BOOKS

...Philip Neri...

...and strong familial and kinship patterns (which at times meant as many as five generations riving in close association...

...Since college days, when I was assigned to 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 643) lieve---a relatively small part of "the new class...

...his excited discovery of Aquinas at just the right time for him to become a force in the revival of interest in Thomism...

...Rather than come to terms with the inevitable tendencies of democratic culture anticipated long before them by Tocqueville, they either withdrew from the gritty unlovely chaos or imperiously Commonweal: 665 set down dicta for the Good Life without bothering to suggest how their elitist principles might be incorporated into the democratic framework...

...his move to Chicago after Hutchins had nagged him into completing his long-delayed dissertation (he wrote it in twenty hours after conducting an experiment in physiological psychology that reads now like a burlesque anticipation of Masters and Johnson...

...U. of Texas Press, $14.95 DANIEL AARON Every writer on American conservatism is faced with the problem of how to define it...

...indeed to everything but what I wrote last June, strikes me as a stellar example of obfuscation...

...Some have even held that there is no such thing as American conservatism, that it could not be expatted to take root and flourish in a society geared to technology, science, and change whose alleged political "conservatives" found themselves ,hitched willynilly to a liberal system...

...Commonweal: 667...

...Yet it requires the most concessive mind to see how even Crunden's elastic conception of conservatism applies with equal appositeness to Santayana's urbane skeptical paganism, Neck's tirades o n politicians, More's religiosity, Babbitt's obsession with moral respousibility, Mencken's serio-comic fulminations, the by no means simil~ Agrarianism (a bit over-represented here) of Davidson, Owsley, Ransom and Tare, Lippmann's measured liberalism, and the cranky and, on occasion, silly jeremiads of Cram...

...Beyond my own work, Peter might find useful Paul H. Weaver's essay, "On Adversary Government and the Liberal Audience," in The Politics ot Planning (Institute for Contemporary Studies, 260 California St., San Francisco, Calif...

...Urban black problems, argued Moynihan, ,have many taproots, but they largely reached back to slavery and centered around the disoriented family...

...After all, the public schools and the paroch/al schools used different methods to pay their way...

...The Black Family tn Slavery & Freedom...

...And i~ is another convincing testimonial in favor of a black culture that is distinctively ,afro...

...bu~ readers should understand that the volume is more than a history of the black family...

...As these studies try to show, the schools were used to knock off the rough edges of class and culture that were found on the children of immi...

...If the Archdiocese was willing to turn and bend to the folkways and values of Rs immigrant parishioners, it was at least partly because the Chancery Office si, as reading the financial realities...

...As important as what Gutman tells about the slave family--and the above is only a samplemis his analysis of what all that meam for Afro-Americans after emancipation...

...The slave family question--~because Gutman gives it the most attention and because of its sensitive historical positionmwiU dominate discussions of Gutman's book and perhaps rightly so...

...His conservatives are both traditional and innovative, even "radical" in "productive ways...

...It is not .always easy to equate the editor's own statements about the substance and import of his representative critics and the selections he prints from their works...

...My life in the last thirty years or so," he writes, "has tended to confirm the view that high living is not necessarily incompatible with high thinking...

...And he insists that the changes do not represent an urban "tangle of pathology" (Moynihan's term) nor do they signal a predominately mother-child family...

...the production of the three-layered fifteenth edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica...

...kXLrH WHITEHEAD, Jn., who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, attended Chicago parochial schools--specifically, St...

...Chicago's parochial schools held up an American image for their pupils, but it tended to be an Irish-American image: to be an American was to be an Irish American, as the Poles and Italians and Bohemians were made to feel...

...As late as the mid-1960s Daniel P. Moynihan sought to explain problems resulting from black migration to northern cities in similar terms...

...most slaves living in double-headed households (despite a high rate of involuntary separation...

...Presumably political conservatism lost touch with American realities after the Civil War and "retreated from politics and social criticism...

...Therefore, although it is not hard to find throughout American history individual politicians and theorists and artists who condemned what they considered to be threats to property and to civil and religious authority and who feared the "enthusiastic" impulse in any of its manifestations, no class or cohesive segment of the population emerged to exemplify and perpetuate conservative principles...

...The Supertluoas Mess: Conservative Cr4ttcs o f American Cwltwre, 1900-1945 ROBERT M. CRUNDEN, ed...

...MICHAEL NOVAK REPLY: Michael Novak's letter, with its references to his other writings...

...Its rhetoric aside, there's still a lot wrong with this passage...

...to his recent reading...

...Bride's and St...

...Ultimately, too, Adler's long commitment to the Great Books is related to his vision of a grand cooperative of philosophers, who, he is convinced, badly need a dialectical clarification of basic terms if truth is to be advanced...

