LETTERS
Editors: The articles by Philip Green are long, and heavily documented, but Mr. Green seems not to have decided whether he is writing facts or polemics. As there are too many points of...
...In regard to the denotation of the term "quota," I could be led to agree that the difference between calling something a numerical goal or a quota is merely a semantic question...
...Members of the team had evidently all been involved with the discredited policies that led to and prolonged the Vietnam war...
...In our society residence is one of the main bases for both class belongingness and ethnic belongingness...
...Does that mean I consider the questions Stanley raises unimportant...
...But to give opportunities to a whole category of individuals because they belong to that category (and not as individuals), which Glazer objects to, is to attack the distribution of class privileges...
...Similarly, complete equality for women, in occupations and in the home, would threaten the structure of the family as well as the present occupational elites...
...Some other distinctions: The fact that a quota is called a goal or target does not change its character...
...I would not want to deny any minority the upwardly mobile channels crime provides, and I did not...
...It is precisely wrong to write "almost the entire world has been prevented from entering the United States," for the United States takes in today—as it has for most of its history—more immigrants, and more diverse immigrants, than any other major nation...
...It should have counseled abstention from voting for one so unknown, knowing so little, and so lacking in a distinctive record...
...But it is not an object of value in itself, it is merely an instrument or occasion of human communion in a festive mood...
...If free choice does play a role in what happens to people— even if affected by history and culture—then it is not the role of government to treat all differences as if they resulted from discrimination...
...Green actually knows of the parenthood of the ones he refers to...
...The former showed a slight advantage in speed over the latter group, though the authors hasten to say that it is not adequate proof for an assumption that this is a/ways the case (being somewhat more careful than Mr...
...That year, the annual ceiling was set at 170,000 visas for nations outside the Western hemisphere, and at 120,000 visas for that hemisphere...
...Elsewhere Mr...
...Pulling deserving individuals out of their class helps these individuals at the same time as it maintains the class structure...
...But Roosevelt's "unpredictability" is a myth created to make voting for Carter more palatable...
...Become president, Carter might of course develop as leader and thinker...
...By 1932, a thoughtful student of [Roosevelt's] career could not but conclude that if he were elected President, he would carry to the White House an integrated philosophy and program of liberalism" (Basil Rauch, in The History of the New Deal...
...Nathan Glazer takes up five points: class vs...
...in the conception of freedom as something beyond, something fully individual, but something built upon and soaring off from a concrete base that has solved the social tasks of necessity...
...Both refer explicitly or implicitly to what they hold to have been the unpredictability of Franklin Roosevelt prior to his election in 1932, suggesting that Carter may well turn out to be a man in the mold of his famous predecessor...
...They included prominent economists from the Brookings Institution and the Conference Board, plus Lawrence Klein, and none of them has been known to think about, let alone favor, for example, public control over corporate investment or 108 over prices or, more generally, disturbing the corporate dominance of the economy...
...Much less did we expect him to act as a "responsible, democratic figure" by "explain[ing] to friends and followers" why he supported the 1950s witchhunting and even sponsored legistation to set up detention camps for subversives...
...I shall take up these points in reverse order...
...My point is that a radical change in the residential pattern of blacks, or a weakening of the effects of residential segregation through busing, weakens class divisions...
...Fortunately, the image was inept: an unprecedented proportion of the electorate will have stayed away from the polls, largely because it will not have been reassured by who Carter "really" is or where he stands...
...In that case, however, I must ask Nathan Glazer to agree that, depending on one's values and priorities, it may be as important to evaluate a policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of achieved results as it is to evaluate a policy of promotion on the basis of productivity...
...Green in his statement...
...About 1 percent of me feels that it is wasted money—how can you ever put together another issue that would appeal to me the way this one does...
...If Roosevelt's victory gave impetus to the great organizing drives of later years, that victory in turn was conditioned by the protest movements of the unemployed, the Bonus Army and what it signified, the restlessness of the liberal left, and Roosevelt's record as governor...
