The Pursuit of Equality in American History, by J. R. Pole
Glazer, Nathan
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Pursuit of Equality in American History, by J. R. Pole Dayan and Dayout (Genesis, Sophisticate) (6) I Get B'hai With a Little Help From My Friends (Exodus, Hatha) (5) Smack Dab in the Mitla (Leviticus, Riyadh) (4) Aqaba Soul in the Bosom of...
...One sympathizes with him in this enterprise...
...My own sense that this is the case mayrepresent an excessive present-mindedness...
...Pole has been too judicious a historian to read into the past our present concerns...
...but when I examine Mr...
...Pole / University of California Press / $14.95 Nathan Glazer J.R...
...and age-group equality (the young and the old would form separate categories...
...the mentally ill...
...prisoners...
...And Mr...
...Pole seems to recognize this: "...a policy of imposing an absolute equality of results as the actual determinant of the measure of equal justice in social, economic, or educational policy would represent a substantial departure from earlier methods of assessment, and from all previous concepts of equality of opportunity...
...By my count, it takes up five of his eleven chapters, which include a discussion of the concept of plural and separate development for racial and ethnic groups...
...Equality of opportunity" emerges in this period as the content of the demand for public action for more equality...
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...When this equality could not be guaranteed, revolution and independence followed...
...Pole's book...
...So they do...
...O ne senses in Mr...
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...Anyone must make a choice, and Mr...
...Pole reviews the claims of the non-established sects and denominations, and of the religions—particularly Catholicism—brought by the immigrants...
...Pole makes use of it...
...Anyone dealing with these issues can think of more candidates that even Mr...
...The revolutionary expansion of equality-producing legislation in the past fifteen years seems to me to re-quire a sharper response than acquiescence in the argument that legislation should prevent demoralization and the sense of powerlessness...
...Pole points out searches for equalities that he has had to forego: economic equality, which has many legitimate sub-themes—taxation, trade unions and their rights, social services and redistributionist programs...
...While Nathan Glazer is professor of education and social structure at Harvard...
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...The rights of the poorer part of the community in the early nineteenth century make up another theme in the history of equality: The most striking point here is that the enlightened workingmen (or those who spoke for them) saw a free education as crucial to realizing a greater measure of equality, freedom, and dignity...
...The dissatisfaction is created by a certain slackness in dealing with the new ballooning of 24 The American Spectator December 1978 claims to equality and the public response to them...
...Pole's virtues, at a time when a resentful revisionism seems to be the common note of much historical writing, are considerable...
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...But I wish there were more passages like this...
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...The second large equality is that of religious equality, and in two chapters Mr...
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...Pole tries to keep right up with it, not cutting off his discussion at some earlier point where it might be convenient for him...
...In his conclusion, Mr...
...More seriously, one hungers for a more powerful, systematic, unifying way of ordering these varied materials on equality than we find in Mr...
...No one could argue with this prominence...
...Since he gave the Berkeley lectures in 1971, and even since he wrote the preface to his book in 1976, a good deal more has happened in the pursuit of equality, and Mr...
...But it needs an immersion in the specifics of this change to estimate whether and to what extent it represents a further stage in the pursuit of equality or a departure from everything that pursuit has meant in two centuries of American history...
...But it would be a sharp reader who would close the book making any more of this sentence than of a number of others of equal or greater weight which do nothing to suggest that we have come to a critical turning point in the history of the search for equality...
...His many books include Remembering the Answers, Affirmative Discrimination, and The Strange Career of American Pluralism (forthcoming).this was the initial content of the meaning of equality, it could not be so confined, and in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and in the new state constitutions following the Declaration a wider political equality was established, with promise of a widening meaning in the future...
...7) Dayan and Dayout (Genesis, Sophisticate) (6) I Get B'hai With a Little Help From My Friends (Exodus, Hatha) (5) Smack Dab in the Mitla (Leviticus, Riyadh) (4) Aqaba Soul in the Bosom of Abraham (Isaac Hayes, Sex) (3) I Feel Gidi (Chad and Dahomey, Vanguard) (2) Three Times Zahedi (The Pahlavis, Voyager) (1) Arish You Love (Earl the Pearl, Diamond) Golden Oldie of the Week Sudan Always Get What You Want (Qatar Slim, Atlantic) Pick Hit of the Week Teheran-ran-ran (Attaturk, Pacific) Album of the Month Whole Lot of Sheikin' Goin' On (Ibn Saud al-Assiz Memorial Orchestra and Choir, CIA...
