Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Takeover Talk In his article "The Selling of America" (TAS, May 1988), Irwin M. Stelzer expresses delight at the takeover mania. He rejoices at the profits that investment banks and...
...Where does he get his crystal ball, and can the rest of us have one, too...
...If a party can be elected into office on less than 35 percent of the vote, there has to be something wrong with the system...
...Again, think of a business environment in which there was a guarantee of stability and an assurance that, regardless of performance, business would remain in the same hands...
...Irwin M Stelzer replies: Mr...
...It is no whitewash but a candid recollection and, yes, defense of a remarkable public life...
...I was employed as a reporter, the youngest on the staff, from September of 1919 until I went down with the ship when the re-named Call ceased publication about 1924, except for a few leaves of absence...
...I do recall clearly that Agnes Smedley, whom I looked up to as an older, more sophisticated, and rather glamorous lady, quite flattered me one day by inviting me to be her guest at dinner at a nearby Child's...
...To substantiate this claim, Mr...
...To describe Mrs...
...Methvin has read Talmadge's book closely, he knows that as a young man Herman Talmadge teamed up with the legendary civil rights attorney Austin T. Walden to defend a black man accused of murder in a barroom brawl with a white...
...Cranston refers to "the British Constitution...
...Cranston's article gives us the answer...
...The others spanned a remarkable array from economic processes to dance, from criminal law to the "effects of natural and physical science on human relationships...
...Let us hope that it is not too late for those supposedly intelligent individuals to see reason, and to put the government of the country firmly in the hands of those who wish to serve the country, not to own it...
...Also at heart is the diminishing presence of the ethical factor in socio-economic relations...
...Nonpayment of the new poll tax by the poor will inevitably deny them the right to vote, rendering a sizable portion of the population non-existent in the eyes of the state...
...Methvin's own mother must be in as bad a shape as Lizzie Borden's...
...It makes no difference to them whether stockbrokers are making a fast buck or plunging from the twentieth floor: real economic growth is visible, whatever the academics try to tell us...
...Their aim is to make a quick buck and then move on to another company from which they can strip the cash...
...In my view, the owners of any business should be free to decide on the debt/equity ratios with which those businesses will operate...
...Cranston's assertion that "things would be very much worse if she had not come to power" is a lynchpin in his argument...
...Sometimes it is more appropriate not to be sardonic, and simply to state the facts and allow the reader to reflect on the kinds of behavior of which men are capable .. . —Thomas L. Geer Columbus, Ohio THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 49...
...Philip Hochstein New York, New York Cut It Out I found your attempts at making the savage killing of a kitten and a parrot into foundations for humor offensive (The Continuing Crisis, TAS, July 1988...
...The things that men do to themselves and each other are sometimes humorous, as your column points out regularly each month...
...That is what stockholders do, in effect, when they decide to choose new managers to run their businesses, in the full knowledge that those new managers take on additional debt...
...Need more be said...
...Banning the import of corned beef would have had the same effect as a full-scale military operation against Argentina, but theprime minister wanted to show that we were still A Force To Be Reckoned With...
...It is the very absence of a written constitution that has enabled this government to ride roughshod over those who might be a potential embarrassment to it...
...intergovernmental organizations...
...I wish that Mr...
...Early in his piece, Mr...
...I merely said it is "in some peril," noting that in a 1981 document knowledge "was but one of five categories" and that in the 1983 document Mr...
...Harrigan worries about the debt taken on in the course of many takeovers...
...89.95 plus $4.50 domestic shipping...
...I (who am not a Conservative) attempted a measured appraisal of her achievements...
...Write: Box 10, CSA Publications, SUNY-Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13901...
...Thatcher as a "formidable champion of liberty" is a statement likely to provoke the anger of much of the population of Northern Ireland where, as I remember, a state of martial law exists...
...In his final run for office in 1980, Talmadge had the active support of many blacks, including Martin Luther King's niece Alveda King Beal...
...They got the charge reduced to manslaughter...
...She has sold off the nationalized industries to create an infinitesimal reduction in taxes...