...Henry Adams's generation fled to the Academy, leaving polltics to the vulgarians, and a kind of "cultural conservatism" appeared in the writings of men on the fringe, like Adams, Charles Efiot Norton, William Graham Sumner and others...

...The Superfluous Men, a volume of excerpts from the wr~gs of eleven critics of culture--some of them virtually forgotten---who flourished between 1900 and 1945, is intended "to provide a preliminary overview" and "to reshape the field and establish a more accurate geography of the contribution of conservatism to America in the recent past...

...But Catholic 14 October 1977:662 schools, as expressions of the deviant, originated from and thrived on rejection of that belief, first in its religious dimension, and then in its broader cultural and socioeconomic ramifications...

...Apart from the question whether a selfdenying unity of effort of this sort is desirable, it would require something like the Aquinas-inspired Summa Dialectica, which as a young man he dreamed of writing...

...the establishment of the Great Books program at St...

...Gutman looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth century black families in the rural south and the urban north and describes the changes they underwent in both environments...

...Crunden differentiates these "cultural conservatives" from the conservative thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...the Syntopicon of the Great Books...

...Apparently, "cultural conservar means many seemingly contradictory things and is flexible enough to subsume Crunden's cast of reputed Liberals, Tories, Humanists, Agrarians, and Libertarians...

...Some of these views are presently entertained by people not ordinarily identified with the conservative camp, but, as Crunden notes, they did not sit well with optimistic, democratic, progressive Americans in the early decades os the century...

...Moynihan's conclusions, while consistent with a growing body of historical and sociological literature, generated a good deal of debate...

...Yet, for all practical purposes, the main office of the public schools piled up all the tax receipts and naturally could do better at imposing its will uniformly on the local schools...

...makes this point in his recent book on the New Humanists) lacked Arnold's faith in the average man's capacity to absorb "humane civilization" and held little hope for America's Philistia...

...The conservative consensus on our slack educational system and sleazy intellectual standards seems particutarly apropos at the moment, although it is worth noting that the conservatives' liberal opponents often took pot shots at the same institutional and cultural targets...

...Crunden has performed a useful service in collecting this lively assortment of opinion on democratic society, humanitarian cant, plutocratic vulgarity, and sentimental progressivism...

...Further, in catering to the culturally diverse, the parochial school appears to have functioned in sympathetic vibration with the Catholic, immigrant, alien poor, whereas the public school, as the increasingly bureaucratized agent of the dominant culture, could not...

...In a sense, the most important charaeters here are the Great Books themselves, and the form of autobiography is employed to write the biography of the Great Books movement in which Adler has-played such a vital role...

...It is a s~atement about the legacy of slavery based on hard and continuous research as much as it is a history about slave times, and that is long overdue...

...Two broad general conclusions (which should lay to rest some aged stereotypes) are that Afro-Americans emerged from slavery as family units and with a distinctive culture, and that there was no breakdown of famih'es in the twentieth century whioh produced a matriarchal, black society, urban or rural...

...In fact the conservatives who preached a version of Matthew Arnold's aesthetic gospel (J...

...Indeed, if any of his old enemies read this book (fortunately, he has outlived most of them) they are likely to assess it morosely as a demonstration of how to make philosophy pay off...

...Certainly it would be impossible for anyone to entertain such a vision seriously without Adler's "obsession with putting and keeping things in order"--without what he identifies as his analerotic compulsion to catalogue, index and outline...

...Uniform schooling was to impart uniform skills and uniform hopes and consequently, as this analysis would hold, the Americanized child of the city schools was in fact a standardized child, ready to move smoothly into the industrial work force...

...The Education o f an Urban M i n o r i t y : Catholics i n Chicago, 1833.1965 JAMES W. SANDERS Ox/ord University Press, $13.95 RALPH WHITEHEAD, JR...

...As a matter of fact, he seems eager to accept it, as far as it goes, even if it takes up barely any evidence of what was going on in Chicago's public schools...

...Broad areas of disagreement separate the new scholars, but most embrace the concept of a separate slave culture and consider the family question crucial in their re-evaluation...

...American...

...Hence his conservatives were made to feel "superfluous" by their insensate contemporaries and never commanded as wide a hearing as the Liberals who found in politics and social engineering the solution to all ~human problems...

...One is tempted to conclude, however, that what is worth remembering about the majority of his conserva000 000 000 REVIEWERS zom~ r. SlSg teaches in the English Department at Gonzaga University...

...According to Crunden, the "conservative mentality" has contributed to "a major portion of American culture even when it has not called itself conservative and even when its products have been seized with enthusiastic incomprehension by the liberal intellectual majority/' Thus defined conservatism takes in a large swipe of uncharted territory and aUows him to claim that men as diverse as Santayana, More, and Mencken articulated the values of the Founding Fathers and of all the classic American writers and thinkers he lists at the end of his in~oduction...

