Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

...economics with considerably more clarity than most economists, which makes his book accessible to any interested layman...

...CIVIL RIGHTS: RHETORIC OR REALITY...

...They "are important in and of themselves"-meaning they have their own justification, apart from contingent propositions...

...It is enough for Sowell to introduce facts showing that schools attended mainly (if not exclusively) by youngsters of particular racial groups are not "inherently unequal...

...Segregation of any kind--by law or by circumstance--will have deleterious psychological and educational effects on those segregated...

...It is worth recalling, as Sowell does in Civil Rights, that one of the NAACP lawyers in Brown referred to the theories of the Court's famous "modern authority" this way: " I may have used the word 'crap.' " Soweil contends that Brown's reliance on social science was not incidental...

...By Lyndon Johnson's day, the staff in the White House and the Executive Building had jumped to 1,600, some forty times the size of Hoover's...

...There is also that problem of the "social theories": Not every racial and ethnic group will be "equally THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 35 represented" in every endeavor...

...So, while General Haig has written a valuable book, full of pith and not without some fine lapidary observations, it seems to me he has not quite hit the nail on the head...

...The picture of racial and ethnic groups he ultimately presents is far more complicated than that drawn by many who work in the name of civil rights...

...Unlike his other books, Civil Rights has a personal, at times angry edge...

...Furthermore, it is not true that in the absence of discrimination all groups would be achieving equally...

...And civil rights, he says, are one of our "most honored achievements...

...Sowell's point is that civil rights are "not ingredients from which to expect great economic or educational changes in accordance with particular social theories...

...Yet, here again, as with Brown, it is important to understand Sowell in the entirety of what he says...

...T h i s is a fair enough description of the vision held by many of those who today act in the name of civil rights...

...He exaggerates the hope in the Reagan Administration that tax cuts would raise revenues...

...These trends have focused Sowell's mind and determined that he write this bookma book about "what has been done, and is being done," in the name of civil rights...

...Stein regrets the controls--the "great sin"--but waxes nostalgic about the "exhilaration" felt by everyone who participated in the decision...

...But he tends to concentrate on them while shrewdly ignoring more persuasive and accomplished economic thinkers who have also stressed the importance of restoring incentives to work and investment...

...Sowell's opponents, as Sowell notes in his epilogue, have a history of creating straw men rather than dealing with Sowell himself...

...But it is a resolute layman who will slog through it all...

...This is by no means to suggest that Sowell endorses segregation...

...He argues that the implicit assumption of Brown--that black schoolchildren have equal education opportunities only when they attend integrated schools--reflected a "civil rights vision," a vision based on moral considerations but also on socialscience...

...Originallymwhich is to say at the time of Brown--civil rights meant treating individuals without regard to race...

...This is a worthy project, but one fraught with hazards...

...What is lacking in many discussions of discrimination," he writes, "is a sense of economics...

...Stein does spend a lot of space quarreling, implicitly or explicitly, with supply-side theories...

...They are not the result simply of discrimination, nor does discrimination necessarily lead to poverty...

...He dismissed all the Foreign Office drafts with contempt, packed Anthony Eden (the Foreign Secretary) off to bed, and then, according to an eyewitness, settled down all night to issue his instructions to the British generals and diplomats, "sitting gyrating in his armchair and dictating on the machine to Miss Layton, who did not bat an eyelid at the many blasphemies with which the old man interspersed his official phrases...

...The expansion of the President's entourage came first...

...His entourage was Babylonian, and designedly so, for he believed both in the prestige and the sheer weight of numbers, moving around the world in quasi-presidential state...

...Much more than civil rights are needed for such changes to occur...

...economics...

...Sowell simply refuses to assign exclusive, or even primary, importance to racial discrimination in explaining the relative socioeconomic position of a particular racial group...

...His refusal to do so, and his insistence on considering the many other factors associated with group outcomes, has practical implications...

...It should be settled by the few men, the President included, who carry the actual constitutional authority, and who have a mutual interest in keeping their discussions private...

...Reagan, by contrast, gets 71 pages...

...It is curious to me that Haig, almost as experienced in government as in military matters, does not put his finger on what is a primary cause of the confusions of American foreign policy: the sheer numbers of people who participate in its formation...

...Foreign policy is best conducted by a small group of very well-informed people...

...Something," he writes, "needs to be said...

...Should this happen, one man we will have to thank-whether some want to or not--will be Thomas Sowell...

...Should civil rights mean no distinctions on the basis of race, as Sowell reminds us the idea originally meant, or should it mean the use of race " t o get beyond racism...

...When he is merely thrashing Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski--fat though hardly worthy targets--he is on solid enough ground...