...She has emerged clean as a whistle from one political scandal after another while those around her fell...
...Jarolimek's committee...
...He rejoices at the profits that investment banks and lawyers are making as a result of corporate takeovers they have engineered...
...To say, as Methvin does, that I simply edited those videotapes is tantamount to saying that William Novak's collaboration with Lee Iacocca amounted to his editing Iacocca's television commercials...
...Is this a show of her legendary strength...
...She has banned books and newspaper articles to protect her own...
...I thought she was recruiting me...
...Jarolimek produced it was "not the overriding goal...
...She has eliminated her opponents in the cabinet and replaced them with spineless yes-men...
...Are values to be only financial...
...A" for Efron Rare indeed, not to say exhilarating, is a review like that by Edith Efron of Paul Weaver's The Suicidal Corporation (TAS, June 1988...
...Naturally, it is better to include thetransmission of knowledge among the goals of education than not to...
...Charles also violates a rule he lays down...
...I also recall that when I got back to the office, I was anxiously interrogated by a colleague a few years older than I, who knew Agnes Smedley much better than I did...
...There is still too much bureaucracy, but pre Thatcher governments set it up and entrenched it, and Mrs...
...It is not about bits of paper whizzing about the floor of the Stock Exchange...
...Finn incorrectly states that the document identifies the main objective of social studies to be "to prepare young people to identify, understand, and work to solve the problems that face our increasingly diverse nation and interdependent world...
...Thatcher's Conservative party...
...Certainly, the inefficiencies and sloth that would result would be extraordinary...
...The social services have recently suffered massive cutbacks that make the needy even needier than before...
...Italics added.] Information gained in the classroom should be helpful in understanding events and conditions in the world outside of school...
...Agnes Smedley Remembered I have read your most interesting review by Harvey Klehr of the Agnes Smedley biography by the MacKinnons as well as the book (TAS, May 1988...
...I never suggested that the social studies establishment had banished it altogether...
...Business and Industrial Council Washington, D.C...
...She said that she assumed that since I was Jewish, I was probably preoccupied with the Russian Revolution...
...With so preposterous a collaborator, Senator Talmadge must be forgiven much of the folly of his "memoirs...
...But this has not been reflectedin the quality of treatment accorded to its patients...
...He won a Pulitzer Prize for his steaming columns after some Kluxer-types bombed a synagogue in Atlanta in October 1958...
...Harris points out that "the takeover phenomenon hasn't done a thing for the American economy...
...In preparing for this project, I did a considerable amount of research in Georgia politics of the Talmadge era...
...She herself, she said, was determined to spend her life in China because she was certain that it was the best hope for world Communism...
...The government's constant restructuring and juggling of figures to disguise the truth would imply that things are a lot worse at the bottom of the heap than they are prepared to admit...
...There was one young woman, probably of Smedley's age, who openly leaned toward Communism...
...Over 850 pages...
...Although Herman Talmadge fought to preserve segregation during his years as governor of Georgia, the advancesthe state made in education, health care, and other social services benefited both races...
...Although unable to recall the date of that interesting dinner, the conversation that took place is unforgettable to me...
...After that, she recalled that she was due back in the office and passed up dessert, although she did insist on paying the check...
...Johnson is still with us (I am 86) I would welcome his recollections...
...Talmadge was Georgia's foremost political leader in those days, and the foremost denouncer of the Supreme Court and inciter of "massive resistance...
...Jarolimek's committee identified nine "important areas...
...There is little middle ground for reason or objectivity...
...In other words, what I take to be the proper knowledge transmission goals of social studies occupy roughly one-third of one-third of the "goals" espoused by Mr...
...Cranston also makes much of Mrs...
...In the fourth sentence following Mr...
...Perhaps in a hundred years it will be possible to view the segregationists of the mid-twentieth century with the same balance and detachment with which we now see the defenders of an earlier Southern way of life...
...Methvin and scores of others he fails to mention...
...Until that time, we can at least reject Methvin's implied argument that segregationist politicians such as Talmadge were, by definition, accomplices to Klan violence...
