Why Can't They Be Like Us?
Davis, Jefferson
"Why Can't They Be Like Us?" 1971 Gray Power Why Can't They Be Like Us? America's White Ethnic Groups by Andrew M. Greeley E.P. Dutton & Co., $6.95 Father Andrew Greeley is almost certain to...
...Subscriptions to any two of the following are sufficfent to guarantee one membership at least on the margins of this ethnic group: The New York Times, Commentary, Partisan Review, Saturday Review, The New York Review of Books, Atlantic (but not Harper's), Dissent, The" New Republi¢ and the Nat~n...
...If the article simply implied that great literature, literature which affirms such human values as freedom and individualism, lends support to fundamental conservative tenets such as individual freedom and free choice, there would be no problem...
...has failed Mayor Daley has succeeded...
...The point of my article was not that Herman Melville would have necessarily voted the straight Republican ticket or that T.S...
...Lindsay...
...its informed and influential articles are read by political and industrial leaders educahonlsts members of the professions and those seriously interested In the problems of our times The Chicago Tr2bune says, The Specta tar Is one of the world's soundest journals of opimon " The reasons are not hard to find DISTING UISH E D W RIT ERS Spectator contributors are drav.n tram the ranks of today's most thslmguishcd urltcrs and commentators Often they are lhe I)eoph' most involved in the cvenls x~hlch shape 111e nation's life What they have m ,ay r, mlportant The way m ~hlch they ",ay ~t cmll nlands attention IrOl'l) ,Ill x~ho dppft, t'l;Ite facts without dislorl]ori ne~,~.s uneoh)ored b~ sensationalism outspoken (hscas',lom, ol x d,d questions [f you ~ant Io keel) tlp ~.llh lhe best that is being thought and ~Arltlcn loda,~ you'll "~L, ek'onle the Spl,c't,~tal BOOKS AND ThE ARTS Each week you can read llae in'|Icle3 b", ~,Ix'mahsts on Theatre, Cinema, .Muslc and the Arts In addlhon, an unrwalled book secqon contains revlews by scholars and trifles who are authorflff, s m lhe field RFGU1.AR FEATURES Book Reviews • Art • [~ktucation • Medicine• Science • Ballet •Films • Telev islon • Theat re'• Business and Investment • World Affairs • PLUS a crossword to tax your vocabulary...
...Is Twain.- How does he find m Mark Twain support for ideological conservatism...
...His hobbies are "mingling with the Crowd" and dancing...
...That is - - much to the chagrin of the New Dealers, Fair Dealers and Wheeler Dealers - - imperfect men cannot be programmed with the same predictable results as can an IBM 360...
...Greeley's main explicitly political conclusion is that where Mayor Lindsay ("...the intelligent and sophisticated Mr...
...In an outrageous chapter Greeley identifies even the intellectual community as an ethnic group...
...Had Father Greeley stopped after excoriating the dreamy-eyed social planners mooning over the millennium his membership in the established secular religion of the land might have been salvaged...
...2. I thought that I had made clear that Twain is Twain and that he is his own mail...
...P o l o n ' s L e t t e r : 1. The entire sixth paragraph of my article reads as follows: "English literature during the twentieth century, then, has been, if not conservative in the sense that Robert Taft was conservative, at its center deeply anti-liberal...
...As Fish put it, "Twain...
...I did say - - and continue ~ to say - - that Huckleberry Finn could not (continued to page 23) Language is Sermonic Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric Edited by Richard L. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland and Ralph T. Eubanks This book brings together for the first time Richard M. Weaver's most significant and influential essays on the related subjects of rhetoric and language, providing a full view of his rhetorical theory apart from his political philosophy...
...Allow me one more try...
...Ih" cases of doubt a subscription to The New York Review o) Books alone will suffice...
...Political liberalism is not fed by this stream, but by another - - and some would say, a stronger -- stream going back to the eighteenth century at least...