...that society had some obligation to intervene through legislation to prevent this kind of demoralization...," that is, a "general lack of belief in the effectiveness of political action and cynical apathy towards such idealized concepts as that of equality in political power through the exercise of the suffrage, however conscientiously the right of suffrage might have been distributed on the principle of one person, one vote...
...The change from "equality of opportunity" to "equality of result," a ragged and uncertain change which we see partially realized in judicial decisions, legislation, and regulations, best sums up the distinctive quality of the present...
...But to many—and to me—this is a stage in which the concept of equality has under-gone a remarkable change, and for the worse...
...A fourth equality—the one which engrosses the greatest part of his book—is racial equality...
...Quite so...
...Pole argues in his introduction that there is little in the history of American equality that deals with the direct amelioration of economic inequality, and it is only in the Jacksonian period that this theme emerges with any prominence in his analysis...
...But it is another thing to fail to record the fate of such efforts: their increasing expense...
...What is "equality of result" when it comes to religious equality, or any argument over moral perspectives that are reached by public law...
...The recent emergence of the debate between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of result," which dominates current political disputes over equality, seems one possible ordering frame, and to some extent Mr...
...Pole has not mentioned: equality for thehandicapped...
...but clearly it cannot encompass all the varieties of equalities that are dealt with in this book...
...Pole's final chapter, "An Incomplete Revolution," too great a complacency and equanimity in treating the issues of the present as simply marking one more stage in the history of the American search for equality...
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...Pole's handling of the present, in contrast to the past, I am convinced that he does not have a detailed enough grasp on recent developments—in particular, the expansion of recent legislation and accompanying regulations—to give them a proper weight in his account...
...Equality is a perfectly sound concept, but it has been deployed in so many fields, over two hundred or more years, with so many different arguments and for various ends, that it is reason-able to consider it more plural than singular...
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...the homosexual...
...One hungers for more outbreaks of a distinctly individual view of this complex history, for an occasional irreverence, more easily permitted in a foreigner discussing the grand topic of American equality than in a native...
...regional equality, now a very current issue with the decline of the old industrial-commercial cities...
...Pole's discussion of the issue of the sense of powerlessness in certain minorities, high-lighted by James Coleman's report on Equality of Educational Opportunity...
...Even so, Mr...
...Pole, of Cambridge University, En-gland, one of those foreign scholars of American history and life who impress us with their learning and enlighten us with a view from the outside of our problems, has taken a very large theme in his book The Pursuit of Equality in American History, expanded from a series of lectures he gave at the University of California in Berkeley a few years ago...
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...We will not find any denunciation of Jefferson for failing to be an abolitionist, Jackson for failing to be a socialist, or Lincoln for failing to incorporate in his thought and action the latest pronouncements of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
...Yet when he comes to the present, when this ordering frame is truly available, one is left with a certain dissatisfaction...
...Pole's use of "equality" in the title of his book, he makes it clear that his is a study of "equalities...
...Thus, he begins with the American revolution, where the issue of equality was one, as he presents it, of the equality of Americans with Englishmen...
...Pole, following the American historical record, has chosen the major public conflicts over equality that have marked American history...
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...This is a sober and even-toned book...
...Finally, sexual equality takes up one chapter...
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...their contribution to divisiveness and conflict—and not simply between the more and less equal, but among-many groups all of whom have some claim to more equality, a claim created by the exploding and conflicting equalities that public policy now tries to realize...
...Now, it is one thing to record and analyze the different kinds of equalities that have become part of the agenda of public discussion and led to some response, and certainly equality of esteem, of respect, and of effectiveness have been demanded for widening categories, resulting in a surprising expansion of legislation, regulation, and judicial action to realize these somewhat elusive goals...
...I was delighted by a footnote on Franz Boas' famous and "surprising" finding that the head shapes of immigrants changed in the United States to an American norm: "I confess, as a lay-man, to sharing the surprise [at these changes in head shape], and cannot dismiss the possibility that this was another case of a scientific researcher finding what he was looking for...
...Consider, for example, Mr...
...their failures to achieve expected results...
...He writes: "It seems reasonable to argue...
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...And despite Mr...
...BOOK REVIEW The Pursuit of Equality in American History J.R...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