...Realizing it, with whatever fortunate combination of high living and high thinking, would be another matter...

...Robert Crunden, all the same, ,takes it for granted that not only is there something called American conservative thought, .but that it is also very much alive in the 1970s...

...the foundation of the Institute for Philosophical Research...

...and a body of literature well beyond my own work could have been consulted...

...his meeting New from 0RBIS EDUCATION FOR JUSTICE: PEDAGOGICAL PRINCIPLES by Brian Wren To take effective action against injustice---famine abroad, hunger at home, white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa, the gulf between rich and poor--we must be educated for justice...

...The easiest way is not to attempt any definition and simply to assume that there are too many kinds of conservatisms to agree on an exact designation...

...his involvement with the executive seminars at Aspen...

...Brian Wren works out the basic principles for such education in this book Paper $4.95 Other related titles: EDUCATION FOR JUSTICE edited by Thomas P. Fenton Resource Manual $7.95 Participant Workbook $3.95 THE GOSPEL OF PEACE AND JUSTICE Catholic Social Teaching Since Pope John by Joseph Gremillion Cloth $15.95, Paper $8.95 Write for 118-title catalog ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 with Van Doren, with whom he was paired as a seminar leader...

...The recent espousal of conservative principles by certain scholar-activists (a number of them former men of the Left) and their growing disillusion with governmental intervention in areas better suited to private endeavor have encouraged him to call attention to their neglected precursors...

...David Hoeveler, Jr...

...James W. Sanders has written the first scholarly history of Chicago's parochial schools...

...Yet for all of their deficiencies in thought and action, which Crunden acknowledges, at least conservatives did not mistake 'better' for 'more' or blink away perdurable evil...

...The section titles-"Growing up Conservative in America," "The Critique of Modern American Culture," "The Chosen Heroes and the Chosen Part," "Humanism and the Originality of the Artist...

...It holds that the best things lie beyond politics, 14 October 1977:664 whose only real purpose "is to keep the larger society functioning efficiently and invisibly" and to make it possible for people to do "what gives their lives meaning...

...His argument, reduced here, suggests that slavery so debilitated Afro-Americans ~nd so strained their adaptive capabilities that they were unable to cope in society...

...The latter, he asserts in a rather murky twenty-page introduction, "since the revolutionary generation" have "never been at their sharpest in political writing...

...All but a few of his conservatives were out of touch with the rank-and-file, especially the urban working class and ethnic population...

...John's College...

...Conservatives resist fads, tend to detach themselves from public business, scorn the cant of egalitariz.ns and humanitarians, and distrust democracy~rule by the ignorant many...

...Moreover, many of the parochial schools in Chicago did indeed abet a strategy of Americanization, but a subtler one than was apparently used by public schools...

...Conservatism, he main~tains in a passage which may embarrass uld-fashioned adherents of that ambiguous doctrine, "is more of an assumption about which areas of life are genuinely rewarding for the intelligent person to concentrate upon than it is a stance in support of the status quo...

...The black family, concludes Gutman, did not break down with emancipation or with the migration to northern cities - - a s late as 1925, 85 perce~t of Harlem's households had two parents...

...C. PETER ltlPLEY i s Lecturer in History and Afro-American studies at Yale...

...Gutman's book--born of the Moynihart report debate--represents the new orthodoxy on the black experience from slavery into the twentieth century, viewed from the family perspective...

...Still, the main body of Sanders's case does seem to carry persuasive force: apparently, the parochial schools in Chicago were more inclined than the Commonweal: 663 I ' = I | | - m l | r r w.,.N v--.N public schools elsewhere to take their pupils (and the parents of their pupils) on their own terms, even if the shaping motives here were mixed...

...Thus, as public schools centralized to secure cultural homogeneity, Catholic schools, as an early expression of counter-culture rights and beliefs, deliberately reveled in hopeless-or glorious--diversity...

...He argues, not without justification, that each of them can be properly categorized as "conservative" and that their conscious or implicit disagreements are "without exception" within "the pale of the word...

...He is no more likely to be successful than his beloved Aristotle or that anti-Aristotelian polymath and master-outliner, Peter Ramus, whom Adler so often reminds one of...

...Conservative ideas" hitherto confined, ,he says, to "religious and literary figures have spread into the social sciences and into practical politics...

...Yet, he does point to the obvious...

...For one thing, the sympathetic vibrations of the parochial schools weren't set off solely by a humane or populist or counter-cultural spirit...

...Several of the social histories of the public schools--here, Sanders cites The Culture Factory by Stanley Schultz, The One Best System by David Tyack, The Irony of Early School Reform by Michael Katz, and a few others--portray them as agents of social control...