...Confusing the two only obfuscates matters, and it hampers the search for a meaningful way to bridge that gap between power and authenticity...
...It is a numerical test, and yes, a test for scholarly productivity may well be called a quota, as well as a test for the number of failed operations performed by a surgeon...
...One-third of the nation was without decent food, clothing, and shelter at the end as well as at the beginning of the New Deal era...
...Hayden bears a part of that responsibility, and I remain skeptical of some of his current views...
...presidency exerts such force in its own right, and both Harrington and Clark tacitly recognize this when they ignore the broader factors that would determine Carter's election and subsequent policies...
...Senate in 1976 meant one would have "brushed aside" all those differences...
...Carter, while deploring unemployment, eschewed any commitment to support such pending legislation as the Humphrey-Hawkins bill...
...not to replace the interplay of the social and the individual with an utter negation of the latter and a despotic projection of the former, as in Communism...
...A second distinction that disappears in Rose Coser's review is that between the influence of original advantages on resultant social position and that between the total determining force of original advantages on resultant social position...
...True, the right of collective bargaining was also encoded under the NRA, but the unions had to wage a bitter struggle against the mostly antilabor NRA officials, all Roosevelt appointees, to establish that right...
...and saying, as the EEOC did, that, despite that, his criminal record may not be taken into account in considering him for employment...
...Of course, they could not since, even judging by his autobiography, no such record exists...
...The first is that between class and ethnicity or race...
...1:1 Editors: Richard Pevear's article, "Language and Resistance" (Summer '76), is a beautifully written tribute, not only to the Soviet dissidents, but to all those searching for some kind of authentic sense of humanism with which to confront an increasingly repressive and synthetic world...
...One looked in vain for another Paul Douglas or Rexford Tugwell among them—or for a Galbraith, Lekachman, Sar Levitan...
...the views of those who wanted a socialist revolution rather than mere social reform—a Matter for reproach to Clark—was quite understandable in the circumstances, and in line with larger historical perspectives...
...numerical goals or quotas...
...If, as Clark writes, "many radicals considered the early Roosevelt programs fascist," they cannot, more than 40 years later, be lightly faulted, even if they did lack perspicacity...
...Many of us who supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968 supported him despite his failure to explain—or change—his abominable position on the war in Vietnam...
...Which brings me to Glazer's first point...
...Selecting responsible public officials on such a basis is foolish...
...Worse still was the composition of Carter's foreign policy team, about which the New Republic reported details I won't repeat here (see August 21-28 issue...
...I certainly do not object to giving scholarships to poor students, white or black, as Glazer suggests...
...Neither Harrington nor Clark demonstrated that Carter represented a genuine alternative to Ford...
...Now whatever opportunities crime afforded earlier ethnic groups, it did not afford that one...
...I agree that an authentic sense of humanness resides ultimately in a community of people, but power does not and never has...
...Let me now briefly turn to Clark's letter, since I am one of the "hand-wringing" editors with whom he takes issue...
...But the tone of the comments on Hayden only contributes to the smug assurance that we, only we, were truly correct all along...
...One concerned with "change in the class structure," as Rose Coser is, should find this at least a troubling problem...
...This has always been the vision of socialism: not to destroy community and pervert individuality as capitalism has done so efficiently...
...While women can "choose" to become lawyers, all the pressures—emanating from parents, teachers, peers, as well as from the cultural patterns of courtship and marriage—are against such a choice...
...It is easier for a young woman to "choose" to become a secretary, a schoolteacher, or a social worker...
...On the nature of immigration to the United States: Limitations on the basis of race and ethnicity have indeed been given up as late as 1965...
...And this is why I said that Glazer's latent objective is to prevent such a threat to the class structure...
...Marx spoke of this so beautifully in distinguishing between the realms of necessity and of freedom...
...Paul Douglas was his close adviser on these matters, as also on the creation of employment exchanges...
...17, No...