...It is clear that Mr...
...Thatcher could have got the Argentinian army out of the Falklands "by banning the import of corned beef...
...On the page preceding the one from which Mr...
...current issues...
...The fact is that a large part of the British press (as of the American) is more irresponsible today than it was in the past, and no party wants to allow it a gentleman's freedom if its owners are not gentlemen enough to know how to use it...
...Years later, when Walden was trying a racially explosive case in Miller County, Governor Talmadge dispatched state troopers to provide him with round-the-clock protection...
...But that isn't my central concern...
...We must not speculate (he says) by suggesting that things might have been different from what they have been, yet he goes on to speculate that Mrs...
...Klehr's suspicion that the MacKinnons make far too much of her apparent non-affiliation with the Comintern...
...The very reason that journalists continue to fight such cases is to show that the existing secrecy laws are anything but honest and decent, and that they must be changed...
...Perhaps she should now write one of her own, placing "primacy on the culture over the economics...
...Let us not ignore the fact that the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands were on the verge of becoming third-class citizens with few if any rights as British subjects when the conflict began...
...Lest anyone have doubt, I so say now...
...She added that she did not wish to belittle the Communist regime, but she felt that the future of the world would probably be decided in China, because of its vast population and the capacity for endurance of its people...
...For this reason, a few black leaders (such as Robert Parks of Cedartown) supported Talmadge in his first run for the Senate in 1956, and others (such as insurance executive Jesse Hill) followed suit during his campaign for re-election...
...This was around the corner from our office at 112 Fourth Avenue...
...Hummon Talmadge In his recent review-essay "Hummon Talmadge of Georgia" (TAS, April 1988), Eugene Methvin argues that "to suggest the false while suppressing the true" is to lie as surely as doing in one's "mother with a rusty ax in broad daylight in a downtown department store" is to murder...
...Mrs...
...Neil Charles Carmel, Indiana Maurice Cranston replies: Mr...
...He seems not to understand that a strong economy depends on something more than deal-making...
...They have done enormous harm to well-established, sound companies and to many communities, managers, and workers...
...This seems to be the essence of the dilemma that Miss Efron posits as she draws a line and dares "conservatives" to cross over and receive the blessings of self-criticism...
...Call Professor Winchell's own witness, the late Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill...
...Harrigan argues, first, that I do not seem "to understand that a strong economy depends on something more than deal making...
...Neil Charles's letter confirms at least one of his own assertions, that Mrs...
...The truth is that much of the social and economic progress Georgia has enjoyed over the past forty years is the result of the foundation laid during Herman Talmadge's years as governor...
...Economic growth is measured in jobs, standards of living, and industrial output...
...It even says that "programs that combine the acquisition of knowledge and skills with the application of democratic values to life through social participation present an ideal balance in social studies...
...Quoth McGill: "The state's political leadership has been of the sort which has created a climate of incitement to fanatics and extremist persons, many of whom are neurotic to the point of mental instability...
...cabinet lists...
...Thatcher really achieved...
...She was Dorothy Day, who later lived with Mike Gold of Masses fame...
...Knowledge was one of three major headings...
...And as for the first-past-the-post electoral system, it is an outmoded travesty of democracy...
...Your readers may be interested in knowing a bit more about what that document actually has to say about the place of knowledge in the social studies curriculum...
...Unhealthy, to say the least...
...He expresses the view of many responsible American businessmen, namely that the "iron triangle of takeover mania is the old story of speculators triumphing over investors...
...Corporate raiders aren't interested in corporate efficiency...
...But there is yet time...
...Britain is the only European country not to have proportional representation, an unsatisfactory state of affairs in a three-party state...
...Surely he needs no reminding that no such thing exists...
...Stelzer would read D. George Harris's article "They Took Over His Company" in the May number of Business Month...
...Under it, Mr...
...Look at the relative weights...
...While the Golden Calf is being worshipped by some in the business pages of newspapers, and the Ten Commandments are being handed down in the editorial pages, Miss Efron makes the distinction between the pays legal and the pays reel that de Gaulle was fond of doing, and chooses the reality of fact and the fact of reality...