...He points out, for example, facts that cut against the conventional wisdom: such as that the economic rise of minorities preceded by many years passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...What Sowell says in the space of these 140 pages--six chapters and an epilogue--needs to be said, and not only because this is an anniversary year for civil rights...

...One cannot simply "go from innate ability to observed result without major concern for intervening cultural factors...

...His infatuation with John Connally, who became Treasury Secretary in 1970 and who was for any policy as long as it was bold and dramatic, made controls almost inevitable_9 Other insidious influences were at work, and not only on Nixon...

...No doubt there will continue to be those who say such remarkable things as Joseph Rauh, the veteran civil rights lawyer, did last year: "Cuts in food stamps [are] a civil rights issue...

...Sowell plainly believes that busing is a failed policy, although here he only touches on its effects...

...As Paul Craig Roberts makes clear in his recent book, The Supply-Side Revolution, ' the forecasts of a balanced budget by 1984 were 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984...

...The general arguments of Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality...

...Facts such as these may suggest to some readers that Sowell thinks civil rights irrelevant...

...Obviously the lure of power can corrupt even those who distrust it...

...The six years of the Nixon presidency get twice as much space as the 16 years of Hoover and Roosevelt, which can be justified only by Stein's service under Nixon, as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers...

...Is he so concerned with the long run of history that he forgets to look at the shorter term of a generation, where surely it makes a difference whether one is forced to endure wrongful discrimination or not...

...There was another jump under Richard Nixon, who had 48 administrative assistants and 5,395 people in his executive office staff...

...Of the latter, Stein says that Nixon had little interest in economics and "did not come into office with great zeal to reduce either the expenditure or the revenue side of the budget_9 He did not think that the country was suffering from excesses on either side...

...What is not said or written cannot be leaked...

...But courtiers are notoriously idle people, and officials with not enough to do will always intrigue and leak...

...This book calls to mind one of Jane Austen's characters who hated reading history: " I t tells me nothing that does not vex or weary m e . . . the men all so good for nothing, apd hardly any women at all...

...Sowell prefers relatively freer markets, and thus policies toward that end--repeal of minimum wage laws, and also deregulation, for example...

...But he himself was not above shooting off his mouth at private sessions with his team, even allowing them to take notes at the time...

...That, it seems to me, is the real lesson for Mr...

...Yet there are, I believe, some reasons for optimism...

...Thirty years have passed since the decision in Brown v. Board o f Education, and twenty since enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and yet the races increasingly are polarized, the plight of the truly disadvantaged worsens, and the evolution of civil rights, especially through the courts, is embittering the nation...

...More than a century later, Winston Churchill's methods were not much different...

...Ideologically you should fall on your sword," his son told him, "but existentially it's great...

...But by the early seventies it was quite fully grown, and gradually it has been made to apply to many racial and ethnic groups, and also to women--roughly 70 percent of the population is included in it, by one count...

...a subject that is one of the nation's most important, yet most confused...

...It is perhaps important to stress that SoweU does not deny that discrimination may be one of these factors...

...It was exciting because of the important decisions made, the small number of people involved, and the secrecy of it all...

...Stein writes about Stephen Chapman is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune...

...Sowell is pessimistic about the present course of civil rights, even despairing...

...was written not for pleasure but from necessity...

...Any reader who wants a compact overview of the important economic events of the last halfcentury, according to the consensus interpretation of mainstream economics, will find it here...

...This was the implicit teaching of Brown, and it was a seed that later sprouted into the belief that segregation must be remedied by integ r a t i o n - t h a t anything short of a substantial degree of "racial balance" in the schools would harm the hearts and minds of minority school children...

...One is tempted to want to remind Sowell, in Lincoln's language, that to discriminate on the basis of race is to "blow out the moral lights around US...

...Haig first came to prominence as a colonel on Kissinger's staff, when Kissinger was still Nixon's security assistant...

...Here is where Sowell comes out: Statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings...

...His unique combination of talents has produced a unique book, a work of informed and deeply felt argument about Terry Eastland is co-author of Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to Bakke and Weber...

...According to the Court, the wrong 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 of segregation by race lay in its effects upon those segregated--effects that the modern authorities cited by the Court said were harmful...

...There have always been some confusions in American foreign policy, but they have been greatly magnified in recent decades by the gigantism of central government, both at the White House and in the Secretariat of State...

...With the battle for civil rights "won," Sowell believes it is counterproductive to make every issue affecting minorities into a civil rights matter, where inevitably one's good faith is called into question, and racism is charged, if one is unlucky enough to be on the "wrong" side of an issue_9 It is Sowell's conviction that realities such as the ones he has elaborated in this and his other books should cause civil rights activists to reconsider their rhetoric and the kind of policies they advocate...

