0 My America!.
Kaplan, Johanna
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "0 My America!." humble origins, rose and married into a class, Philadelphia Gentlemen lawyers, that has always chosen private success rather than public leadership. Holmes was arrogant and vain, with all the...
...It also happens that Ez had begun to sleep with ..~obel even before the death of Pearl, his first wife...
...Boston may very well have produced more famous architects on the national scene down through the years, but Philadelphia architecture today is by all odds the most exquisite and richly varied in the nation...
...Be sure to include the llne of Information above your name...
...Otherwise it would still be bringing me down...
...Rogge explores the prospects for capitalism, the philosophy of freedom, the nature of economics, and what must be done to ensure the survival of capitalism and free institutions...
...We failed you, I failed you...
...Thus in the life of the mind, the author demonstrates, the powerful intellectual influence upon America of Bostonian culture, from Cotton Mather to Henry Adams, has no counterpart in Philadelphia, which yielded "only a privileged caste that has never given tone to the ideas of either the state of Pennsylvania or the nation" Much the same contrast is seen in the position and activities of Roman Catholics in the two cultures...
...And anyhow, Jonathan Edwards and Oliver Wendell Holmes notwithstanding, which state must carry the dreadful burden of the Kennedy family, whose greatest contribution to the Commonwealth would have been simply remaining behind a good saloon bar...
...EE Anonymity Too Soon No one has ever explained why it is easier for the human brain to produce a 500-page book than a one-line epigram...
...And at a pary Ez attends before he makes his famous speech, there is this splendid remark made by the wife of a psychiatrist about her son: " 'In fact, he would be here right now, but he's busy with the committee...
...And, according to Baltzell, at least one other difference between these men may be explained by the cultural traditions each came to typify: The members of the upper classes in egalitarian societies [such as Philadelphia's, by root] that lack a clear hierarchy of values recognized by all classes tend to avoid position of authority and to protect themselves from the masses by a high wall of wealth...
...But Ez is still the man to talk to, and after he makes a speech at a large protest rally in New York-which is caught on film and becomes the centerpiece of an antiwar movie, No More American Songs, later "shown at teach-ins everywhere"-Ez comes into his greatest popularity...
...the new element seems to be "radical chic...
...And true to form for an "idea" that is essentially moral--it might more accurately be called a vision--Ez's idea denies the legitimacy of any authority, political or otherwise, that does not embrace i t By his own admission, Ez is more an anarchist than anything else, and, not surprisingly, his "idea of AmeriPle~we attach the address label from the most recent Issue of your Amerlcan Spectator in the space below...
...By Benjamin A. Rogge Penetrating, witty, and wise prescriptions for our day, by the Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at Wabash College...
...George Heller spoke on music education in Kansas from 1854 to 1870 and Reginald Buckner presented a paper on '"['he History of Music Education in the Black Community of Kansas City, Kansas, 1905-1954...
...She is not altogether successful in this...
...Holmes was little concerned w~th the visual, a common trait of the very intellectual...
...In Philadelphia "Catholics have been largely content to cultivate their own garden" whereas in Boston they "have been busy cultivating voters of all faiths in their city, their state and their nation...
...Denied: Highly creative women musicians show a "stronger endorsement of feminine characteristics...
...Affirmed: Women musicians reveal "androgynous personalities...
...Miss Kaplan seems to be resting her case for Ez on the consistency of his "lifelong affair with the idea of America...
...Paul Haack is from the University of Kansas but, significantly (as the music educators would say), in his paper he chose not to di~uss Kansas, as a state, at all...
...I have had a lifelong affair with the idea of America," Ez says at one point in his life, a remark for which he becomes quite well-known...
...To be sure, the sixties cocktail parties have a character somewhat different from those of the thirties...
...It is not simply that Ez is a man whose time, in the form of the counterculture, has come...
...Hardcover S9.00, Paperback $3.50...
...In any way.'" But it is Ez's political slant that draws most of our attention...
...E3 Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Her "Study of Creative Women Musicians With Implications for Nurturing Creativity in Music Students" dared both to subvert and shore up our conventional notions about music and sex...
...Ez, whose intellectual mentors include the transcendentalist radical Thoreau, has shaped his "idea of America" to include elements of Thoreau's pacifism and his doctrine of civil disobedience...