...Indeed, by 1959 Talmadge was drawing fire from the segregationist press for stating on the floor of the Senate that the Brown decision was the law of the land...
...The atmosphere at the Call office was not favorable to Communist infiltration, but there was some strange reluctance on the part of a few "liberals" to identify with the anti-Communism that prevailed among the staff and the editors...
...That is simply a variation of the argument that Reagan's opposition to affirmative action quotas somehow made Howard Beach possible...
...She has without doubt made the rich richer and the poor poorer...
...The inaccuracies begin in the first paragraph with Methvin's misstatement of my role in producing Talmadge's recent autobiography...
...more...
...In the interval, while she was undergoing a self-liberation from her Communist ties, she wrote and edited a superb weekly Garden Page for the Staten Island Advance when I was its editor...
...As for the poor men who so needlessly suffered in the conflict (not "war"), they were not allowed to attend the victory parades for fear of deflating Thatcher's already hollow victory...
...If Mr...
...The facts and figures to back up this assertion (which are too extensive to go into here) are detailed in Talmadge's autobiography...
...The tragedy of Herman Talmadge," according to Methvin, "is that he had so much political talent and such a devoted following that he might have moved mountains, and yet he accomplished so little...
...At any rate, she certainly has parsed the book she was reading...
...Thatcher Basher Maurice Cranston has obviously lived too long in an ivory tower...
...That puts him on the losing side of history just as surely as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were...
...In calling it an apologia, Methvin has stumbled upon a very apt historical analogy...
...It is all very well to criticize James Callaghan for failing to rescue an ailing economy, but has Thatcher really done any better...
...And if he seriously believes that, once the all powerful state has been established it will quietly withdraw to allow Britain to run itself, he should know that power-crazed egotists never quit...
...To be sure, the man who did these things was a segregationist, but he was not nor could he have been a supporter of racist violence...
...Well, it sure wasn't...
...As for Britain being a "democracy," the facts speak for themselves...
...The reference is to a publication entitled "In Search of a Scope and Sequence for Social Studies," a report of a task force that I chaired...
...Finn draws his citation, the same document says this: Social studies has historically had a special responsibility for the attainment of such educational goals having to do with knowledge of the American heritage, the economic system, law and government, political processes, the history and geography of the world, world cultures, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the principles and ideals of American democracy...
...Herman Talmadge's autobiography forthrightly confronts virtually every charge dredged up by Mr...
...She has extended police powers and used them for political ends (such as raiding the BBC...
...Finn provides a few carefully selected examples, among them a reference to what he calls "another influential NCSS statement adopted in 1983...
...As a British citizen currently residing in the U.S., I feel compelled to reply to some of his more wayward observations with a few of my own...
...If a nation should look to its leader for (to paraphrase Mr...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988Mr...
...Quite right...
...Thatcher's "moral quality . . . courage...
...She not only takes care of the matter at hand, the book under examination, but illuminates with her not-so-gentle irony some of the pertinent economic, political, ideological, and linguistic controversies currently in play among our various civil sects...
...I must have shocked her by responding that I did not favor Communism anywhere and that I felt that the Bolsheviks had hijacked the real Russian Revolution...
...Of course, the exception made in McGill's statement is the real crux of Methvin's brief against Herman Talmadge...
...This causes me to wonder how much credibility can be given to the rest of what he has to say about NAEP results and other matters discussed in the article...
...Finn distorted what he had to say about this NCSS statement in order to serve his own purposes...
...The NCSS statement says simply that such is "a responsibility of social studies programs...
...While in office he was the first deep South senator to appoint a black aide to his staff...
...In spite of modern technology—or perhaps because of it—the ordinary citizen has an enormous need for knowledge that is useful in making informed decisions...
...Kinnock's Labour party is even more resolutely opposed to its introduction than is Mrs...
...Charles that proportional representation is needed in England to ensure majority rule, but Mr...
...Thatcher has "generated hatred amongst her detractors . .. that borders on the fanatical...
