Peace Now!
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri
ed in 1934. "Mandela was expecting the "The prison years," Sampson writes, brutal in turn, might have become de- other pupils to treat him with respect as "are often portrayed as a...
...copalianism, became the dominant black Luke, we did what thou- Granting an encyclopedia such status church...
...preter, a much-esteemed profession in the rural areas, which promised both influence and status...
...the war zone...
...high, and not just for Mandela himself...
...his rigorous self-discipline...
...ple, or any of us, really understand the memoirs, and films about the Vietnam Commonweal 2 4 February 25, 2000 War, but only a relatively small portion have focused on the peace movement...
...ration from his wife, Winnie, and his chil- Mandela's family...
...The Truman Show, a film about a war activists as self-absorbed, craven, cause...
...They seem to member or interpret their extraordinary tempted to understand and "convert...
...Peace Now...
...If, in future He found himself in a community which and read about in the newspapers...
...with P.W...
...The Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...What Gallup Poll showed Africana cause it was the standard set by the man this...
...No minister, no priest, no rooms...
...What, then, are Commonweal 2 6 February 25, 2000...
...gloomy rumination was inspired by a politics, he fell hard-like a young lover fact about Donna Reed that I learned smitten...
...here-and in all Africana's religious distivists (Syracuse, 1999) and George cussions-how these devout Southern Mariscal's Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano Chris Appy, author of Working-Class War: whites reconciled their beliefs with slavand Chicana Experiences of the War (Cali- American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, ery...
...explore the impact of four key social groups on the shaping of U.S...
...And many African-Amer- abiding citizens...
...offers little to inspire such Religious and Catholic Studies with: an homage...
...five years to publish a black equivalent at best a sorry lack of editing...
...but I see them as key to his develop- of Nelson might have attenuated her "Instead he was mocked by one girl ment, transforming the headstrong ac- worst instincts...
...Uninviting...
...realize, in ways I could never quite fath- resistance to a war-making government...
...African religious influences, the entry lived experience might read two recent All three books are a sign that the anti- turns to "White Protestantism and Slavanthologies, Mary Susannah Robbins's war movement may now be receiving ery...
...After all, the ANC and other proscribed political And yet, I do not believe young peo- we've had thousands of books, novels, organizations...
...which the new African encyclopedia, Really...
...places Jeffreys-Jones credits the antiwar we were supporting, and the views of It soon became apparent, however, as movement with shortening the war, the Vietnamese...
...This sentence prominent black intellectuals, DuBois Appiah and Henry Louis had tried unsuccessfully for some fiftyand the hundreds of others like it reflect Gates, Jr...
...Mandela spent sever- American Society and the tion from reality that seems not to close, al years just finding his footing in the Ending of the Vietnam War in spite of the Internet's ability to "link" city, which included finding his voca- Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones us to every war zone on the planet...
...sonable to think that the daily presence founded the school," Sampson writes...
...In real life, it turns out, Reed 1912) and most enduring organization Chris Appy was not simply an actress, a registered devoted to equality for blacks and the Republican, and a mother of four sons, concept of a nonracial democracy...
...and ultimately his negotiations man who unwittingly stars in a nonstop or even treasonous...
...Has some recent but still obAfrican and African-American such an encyclopedia, sociologist W. E. scure scholar delved into nineteenth-cenExperience B. DuBois...
...Not a word...
...This is one o settle a holiday dispute reference on African or African-Ameri- reason Methodism rather than, say, Episabout the ethnicity of Saint can matters...
...His love was the African Na- from reading Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's tional Congress, the oldest (founded in Peace Now...
...69.95, 2 CD-ROMs want to wish it well...
...Is it a remous debates about his true identity and five thousand Christian churches with a nant of an earlier ignorant age of favorideas...
...While many surveys of the Workers, blacks, and women offered union leaders, there were important ex- period focus exclusively on famous tacit support in the early years of the ceptions...
...Thus the Gates, Jr...
...Botha and F.W...
...war policy • Courses taught by distinguished professors...
...My children and are remarkably few stories in our postties and with his warders, most of them former students are all far more savvy Vietnam popular culture to help us reuneducated Afrikaners whom he at- about TV than I ever was...
...5913 pages with detail, but his arguments too Facsimile: (202) 687-8954 often read like laundry lists of "factors" E-mail: lsp@gunet.georgetown.edu that do not awaken curiosity or clarify Web Address: understanding...
...Jeffreys-Jones, a historian at the University of Edinburgh, sets out on • A wide range of courses leading to an intera serious and worthy undertaking-to disciplinary bachelor's or master's degree...
