The Inheritance
Freedman, Samuel G.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Inheritance" Harding "a third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge...
...As a high school student, Frank organized a pro-Vietnam war rally on Honor America Day...
...Even worse, the apartments in the newly-built public houses compared quite favorably with the Trottas' own modest dwelling, yet their tax dollars were being used to subsidize these projects...
...If he is silent about the mechanisms of censorship, he is apocalyptic about the racial and ethnic future...
...Harding "a third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge joiner...
...into Polish are particularly egregious), it is an honest, earnest, and sympathetic portrait of a group of Americans who, for the past three decades, have been mocked as racist know-nothings by their liberal "betters...
...Ever since you got married," Silvio scolded her, "you're a Yankee fan and a Republican...
...First you wanna integrate...
...What legal meaning should that "should" have...
...Indeed, Freedman ends up largely echoing George Meany's indictment: The liberal agenda has been hijacked by counter-cultural elitists who have nothing but scorn for traditional American values...
...Few of conservatism's themes resonated more deeply with the children of immigrants," writes Freedman, "even a generation or two off the boat," than love of country...
...When he began working for Hartley Houses in 1959, the tenants "represented a wide sweep of race, religion, and ethnicity...
...The antiwar movement, with its strain of national self-hate, only drove them deeper into conservative arms...
...Like Thomas Edsall's Chain Reaction or Arthur Schlesinger's The DisJosEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...Freedman continues to count himself a liberal, but he recognizes that working-and lower-middle-class Americans have had to bear a disproportionately large share of the costs of liberalism's often disastrous experiments in social engineerSlouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline Robert H. Bork Regan Books / 382 pages / $25 Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography Roger Shattuck St...
...Harding's presidency coincided with the publication of Main Street and Babbitt, and it was his misfortune to fit both...
...Like Trotta, Maeby and Carey had renounced their liberal inheritance and embraced conservatism because they came to see contemporary liberalism as a menace to ordinary Americans like themselves...
...The parking lot once bounded by garden plots bore a bumper crop of cigarette butts, blackened spark plugs, and pint bottles...
...On the one hand the state tries to enforce equality of outcome in the public sphere...
...By whom...
...If life imitates art, then the 1994 elections, Freedman suggests, mirror "Columbo," the TV detective series in which a rumpled, cigar-chomping "ethnic" cop eventually gets the better of his well-heeled adversary...
...She was appalled by the excesses of the counter-culture and voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, less for his achievements as president than as a father...
...Lorraine's politics did not sit well with her own father...
...As a distinguished jurist whose nomination to the Supreme Court was effectively opposed by the counterculture, Bork might be expected to have particular insight into the problem...
...went on to the State University of New York where, as a conservative on an overwhelmingly liberal campus, he endured "a profound sense of isolation...
...Frank's wife, Lorraine, was also moving rightwards...
...With an eye on Canada and Bosnia, he claims that "no multiethnic society [such as we have become] has ever been peaceful Out of Self-Control: How Far We've Fallen 76 December 1996 • The American Spectator...
...Bork names the villain—"modern liberalism, a corrosive agent"—and traces our malaise to Enlightenment notions of DONALD LYONS is theater critic for the Wall Street Journal...
...About concrete remedies he remains evasive, as when he suggests that "lyrics, motion pictures, television, and printed material are candidates" for censoring...
...He also pinpoints (rather predictably) the 1960's as the time when this disease took hold...
...No one practiced that religion more faithfully than Silvio Burigo, a plumber and union official whose father, Martin, emigrated from Italy to New York in 1890 and committed suicide in 191o...
...they ranged from chauffeurs to cops, mechanics to firemen, garbage collectors to telephone operators...
...They composed not an underclass to be quarantined but a working class to be embraced...
...The biggest difference is the change that has come over the elite's opinions of politicians...
...It would have been even nicer had liberals like Freedman spoken up a bit sooner, but when you're busily building the Great Society, it's easy to lose sight of ordinary people's troubles...
...04 uniting ofAmerica, The Inheritance is one of those books in which a liberal takes a close look at conservative arguments and discovers that they are not nearly as evil or irrational as he had supposed...
...What accounts for this epochal political transformation...
...Along with Leslie Maeby, a Republican fundraiser whose Polish grandfather was a Democratic ward heeler in Baltimore, and Tim Carey, a Republican campaign strategist whose Irish grandfather was a gravedigger and Al Smith fan, he helped topple liberal America's most articulate spokesman, New York Gov...
...But it's his way of answering the question that's unusual...