...If a student refuses to read, it is unfortunate for him, and it should not be the function of the university to force him to read...
...What I am saying is that great literature (exemplified but not exhausted by the examples I gave) and political conservatism are fed by the same spiritual and intellectual stream...
...Ramparts Magazine once published a huge article "proving" that Twain was a radical socialist...
...BW let us move away from the intellectuals and back to the more germane urban ethnics...
...He says from Huckleberry Finn...
...For another, convinced as he is of his superior intelligence, the intellectual has no trouble in concluding his superior moral recq~ude: he is both right and righteous " In reading these thoughts I was, by this time,quite overcome...
...And one final point is in order...
...The differences atThe Spectator The Outspoken I~ e e k l y PLACE A REGULAR ORDER with us and receive free a print of the above The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London WC1 Please supply the Spectator for one year [ ] Cheque enclosed [ ] two years [ ] three years [ ] NAME .. ADDRESS UNIQUE AMONG BRITISH WEEKLIES There is scarcely a pubhc figure of note who does not see the Spectator Here and abroad...
...Wrong, says Greeley...
...The leftists at Ramparts did the same thing your poet from Slippery Bear Shoot, Indiana has done: read great literature not for its value as literature, but for its supposed value as a source of conservative (or leftist) ideology...
...It is not that he does not genuflect properly before all the icons of Eastern Establishment Liberal Orthodoxy -- he does...
...What would Greeley serve up after these appetizers...
...a member of the intellectual ethnic group can be identified by the journals he reads...
...is and has been a great source of conservative strength during this cruel and wonderful century...
...has at its center certain fundamental tendencies...
...He names T.S...
...states why they are not and urges the same temperance and understanding in the area of civil rights that Presidential advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan called for when he advised "benign neglect," and I expect it will attract the same wrath from Liberaldom that Moynihan received...
...Greeley concludes that what is needed is understanding and inleraction, not condemnation and homogenization...
...Rather, despite going through the forms of ritual, Father Greeley fails to accept certain liberal doctrines as matters of faith, and he even giggles at some of the communicants in the midst of holy liberal communion...
...To wit...
...It is at this point that Greeley exhibits his grasp of reality that eludes most well-meaning liberal social planners...
...And, finally, these tendencie~ are at the heart of political conservatism...
...And, further, Greeley suggests the heretofore unthinkable: perhaps what we should consider in the years ahead is not how best to break up these separate ethnic communities, but, rather, how to operate upon the reality of their existence...
...I suggest Mr...
...I did not mean to suggest (and, in all honesty, upon re-reading what I have written, I do not think I did suggest) that we read, say Moby Die.k, to "find support" for some "ideology...
...But it is a writer's duty to make his ideas clear the first time and I obviously have not done so...
...While being only a pioneer endeavor, Greeley's work is a valuable contribution to understanding the phenomenon of American acculturation...
...He states, most probably correctly, that no one who has read great literature would want to go out and burn a University down...
...JeIferson Davis, a disc jockey in Pike County, Indiana, is a connoiseur o] rock and roll music...
...Sincerely, Lawrence Polon Los Angeles, Calif A reply to Mr...
...The piece de resistance is selected from a menu which'b~)ils many of the youthful revolutionaries and intellectuals in a style one would not expect outside the Vice President's office: "The intellectual who shivers with delight at the fantasy of a Polish storm trooper kicking in his door at four o'clock in the morning has the same contact with reality as does the Polish homeowner on the Northwest Side of Chicago who thinks that Black Panthers are lurking in his corner drugstore...
...class does not want to read the book, the high schoolish prodding of a professor is not going to make him read the book coercion will only cause resentment, resentment of reading...
...Polon's phrase) "avid supporters of ideological conservatism...
...For one, the intellectual's roots in the Puritan Protestant and Jewish messianic past would incline him toward moralism even if there were none so bold as to disagree with him...