...And elsewhere: "The state has no other power than necessity, the real source of all mythical power . . " This strikes me as a faulty mythification of an awesomely concrete entity...
...What, then, is one to make of Glazer's statement that "the entire world would be allowed to enter the United States...
...On the nature of quotas: Permit me in turn to recall an elementary distinction: that between denotation and connotation...
...As there are too many points of controversy to go into all of them, I will simply give one example: On page 190 (Spring 1976 issue) Mr...
...when a material, concrete sense of social solidarity, rooted in a truer reality of justice and dignity becomes the key source of our sense of community...
...Pevear writes that "a poetic work exists by its own laws as a finished object, a construction...
...Yet there is always danger in any discussion relating art and politics, abstract and concrete, spiritual and material...
...free" immigration to the United States...
...Both Harrington and Clark argued for supporting Carter for president, yet neither the one nor the other advanced reasons based even remotely on Carter's political record, either as legislator or as executive, that might inspire confidence in him as a protagonist of working people, the poor, or social justice...
...I hope this strange compulsion does not recur soon...
...But the "unpredictability" of Carter is of a different order of magnitude than was that of Roosevelt...
...Holders of power propagate lies and myths (a basic function of any successful elite ideology), but state power itself is not mythical, unless one confuses a concrete conception of power with the more spiritual/ cultural concepts of legitimacy or authenticity...
...Since then, however, only a small stream of immigrants has been allowed in...
...Editors: Although the presidential elections will long have been decided by the time this letter is published, I think it necessary to address some of the issues that Michael Harrington raised in his article "On the 1976 Elections" in the Fall 1976 Dissent, and Joseph Clark in his letter to the editors in the same issue...
...On the nature of evidence: There is a difference between reported feelings and facts...
...112...
...There is much truth and beauty here, but I think more is needed...
...Numerical goals, in contrast, are meant to get people in who do qualify for the main requirements for entrance, and who would be kept out otherwise for reasons that are not pertinent to the performance that is sought...
...I would prefer a day when poetry and art need not be our major sources of social awareness and community...
...Dissent has done some good work in raising questions...
...But isn't it silly to say that because we accept such quotas as tests of technical competence we should have no argument against quotas for blacks, Spanish-surnamed Americans, etc...
...Mass unemployment was ended by World War II, not by the New Deal measures Clark cites...
...The problem is precisely that there are identifiable demographic categories in the population whose range of choice is vastly more limited than is the range of choice of other categories...
...Nor do most of us, when we're acting as serious political people, really expect such explanations from major figures running for office . . Personally, I would have supported Hayden if I lived in California...
...Further, he asks why Hayden as a "serious political person" has not recanted all his errors...
...Editors: I would like to urge the consideration of some key distinctions on Rose Laub Coser (review of my Affirmative Discrimination in the Summer issue of Dissent...
...My book concerns itself only with policies affecting race or ethnic groups—and they are not synonymous with classes...
...Some of the passages make for strange reading indeed...
...Roosevelt had not initially been a friend of labor as an organized movement...
...some people have more of it, others less...
...On the nature of free choice: Free choice, like any privilege, is stratified...
...Let us rather have both fuel each other amidst an effort to reach a truly human collectivity, a truly human aesthetic, a truly aesthetic individuality...
...But there is a difference between saying any minority person may be, if he chooses, a criminal (and since this is illegal, who could prevent him...
...Editors: This is awful...
...Given his opponent's dismal record and uncertain principles and his own spirited, programmatic campaign, I would have backed Hayden with some enthusiasm...
...5, of May 1939...
...As early as April 1929, on Governor Roosevelt's insistence, New York State took the lead in creating the first statewide poverty-relief administration...
...On my criticism of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission for denying employers the right to use as a test for employment arrests or convictions because some minorities are disproportionately represented among those groups: It is certainly no answer that Dan Bell pointed out the role of crime in Irish, Italian, and Jewish social mobility...