...But while Silvio spoke proudly of Local 86 as a "father-and-son local" in which union officials, deeply committed to "taking care of their own," diwied up a limited number of union openings among fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, nephews, and grandchildren, civil-rights activists saw the building trade unions as "feudal enclaves in a postindustrial society...
...According to Freedman: [Silvio's] social life revolved around union affairs, from clambakes in City Park and dances at Glen Island Casino to national gatherings...
...4. Alice Roosevelt Longworth uttered the deathless, "Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob," but some thought she was consumed by the belief that another Ohio politician should have been president: her husband, Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth —who, Ferrell adds, drank up all of Harding's liquor...
...As he readily admits, the courts will not uphold restrictive legislation because they share the values of the cultural elite...
...Frank Trotta, Jr...
...But it was Silvio's grandson, Frank Jr., who broke decisively with the family's liberal traditions...
...In 1967, Local 86 was accused of racism, and angry pickets descended on the construction site where Silvio was working, seeking to shut it down...
...A decade later, however, most Hartley House tenants were on welfare, and the whole atmosphere of the project had grown threatening: A complex that once fretted about zealous matrons shaking their mops out the windows now had teenaged mothers heaving their trash to the ground...
...Another difference is timing...
...3. Allan Nevins, the historian, worshipped Woodrow Wilson and was a passionate supporter of the League of Nations, which Senator Harding helped to defeat...
...Once firmly embedded within the liberal New Deal coalition, their political allegiance today is up for grabs, and they are more likely than not to vote Republican if the alternative strikes them as excessively "liberal...
...Frank Jr...
...Instead of citing polling data and conducting endless interviews, Freedman has written a multi-generational history of three American families—Polish, Irish, and Italian—from their turn-of-thecentury immigrant origins to their current state of relative affluence...
...Instead of helping the "deserving" poor, government officials, it seemed to him, were wasting money on worthless loafers, people who regularly discarded percolators, stereo speakers, roasting pans, and similar items that a penny-pinching handyman like Frank would repair and bring home...
...White, says Ferrell, was jealous that another small-town newspaper editor had beaten him to the White House...
...Rather than miss the United Association convention one year, Silvio skipped a granddaughter's wedding...
...During the Depression, Roosevelt's public-works projects created desperately needed jobs for unemployed craftsmen like himself As a result, FDR became Silvio's God, and the United Association of Journeymen Plumbers and Steamfitters was his church...
...Harding's reputation will never be completely restored, but Ferrell has done a superb job of debunking his debunkers and ferreting out facts from the tangle of calumny that no other historian has thought worthy of attention...
...Martin's Press /369 pages /$26.95 REVIEWED BY Donald Lyons Is American culture being polluted...
...Moreover, Nevins had once worked for the Dayton editor, James M. Cox, who ran against Harding in the 192o presidential election...
...in the private, meanwhile, unchecked hedonism reigns supreme...
...eventually became a Republican election lawyer...
...Ferrell suggests he did so to guarantee himself four years' worth of column material...
...If [he] spotted anything resembling a hippie as he drove through New Rochelle," Freedman reports, "he rolled down the window and shouted, 'Get a haircut, you son of a bitch.' When the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power, he cried, Whattaya want, you lousy bastards...
...liberty and equality...
...They don't know what it is to be hard up...
...By promoting both radical egalitarianism and radical individualism, liberalism created a toxic mix of tyranny and anarchy...
...Freedman's story begins in the teeming slums of New York, where the Democratic political machine known as Tammany Hall won immigrant loyalty by operating "a virtual social-service bureaucracy, endowing the poor with shoes, coal, summer outings, Christmas dinners, and leverage with the landlord and beat cop alike...
...Why the different reactions...
...Somehow the culture must reform and censor itself...
...In so doing, he has chronicled liberalism's rise and fall in one of its key constituencies...
...Bork trots out the usual suspects to build his case, from rap lyrics and Calvin Klein ads to affirmative action and euthanasia, postmodernism, unchecked immigration, and the painful absurdities of PC in schools and workplaces...
...Although Smith was defeated by Herbert Hoover, he helped lay the groundwork for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's victory in 1932, and FDR's New Deal, in turn, transformed urban America's Democratic orientation into a secular religion...
...Make up your goddamn minds...
...often gave vent to his rage in abusive outbursts...
...I have always had a certain fondness for Mrs...
...Today's elite, enamored of government Ober alles, regards Bill The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond Samuel G. Freedman Simon & Schuster / 464 pages / $27.56 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Explaining his refusal to endorse George McGovern back in 1972, the AFL-CIO's crusty, ex-plumber president, George Meany, denounced the Democrats as the party of "acid, amnesty and abortion...
