mind. It reemerged in late-night talks with the State Department official accompanying him. He talked of it as they sat on the balcony of their hotel listening to water drip in the garden. Meeting with a group of Japanese professors, he read to them a manuscript, "On Fear," from a book he had begun on the American Dream. Economic fear underlay resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling, he said—fear that the Negro would "take the white man's economy away from him." Explaining that fear, he did not justify it: Americans had to practice freedom if they were going to talk about it to everybody else. Outside of the United States, traveling under the auspices of the U.S. government, Faulkner had become a spokesman not for Mississippi but for his entire country.
On his way home from Japan, another opportunity for public statement opened up. On a stop in Rome, United Press International asked him to comment on a terrible event that had occurred in Mississippi. The body of Emmett Till, a Negro teenager from Chicago who had engaged in a trivial exchange with a white woman at a country store, had been pulled from the Tallahatchie River. Although most southern white brutality passed unremarked by the world, this particular murder did not. Asked by the press to comment, Faulkner wrote out a 400-word statement that would reach a broader audience. U.S. Information Service staff in Rome looked it over; then Faulkner gave the statement to the press.
Fresh from his visit to an Asian country, Faulkner pointed out, practically, the minority status of whites in the world. "The white man can no longer afford, he simply does not dare, to commit acts which the other three-fourths of the human race can challenge him for." Calling up the devastation the Japanese had wreaked on Pearl Harbor only fifteen years earlier, he raised the specter of a prospect even more dire, if all the peoples of color joined with "peoples with ideologies different from ours"—that is, with the communists. America would survive only if Americans presented to the world a united front.
Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
Masses & Mainstream, so pleased by Faulkner's earlier letters to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, liked his Emmett Till statement, too, and reprinted it in full.
In the longer span of his life, Faulkner's political statements of the mid-1950s would appear to some of his biographers an aberration, and in a sense they were. He had not made a practice of public comment, although from time to time he did write letters to the editor, including letters on racial problems. But if it had not been for these journeys abroad under the auspices of the State Department, Faulkner's comments on Mississippi's racial scene might have stayed within the borders of his own state. They might also not have taken on the Cold War tinge they did—the hint of apocalypse: the undercurrent of final struggle between the democratic countries and the communist world. If the United States wanted to survive its battle with the communists, it needed the world's people of color on its side.
According to Faulkner's Oxford friend Jim Silver, a lanky history professor at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner was a "non-Marxist egalitarian" who had picked up the "Cold War rhetoric" around him on his journeys. Making his "patriotic pilgrimages," Silver said, Faulkner "became alarmed at the powerful influence of racism in the propaganda of the Cold War." Putting himself at the service of the federal government in the international arena, speaking to foreign audiences and the foreign press, Faulkner offered at least a small measure of evidence to the critical world that one white southerner favored racial desegregation. At a time when so many white southerners considered the federal government the enemy, Faulkner's partnership with the federal government was an interesting alliance, and not one that would last.
Memphis, Tennessee, a biracial river city, was just up the road from Oxford, Mississippi. Despite the ease of getting there, Faulkner had not been especially eager to speak to historians gathered at the venerable Peabody Hotel for the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (SHA) in the fall of 1955. The spring before the meeting, with the hope of getting Faulkner to speak, Jim Silver had paid frequent visits to Rowan Oak to persuade Faulkner to come. The two men had talked in the side yard while Faulkner worked on a sailboat he had bought, and Silver tried to wrest a commitment from him. "He wouldn't say yes and he didn't say no, so in late summer I placed his name on the program that had a printer's deadline," Silver recalled. "It seemed a good bet that he would appear, not so much out of friendship but because he had something to say to the South and Nation."
In the end, Faulkner came, and the timing of his appearance could hardly have been better. White Citizens Councils formed to oppose desegregation were springing up across the South. They had originated in Mississippi but were spreading as fast as kudzu vines. Forswearing violence, the councils meant to strangle Negroes' efforts to enroll their children in white schools by retaliating economically. Parents who tried to act on the promise of Brown lost their jobs, their credit, their homes. Meanwhile, white southern liberals had proved disappointing, their support fading the moment resistance appeared. Washington had done little more. President Dwight Eisenhower, preferring to let the states work things out for themselves, had refused to throw the weight of his office and personal popularity behind the Supreme Court ruling. Congress, caught in the grip of powerful southern Democrats, predictably did no better. With so little support from other quarters, encouraging words from the South's leading novelist would be welcome. But given his eccentricity and his drinking, could he be depended on?
