Oh Calcutta: Oi, Professor! (Special Book Review)
Starr, Roger
THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER THREE / DECEMBER 1976 Special Book Review / Roger Starr Oh Calcutta" Oi, Professor! How Milton Rakove, writing about Daley's Chicago...
...Yet Daley's skill in keeping the communal groups from warring with each other and in attracting new investment to his city is surely one of the major reasons why Chicago has avoided the fate of Calcutta, despite the noted similarities...
...Beyond economics based on the distribution of political jobs at the lowest levels (in America, traditionally, jobs are distributed by politics at the highest levels also--it's the broad middle ranges which must be awarded on the quantification of merit), Daley paradoxically creates unity by the clever manipulation of preexisting ethnic and religious divisions...
...He has, without force of arms, slavery, or circuses, accomplished what the Flavians and Antonines accomplished in a Rome that was similarly split in its ethnic affiliations...
...The basic trouble in Calcutta, as elsewhere in India, is the extraordinary fecundity of the Indian people and--one regrets to say it--the drop in infant mortality in the years since independence...
...Madison, he tells us, would not have approved of Daley (maybe, maybe no0, but then Chicago is not plantation Virginia...
...Ite despised Christmas, but gave Bob Cratchit, his dimwitted clerk, the entire day off--with pay...
...Its history is bloody and romantic, its early outline determined by the eighteenth-century British imperialists, and the Bengali princes with whom they trafficked and fought...
...Geoffrey Moorhouse's book about Calcutta is no statistical-clinical-technical-pastoral account of the distempers from which Calcutta suffers...
...In the complex setting of Chicago life, Daley has managed through politics to create a sociological unity, or at least tranquility...
...there is still a substantial group of Protestant Anglo-Saxons, including the most important figures in the city's business community...
...tt is irrelevant for a brave Westerner to wonder why a man in such a predicament doesn't charge the mob and try to battle his way through them...
...He believes that if more earnings had been reinvested in the city, the present deterioration would be far less significant...
...The gberao is a demonstration in which no projectile violence is used--nothing is hurled, no shots are fired, no punches thrown-but the demonstrators surround their target, preventing his movement, imperilling his human essence...
...Every visitor to Calcutta has had a Doomsday remark to make about it...
...It has had a tradition of violence: its 1919 race riots were among the worst in American history...
...If the twentieth century has a salient failing, it is that so few of us listened when Scrooge spoke...
...The animosities of Calcutta are perhaps best demonstrated not in the riots themselves, horrible as they are, but in the custom of the gherao, an ostensibly nonviolent way in which the mass is permitted to marshal its opposition to an individual person...
...Sanctity of contract cuts both ways, dammit...
...Rakove is a card-carrying member of Mayor Daley's organization...
...He has also forgotten that those who carry water on both shoulders must have a very narrow head, or wear a heavy slicker...
...In the end, it took 45,000 troops and Gandhi himself to restore a kind of calm...
...Nor the hidden depths of thought...
...He becomes nearly incomprehensible...
...One need not go back to the Haymarket riot or the St...
...To start with, he was honest...
...Small wonder, then, that Scrooge offered himself to the world as he was...
...It is, therefore, somewhat remarkable to learn that Chicago finds the money to keep up its municipal services...
...He could never bring himself to take down the name of Jacob Marley, his deceased partner, from the counting-house door...
...Using economics to override that difference of opinion which political professors customarily call "ideology," Daley expects his precinct captains to amass knowledge, to do favors, to bring out the vote...
...Evil--or what passes for evil--would vanish from the face of the earth if only Jacob Marley and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future would consent to work the other 364 nights of the year...
...People can still walk about downtown Chicago at night with their fears under control, and if one wants to understand what this means in practical terms, he should visit downtown Detroit and downtown St...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 7...
...A self-made man and individualist, Scrooge (the old Scrooge) kep...
...He was solvent...
...These assignments, however, change in response to changing numbers and increased political effectiveness on the part of the newly-arrived minorities: each group gains enough rewards from the Democratic Party to guarantee its unwillingness to throw over the applecart in the perhaps futile search for a greater reward or for ideological success...
...He is not trying to hide his feelings, or to alter them in order to mollify someone else...
...No simple collection of oriental mudhuts, Calcutta is a very important port, drawing its commerce from a free harbor and access to the fertile plains of Bengal, and the wealth in minerals that lies beneath them...
...James Grant Homage to Ebenezer Scrooge I f the twentieth century has a salient failing, it is that so few of us listened when Scrooge spoke...