...We must remain conscious of these distinctions or else we will ultimately sacrifice social awareness for the cultivation of aesthetic sense...
...And he viewed "as matters of an absolute right" the demands of organized labor for statutes to improve its position...
...Black leaders and scholars (Jesse Jackson, Thomas Sowell, Orlando Patterson) insist that even the most deprived and persecuted group, the blacks, are not the product and should not view themselves solely as the product of the social forces of discrimination, and that the individual does have responsibility for and can affect by his actions his ultimate fate...
...Green says, "A leopard born and brought up in a cage will never attain the speed of its siblings born and raised on the veldt...
...In any case, in my book I wrote it would be better to give advantages directly on the basis of class or income than to give them on the basis of race or ethnicity (e.g., a scholarship for a poor student rather than a black student), simply because we should properly fear governmentally or institutionally made formal distinctions on the basis of race or ethnicity, in view of the awful history of such distinctions in the past...
...I agree that the New Left 109 was wrong in much of what it did in the 1960s...
...Then poetry itself could become a more thoroughly individual expression of freedom and growth, projected in as many ways as there are individual human beings...
...As Thomas Sowell points out, everyone knows what a quota is, and it remains a quota even if it is exceeded or not reached...
...We have done this for years and have fared well with it in the sense that it has not caused any social change...
...lf, as Harrington writes, Carter represented a "political Rorschach blot" in which "everyone sees their own fantasy in him," so much the worse for those who advocated his election...
...After reading your brilliant Fall 1976 issue, I feel compelled to send you another $50...
...However, according to the two reports I have been able to locate, the conclusion he draws is not warranted...
...It is rather an image of a reality that satisfies our collective material needs, gives us a sense of participation in a vital human community, and leaves us each to try and find for ourselves a deeper individual meaning to our lives wherever that might be found...
...None of his 26 references is used to document this statement, though he is very meticulous in cases that most of us would feel did not require such nicety...
...This is what government agencies and courts are now doing in the name of fighting discrimination...
...But, as a judge in Washington has ruled recently in a case in which nonminority law students could not share equally in a fund for the disadvantaged, why should a minority student whose "need" is estimated at $2,000 be considered "needier" and get more than a white student whose "need" is estimated at $2,000...
...And both measures taken together, or either one of them, threaten the present stratification system...
...Fuller details may be found in the South African Survey Journal, Vol...
...Late in the campaign, James Schlesinger, a noted hardliner on stepped-up defense expenditures, was also prominently consulted...
...free choice...
...Although Roosevelt's record as governor of New York was in the liberal tradition, the misgivings socialists evinced about him were well taken...
...The first I do not consider evidence other than of the feelings themselves...
...36, 1940...
...Editors: Stanley Plastrik's ruminations on Tom Hayden's "character and politics" (Fall 1976) reopen the feuds of the 1960s in the least productive way...
...The problem of agricultural crisis was to be solved by controls on farm output and the destruction of surpluses...
...Similarly, when "choosing" where to live, blacks have an easier time choosing where they will feel accepted than where they won't...
...Fascism was an actuality in Central Europe, and a threat everywhere else in the West...
...The first author also did a similar experiment in 1940, on gazelles, with similar results (see South African Museum, Vol...
...between the material and spiritual, social and individual aspects of human need...
...Like other key aspects of the Carter campaign, this one too is left unexplored by Harrington...
...Yes, there was Lester Thurow, an outstanding economist of the left, but he hardly was a prominent member of the team and, rather, seems to have been an instance of tokenism...
...On the contrary...
...ethnicity...
...The rise of industrial unionism in the United States—which might as arguably be dated from the passage of the NorrisLaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of early 1932 as from Section 7 of the NRA—was certainly part of a broad movement that constrained, even curtailed, the power of business and reinforced democracy...
...and the National Recovery Act, meant to deal with the induStrial crisis, in essence "embodied the conception of many businessmen that recovery was to be sought through systematic monopolization, high prices, and low production" (Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition...