Anticipation had run so high that Faulkner's session had been switched from the afternoon to the dinner meeting, and Faulkner arrived early. Bennett Wall, secretary treasurer of the association, invited the great man up to his hotel room and sat with him most of the day, doling out bourbon in small amounts in the hope of keeping him sober enough to speak. The change to the dinner meeting presented another difficulty. The SHA had trouble talking the hotel management into seating Faulkner's fellow speaker Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College and a Negro, at the head table in the main ballroom. The management was so worried about how racial mixing might affect the hotel's reputation that it kept photographers out of the ballroom, lest they pick up images of Mays or the thirty other Negroes present. Instead, the press met Faulkner beforehand on the balconied mezzanine above the grand lobby.
As it turned out, William Faulkner was nearly a sideshow. Long a forthright leader in racial affairs, Benjamin Mays could be expected to rise to the occasion, and he did, speaking so eloquently that the audience broke in several times with applause. Addressing "the moral aspects of segregation," Mays did not mince words. Segregation was "a great evil," and if Americans did not follow the Supreme Court's lead and abolish it, then they might as well confess to the world that they did not believe the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In fact, Mays said, ratcheting up his argument, they might as well confess that they did not believe that the Old and New Testaments were meant for peoples of color. They might as well resign themselves to losing their "moral leadership in the world." Would the South "accept the challenge of the Supreme Court" and "make America and the South safe for democracy"? Mays believed so. The stakes were high in the Cold War world. "If we lose this battle for freedom for 15 million Negroes we will lose it for 145 million whites and eventually we will lose it for the world. This is indeed a time for greatness." The five hundred historians rose to their feet in thunderous applause. It was the first standing ovation Jim Silver had ever seen them give.
Faulkner's "slight remarks," by contrast, were a letdown. Recycling his essay "On Fear," he, too, mounted his argument on the Cold War platform. If white people wanted to remain free, they could no longer deny equality to Negroes. He whispered his remarks so softly that Silver, sitting only a few feet away, could barely hear him. Historian C. Vann Woodward wrote a friend that Mays's remarks were better than Faulkner's. Faulkner's comments were, however, the ones featured by the New York Times from an Associated Press dispatch. In a one-paragraph article, the Times, picking up the Cold War theme, reported that "William Faulkner said last night that continued racial segregation was as great a threat to world peace as communism."
The Memphis Commercial Appeal ran Faulkner's speech in full, and the governing council of the SHA voted to publish the three speeches from the session—Faulkner's, Mays's, and a third by Nashville lawyer Cecil Sims. Emory professor Bell Wiley, president of the SHA that year, contributed the introduction. This pamphlet, he said, would show that there was a "liberal South": "soft-spoken and restrained, but articulate and powerful—that is earnestly pledged to moderation and reason."
"Moderation and reason"—this became the mantra of liberals, North and South. They wanted to speak out for desegregation without stirring up too much opposition. But even such a moderate and reasonable effort as the little pamphlet of speeches stirred opposition within the ranks of the SHA. Two members of the council, worried about the response from the association's more conservative members, vigorously opposed publication. In the end, the speeches did not appear under the SHA imprint, and the book's introduction noted carefully that they did not represent the association's official views.
The pamphlet came out instead under the name of the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a moderate interracial organization formed in the 1940s and based in Atlanta. The SRC had been slow to speak out against segregation in its earlier days. Like most southerners, those who ran the SRC would speak out for racial justice but not against segregation outright. With its moderate, southern past, the SRC was a safe publisher for the Memphis talks. A northern organization, the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, covered the cost. The fund's support was kept quiet because Faulkner feared, apparently, that if white southerners knew that northerners had paid for the pamphlet, they might pay less attention to it. Here, writ small, was the state of free speech in the South: on the racial issue, there was not much of it.