...when he favors the professorial side, some of the water must splash on his glasses...
...an eye is blackened, teeth missing...
...Give me the grasping Scrooge...
...at the same time he is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus...
...In order to maintain his standing with his academic colleagues, Rakove loads himself down with paragraphs like the following: ...under Daley's rule, few ambitions have been able to counteract Daley's ambitions, and the constitutional rights of the place have been subordinated to the interests of the man...Because he has come to dominate the city, the normal checks and balances which are the built-in protections of it democratic political system have, to some extent, been compromised in Chicago...the Madisonian concept of safeguarding individual rights and the general welfare through checking power internally within a governmental system has not operated very well in Chicago either...
...has lately avoided internecine warfare (though everyone remembers the battle between the city police and non-Chicagoans during the 1968 Democratic Convention...
...This is as ludicrous a description of the possibilities of political bodies as of human bodies: none of us believes that the class klutz can be turned into the college quarterback by lifting weights, or, to make the analogy.more precise, by reading books about lifting weights...
...We feel her, smell her, listen to her grunts...
...The communal riots of 1946 are described by Moorhouse in all their hideous detail...
...The implicit comparison, mine alone, between Calcutta and Chicago, is not wholly fanciful...
...American tradition looks down on conspiratorial theories and--with some notable exceptions--discourages intercommunal violence or at least limits violent outbursts to brief, sharp encounters...
...It is inconceivable that any city, no matter how well organized its government, or how unified its people in a determination to dedicate their public resources to the improvement of public facilities, could support the present Calcutta population on the wealth now being produced in that city, or its equally overpopulated hinterland...
...He can speak simply because he knows what it is he feels about this city and its people--not that his responses are simple responses, burrather that his examination of his own feelings is simple...
...But the wisdom which Rakove respects so much is essentially trivial...
...Calcutta inspires hopelessness in its visitors who see that without a Gandhi (and perhaps even with one) Calcuttans will not stop fighting each other over differences in culture, race, religion, and social class even at the edge of the common grave...
...Moorhouse's description of this tactic exemplifies the quiet, straightforward style in which his magnificent book is written: _9 ..teachers have been gheraoed by their students, tax collectors by their debtors, bus drivers by their passengers...
...Scrooge wasn't your ordinary clubman, but he wasn't immune from the tugs of human sentiment...
...He counts on the number of jobs at the disposal of the Mayor and his appointees to facilitate the job of the captains...
...Such an observation is unwelcome in academic circles, whose inhabitants expect to travel into power with wisdom as their passport...
...He wants to return to the hotel and immerse himself in hot water, green soap, and a solution of potassium permanganate...
...He has forgotten also that that government is best which is best suited to the real constitution of the governed...
...Rakove points out that membership in the political organization is essential to assure oneself a municipal or Cook County job, while the political organization exacts from the job holder in return a dedication to societal unity...
...there is also a large Jewish population, and a growing Latin ethnic group...
...He does not tell us about the old harridan...
...He has apportioned his largesse between the several ethnic groups which compose Chicago...
...Diligent to a fault, Scrooge perused the financial press over dinner on Christmas Eve and, records Dickens, "beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's book...
...The city's economy is uncommonly resilient, composed as it is of both heavy industries (such as steel) which cannot easily move away and light industries (such as canning) which provide some insulation against the volatile employment cycles in basic heavy industry...
...The city today suffers from every imaginable urban ill, each of which can be viewed as the extension to the point of absurdity of a trend only too apparent in America's polyglot cities, and even now in London with its growing heterogeneity...
...Chicago, after all, would not become Erewhon or Utopia even if Edward Levi were its mayor...
...Not the reconstituted Scrooge, whom everyone likes, the radiant, cloying Scrooge of Christmas morning...
...I suspect that Rakove the professor forgets what Rakove the politician does not...
...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 We do well to remember that only one of the Antonines was sty4ed a philosopher...
...But this basic economic proposition falls woefully short of conveying the impression of how desperately Calcutta fails...
...her sores drip on us, and if in the end we cannot share his love for her, at least we begin to appreciate his awe of her capacity for survival, and also of her spirit--malign, vindictive, ugly, but nonetheless vital...
...To avoid "making waves" means to engage in no activity that stirs the hidden depths of diversity in the population...
...Rakove recounts in elaborate and sometimes difficult-tofollow detail how certain jobs are traditionally assigned to different ethnic constituencies...