...Dutton & Co., $6.95 Father Andrew Greeley is almost certain to be excommunicated for penning Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...I am not saying that because great literature has a "conservative" basis that therefore the great authors are "ideological conservatives...
...Alas, to his credit, Greeley did not stop there...
...Eliot and Karl Mundt would have gotten along famously...
...Forcing students in a university to take required literature courses outside their area of interest and forcing these unwilling bodies further to read books they do not want to read, is not the answer to the radicals...
...The article only goes to wove how many a well-meaning conservative can become an ideologue, intent only on finding in literature, even ltterature totally unrelated to politics, justifications for his conservative beliefs...
...however extensive, chess problems tar the enthusiast, a weekly competfl)on [with prizes) to challenge your knowledge and Ingenuity SPECIAL LONG TERM SUBSCRIPTION OFFER By Air Mail to the United States One Year ($2 weeks) $22.00 The Alternative October, 1971 21 tending various white ethnic groups will be wih us for some years to come...
...Greeley, who is Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnic Pluralism at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, was a parish priest in Chicago's urban melting pot...
...I thought this paragraph had made it clear that I was not claiming the writers in question are (to use Mr...
...Polon re-read this section of my article and I am certain if he does he will find that I did not try to pin some kind of "ideological conservative" badge on the great Twain...
...If he is at all serious, he'll never make it anyway because of his cultivated ignorance...
...The thesis of "Fiction and Conservatives" is "that fiction - - fiction embracing poetry...
...Fish attempts to explain the preponderance of radical humanities majors (as contrasted to the scarcity of radical math or science majors...
...And it is delightfully written...
...If he can fake a "C," then, so what...
...My point, stated briefly, is this: that way of looking at the world which most intelligent men describe a.~ "conservative...
...He condemns the "assistant-assistant-assistant professors" who "don't give a damn whether or not the students read...
...Liberaiism...
...But Mr...
...LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Baton Rouge 70803...
...The introduction provides a critical interpretation of Weaver's writings on rhetoric...
...Anyway, I thought cor~ervatives were the ones who opposed coercion...
...Jefferson Davis CORRESPONDENCE To the Editor: The April 1971 issue of The Alternative contained an article by one Lazy Joe Fish entitled, "'Fiction and Conservatives...
...If a student in a lit...
...These tendencies are at the heart of much of the great literature of our century...
...Nor am I saying that the great works are somehow or other "conservative" in a strictly ideological sense...
...Slinging the charge of "white racism" about too freely hinders understanding of the true nature of the aspirations and fears - - real or imagined --which spur America's white ethnics...
...Fish goes out of his way to name specific writers and pin them down as being without a doubt, avid supporters of ideological conservatism...
...So what...
...Beyond the first or second generation, Poles, Germans, Italians and Irish simply scattered from their separate and isolated ghettoes and became simply hard hats, right...
...Boss Daley, despite the ogreish porh'ayal of the man, has managed to hold Chicago together (75 per cent of the vote most recently) partly through recognizing the ethnic communities ad integrating them into the political machine at the same time that Hohn Lindsay's charisma (45 per cent) has acted as a centrifuge, contributing to Fun City's ungovernability...
...Both have created terrors for their own entertainment and delight...
...Now these same tendencies are, by and large, not at the heart of the predominant ideological force of the past two hundred years, i.e...
...Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville and Twain as authors in whose writings he, as a conservative, finds grea{ solace and support...
...20 The Alternative October, 1971 Gray Power Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...Now comes the hard part...
...A Pole on Chicago's North Side is not ipso facto a racist because he is fond of his community and resents and fears intrusions by outsiders...
...Liberals are always finding from Twain's works support for their ideology...
...At the root of Greeley's sociological observations is the question of to what extent the melting pot indeed does melt...
...Or: "The strong moralism in the intellectual ethnic is reinforced by two other factors...
...Professors, politicians and other professional fussbudgets have assumed that our urban crucibles have acted as the great homogenizers of society...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