Given the difficulty of opposing segregation in white southern publications, all the more important, then, was whatever might be said in the national magazines. Only in Life were most white southerners likely to hear support for desegregation. But when Faulkner asked his agent, Harold Ober, to place his essay "On Fear" in a magazine, Faulkner said he would rather it not appear in the "slick mags," since southerners assumed their reports on segregation were biased, and "doubt as propaganda anything they print." He particularly did not want Life to have the piece. Against his wishes, Life had published a long feature on him that had delved into his private affairs. Anything in Life would seem to him "automatically befouled and not credible." The Saturday Evening Post might have it, if the Post would present it "simply and without fanfare or headlines, pictures, etc. as an editorial." Faulkner wanted "On Fear" to be taken seriously. He hoped it would help the South "in a dilemma whose seriousness the rest of the country seems incapable not only of understanding but even of believing that to us it is serious."
Not a man who had made a career out of political punditry, or a man who needed to write essays to enhance his career, Faulkner sought publication out of that rarest of motivations: he had something to say that he wanted to be heard. At his suggestion, the piece went to Harper's, where he had published before, and Harper's, a magazine for a more intellectual and smaller audience than Life's, accepted it. But Harper's, a monthly, had a lead time of several months. Before the issue carrying "On Fear" appeared on the stands in June 1956, Faulkner's public position on race had begun to cloud over.
In public arenas, Faulkner had couched his plea for racial equality in the political terms of the Cold War. Privately, writing to Mississippians, Faulkner cut his cloth differently, to fit his correspondent. "Since there is so much pressure today from outside our country to advance the Negro," he wrote to the president of the Lions Club in Glendora, "let us here give the Negro a chance to prove whether he is or is not competent for educational and economic and political equality, before the Federal Government crams it down ours and the Negro's throat too."
Faulkner took an even cruder line to a white segregationist named W. C. Neill, who was corresponding with Faulkner in the hope that the great man ("the prime literary figure of our generation") might swing over to his side. "If you will excuse the symbolism," Faulkner wrote Neill on January 23, 1956, "we are like the man whose bed was infested. He has three choices: 1. Burn the bed (i.e., kill the bugs) 2. Move away. 3. Draw their teeth. We can't kill them: against the law. We can't move: we live here. We can draw the teeth: give them such schools that they wont [sic] want to enter ours." It was an ugly argument.
The ambivalence that underlay Faulkner's support for desegregation spilled into his public statements when a series of violent events at the start of 1956 touched off his fear that things were moving too fast for white southerners to adapt. The Brown decision itself had left the speed of change open to question; so had the implementation decision that followed a year later. The Supreme Court ordered the South to desegregate its schools with "deliberate speed," which might have meant anything, especially as interpreted by white southern judges. When Negro parents began filing suits and judges actually ruled in their favor, resistance erupted. In Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott leaders' homes were bombed. At the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, a riot blocked the entry of Negro student Autherine Lucy. Preventing racial violence had long served as an excuse for the race barrier. Remove it, South Carolina attorney John W. Davis had said in argument before the Supreme Court, and reap an outcome "one cannot contemplate with any equanimity." That prediction appeared to be coming unpleasantly true.
(Continues...)
'Losing Iraq'
July 10, 2005
First Chapter
'Losing Iraq'
By DAVID L. PHILLIPS
George W. Bush did not imagine that preemption and nation-building would preoccupy his presidency. However, the 9/11 terror attacks gave Bush a defining mission. To defend the American homeland and U.S. global interests, the United States would retaliiate against failed states, such as Afghanistan, that provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda or other shadowy terrorist networks. It would also act preemptively, targeting rogue regimes to prevent them from developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which could be used against the United States or given to terror groups.
Having traveled overseas only a couple of times, it is clear that Bush lacked knowledge about international issues before he won the White House. His farthest trip away from home was to China, when his father was ambassador. During that visit, the younger Bush never left the embassy compound.
Bush's lack of international experience did not, however, make him an isolationist. During the 2000 campaign, he professed support for U.S. engagement in world affairs, insisting that "to build a proud tower of protectionism and isolation would invite challenges to our power."
George W. Bush embraces the use of U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military might to build a better world and to promote global freedom. Consistent with America's tradition and heritage, Bush maintains that the United States would never use its unparalleled military strength for national advantage. Speaking for the president, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice extolled the purity of America's mission: "We may be the only great power in history that prefers greatness to power and justice to glory."