...the phenomenally successful How To Read a Book...

...The incipient event in this story is Adler's faking of John Erskine's General Honors course at Columbia, a conversion experience from which there was never any falling away, and with which most of the major events in his life have a connection: his own teaching in the General Honors program...

...to the "subject," "tone," "context," and "distinctions," of his column...

...In the three decades preceding the Civil War, when a reform impulse swept the North, anti-slavery critics attacked with countless arguments, but few were as persuasive to homeoriented Yankees as that one which pictured slave families separated by cruel masters and the auctioneer's gavel...

...DANIEL AARON, professor of American Civilization at Harvard, is author of The Unwritten War...

...As studies of the parochial schools in other cities appear, it might b e possible to get a better sense of what the Catholic experience was in the city schools, and what it meant, then and now...

...his present marriage...

...In order to plead for lucidity, he did not have to overlook the distinctions I actually made...

...to our past exchanges...

...But this does not keep the record of his efforts from being thoroughly entertaining...

...his long relationship with Hutchins, begun when the latter was the boy-wonder Dean of the Yale Law School...

...Agrarianism and the South," "Politics is the Enemy," and "Religion and Immortality" serve as receptacles into which the editor can pour the often disparate and contradictory views of the contributors...

...Mencken, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Frank L. Owsley, and Walter Lippmann...

...He insists that black famliies and kinships thrived and grew----despite the exigencies of slavery, emancipation, migration and urbanizationmbecause they were rooted in an adaptive and resilient cultural base unique to AfroAmericans...

...The 1970s produced a new corpus of slavery literature which generally acknowledged the debilitating qualifies of slavery but nevertheless sought to examine what Yale historian John Blassingame calls the "slave community...

...He divides these into seven overlapping parts, each prefaced by a short headnote...

...94111...

...grants and the first generation...

...It offers a suggestive account of how the schools acquired their character, particularly in the years after World War I. I t also seeks an interesting place for itself in the literature of the city schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries...

...That argument---~a moral one based on slaveholders' rejection of the familial rights of their chattel-helped mobitize the abolitionist" crusade and has since become central to the historical debate over AfroAmerican life...

...I should add that i~ has thirty-two pages of photographs and that it is, as one would expect, superbly indexed...

...As he concludes: To the established, creation of the "one best system" followed logically from a belief in the one best way of life...

...PETER STEINFELS H i t t i n g on B t t l e r New York, N.Y...

...By next year this time, he will no doubt have caught up...

...What does Gutman conclude in this large, awesome and sometimes unwieldy volume...

...Trying to puzzle my way through it, I was bit by bit led into the lengthy examination of our apparently incompatible modes of discourse that appears in my regular column...

...1750.192~ HERBERT G. GUTMAN Pantheon, $15.95 C. PETER RIPLEY The family has served as a benchmark for the Afro-American experience...

...14 October 1977:666 Gu~nan .insists that "family" cannot be separated from "culture," and that broadens and strengthens his effort...

...In articulating conservative values, they "illuminated the complexity of American experience and the fragility of easy generalizations about it...

...There, he finds, the experience was radically different--or, at least, it was in Chicago, where the parochial schools were open to the particular currents of class and culture and aspiration...

...and the whats he found include: enduring slave marriages...

...Gutman does not suggest that black families survived because slavery was a benign institution...

...rives is not so much their fidelity to a set of principles or the originality of their ideas as their intellectual energy and style and the learning, wit, and irony they displayed in their manifestoes, apologias, and lay-sermons...

...Rather he suggests that questions of "bad and good" be put aside in favor of '%vhats and whys...

...So what he has offered is a generous slice of Afro-American culture wrapped around the family...

...An exact and careful analysis of "the new class," both on the left and on the right, is further along toward the lucidity Peter seeks than Peter finds...

...Sanders doesn't dispute this wing of the literature...

...If there is any validity in Crunden's term, "the conservative ~mnp," it amounts to a shared doubt about the prospects of Boobus Americanus and his squalid institutions and on the decline of standards in American intellectual life...

...Represented in the anthology are George Santayana, Ralph Adams Cram, Albert Jay Nock, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, H.L...

...At the time I was writing, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bella Abzug were fighting a major battle on this terrain, as had Hugh Carey and Howard Samuels two years earlier...

...To the Editors: I was delighted to read Marilyn Moorcroft's "Floundering with Grass," and have a chance to know the person .behind the book [July 8...

...Namely, this work doesn't go far enough, since roughly a quarter of the children in the major cities of the Northeast were sent to the Catholic schools...

...The citywide tax base was a far steadier and surer source of revenue than the parish-byparish flow through tuitions or the collection basket...

...Moynihan associated cultural and economic conditions (such as high, black urban unemployment) with "the deterioration of the Negro family...