Correspondence
Elmer Fudge What has prompted you to change your name at the height of your career (TAS, February 1987)? It may be true, as Joseph Epstein says, that R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. "represents a distinct...
...Read for yourself...
...Sorry, but I do: It's a terrible idea...
...Finn may simply be so fearful of the destructive consequences of intramural bickering among conservatives (vide his piece in your November 1986 issue) that he declines to argue at all—and hurls bulls of excommunication instead...
...By transposing Madonna's order (deliberately...
...I hear you've been running around with hookers...
...I conclude that for homemakers the ERA "would have had little short-term impact after 1976...
...The Great Acid Rain Debate" AMERICAN SPECTATOR REPRINT To what extent is American industry responsible for acid rain...
...You were so named because your father believed himself to be the greatest man on earth, and felt the infant would be honored to live in his shadow...
...Finn may actually wish to discard all the nondemocratic thinkers of the past, thus rendering "cultural literacy" ever so much easier to acquire...
...Was that fair and square...
...Randolph had a great deal of money, mostly extorted from the residents of Utah during his sojourn there as Chief Justice of the Utah Territory, appointed by President Buchanan...
...Does this win your contest...
...Highly negative vibes, I'll bet she will tell you...
...These reprints are ideal for distribution to your employees, shareholders, concerned citizens and the press...
...Jane Mansbridge Professor of Political Science Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois Fred Barnes replies: Okay, okay, I get the drift...
...Scortaris...
...C Westmoreland Charleston, South Carolina Send Me No Flowers I write to correct some inaccuracies, not of fact, but of implication, in Fred Barnes's review of my Why We Lost the ERA (TAS, February 1987...
...With friends like me and TAS, Jane Mansbridge doesn't need any enemies...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987...
...Its effects would have been almost entirely indirect, as a mandate "encouraging" attention to the admittedly subtle problems of women when most political, economic, and even social power is held by men...
...Take the following passage, literallycorrect, in which Barnes writes that I describe Phyllis Schlafly as moving, in his words, "the argument from one over equal rights to one centered on the practical effects the amendment might have, such as requiring combat duty by women and weakening the family...
...Veal surely has the right to possess, even to utter, these lamentable opinions, I have to say that it makes me sad and slightly nauseous to see them emanating from an American...
...As with draftees in combat, the real story I have to tell here is how and why some of the public came to see the ERA as having an effect that it would not in fact have had...
...However, I take issue with the expressed myth that I was betrayed by my lawyer, Dan Burt...
...This new doctrine, which states with a state ERA have been more likely to adopt than those without, helps combat the pernicious effects of no-fault divorce laws—which, incidentally, no feminist organization ever supported and which feminist scholarship has shown is more likely to hurt women than to help them...
...From Mansbridge's standpoint, I suppose the worst thing I could say at this point is that I agree with her about no-fault divorce...
...Finn is best known, of course, as an advocate of "cultural literacy," which I had assumed meant reading carefully and taking seriously the central thinkers of the Western tradition...
...If you don't believe me, ask any homemaker about the vibes she gets from feminists...
...True, she did say the ERA would help homemakers in the long run...
...It would encourage, for example, the feminist legal theory that the homemaker makes an equal contribution to the marriage...
...Once opponents turned public attention to the amendment's effects, they were already on their way to winning.' Mansbridge says...
...Some readers might take away from Barnes's two sentences, which slide almost imperceptibly from "effects the amendment might have" to "the amendment's effects," the idea that I thought the ERA would require combat duty by women and weaken the family...
...Can this be the reason you've changed your name to Elmer...
...Elmer Senior thought he was the greatest man on earth, too), ran off to a far country where he took a non-white wife, and was never mentioned again by the rest of the family . . . until his grandson, also named "Elmer Tyrrell," developed a unique formula for manufacturing glue from cow horns, while working in a rendering plant at Sioux City, Iowa...
...Finn, in a less agitated moment, will be amenable to doing so...
...Box 10448, Arlington, VA 22210...
...Veal uses exactly the same arguments as do senior government officials in the Peoples Republic of China, which nation I just visited for the first time, in explaining why democracy is ill-suited to their land and vice versa...