...They are the checks and balances of the several constituencies which contend for power within the city, but which, under Daley's leadership, have been willing--in the most checked and balanced way--to postpone their hope of ultimate and lonely victory for the practical possibilities of present compromise...
...But Rakove burdens his left shoulder with a pail full of the quaint belief that Chicago could be improved if only the proper incantation were spoken, and the proper passing genuflection made towards the busts of the Founding Fathers...
...How Milton Rakove, writing about Daley's Chicago (Don't Make No Waves...Don't Back No Losers, Indiana Univ...
...Who wouldn't recant following a nocturnal bout with three phantoms and the shade of one's late partner...
...To Marley's ghost, he gamely rejoined: "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato...
...There is no present Gandhi, as we all know...
...Of course, when a mortgage payment fell overdue, Scrooge promptly foreclosed...
...An order of healing nuns has established a hospital in Calcutta only for dying people...
...But I wander...
...the academic wisdom in political matters is totally subsumed in the proposition that the body politic is capable of infinite perfectability...
...This, of course, is how Rakove the professor would translate the first part of the title for the book chosen by Rakove the politician...
...Only a few years ago, Saul Alinsky was urging on the Poles who lived back of the yards to fight the blacks...
...There's more of gravy than of grave about you whoever you are...
...Valentine's Day massacre for examples...
...Moorhouse's chapter on the poverty of Calcutta--the street sleepers, the bustees (slums) without access to streets, the rubbery white corpses in the Hooghly --afflicts the reader in much the same way as a first walk through an Indian city...
...County Committeeman Rakove does not want to give up his position in practical politics while, at the very same moment, Professor Rakove does not wish to surrender his claim to academic respectability and objectivity, evidenced by his sharing the current academic suspicion of middle-class effectiveness...
...Mine occupies me constantly...
...The book thus stands in vivid contrast r Milton Rakove's book about Mayor Daley's Chicago, Don't Make No V/ayes...Don 't Back No Losers...
...His credit was impeccable...
...James Grant is a grouch who lives in Brooklyn...
...He was punctual...
...To manipulate rewards in this way is Daley's great triumph, one for which he might, incongruously, be drawn through the streets of Chicago in a chariot...
...In deference to his academic colleagues, he all too frequently forgets that a philosopher and a successful ruler are seldom combined in a single body...
...that Chicago would be diminished, perhaps to the level of Calcutta, if someone tried to govern it with a system that fits comfortably in the House of Burgesses of Williamsburg, Virginia...
...He reveals a touch of Midland fabianism (he has been a correspondent for the Guardian, formerly Manchester Guardian) in his suggestion that an unfair amount of capital has been drained from Calcutta...
...Unfortunately, Rakove seems to overlook this...
...Today, almost one third of its population is black, nearly all of whom are Protestant...
...Still he kept his wits about him...
...This formation, naturally, took place when the pound was worth $5 in old American dollars, which in turn would each be worth about three present-day dollars...
...It's enough," he said, dismissing a pair of United Fund pests, "for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's...
...Chicago has somehow avoided imposing civil service and the so-called merit system on municipal jobs, particularly those requiring only modest competence...
...Press, $I0), forgets what Geoffrey Moorhouse tells us in Calcutta (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.95...
...The magnitude of this dividend may sound rather high to Moorhouse, but the 9% is calculated on the number of pounds in the original paid-in capital of the company...
...even a judge has been gheraoed by witnesses at a judicial committee of inquiry...
...Applying both corrections--the pound to dollar, and the dollar to dollar--to our 9 %, we find that the seemingly high return in modern currency is really equivalent to slightly more than a 1% return on the value of the original capital...
...But somewhere, I hope, perhaps in the wilds of Argentina, the real Scrooge lives, minding his own business and asking nothing of anyone else than that they do the same...
...The major failings of the Daley regime have been revealed by external governments--in matters like checking the ballot boxes in the national election of 1960, or investigating the possible violation of the civil rights of Fred Hampton, or in helping to maintain order during the awful days of 1968, during which Daley felt threatened by the ideologies which his practical system must forever avoid...
...Moorhouse quotes many of them, but his achievement is to offer so vivid a glimpse of the city that the reader is fully prepared to pronounce his own epitaph after reading the book...
...But ask yourself this, gentle reader: What is Christmas, a day given over to the celebration of objects, without bargains-without bankbooks...
...Scrooge was a wag and a phrase-maker, even in the face of supernatural terror...
...the man knows perfectly well that they would beat him to death without hesitation with their fists if they had nothing else handy...
...Among the city's whites, there are significant differences between European ethnic groups, frequently Catholic, of which the Irish, Poles, and Italians are most numerous...