...He seems to have conceived his famous "percentage deal" with Stalin, which settled spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in October 1944, entirely by himself...

...Whatever its flaws, it is not a tract against Arthur Laffer...

...Only true aficionados will remain alert through long sections on such matters as the arcana of budget projections...

...One is tempted to recall the methods of Lord Palmerston, perhaps the most consistently successful foreign minister in history...

...Readers of Sowell's previous books-such as Knowledge and Decisions, Ethnic America, Markets and Minorities, and last year's The Economics and Politics o f Race: An International Perspective'--will be familiar with what Sowell thinks of this vision...

...But Civil Rights: Rhetoric ov Reality...

...Franklin Roosevelt got the first six "administrative assistants," on advice received, I regret to say, from Stanley _9 , _9 _9 Baldwin s eminence gnse, Tom Jones...

...PRESIDENTIAL ECONOMICS: THE MAKING OF ECONOMIC POLICY FROM ROOSEVELT TO REAGAN AND BEYOND Herbert Stein/Simon and Schuster/S16.95 Stephen Chapman D e s p i t e a long career as one of the nation's most prominent conservative economists, Herbert Stein is best known today as an opponent of the economic policies of the most conservative President since Calvin Coolidge...

...That is one of the reasons Presidential Economics comes as a surprise...

...He merely sends out questions to be answered or papers to be copied when he is here in the evenings, and our only business is to obtain from the clerks the information that is wanted...

...But as Sowell points out, it follows that if segregation is in itself harmful, the reason for the segregation doesn't matter...

...I am sure he is right in claiming that the systematic and deliberate leakings which militated against his interests came from the Reagan crew...

...Kissinger spread the disease of gigantism to the State Department when he moved there...

...Or even alone...

...And so, to achieve this balance, school districts eventually were directed by federal courts to bus their pupils...

...Brown, as Sowell writes, was "a political masterpiece," a decision that repudiated Supreme Court precedent and Southern custom without appearing to point an accusatory finger...

...According to this vision, politics becomes all-important, because it is only through political action that moral accounts can be settled, and equal results--and the socioeconomic advancement they suggest--can finally be secured...

...Not so widely understood is what Sowell also shows: that Brown itself augured this shift in meaning...

...The controls were more complicated_9 Nixon was "allergic to unemployment" and thus reluctant to fight inflation with tight money...

...He caught the disease too...

...For more than a decade now he has had the courage to ask many of the right questions, and to follow the evidence wherever it has led...

...It is generally recognized that the meaning of the term has changed greatly since Brown, to require treatment on the basis of race and other irrelevant characteristics, and Sowell demonstrates how this change has occurred, briefly reviewing the court cases that led to Supreme Court approval of btising in 1971, and the administrative actions that ushered in government-imposed quotas and "goals" in employment...

...But these flaws shouldn't overshadow the book's many virtues--lucidity, adequate thoroughness, and somewhat more humility than one is used to from economists...

...He has also been on the receiving end of personal attacks from members of this elite (the epilogue--"The Degeneration of a Controversy"--is Sowell's response to his critics...

...In any case, he had little support from the public or in a Democratic-controlled Congress to do so...

...S t e i n ' s criticisms o f supply-side economics are less stimulating...

...S t e i n deserves credit for his nutritious approach...

...It may be a necessary part of the Washington power game, under the Kissinger rules, for the Secretary of State to have a court...

...And on this, surely Sowell is right...

...But his book is at once less polemical and more ambitious than that...

...A polemic, however wrongheaded, would hold the reader's attention better than a history...

...Sowell is not only upset by the ' 'politicization of race," the "lies and deceptions" associated with racepreferential policies, and "the lofty contempt of a remote and insulated elite [judges, bureaucrats, civil rights activists, and members of the media] from the mass of citizens...

...The nation is still a long way from where it should be on civil rights...

...Though he has often been highly critical of Ronald Reagan, he has not gone over to the enemy camp...

...and that during the current "quota era" disadvantaged blacks with little experience or education have actually retrogressed relative to whites of similar description, while more "advantaged" blacks have risen both in absolute and relative terms, in comparison with their white counterparts...

...that this trend was not accelerated either by that legislation or by the quotas introduced during the seventies...

...A growing number of these people wanted and got a finger in foreign policy, always the most glamorous aspect of government activity...

...In this vision, as Sowell elaborates it, statistical disparities among groups in terms of income, occupation, education, and so forth result from invidious discrimination...

...For Sowell, advancement does not lie principally through politics but elsewhere--through the marketplace...

...Thomas Sowell/William Morrow/S11.95 Terry Eastland Thomas Sowell notes in the preface that Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality...