...lsn't it inspiring to know that, even as the baby seals are being thumped brutally and Soviet peace-keeping forces are being called upon to pacify what our President refers to as the "freedom-loving" nation of Afghanistan, some Americans remain undeterred from their devotion to Art...
...please print) Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . City ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Z i p . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Date of change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X91 Pl~Se renew my $ubScriptlon for one year (twelve issues~$12...
...Well-reasoned, gracefully written~ and gently humorous" --National Review...
...Provocative"--Lihrarv Journul...
...771 Peyment enclosed [~ Please bill me THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 33 ca," his advocacy of "our own and lawless future," becomes one of the cornerstones of the emerging radicalism of the sixties...
...When writing to us about your 8ubscriptlon, elw:.ys attach your addr~ label or print your name and address exactly as they appear on your address label...
...Merry is the only one of Ez's children he has ever treated fairly...
...in i972...
...the literary tradition was bred into him...
...But these are curmudgeonly muttering s Not in many years has there appeared a sociological history as deeply researched, imaginatively constructed, and superbly written as Pun'tan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia...
...Ez, too, has moved with the political fashion, and has thereby clone damage to his intellectual integrity...
...One would like to think that the special quality of the authentic aphorist, the rarity of his gift, would cause his name to be universally treasured and chiseled into the stone of public memory...
...Johnson wrote nothing, very much in the tradition of Quaker Philadelphia, and he neither sought nor accepted public office or, for that matter, even discussed public questions...
...Whatever the other achievements of the MENC convention, it did put Kutztown State College on the map-though of precisely which state remains uncertain...
...Print your new address and mall this form to The American Spectator...
...We pay postage, but require prepayment, on orders from individuals...
...God knows, Massachusetts history, beginning with the presumptuous Pilgrims ("ye are the light of the world...
...A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid") is filled with those who, unable to sit or stand, must always be doing something, a trait that, as Pascal observed, accounts for much of the evil as well as the good in the world...
...Don't they serve who only stand and wait...
...What happens, though, is that the bright saying, the gem-like epigram, the curtly comical remark, is taken up and endlessly repeated while the name of its author There opportunity In Am_er ca...
...Delightful"--Persona/ Fimmce...
...We read of Nicky travelling in India, of Ffrenchy unabashedly breastfeeding her daughter on the sidewalk of New York's West End Avenue, of Ez making a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make amends with his abandoned son Jonathan in the name of peace in Vietnam...
...He insists on judging the actions of America against the standard of his idea...
...yet only the personal part of his pronouncement--what Ez might, but never does, say to his own children and family directly--rings at all true: " 'I failed you.' " On the rest of his generation, and especially on the leaders of America in politics, the military, and industry, Ez wishes to impose his purely moral vision, that "idea of America...
...I f there is a slight fault in this masterful study it lies perhaps in Baltzell's overweening emphasis upon doing and giving, especially in the political sphere broadly defined...
...He is conciliatory, even adulatory, to the young people of the counterculture in the face of what he surely recognizes as sloppy thought and inarticulate expression...
...Even at the beginning, or certainly by 1800, all of these differences between the two cities' cultures were apparent: "Class authority and deference democracy were hegemonic values in Massachusetts, as they had been since the colony's founding . . . . In contrast, class authority and deference democracy were rarely since the beginning, and almost never after 1800 hegemonic values in the colony and commonwealth of Pennsylvania...
...Ann and Frances, however, were far from cavalier, or concise, in stating their conclusion: "Results indicated a similarity of pitch-matching accuracy means which, in this context, suggests that male vocal modeling may not necessarily present unique pitch-matching problems to first graders...
...Johnson died a Wealthy man...
...The results: Having been instructed in the value of art and music, students "demonstrated significant increases in the ability to assess personal values...
...Holmes wrote all his life for posterity...
...But not everyone's results were so heartening...
...Johnson's one extralegal, extrafamilial passion was art, and he built, in the style of the rich then, a fine collection...
...Donald Hamann and Shirley Herlong of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro discovered that stress and anxiety had no (significant) effect on music performance, a finding all the more important for being counterintuitive and probably dead wrong...