...This included viewing videotapes of interviews Talmadge did with a couple of professors at West Georgia College...
...His admittedly "hostile" attack on the personal character and public career of Senator Talmadge is a venomous pastiche of inaccuracies and innuendoes unworthy of a distinguished conservative publication such as The American Spectator...
...And Lao Tzu said: "Abandon learning and there will be no sorrow...
...His mild January 1959 Senate law-and-order speech came on the heels of years of silence in the face of lynchings, beatings, night-riding, and blistering editorials such as McGill's, and was in effect a plea of guilty to the charge of complicity with the Kluxers...
...It is late...
...foreign relations...
...By that definition, Mr...
...Think, for a moment, about an economy in which the management of assets was perpetually frozen in the hands of those who happen to control them at any point in time...
...Thatcher can get away with it because there is no specific law against such action...
...Cranston) "honesty . . . industry . . . justice . . . " etc., then I think it should look somewhere else...
...This is hardly honest or caring...
...The hostile takeovers of recent years have destabilized American business to an alarming degree...
...The banning of books and the seizure of tapes from the BBC should not be permitted in civilized society, yet Mrs...
...So, what has Mrs...
...Thatcher has done something to diminish its power...
...Anthony Harrigan President US...
...Is this honest...
...In all there are about four million people out of work in Britain through no fault of their own...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 47 (continued from page 47) My own recollection is vivid, but not clear as to time...
...For a long time now it has been needful for all Americans to stand up and be counted on the side of law and the due process of law—even when to do so goes against personal beliefs and emotions...
...She later turned on Communism and founded the Catholic Worker movement, publishing its weekly newspaper...
...I would agree with Mr...
...Mark Royden Winchell Department of English Clemson University Clemson, South Carolina (continued on page 46) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) Eugene H. Methvin replies: Far from implying that Talmadge was an accomplice to Klan violence, I stated it plainly, I thought...
...He had introduced meto some of her Indian circle at a restaurant frequented by Indian self-exiles in New York, but he too was anti-Communist, but more on aesthetic than ideological grounds...
...Yet the prime minister will be the last to change it: it works all right for her...
...She has lied to Parliament (over the sinking of the Belgrano...
...Jarolimek and his colleagues prepared indeed recognizes "knowledge" as a legitimate educational goal...
...I note in passing that "application of democratic values to life through social participation" is a classic example of the sort of fuzzy gobbledygook that characterizes this field...
...But in the debate over its implications we are confronted with the Biblical reminder that words can be multiplied without knowledge...
...George Marshall with Agnes Smedley, who was referred to in the caption (NY Times) as Marshall's advisor in his efforts to effect anti-Japanese unity in that country...
...The book was a collaboration based on my taped conversations with the former senator...
...Is "free enterprise" anything more than social Darwinism...
...The record on that is clear...
...continued on page 49) POLITICAL HANDBOOK OF THE WORLD 1988 From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the world's politics in one volume: political parties and movements (legal and illegal) with leadership...
...As the prime minister will not agree to a written constitution, she must expect law reformers to attack from wherever they can...
...There is no question that, like the vast majority of Southern politicians of his generation, Talmadge was a segregationist...
...Since then their status has been upgraded again to justify the colossal expense of maintaining "Fortress Falklands...
...His article "Margaret the Magnificent" (TAS, April 1988) could only have been written by a Thatcherite academic with little or no experience of what mere mortals call "the real world...
...Alexander Kendrick Philadelphia, Pennsylvania In Pursuit of Knowledge In the May 1988 issue of The American Spectator, Chester E. Finn, Jr...
...He thinks it's great that these types spend their days and nights "looking for deal-making opportunities and a chance to earn impressive fees...
...Finn's excerpt, the NCSS document states: The knowledge base provides facts, concepts, and generalizations that help students understand human affairs and the human condition...
...argues [in "The Social Studies Debacle] that social studies educators are biased against the transmission of knowledge as an educational goal...
...Throughout the statement, there are numerous references to the importance of knowledgeand the need for the citizen to be informed about subject matter from history and the social sciences...