...Furthermore, neither Harrington nor Clark, seeing that they could not look to Carter's past for clues to his future actions, bothered in the least to examine the persons upon whom he relied for counsel prior to and during his campaign...
...Writing as if there is no such thing as free choice (which she places in parentheses), she sets the stage for justifying governmental intervention to change whatever distribution of races and ethnic groups in occupation, education, or residence exists at any time...
...Reviewing all that was wrong then about Hayden and his New Left perspective, Plastrik asserts that to support the Hayden campaign for U.S...
...The term quota has been used mainly in conjunction with exclusionary policies in regard to Jews, so that now the term has a reactionary, antiliberal connotation, and is often used as a scareword for political ends...
...If it was, how could we explain the fact that some groups subject to discrimination have achieved high average social positions...
...Roosevelt as governor was an early advocate of an unemployment insurance system and a public pension system, in the face of opposition by the NAM as well as the AFL...
...The author notes that "a state may be tyrannical in its power, but that power does not belong to the state...
...Apparently he assumes that socialists today celebrate Roosevelt as a sort of hero of the liberal left, and he thinks it necessary to remind them of socialists' misgivings when he campaigned against Hoover, the implication being that misgivings about Carter are similarly misplaced...
...Of course my main point was that the government agency involved is not, as it is supposed, fighting racial and ethnic discrimination, but laying the groundwork for imposing quotas...
...As to the connotation of the term "quota," let me repeat what I said in my "Letter to a Worried Colleague" (Dissent, Fall 1975): In everybody's mind, quotas are meant to keep people out on an extraneous criterion, whether or not they otherwise qualify for the main requirements for entrance...
...The myth is dispelled by casual reference to Roosevelt's record as governor of New York State, compared with which Carter's is puny—minor achievements in the technicalities of government organization in a minor state...
...To deny affirmative action to those who have little choice and to say, as Nathan Glazer does, that the educated blacks will make it anyway, is to take a status quo position in regard to the class system...
...Harrington would not deny that these "forces" were to some extent incarnated by the leading men who surrounded Carter as candidate...
...She is concerned with the position of classes with limited advantages of birth, education, connection, but seems to think policies that require special treatment for persons on the basis of race or ethnic group are perfectly sound ways to deal with such disadvantages...
...Marais and Van Houven, in their experiments precisely near the veldt in 1938, used over a dozen leopards (both spotted and black), which were born and had remained in captivity, and pitted them against an equal number of recently captured "siblings" (we don't know whether Mr...
...This is what Rose Coser would have them continue to do when she ignores the reality that individuals and groups do have a substantial area of free choice, and their fate is not totally the product of discrimination...
...But the U.S...
...See also Irving Bernstein's Turbulent Years...
...and the nature of evidence...
...While this was but one of numberless commitments he refrained from making, it had a special significance, and Harrington in fact asked that we "watch" Carter on the position he would eventually take—so we were to vote for him even without knowing where he stood on an issue of the most fundamental concern to socialists...
...Roosevelt pressed for public ownership of hydroelectric power and demanded that water power sites should be "inalienably vested in the people of the state...
...On the nature of class and ethnicity: It is not that I don't know the difference between class and ethnicity, but that the two are highly correlated...
...Both apparently looked to "historical forces" that would shape Carter's course...
...It would be tragic for the alternate and simplistic view to prevail at this time, but this is what Rose Coser seems to want...
...it was much later that he turned to labor for support...
...A point of fact: Since 1965 there have been no racial or ethnic quotas limiting immigration, as there were none (except for Chinese exclusion) before the 1920s...
...On respect for evidence (I am charged with having little): One wonders how seriously to take the judgment of a critic who casually dismisses statistical evidence that a very substantial number of heads of sociology departments specifically assert they feel coerced to hire women or minorities regardless of qualifications, or the 110 specific assertion (there is considerable evidence) that a head may not interview nonminority candidates, because it pleases her to give her own idiosyncratic interpretation of this clear evidence...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