...And that was two months a g o ! ' " - - a n d has herself given birth to an illegitimate daughter, Mountain Spring Meisel...
...In his speech, he tells the young: " ' We are the ones who let you down...
...Must it always be, as the Duke asked Edward Gibbon upon receiving a copy of the first volume of The Decline and Fall, scribble, scribble, scribble...
...Among Ez's other children, two despise him: Jonathan, his oldest, whom Ez abandoned at the death of the child's mother...
...Probably derived from Karl Marx, Ez's "idea" also seems to feature a sort of communistic egalitarianism and a strong sense of anti-materialism...
...a true product of the sixties, she has dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design--" 'I like totally wiped it out of my head, you know...
...As a result, Ez becomes a kind of political celebrity --something be has been before, if on a smaller scale...
...He even takes young Merry with him on some of his philandering junkets with Paula, who is Ez's lover while he is married to his second wife, Isobel...
...IMPORTANT: Allow 8ix weeks for addresll change...
...What is more, the subjects of the conventions' papers ranged beyond music, narrowly defined, to include, among other things, Kansas...
...In contrast, Johnson was democratic and humble, his office filled with clients, rich and poor...
...To order this book, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPrvss/LibertyChlssi~'s 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...What began, continued...
...Beginning in the thirties at the cocktail parties gum Communist Party rallies, Ez had always been the star, the one whose views are sought out by everyone else at whatever gathering it may be...
...I am...
...What Miss Kaplan does most assuredly create in 0 My America/is a series of stunning portraits of her characters and their world...
...And without compassion...
...Ez should be sympathetic not just because he is able to score points on people who are not as bright as he is, but because he has throughout his life been true to his idea of America (groundless as his idea may be...
...According to Alicia Gibbons, although probably to her chagrin (for her results are nothing if not ammunition for the enemies of the welfare state), elderly people with high morale are not necessarily more musical than elderly people with low morale, proof of which follows when she points out that the female elderly scored better on musical aptitude tests than the male...
...They were also more childlike, a feminine trait, and conceited, a neuter trait...
...With a careful eye toward the realities of the political world, Miss Kaplan has rightly given Ez no grounds for his harsh indictment of the sins of the fathers...
...fiolmes was only comfortable...
...he is much more intelligent than anyone around him, and if he treats people badly, patronizingly, condescendingly, he does so with a compelling sort of flair and style...
...and Nicky, the product of his second marriage, who has given up his ambition of becoming a concert pianist in favor of wandering with a tape recorder in the back country of India, there to be a music ethnographer...
...Ez's illegitimate daughter Ffrenchy Meisel loves him dearly, though...
...Bloomington, Indiana THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 ~5...
...D S P E C T A T O R ' S J O U R N A L A Rite of Spring The Soviets are in Afghanistan, baby seals are under attack again in the arctic, and consumers of perfume the world over continue to worry about the shortage of placenta coming from the Caribbean...
...But what Ez fails, or refuses, to take into account is that any nation, at any time, would fail to measure up to his impossible standard...
...Aristocracies, in contrast to plutocracies, are led by a class whose authority is recognized by all, which lessens the need for the protection of pure wealth...
...Moreover, his literary-juristic eminence crossed both oceans...
...All those down art school vibes...
...But the presenting of abstruse papers in lecture form is the hallmark of any great profession's national convention, and besides, not all of the MENC's papers were so pedantically narrow...
...And if anyone ever had a better reason for not coming to a party, I haven't heard i t . ' " But O My America ? is primarily a political novel, and in weaving together the personal, social, and cultural threads of the time, Miss Kaplan has superbly exposed the ideas of the counterc u l t u r e - - t h e i r hypocrisies, their groundlessness, and their lies...
...Holmes was arrogant and vain, with all the vices of aristocracy...
...Merry is a social journalist of the standard sixties variety, chronicling in the course of her work "the sudden upsurge of Eastern mysticalreligious groups" in New York, among other things...
...He certainly engages our interest throughout 0 My America...
...Miss Kaplan writes about Ez and his large family--over his 64 years he has had three wives, a lover, and six children, four of them legitimate--in a series of fragments and vignettes, primarily triggered by the mental associations of his oldest daughter, Merry, when she learns of Ez's death Tod Lindberg is a student at the University of Chicago...