...Judge Robert Bork thinks so, and in the clumsily titled Slouching Towards Gomorrah, he looks at how we got from there—some earlier epoch of cultural health—to here...
...Frank identified with Richard Nixon, supported the Vietnam war, and resented the fact that "many colleges lavished far greater effort and resources on recruiting black students than working-class whites...
...In his daughters she saw proof that even in the liberated '6o's children could grow up untainted by drugs, sex or radicalism...
...Mencken admitted he voted for Harding...
...Rejecting the timid objection merely to their public funding, he boldly declares that filth by Mapplethorpe and Serrano "should not be shown in public, whoever pays for them...
...But largely he remains content to hop from theme to theme — listing sermon topics like an old-fashioned treatise on homiletics—rather than engaging any issue deeply or with originality...
...For Frank Trotta Sr...
...Some of what he has to say is well stated: "American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaninglessness...
...The simplest explanation is that Harding was a Republican whose cultural elite were all Wilsonians, whereas Clinton is a Democrat among McGoverniks and worse...
...That is the question former New York Times reporter Samuel G. Freedman sets out to answer in The Inheritance...
...At those family occasions Silvio did attend, he argued so relentlessly with his brother Jimmy the electrician about who belonged to the better union that their sister Vincenza usually fled the room, muttering "Them guys, them guys...
...As Freedman observes, "The Democratic coalition was cleaving, perhaps irreparably, along the fault lines between its constituencies in organized labor and in the civil rights movement...
...Immigrant America's fidelity to the Democrats was further strengthened by the 1928 presidential candidacy of Alfred E. Smith, "who personified the historic alliance of the Tammany Hall machine The Righting of America A Generational Saga 74 December 19 96 • The American Spectator and the Progressive movement...
...Meanwhile, Silvio's son-in-law, Frank Trotta Sr., was employed as a janitor in a New Rochelle public-housing project...
...Although The Inheritance is too long, and contains no new insights and several gaffes (Freedman's attempts to render simple phrases like "Give me two dollars" The American Spectator • December r9 9 6 75 and "What did you do...
...He was the "Typical American," a gregarious booster from a small Midwestern town who graduated from a cow college and had neither the time nor the inclination to read books—all the things his elite despised...
...Clinton and his ilk as the architects of their fondest dreams...
...But an incisive legal mind does not necessarily make for incisive cultural criticism, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah never gets beyond being a catalogue of symptoms, most of them already well documented elsewhere...
...Mario Cuomo, in 1994...
...his daughter Carole Ann rescheduled her own nuptials to avoid a conflict with Local 86's weekly membership meeting, knowing which aisle her father, forced to choose, would walk down...
...The Republicans are for the rich," Silvio liked to say...
...Now you wanna segregate...
...2. William Allen White, editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette, called Harding a "he-harlot," and repeated in print the rumor that he had signed over oil reserves while drunk...
...That's not intellectually satisfying or historically accurate...
...Indeed it is not, and it's nice of Freedman to say so...
...I feel that liberals can't just disparage the conservative movement by saying, 'It's because they're all racists, or they're greedy,— Freedman recently told Publishers Weekly...
...When he and his conservative soul-mates got together, they would give the clenched fist salute and cry, "Power to the individual...
...Their hatred of Harding was as passionate and unrelenting as the adoration of today's cultural elite for Bill Clinton, yet the two presidents are practically clones...
...The rooftops that janitors used to comb for baseballs clouted from the nearby diamond yielded junkies' needles...
...Harding because her maiden name was Florence Kling, but now, thanks to Ferrell's sympathetic portrait, I like her husband as well...
...By contrast, "as the party of Yankees and bankers, the GOP did not exactly court the immigrant, ethnic constituency...
...the Hartley Houses came to symbolize liberalism at its worst...
...Frank Sr...
...The Harding debunkers quoted each other—and Nan Britton—over and over until their undocumented claims entered the national consciousness like a computer virus...
...Harding's elite looked down on them and harbored, says Ferrell, "a refusal to believe that ability at politics is a mark of intelligence...
...Bycontrast, Bill Clinton is the atypical small-town American who went to the right schools, lives in an era that calls gregariousness "caring" and "reaching out," and stages photo-ops in bookstores...
...Although Democrats and Big Labor have long since kissed and made up, many Northern, urban, working- and lower-middle-class Catholics have been unwilling to return to their political roots...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