...In fact, I spent most of one chapter spelling out how the ERA would affect homemakers...
...Burt my chances with the jury and decided to accept a settlement after the judge imposed an inordinately high burden of.proof on my attorney before a jury dealing with matters unfamiliar to them...
...That support should not, however, deteriorate into uncritical fundamentalism...
...Conservative democrats need to face these problems openly...
...Copies are now available...
...Aaron Haspel V New York, New York Back in 1888, your great-grandfather Elmer Tyrrell married a girl named Mary Emmett, daughter of a prominent Copperhead politician, Randolph Emmett, of Greencastle, Indiana...
...And with billions of federal dollars now poised at "correcting" acidic rain, Dr...
...Meanwhile, your great uncle Elmer Tyrrell, Jr...
...If that conviction on my part "stultifies" my "life's work" in the eyes of you and others who may share your blighted worldview, that is a price I gladly pay...
...Dixy Lee Ray thoroughly examines this controversy by laying out the varied and complex factors involved...
...This article originally appeared in the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator...
...While Mr...
...I do point out that right was not always on the side of the ERA movement...
...We may as well try to persuade modern scientists to study phlogiston and Ptolemaic astronomy...
...In response to a letter writer's argument that "modern democracy with its one-person, one-vote popular sovereignty" undermines the conservative tenets of limited government and individual responsibility, Mr...
...The sentence is, again, literally correct...
...3. Finally, Mr...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Anyway, (continued on page 52) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 9 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) I'm glad to know I was "literally correct" on the points she mentions...
...She has a complex argument on this, and I guess from her perspective it's a persuasive one...
...Throughout the totalitarian and authoritarian nations of the world—a far larger set, let us bear in mind, than the democratic nations—Mr...
...A fairly diligent undergraduate should require no more than a semester or so, I think, to read every extant word written before 1900 by every human being who was possessed of "a deep and abiding affection for and belief in democracy...
...It's not just in China...
...I can think of three possible ways to resolve this seeming contradiction: 1. Mr...
...Must have been tough explaining that one to her friends...
...Please send me reprints of Dixy Lee Ray's "The Great Acid Rain Debate...
...Madonna, you may remember, is the author of that curt and cryptic letter in the February issue reading, "Saluto R. Emmett, Scortaris te, Vale...
...Mr...
...We should have listened more carefully to opponents' worries about the amendment's effects and respected more deeply the kinds of truth those worries reflected...
...Near the end of the trial, I weighed with Mr...
...But less than 15 percent of these legislators were women...
...Successive generations descending from Elmer and Mary were careful to use the name "Randolph Emmett" for their children, in hopes that the great man might bestow more than their fair share of his fortune on them when he died...
...One reason was that feminists usually treat homemakers with disdain, as if their integrity as women and human beings is hurled into doubt by their decision to stay home...
...The practice of adversary politics makes listening to one's "opponents" difficult...
...replies: Mr...
...My attorney did not betray me...
...Opportunist that you are, you sprinted to the Arlington courthouserecently and changed your name from Randolph Emmett to Randolph Elmer Tyrrell, in an attempt to ingratiate yourself with this distant cousin, who is reported to be manipulating many others in the family, as well...
...Veal, I do, fervently and permanently believe that cultural conservatism presupposes a deep and relentless ardor for democracy...
...Cultural literacy" may be a mere aesthetic accomplishment, the ideas of the pasthaving been superseded by an enlightened modernity...
...One does wonder, though, what grounds exist for asserting that universal literacy in a dead language of thought is one of the Republic's central needs...
...Further, I was disillusioned by the large number of low level, narrowly focused witnesses for the defense who were allowed to present to the jury, in the context "state of mind," hearsay evidence...
...In my own opinion (which I mention only in the hope of satisfying Mr...
...Having convinced themselves of this, they proceed to do all sorts of unsavory things to college students, university professors, and even government officials who persist in pressing for greater freedom, for more rights, for multi-candidate elections, and for other of the trappings and accoutrements of democracy...
...Emmett, te saluto...
...Even I can imagine the embarrassment she must have felt as a committed feminist upon reading a rave review in a conservative sheet...