...There can be no doubt that the present government has spent more than ever before on the National Health Service...
...Charles's criticisms of British government policy are fair enough...
...Knowledge provides a basis for values and beliefs, and it is the vehicle for the development of skills...
...When the smoke of controversy has cleared, it will be evident that Talmadge's critics have been playing Charles Kingsley to the senator's Cardinal Newman...
...In fact, blacks probably benefited more because they had farther to come...
...And those of us who attempt to remain objective find it harder by the day as we read the ever increasing mountain of propaganda singing the praises of one of the most dangerous people ever to set foot in Britain...
...One of the first things we were taught in history lessons was never to speculate, yet Mr...
...Of course it does...
...Finally, Mr...
...Charles attacks her immoderately...
...He next complains that takeovers "have destabilized American business...
...There is too much interference with the press, but the opposition is demanding more curbs on the press (to protect the right to privacy, etc...
...John Jarolimek Bothell, Washington Chester E. Finn, Jr replies: The 1983 "scope and sequence for social studies" statement that Mr...
...I do not recall his first name, but if this Mr...
...Phone: 607/777-2116...
...Now, as we watch the manic-depressive behavior of the Stock Market and seek a prognosis for the Trade Deficit, we are said to be experiencing an "information explosion...
...Whether or not Agnes Smedley was a Comintern operator may not be of substantial importance at this late date, but the answer might shed some light on the more general suspicion that some mere "fellow-travelers" were more effective and committed operators than the general run of dues-paying Communist members...
...It is hard to understand how a fair-minded person could read the document and conclude that the transmission of knowledge is not an important goal of social studies...
...Recalling my own acquaintance with Agnes Smedley as a fellow employee of a onetime Socialist daily newspaper in New York, the Call, I am inclined to accept Mr...
...I'd like to read it...
...Three of these were "history," "geography," and "government...
...To quote Atlanta editor Ralph McGill, one of the patron saints of Southern liberalism, "I think Governor Talmadge has done a constructive job, that he has contributed greatly to Georgia's progress in every field save race relations...
...One can have some sympathy for an aging politician looking back, but what does one do with an accomplice college professor who claims to have done research on his own and still joins such a historical flummox...
...Britain also has the worst history of human rights violations in the European court, and consistently refuses to act upon the court's rulings...
...So far, shareholders have decided wisely: companies that issued high-yield debt in the 1980-1986 period have grown faster, had higher productivity increases, and increased plant and equipment investment more rapidly than industry in general...
...Dare I say that a man who believes that will believe anything...
...However, the cooking of live anials, whether in a conventional oven, a microwave or a crockpot, reveals only the sickness of the perpetrator of the act, and your treatment reveals only a lapse of your sensibilities...
...This is certainly a "return to Victorian values"—disenfranchisement on a massive scale...
...We don't need to wait a hundred years to pass judgment on such leadership...
...Instead, all the extra cash has gone to bolster up an unwieldy bureaucracy—to pay more administrators while wards close and waiting lists lengthen...
...Since when has it been courageous for one of the most powerful armed forces to take on a tin-pot junta and win...
...She would not talk about Agnes Smedley, except to indicate a deep disapproval...
...Some of Mr...
...If Mark Royden Winchell truly believes "much" of Georgia's progress over the past forty years is the result of Talmadge's six-year governorship, he undoubtedly also thinks the rooster's crowing makes the sun rise...
...But it depends, too, on such deal making—deal making which makes it possible for assets to be deployed in their most productive uses...
...Last year's crash testified to the flimsiness of such an economy and showed how little effect such business has on the man in the street...
...Cloth...
...Thatcher has generated hatred amongst her detractors and a kind of loyalty amongst her followers which borders upon the fanatical...
...I also recall how astonished I was years later when I saw a picture of Gen...
...The devices of corporatism should not be news to those who remember the work of Gerdner and Means in the thirties, or the studies of Adolf A. Berle, the corporation lawyer-diplomat-FDR Brain Truster...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