...All of this makes a rea- www.georgetown.edu/ssce/ls/ sonably short book very slow going...
...Nearly everyone dural-interest in the subject...
...Most readers will want to know Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Ac- the attention it has long been denied...
...While in tory of the war, the nature of the "ally" and the Great Society...
...But years, anyone is tempted to say that the respected merit and intelligence more the price of that transformation was apartheid era was not all that bad (as than hereditary status...
...deKlerk for television drama, does not strike them as Antiwar amnesia cannot be explained his own release and the legalization of especially revelatory or troubling...
...maintain considerable backing from movement...
...predominance of African-American able press for Catholics...
...degree and cost of our isolation from The political bug did not bite Mandela the unmediated world and its history, until, still single, he moved to Johannes- our emotional distance from the serial burg in 1941, and even then it didn't hap- Peace Now...
...ghastly," the particular nature and con- on domestic policy to preserve support Jeffreys-Jones deserves praise for docduct of the war are not central to this in- for the war...
...down on the battlefields of Vietnam...
...bate than popular understanding...
...And the vast number of rank- demonstrations and white male campus war, we are told, not so much because of and-file workers were never more hawk- activists, this work amply demonstrates the lies of their leaders, or their adher- ish than the larger society, less so ac- that all kinds of people opposed the ence to cold-war anticommunism, but cording to some polls...
...who picks up the printed Africana will Methodist church, for example, is disMil rosoff Carporatiou...
...Those les-the largest antiwar demonstration After a brief discussion of Islamic and who seek more vivid treatments of the ever held in a minority neighborhood...
...Instead, we clicked onto the Bri- these standards...
...Africana Basic Civifas Books, 589.95, 2,095 ply...
...It begins well enough, not- Latin identity...
...lously tidy, and obligingly deferential that killed 3 million people...
...his gradu- om, that the tube creates a make-believe And the fragmentary images that occaally evolved role as the acknowledged world that screens out most reality and sionally float by often represent antileader of the ANC and the liberation history...
...Luke" Take the entry on "The Black Church," its bouts of inquisitorial zeal have reninto the "Find" slot...
...Despite converting many slaves, the entry asserts, NEEDED: FACT CHECKERS "for most whites, Christianity was largely viewed as an instrument of social control, to produce 'obedient and docile' The Britannica is the standard against slaves...
...Surely such a sentence demands a The Encyclopedia of the who first dreamed of putting together citation...
...apparently had no editor demanding Now it is here...
...Mandela was expecting the "The prison years," Sampson writes, brutal in turn, might have become deother pupils to treat him with respect as "are often portrayed as a long hiatus in structive in any case...
...As one of this country's most tury accounts and come to this startling Edited by Kwome Anthony conclusion...
...greasy pole of social advancement...
...devotes considerable at- The dense argumentation, however, Commonweal 2 5 February 25, 2000 will do more to stimulate academic de- um Against the War, in East Los Ange- members and black clerical leadership...
...Jeffreys-Jones rightly indicates that widespread resistance to the Vietnam War took time to develop...
...She was, in other Mandela and the colleagues-black, M have seen her on "Nick at words, one of millions of women and white, colored, Indian-who made com- Nite" reruns, frozen in the men who stood in defiant opposition to mon cause with him in prison, in exile, early 1960s, a perfectly adorned, scrupu- the American war in Vietnam, a war and in opposition within South Africa...
...intervention terest in the so-called "Vietnam run"- forts to cultivate a backlash against the "there was a greater consensus in sup- the manufacture and shipment of vast antiwar movement by pandering to a port of the Vietnam War than there had quantities of weapons and supplies to "great, silent majority" of patriotic, lawbeen for almost all other American wars...
...sands of people in a hurry requires trust: Trust by the reader that However, Africana reserves its most have done before us-we turned to the the encyclopedia is thorough, meticu- serious disdain for Catholicism...
...assessment is equivocal and, in some places, muddled...
...some now say of slavery and the segIn his youth and young adulthood, The most poignant and wrenching regation era in the United States), let Sampson says, Mandela's aspirations chapters of the book deal with his sepa- them read here what it did to Nelson were anything but grand and majestic...
...a stunning characterization of white Protestants through the Second Awakening that ended in 1830...
...They Mother for Peace...
...This subject is enorWhat Jeffreys-Jones fails to stress is that icans, Jeffreys-Jones argues, were reluc- mously important to any understandthis "consensus" (acquiescence might be tant to criticize the war for fear of un- ing of Nixon's political success and his more accurate), rested on a long train of dermining President Lyndon Johnson's prolongation of the war...