Bush's global goals are consistent with those of his predecessors dating back to President Harry Truman. According to Truman, "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation." To this end, Truman made a strategic decision that U.S. power could be effectively projected via international organizations. He sponsored the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; NATO's (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) creation in 1949 also affirmed the link between U.S. security interests and those of Western Europe. Regarding the means to achieve objectives, Truman's successors all affirmed the view that America's extensive overseas interests could best be defended through international organizations and alliances-until George W. Bush.
Bush differs from his predecessors, including his father, on the instrumentalities for exercising power. He is wary of working with international organizations lest those entanglements impede U.S. interests. He is prepared to engage multilaterally, but only on his terms. Bush believes that leadership means the courage to do what he thinks is right and in the national interest. Even if other countries object at first, Bush is convinced that they will eventually come around to the U.S. point of view.
Bush's antipathy towards internationalism and his willingness to go it alone stand in marked contrast to the views of President Bill Clinton, who championed globalization and relied extensively on a web of interconnected interests. However, Bush reflexively rejected Clinton's initiatives, accusing him of tainting America's image and squandering its prestige internationally.
Decrying the principle of humanitarian intervention, Bush and his advisers criticized Clinton's deployment of U.S. forces to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and even Kosovo. Using troops for nation building was anathema. As Rice flatly stated, "The 82nd airborne should not escort kids to kindergarten." Bush was just as emphatic: "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside of our strategic interest. I don't like genocide and I don't like ethnic cleansing, but the president must set clear parameters as to where troops ought to be used and when they ought to be used."
During the first months of Bush's presidency, U.S. allies realized that Bush was serious about foregoing multilateral institutions and agreements. Though fifty-four countries ratified the Kyoto Protocol, Rice proclaimed that the climate-control treaty was "dead." The administration withdrew from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; balked at a new protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention; opposed a pact to control small-arms trafficking; and launched a determined and heavy-handed campaign to undermine the International Criminal Court.
But when it came to Iraq, Bush was initially content to continue his predecessor's policy of exerting pressure on Saddam Hussein through multilateral sanctions and support for groups in exile. Bush endorsed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million in U.S. government goods and services to support Iraqi oppositionists trying to overthrow Saddam. In 2001, Bush sought to strengthen the UN's role by replacing existing sanctions with so-called smart sanctions targeting dual use and military goods. Colin Powell stated, "We have kept [Saddam] contained, kept him in his box."
Though Bush's national security team focused on traditional threats and big power politics, Bush bore a personal grudge against Saddam. Indeed, Bush came into office with the idea of addressing unfinished business from the Gulf War and avenging Saddam's attempted assassination of his father in 1993. To George W. Bush, Saddam was more than a tyrant bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. He was the "guy that wanted to kill my dad."
If George W. Bush had ever been inclined to find false security behind America's borders, 9/11 changed all that. The terror strikes had a huge impact on Bush personally, as they did upon every American: The continental United States was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The American people felt an unprecedented sense of vulnerability.
Within a few days, the U.S. Congress unanimously gave Bush permission to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Reflecting the international community's united support, France's Le Monde bore the headline, "We Are All Americans." A few days later, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1368, which condemned the attacks and authorized all necessary steps in response; NATO invoked Article 5, affirming that the attack on the United States represented an attack on the Alliance.
Bush concluded that the United States should aggressively prosecute a global war on terror and destroy its enemies. He warned, "We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain weapons of mass destruction. We must act now, because we must lift this dark threat from our age and save generations to come."
The 9/11 attacks also prompted a reevaluation of the overall U.S. security strategy that had existed since the beginning of the Cold War. Bush came to believe that
deterrence-the promise of massive retaliation against nations means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizen to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the oath of action. And this nation will act.
The internation community grew increasingly alarmed by Bush's penchant for unilateral action. Fears were compounded by his moral invocations concerning the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In jihadist vocabulary similar to Osama bin Laden's, Bush discarded nuance by dividing the world into good and evil. With deep conviction, he proclaimed that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." He also threatened: "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Bush pronounced U.S. intervention in Afghanistan a "crusade" and declared that "liberty is not America's gift to the world. Liberty is God's gift to every human being in the world."