...And I'm also sorry to add that nothing Mansbridge now says takes away from the fact that she's written a fair, honest, trenchant book...
...Why, then, allow them a place in our "conversations...
...She'll just have to learn to live with that...
...represents a distinct case . . . of cognominal overload," but does R. Elmer really solve the problem, and isn't it a bit late, in any case...
...Finally, I do not argue that the ERA "lost fair and square" In the unratified state legislatures, where the ERA had to win only seven more votes, 80 percent of the women legislators favored the ERA, compared to only 40 percent of the men...
...Unfortunately, however, shortly after your father came along, the great Randolph Emmett finally died, and bequeathed all his money to the ASPCA, leaving his descendants only a rich knowledge of, and fascination with, polygamy...
...Which is to say, "Hi, Emmett...
...I devoted two chapters in my short book to explaining why the ERA would not have required sending women draftees into combat...
...Finn may not take dead authors quite so seriously as those of his own generation...
...My assumption must have been wrong, though, for hardly any of these figures had anything resembling "a deep and abiding affection for and belief in democracy" (and some of those who did, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, found this affection compatible with totalitarian sentiments...
...So long, N4.9, I must say I'm surprised...
...Vale...
...Finn bluntly states, "Anyone who doesn't start with a deep and abiding affection for and belief in democracy has no standing, in my view, to participate in the conversations about 'cultural conservatism'—or about much else...
...But it implies, and subsequent sentences seem to confirm the implication, that the ERA would hurt homemakers...
...The response of feminists to my book, along with much of my earlier experience, bespeaks a women's movement very different in fact from the movement the media sometimes conveys, and that Mr...
...Lawrence B. Hughes Marshall, Michigan You have wronged Madonna...
...Finn's criteria for "standing"), democratic government has worked well in America and deserves conservative support...
...Veal's arguments and reasoning are accepted, at least by those in power, and deployed to forestall motion toward democracy...
...Yet the underlying willingness to listen to women in the feminist movement has surfaced dramatically in the enthusiastic reception my book has received from one feminist reviewer after another, even though the book is quite critical not only of our strategy but of our entire stance...
...True, she did say that female draftees would never see combat...
...Yes, Mr...
...Enclosed is $ $ 1.50 for one $ 10.00 for ten $ 20.00 for twenty-five $ 75.00 for one hundred $350.00 for five hundred Name Address City State Zip The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...As a member of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, she is not content to take the easy route by fingering a convient bogey-man...
...History has a way of repeating itself, and sure enough, this Elmer Tyrrell became patriarch of the famed Elmer's Glue Company, and rich enough to have avaricious relatives naming their children after him...
...2. Alternatively, Mr...
...But in the heat of battle over the ERA, a lot of homemakers felt threatened by the amendment and its advocates...
...Anti-feminists were often telling us important things that we needed to hear...
...John M Duff Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania General Westmoreland on Dan Burt I found Ben Stein's article, "Free to Libel," in the February 1987 issue of The American Spectator, impressive and agree with its argumentation...
...Oportet te paenitere...
...Barnes too implies with his perhaps not carefully chosen words, "hysterical" and "feminist screeds...
...Not only do democratic principles sometimes clash with civilization and liberty, but democracies often seem incapable of selfpreservation...
...In fact, I argued that the ERA would have done neither...
...probably) you have turned a beautifully classic message into ungrammatical gibberish...
...Ray demonstrates that knowledge of its causes and research into its history remain woefully inadequate...
...Take another example: "Mansbridge insists that homemakers weren't merely fantasizing when they concluded that both the ERA and the women's movement were not out to aid them...
...Because I thought the story of how people—both for and against the ERA—came, incorrectly, to think the ERA would have this effect shows how our "adversary" politics tends to distort our understandings of reality...
...The trouble was, this wasn't what feminist lawyers were saying during the ERA fight, as she notes in her book...
...Finn Angler With a single intemperate sentence in [the Correspondence section of] your February issue, Chester E. Finn, Jr., stultifies most of his own life's work...
...It should run, "R...
...Edward Thomas Veal Alexandria, Virginia Chester E. Finn, Jr...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