...Even so, the Music Educators National Conference held their national convention in mid-April and, judging by the abstracts of the papers presented there, it was a serious affair, notwithstanding the voluptuous a t t r a c t i o n s of Miami Beach...
...He holds that one may work inside or outside of the law in order to change the law, the important thing being that one work...
...Realizing that "little is known about the manner in which high school students value artistic objects, nor [sic} about their valuing awareness," he decided to do some digging...
...According to Miss Tollinger, highly creative women were "significantly [!] more self-reliant, ambitious, willing to take risks and to defend beliefs--desirable masculine traits...
...Ez is a lousy father and an unfaithful husband...
...At a time when serious music is under attack for b e i n g - - b e s i d e s ugly--lofty, cerebral, and of course elitist, the music educators at their national convention showed themselves to be anything'but indifferent to the concerns of both the popolo minuto and, incidentally, academic promotion committees...
...Book authors come in shoals...
...And I am sure it will play as well in Peoria as in Boston and Philadelphia...
...A33 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 generation, his generation, for its horrible faults...
...At one point, he tells Merry of his feelings toward his son, Nicky: " 'All right, so I'm deficient as a father, I admit it...
...He is sought after for interviews and panel discussions, he is the subject of public broadcasting programs, and he resoundingly denounces the older LlbeltyPms L rtyC/ Can Capitalism Survive...
...The America of the sixties fails to measure up, and so he stamps his brand of absolute evil upon it: "This is a country, a whole culture, that is cruel...
...Charles Elliott and Nell Sins discovered that most music students respond "positively" to handicapped peers, although female students "tended to be more positive...
...Please allow four to six weeks for delivery...
...Only in art and architecture has Philadelphia made its mark...
...O MY AMERICA...
...Among other things, Miss Kaplan writes about an affluent group of doctors and psychiatrists united against the war in Vietnam over a brunch of lox, bagels, and Bloody Marys...
...Maybe a few people, come to think about it...
...Isn't there something to be said for an Order of the Garter where, as one of its members exulted, there is no damn nonsense about merit...
...an essay of his from 1939, urging the United States not to repeal the Neutrality Act, betokens a far more patriotic attitude toward America, a far greater commitment to American possibilities, than his 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 speech in No More American Songs...
...Laree M. Tollinget sits on Kutztown's faculty...
...Who, after all, would favor sun and surf to hearing about "The Effect of Participation in a MusicBased Arts Education Program on Non-Musical Factors of Selected Fourth-Grade Children...
...But it is not enough for Ez to be sympathetic only by comparison...
...But I just--Oh, look, Merry, he's always seemed like Isobel's child to me--Not mine...
...We owe a debt to these conjurors of the phrase who express, brilliantly and succinctly, what we would all like to say ourselves if only we could get our thoughts into sharp enough focus and arrange the words in the right order...
...JohannaKaplan / Harper& Row / $10.95 Tod Lindberg Johanna Kaplan's first novel, O My America/, is about Ez Slavin, an "iconoclastic social critic" (according to the headline of his New York Times obituary) and a founding father and leading figure of the counterculture...
...there is never a shortage...
...For instance, Patricia Flowers of Florida State University revealed in her paper that, according to her experiments, students who listened to African music qua music liked it better than those who had never heard it at all...
...Not mine at all...
...Another aborted thesis: Ann Small and Frances McCachern found that first-graders sing about as well after hearing a man's voice as after hearing a woman's...
...But at no time, ever, is thete more than the thinnest trickle of those capable of fashioning a mot that, in a sparse sentence or two, turns a laser-beam of penetration into the way things are or with a flash of insight exposes a hidden aspect of human folly...
...The sixties' turbulence and its cultural and political antecedents serve as the principal backdrop for the novel, and in the characters ofEz Slavin and his relatives, students, and sycop h a n t s , Miss Kaplan examines the political and cultural forces that played themselves out in the rise of the counterculture...
...I n spite of the ideas Ez brings forth with no basis in reality, and in spite of his consistent unwillingness to take responsibility for what he has done to his children and family, Ez remains for us a sympathetic character...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