The United States was at war, but it was not clear who the enemy was. The Defense Policy Board, a standing group of defense and national security experts that advises the secretary of defense, met in the Pentagon on September 19, 2001. The former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle was accompanied by Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi proceeded to make a strong argument for skipping Afghanistan and attacking Iraq. Though al-Qaeda was harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan, Chalabi argued that Iraq was more threatening in a dangerous world where, according to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, "Life is war of all against all."
Richard A. Clarke, Bush's antiterrorism chief, was amazed when, days after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld broached the idea of bombing Iraq. Clarke pointed out that there was no evidence linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. According to Clarke, Rumsfeld complained about the poor selection of high-value targets in Afghanistan. "I don't want to put a million-dollar missile on a five-dollar tent." "No, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan," Clarke responded, "We need to bomb Afghanistan."
Bush instructed Clarke to find a link between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. According to Clarke, "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' The entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'"
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that regime change in Iraq was on the agenda at Bush's first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001. Instead of focusing on Osama bin Laden and a strategy for securing and stabilizing Afghanistan, Bush and his advisers seized on 9/11 to make the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Bush insisted: "I'm tired of swatting flies. I'm tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists." Re-calibrating America's approach to terrorism, Bush also wanted to send an unambiguous warning to countries that sponsor terrorism: "We want to cause them to change their views."
The administration saw Afghanistan as the first stage in an open-ended global war against terrorism. Bush wanted action. One week after the terrorist attacks, George J. Tenet, the CIA director, presented Bush with a "Worldwide Attack Matrix" detailing ongoing or planned covert antiterrorism activities in eighty countries. Anxieties were fueled by anthrax mailings. Americans felt a sense of imminent risk when it was reported that a "dirty bomb" had been smuggled into the United States.
After 9/11, the administration focused on failed states that provided haven to terrorists. The administration was also concerned about states that aided or provided safe harbor to terror groups such as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. In addition, U.S. troops were deployed and military assistance significantly expanded to weak states such as Georgia, Nepal, and in the Philippines. By the time President Bush delivered his "axis of evil" speech on January 29, 2002, the link between terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism had become the cornerstone of the administration's national security strategy.
Bush addressed the nation: "States like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, constitute an axis of evil. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases the price of indifference would be catastrophic." Presaging the "Doctrine of Preemption," Bush fired a verbal shot at those who might conspire to harm the United States. "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
The preference for unilateral action reflected a growing aversion to diplomacy, which is inherently about negotiation and compromise. Some senior officials disdained diplomacy and believed there should be no negotiation with states that support terror groups. They also argued that force is the only appropriate response to terrorist threats.
Administration hawks were mostly concerned about Iraq, which had defied sixteen UN Security Council resolutions demanding its disarmament. "The leader of Iraq is an evil man," he proclaimed in ratcheted-up rhetoric. "We are watching him carefully." Bush underscored the danger posed by terrorists possessing weapons of mass destruction, demanding that Saddam surrender his WMD and allow enforcement by international monitors. When asked what he would do if Saddam refused, Bush replied, "He'll find out."
Public statements about Iraq coincided with private instructions laying the groundwork for war. Within days of the Taliban's fall, Bush began accelerating plans to topple Saddam. In December 2001, he told General Tommy R. Franks that the Defense Department's Central Command (CENTCOM) should start preparing war plans for Iraq, to include lines of attack, specific targets for U.S. missiles and warplanes, and the composition of highly mechanized ground forces. From $100 to $200 million in additional funds was given to the CIA for covert operations. Clarke also asserted that the White House diverted $700 million from Afghanistan to pay for infrastructure that could be used for military operations in Iraq.
. . .
Excerpted from LOSING IRAQ by DAVID L. PHILLIPS Copyright © 2005 by David L. Phillips. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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First Chapter
'Losing Iraq'
By DAVID L. PHILLIPS
George W. Bush did not imagine that preemption and nation-building would preoccupy his presidency. However, the 9/11 terror attacks gave Bush a defining mission. To defend the American homeland and U.S. global interests, the United States would retaliiate against failed states, such as Afghanistan, that provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda or other shadowy terrorist networks. It would also act preemptively, targeting rogue regimes to prevent them from developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which could be used against the United States or given to terror groups.
Having traveled overseas only a couple of times, it is clear that Bush lacked knowledge about international issues before he won the White House. His farthest trip away from home was to China, when his father was ambassador. During that visit, the younger Bush never left the embassy compound.