...To have the fundamental meaning of civil rights finally addressed in Washington is a necessary step toward a satisfactory answer...

...High policy is not a matter of collegiate endeavor...

...It certainly should not be shaped by seminar...

...Sir George Shee, one of the under-secretaries, wrote to a colleague in 1832: "Lord Palmerston, you know, never consults an Under-Secretary...

...This vision was only developing at the time of Brown, and it was first applied only to blacks...

...Intentionally or not, Stein's account of the imposition of controls casts the author in an unflattering light_9 The meeting at Camp David from August 13 to 15 of 1971, he says, was "one of the most exciting and dramatic events in the history of economic policy...

...is not a book of economic policy argument, although it is in part about Morrow, $15.95...

...Soweil is an economist who writes well, understands law and the courts, knows history and social science, and, not least of all, cares about his country and its future...

...That perception is Stein's fault, but it isn't entirely fair...

...Food stamps are a form of recompense for past discrimination against minorities _9 . . whose parents didn't get enough to e a t . " And no doubt there will continue to be pressures brought and things done in the name of civil rights in matters that have no busihess being called civil rights issues_9 But we may well be moving toward a recovery of the proper meaning of civil rights and their vigilant, colorblind protection, and toward a more realistic understanding of the complicated landscape of racial and ethnic progress, and the limits of government action to effect it...

...Perhaps more important, he was "impatient with the dull, pedestrian and painful economics of conventional conservatism_9 He called that the economics of three yards and a cloud of dust, whereas he yearned for the long bomb...

...Ford and Carter get a scant 26 pages, with no mention of such ventures as Carter's asinine proposal for a $50 income tax rebate, his fruitless jawboning of inflation, or his admirable deregulatory measures...

...The worst is tedium...

...Still, it's hard to escape the conclusion that his greatest pleasure is deriding supply-siders...

...The "civil rights vision" will continue to have a hold on many...

...Two months later he decided to cash in Britain's part of the deal and use the army to save Greece from the Communists --a move which gave the Mediterranean to the West for an entire generation...

...According to Sowell, there are many reasons for the relative positions of racial and ethnic groups, among them age, location, immigration, and cultural habits, in a d d i t i o n , to discrimination...

...The best is his examination of how Richard Nixon, an avowed opponent of expanding government involvement in the economy, could succumb to the most draconian wage and price controls in American peacetime history, besides presiding over a rapid increase in federal spending...

...Meanwhile, there is a growing awareness among minority intellectuals that not every issue facing minorities can be explained by discrimination and thus reduced to a matter of civil rights, or resolved by government action...

...Reagan to learn...

...When he turns his attention to more worthy targets, as in a recent attack on Walter Mondale in the New York Times, he makes a persuasive de facto case for re-electing Reagan...

...are in large part based on the findings presented in those books...

...Why then should he be surprised and shocked to read it all in the Washington Post...

...Some of the author's recollections of his government service are illuminating...

...The spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly, for example, contains essays by William Julius Wilson, the Chicago sociologist, and Gary Puckrein, a young historian at Rutgers, that tend to focus attention on factors other than discrimination in understanding the socioeconomic situation of blacks...

...Sowell, of course, demonstrates such a sense, on almost every page he writes...

...Sowell's point is simply that slippery social science should not be the basis for such school desegregation policies as were implicit in the Brown decision...

...But his book has defects as a historical survey too, chiefly its idiosyncratic emphases...

...in fact, he makes a better case against segregation than the Court did in 1954: " I t is both wrong and socially dangerous for the state to classify people by race for different treatment...

...Hoover had difficulty persuading Congress to provide money for a third...

...When he, in turn, became Secretary of State, he surrounded himself with large numbers of assistants and advisers...

...The meaning of civil rights is more and more debated, not just in magazines and books but also in corridors of federal power (e.g., the Civil Rights Commission) where, previously, race-preferential policies were seldom questioned...

...Puckrein writes frankly that many of the problems facing blacks today the growing number of female-headed households, teenage pregnancy, high black youth crime rates, drug abuse-cannot be "addressed by federal regulation or resolved by the tactics employed during the civil-rights era...

...He traces, in a temperate and generally fair manner, through the economic policies of the last nine Presidents, explaining where they went right as well as wrong...

...Brown concerned segregation by law...

...Take away the sins of discrimination, and all groups would be achieving on more or less equal terms...

...Yet the cost of such a masterpiece can be measured in the Court's failure to articulate a principled justification for its decision, and in its use instead of social science--the findings of so-called "modern authority...

...Lincoln had to pay for a secretary out of his own pocket...

...What is more, some of the most damaging leaks--because they were plainly unmalicious--came from Haig's own staff...