...pupil for his country boy's accent, his tivist into the reflective and self-disci- Mandela the hero paid a terrible slowness in class, and for walking in his plined world statesman...
...0 Quite the contrary...
...It en- any young Americans know but also, by 1968, cochair of "Another dured largely because of the loyalty of about Donna Reed...
...What do kids make Many anonymous "Donna Reeds" concerns Mandela's life in prison-his of all those old family sitcoms like the were politicized in the 1960s, but there relationships with the prison authori- "Donna Reed Show...
...Of necessity, much of Sampson's book suburban housewife...
...This instantly called an immensely important subject by any- dered it an uninviting space for Afroup a typically elegant, traditional Bri- one's criteria...
...The counteracted the achievements of the While he concedes that "the war was White House could no longer depend peace crusaders...
...This tion, the law...
...of the Britannica...
...He saw a degree as his passport not to political leader- STILL FIGHTING THAT WAR ship, but to a position in the community which would enable him to support his family...
...This is how most whites viewed Africana, measures itself-in part be- their religion...
...At Fort Hare, the dren, and the effect that separation had black college he attended, "his imme- on all of them...
...manuscripts...
...It is that states- price for his triumph-and so, sadly, brand-new boots 'like a horse in spurs.' man that we see on television nowadays did his wife and family...
...students, African-Americans, women, • A degree program designed for part-time and organized labor...
...Beautifully pro- cussed in dozens of entries without any duced on good stock with lavish pho- mention of its strong substantive attractographs and maps, Africana asks to be tion for slaves: Methodists believe in a given the pride of place once given to direct relationship between the individJulia Vitullo-Martin the Britannica in middle-class living ual and God...
...2000 Like Britannica, Africana can be read Worse, such sentences reflect a lack of Edited by Krvame Anthony in a handsome printed edition or in a substantive-rather than mere proceAppiah and Henry Louis computerized edition...
...thetic to the aims of antiwar activists who emerged from each of these groups, his • A schedule of evening and Saturday classes...
...in the margins of submitted Encarta Africana DuBois's aspirations...
...When Mandela did fall into Yale University Press, 525, 297 pp...
...Though sympa- adult students...
...The silencing of antiwar memory remains to be explained, but consider this: C~EORC~ETOWA~ UNIVERSITY Wouldn't it be surprising, even shocking, if a major public figure were to stand LIBERAL STUDIES DEGREE PROGRAM before the American people and offer an impassioned tribute to the citizens who struggled to end the Vietnam War...
...Here, though, official lies and distortions about the his- commitment to civil-rights legislation the argument is confusing...
...atrocities of the past century, a separapen immediately...
...Africana does not yet meet saying that the "church's complicity in shelf...
...by the passage of time alone...
...offering Peace Now...
...It seeks to become the primary human authority intervenes...
...But unlike most lous, well researched, and-since the entry on the Catholic church in Latin encyclopedia users, we did not haul editors must make innumerable judg- America and the Caribbean begins by down a thick volume from an upper ments-fair...
...Does it measure up to "Source...
...It was their sons, war-not only radical students, but sigbecause they hoped the government after all, who did the bulk of the fight- nificant numbers of blue-collar workers, would reward their loyalty with federal ing and dying in a cause that seemed in- African-Americans, homemakers, clerassistance in their efforts to "climb the creasingly doomed...
...slavery, its Euro-centric cosmology, and tannica Web site and entered "St...
...gy, businessmen, and Vietnam veterans...
...But it is not unreaa royal whose great-grandfather had the midst of Mandela's political career...
...The latter includes many is preparing an oral history of the Vietnam tion or sensitive analysis, Africana offers accounts of the 1970 Chicano Moratori- War era...
...Winnie, who was brutal- Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the diate ambition was to be a court inter- ized by the apartheid regime and became Chicago Tribune...
...Yet instead of either good descripfornia, 1999...
...Though Washington did umenting the diversity of the antiwar terpretation...
...Is the gentannica entry laying out the known facts ing that the black church is a simplified eral impression of Latin America as priabout Luke and summarizing the vari- way of referring to the more than sixty- marily Catholic just wrong...
...He has done a prodigious amount of research and fills his Phone: (202) 687-5706...
...Similarly, the war itself is Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in 1967, elsewhere he seems to blame it for the given little attention as a major cause in that the Great Society was being shot conservative backlash that "more than eroding compliance and igniting protest...
...Indeed, he Many workers had a vital economic in- tention to President Richard Nixon's efclaims, at the outset of U.S...
Vol. 127 • February 2000 • No. 4