Bush's lack of international experience did not, however, make him an isolationist. During the 2000 campaign, he professed support for U.S. engagement in world affairs, insisting that "to build a proud tower of protectionism and isolation would invite challenges to our power."
George W. Bush embraces the use of U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military might to build a better world and to promote global freedom. Consistent with America's tradition and heritage, Bush maintains that the United States would never use its unparalleled military strength for national advantage. Speaking for the president, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice extolled the purity of America's mission: "We may be the only great power in history that prefers greatness to power and justice to glory."
Bush's global goals are consistent with those of his predecessors dating back to President Harry Truman. According to Truman, "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation." To this end, Truman made a strategic decision that U.S. power could be effectively projected via international organizations. He sponsored the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; NATO's (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) creation in 1949 also affirmed the link between U.S. security interests and those of Western Europe. Regarding the means to achieve objectives, Truman's successors all affirmed the view that America's extensive overseas interests could best be defended through international organizations and alliances-until George W. Bush.
Bush differs from his predecessors, including his father, on the instrumentalities for exercising power. He is wary of working with international organizations lest those entanglements impede U.S. interests. He is prepared to engage multilaterally, but only on his terms. Bush believes that leadership means the courage to do what he thinks is right and in the national interest. Even if other countries object at first, Bush is convinced that they will eventually come around to the U.S. point of view.
Bush's antipathy towards internationalism and his willingness to go it alone stand in marked contrast to the views of President Bill Clinton, who championed globalization and relied extensively on a web of interconnected interests. However, Bush reflexively rejected Clinton's initiatives, accusing him of tainting America's image and squandering its prestige internationally.
Decrying the principle of humanitarian intervention, Bush and his advisers criticized Clinton's deployment of U.S. forces to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and even Kosovo. Using troops for nation building was anathema. As Rice flatly stated, "The 82nd airborne should not escort kids to kindergarten." Bush was just as emphatic: "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside of our strategic interest. I don't like genocide and I don't like ethnic cleansing, but the president must set clear parameters as to where troops ought to be used and when they ought to be used."
During the first months of Bush's presidency, U.S. allies realized that Bush was serious about foregoing multilateral institutions and agreements. Though fifty-four countries ratified the Kyoto Protocol, Rice proclaimed that the climate-control treaty was "dead." The administration withdrew from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; balked at a new protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention; opposed a pact to control small-arms trafficking; and launched a determined and heavy-handed campaign to undermine the International Criminal Court.
But when it came to Iraq, Bush was initially content to continue his predecessor's policy of exerting pressure on Saddam Hussein through multilateral sanctions and support for groups in exile. Bush endorsed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million in U.S. government goods and services to support Iraqi oppositionists trying to overthrow Saddam. In 2001, Bush sought to strengthen the UN's role by replacing existing sanctions with so-called smart sanctions targeting dual use and military goods. Colin Powell stated, "We have kept [Saddam] contained, kept him in his box."
Though Bush's national security team focused on traditional threats and big power politics, Bush bore a personal grudge against Saddam. Indeed, Bush came into office with the idea of addressing unfinished business from the Gulf War and avenging Saddam's attempted assassination of his father in 1993. To George W. Bush, Saddam was more than a tyrant bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. He was the "guy that wanted to kill my dad."
If George W. Bush had ever been inclined to find false security behind America's borders, 9/11 changed all that. The terror strikes had a huge impact on Bush personally, as they did upon every American: The continental United States was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The American people felt an unprecedented sense of vulnerability.
Within a few days, the U.S. Congress unanimously gave Bush permission to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Reflecting the international community's united support, France's Le Monde bore the headline, "We Are All Americans." A few days later, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1368, which condemned the attacks and authorized all necessary steps in response; NATO invoked Article 5, affirming that the attack on the United States represented an attack on the Alliance.
Bush concluded that the United States should aggressively prosecute a global war on terror and destroy its enemies. He warned, "We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain weapons of mass destruction. We must act now, because we must lift this dark threat from our age and save generations to come."
The 9/11 attacks also prompted a reevaluation of the overall U.S. security strategy that had existed since the beginning of the Cold War. Bush came to believe that
deterrence-the promise of massive retaliation against nations means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizen to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the oath of action. And this nation will act.