...to himself and bade others do the same...
...Like Calcutta, Chicago is a city incorporating large groups of people with substantial communal and religious differences...
...Men have collapsed halfdead from exhaustion and dehydration in Calcutta after having been gheraoed in the blazing sun for the best part of a day by perpetually fresh mobs operating under a shift system...
...Thousands were killed--no one knows exactly how many thousands--and at least 15,000 were injured...
...Attests Dickens: "He was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral [Marley's] and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain...
...he brings us to her, in bed, on the toilet, in the street, or standing at the public bar for a couple of fingers of gin...
...As proof of this somewhat familiar proposition, he tells us that the Calcutta Electric Power Company, which provides a frequently flickering light for a part of the Calcutta population, paid a 9 % dividend several years ago (earnings dropped off in the following year...
...they cannot help him...
...All of these have their differences with all of the others, differences which occasionally erupt or have erupted into violence, sometimes as the result of conscious propaganda...
...It is scarcely to be wondered that no one wants to invest any money in Calcutta today--least of all the Indian government, which is trying to use what money it can scrape tog,.ther for such contrasting purposes as industrial development, arm achievement of first-class international status through atomic bomb manufacture...
...Louis for purposes of comparison...
...In 1943, 100 years after the publication of "A Christmas Carol," the world was convulsed by men and nations who insisted on doing precisely the opposite...
...The most oppressive sections of the chapter on poverty are those which describe the efforts of a few saintly, lost people to do something about health care...
...His social program, was to "rub raw the sores of discontent...
...Yes, yes, I know, shocking behavior...
...Part of this success Rakove attributes to the skillful use of political patronage...
...The only thing you can do if you are gheraoed is to sit tight with as much calmness as you can manage and hope for the best...
...Around the old port of Calcutta which is struggling against suffocation in the drifting silt of the Bengal delta, there has concentrated a large, constantly growing population, some trying to survive on a bare minimum wage, but the vast majority of whom are hopelessly poor, living without services that everyone in Europe and North America takes for granted: water, sanitation, streets, rooms, beds, hospitals, name it...
...Scrooge's name," Dickens concedes, "was good upon the 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to...
...As m what became of Scrooge, we must take Dickens at his word...
...She is clothed in tattered grandeur, her stockings ravelled, heels overrun, her legs a mass of varicose veins and bleeding ulcers...
...Among cities, Calcutta is the old whore who demonstrates the pernicious effects of a life of sin...
...Chicago's current position of relative comfort and its continued resistance to central deterioration cannot be ascribed solely to the talents of a single Mayor...
...Small wonder, too, that at last he succumbed to the world...
...Nor does it convey the impact of the ugly animosities between its constituent populations or the susceptibility of its Roger Start is Henry Lute Professor of Urban Values at New York University and author of Living End: The City and Its Critics...
...Another major factor in Chicago's health it its somewhat corny tradition of civic boosterism, which, for all the mocking such Babbitry inspires among us sophisticates, helps keep the city together...
...As a result, though Committeeman Rakove provides us with some valuable information on how Richard Datey keeps Chicago from turning into another Calcutta, Professor Rakove is busy assuring us that he knows that there are far more elevating political questions to be explored than keeping the municipal peace...
...The effort of carrying a pail on each shoulder complicates Rakove's vision...
...I admire Ebenezer Scrooge...
...of course, it can admit but a tiny fraction of the mass of Calcuttans who perish each day from the diseases of starvation and filth, but the nursing order is dedicated, not to providing health services for the living population-that is beyond imagination--but simply a shred of decency, a teaspoon of respectability to speed the dying on their way...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 5 population (including many of its Bengali intellectuals) to the belief that secret conspiracies and the devious meditations of the heart itself compromise any joint activity from the beginning...
...Oi, professor, the checks and balances in Chicago have been working very weft indeed...
...If a patient fails to die within a few days, he must leave the hospital...
...Moorhouse contrasts the poverty of the immense restless, homeless, fibrillating mob with the stony wealth of older British Calcutta, its hotels, office blocks, industrial headquarters, palaces, parks, and perhaps more important than any of the others, the clubs that incarnated the imperial presence...
...He became," the author vows, "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough, in the good old world...
...The colloquial manner in which this account of horror is written conveys Moorhouse's attitude toward his subject and himself...
...In Rakove's view, some ethnic groups, blacks particularly, and perhaps Hispanics as well, are currently under-represented...
Vol. 10 • December 1976 • No. 3