The internation community grew increasingly alarmed by Bush's penchant for unilateral action. Fears were compounded by his moral invocations concerning the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In jihadist vocabulary similar to Osama bin Laden's, Bush discarded nuance by dividing the world into good and evil. With deep conviction, he proclaimed that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." He also threatened: "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Bush pronounced U.S. intervention in Afghanistan a "crusade" and declared that "liberty is not America's gift to the world. Liberty is God's gift to every human being in the world."
The United States was at war, but it was not clear who the enemy was. The Defense Policy Board, a standing group of defense and national security experts that advises the secretary of defense, met in the Pentagon on September 19, 2001. The former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle was accompanied by Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi proceeded to make a strong argument for skipping Afghanistan and attacking Iraq. Though al-Qaeda was harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan, Chalabi argued that Iraq was more threatening in a dangerous world where, according to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, "Life is war of all against all."
Richard A. Clarke, Bush's antiterrorism chief, was amazed when, days after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld broached the idea of bombing Iraq. Clarke pointed out that there was no evidence linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. According to Clarke, Rumsfeld complained about the poor selection of high-value targets in Afghanistan. "I don't want to put a million-dollar missile on a five-dollar tent." "No, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan," Clarke responded, "We need to bomb Afghanistan."
Bush instructed Clarke to find a link between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. According to Clarke, "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' The entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'"
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that regime change in Iraq was on the agenda at Bush's first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001. Instead of focusing on Osama bin Laden and a strategy for securing and stabilizing Afghanistan, Bush and his advisers seized on 9/11 to make the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Bush insisted: "I'm tired of swatting flies. I'm tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists." Re-calibrating America's approach to terrorism, Bush also wanted to send an unambiguous warning to countries that sponsor terrorism: "We want to cause them to change their views."
The administration saw Afghanistan as the first stage in an open-ended global war against terrorism. Bush wanted action. One week after the terrorist attacks, George J. Tenet, the CIA director, presented Bush with a "Worldwide Attack Matrix" detailing ongoing or planned covert antiterrorism activities in eighty countries. Anxieties were fueled by anthrax mailings. Americans felt a sense of imminent risk when it was reported that a "dirty bomb" had been smuggled into the United States.
After 9/11, the administration focused on failed states that provided haven to terrorists. The administration was also concerned about states that aided or provided safe harbor to terror groups such as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. In addition, U.S. troops were deployed and military assistance significantly expanded to weak states such as Georgia, Nepal, and in the Philippines. By the time President Bush delivered his "axis of evil" speech on January 29, 2002, the link between terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism had become the cornerstone of the administration's national security strategy.
Bush addressed the nation: "States like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, constitute an axis of evil. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases the price of indifference would be catastrophic." Presaging the "Doctrine of Preemption," Bush fired a verbal shot at those who might conspire to harm the United States. "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
The preference for unilateral action reflected a growing aversion to diplomacy, which is inherently about negotiation and compromise. Some senior officials disdained diplomacy and believed there should be no negotiation with states that support terror groups. They also argued that force is the only appropriate response to terrorist threats.
Administration hawks were mostly concerned about Iraq, which had defied sixteen UN Security Council resolutions demanding its disarmament. "The leader of Iraq is an evil man," he proclaimed in ratcheted-up rhetoric. "We are watching him carefully." Bush underscored the danger posed by terrorists possessing weapons of mass destruction, demanding that Saddam surrender his WMD and allow enforcement by international monitors. When asked what he would do if Saddam refused, Bush replied, "He'll find out."
Public statements about Iraq coincided with private instructions laying the groundwork for war. Within days of the Taliban's fall, Bush began accelerating plans to topple Saddam. In December 2001, he told General Tommy R. Franks that the Defense Department's Central Command (CENTCOM) should start preparing war plans for Iraq, to include lines of attack, specific targets for U.S. missiles and warplanes, and the composition of highly mechanized ground forces. From $100 to $200 million in additional funds was given to the CIA for covert operations. Clarke also asserted that the White House diverted $700 million from Afghanistan to pay for infrastructure that could be used for military operations in Iraq.
. . .
Excerpted from LOSING IRAQ by DAVID L. PHILLIPS Copyright © 2005 by David L. Phillips. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Home
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