REVIEWS
Harrington, Lloyd & Woll, Josephine & Ribuffo, Leo P. & Hausknecht, Murray
THE NEOCONSERVATIVES: THE MEN WHO ARE CHANGING AMERICA'S POLITICS, by Peter Steinfels. New York: Simon and Shuster. 335 pp. $11.95. If the New Left put an indelible mark on the '60s, the...
...On the other hand, there is no basis for the accusation that reforms are rejected simply as a mindless defense of privilege...
...FitzGerald says that critics since the late '50s have played variations on these themes and the 221 notes are still sour...
...But its appeal does not really lie in intellectual cogency or moral validity...
...Can one deny, he concluded, that "the disciplined order of West Point has more to offer than the garish individualism of Main Street...
...America Revised contains many contradictions, but none greater than the author's claim to judge American history texts without bothering to learn much American history...
...They are directed primarily at college students, but they can be, and are, taught in secondary schools as well...
...Those who were once unambiguously subordinate now reject their inferior status assignments...
...Aware of the issue, FitzGerald nonetheless evades it to score easy points off boards of education that choose conservative texts or grant classroom time to Genesis along with Darwin...
...Three years later, when I saw him again, he had stopped working in the lab altogether, and was fixing apartments full-time...
...rather, it is embraced for its practical utility in defending a market superiority...
...Only students poring over primary 220 documents in "inquiry" texts might infer that the war polarized the United States...
...he finds it, however, a great oversimplification...
...It is as if FitzGerald had tried to unravel the Vietnam War by reading the Congressional Record...
...Furthermore, FitzGerald infers too much from literary evidence...
...Unlike many readers of Dissent, I concur in FitzGerald's revisionist approach to diplomatic history...
...If the New Left put an indelible mark on the '60s, the neoconservatives will surely become a major part of the image of the past ten years...
...Political radicals, represented in America Revised only by Jonathan Kozol, favored "'relevant' courses in the real problems of democracy...
...they are sensitive to the intricate complexities of public policy decisions...
...But World War II and the Cold War produced another batch of patriotic primers...
...Like his contemporary, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Daniel DeLeon saw efforts to analyze the American scene complicated by "the flux of our population westward...
...Though often of another class, he represented himself as having the same social origins as his constituents...
...Grumbling that the geographer Jedidiah Morse "did not like foreigners at all," she declines to explain that his ethnocentrism was molded by Revolutionary ideology and the volatile rhetoric of the 1790s...
...Beyond the issue of bias, FitzGerald is cross with texts because their interpretations are "slippery...
...Under such conditions both wealth and the illusions of wealth militated against the growth of class consciousness...
...According to FitzGerald, changes in the late 1960s revealed less insight than bewilderment or craving to profit from academic fads...
...six months later he took a job with it...
...And their dullness is "astonishing...
...As time has demonstrated, union leaders who view wages and working conditions as secondary matters end up without members...
...Or teachers can simply promote broad discussion...
...FitzGerald's major contribution is to show how publishers, unconcerned with scholarship, revise texts in order to accommodate pressure groups or state boards of selection...
...Problems of governance" underline a liberal society's disorderliness, which in turn creates a yearning for its opposite...
...No political system, obviously, can wholly eliminate challenges to deeply held beliefs and guarantee the survival of a power structure...
...Although it is in part a reaction to the New Left, the roots of the new conservatism, as Steinfels points out, go back to the '50s and such notions as "the end of ideology...
...it produces, if you wish, its own antithesis...
...he is far less known than is warranted...
...NEOCONSERVATIVISM RECEIVES A BOOST from the circumstances of our times...
...His boss included him in work rosters and quota fulfillments...
...his prior refusals explain why he is still, at 42, only a senior construction supervisor and not a chief engineer...
...This Daniel DeLeon, whose favorite American author was Artemus Ward and whose favorite recreation was sailing a small boat on Long Island Sound, is little known...
...This last, of course, reflects the tempering of many of today's new conservatives in the fires of the Cold War...
...This complaint fits into FitzGerald's broader indictment of schools for promoting "values" when they should teach "children how to think...
...In union matters DeLeon lacked a worker's understanding of unionism's day-to-day role...
...Instead of mastering respectable disciplines, these professors at teachers' colleges invent educational gimmicks...
...Although his rhetorical style is a far cry from that of a redneck politician snapping his galluses, its patina of intellectualism is just as carefully crafted to fit the sensibilities of his urban constituents...
...The Proposition 13 tax revolt that cuts public services crucial to the lives of the less well-off is only one instance of a general reluctance to support programs mitigating the effects of poverty and inequality...
...Far too readily have they accepted the judgment that Daniel DeLeon was rigid, doctrinaire, unyielding to the point of being utterly impossible, and as if all this were not enough, a loyal coterie of DeLeonists persisted over the decades in glorifying the very rigidities that appalled the critics...
...Nor is it remarkable that a country lacking socialist or left-liberal network commentators or nationally syndicated columnists produces few socialist or left-liberal textbooks...
...In the letter Voinovich sent to the Writers' Union the day before his expulsion he said: "We have nothing to discuss and nothing to argue about, because I express my own opinions while you say what you are told...
...It "is primarily a cultural crisis, a matter of values, morals, and manners . . . our convictions have gone slack, our morals loose, our manners corrupt...
...This preservation of the liberal heritage means in practice defending the existing social structure against fundamental change...
...The "excessive demands on government" are sparked by intellectuals who, ridden by guilt, back programs on behalf of an underclass composed largely of the undeserving poor...
...More and more he came to identify himself as a Latin-American...
...At the vulnerable age of fourteen DeLeon had been shipped off to Germany for his secondaryschool education...
...FitzGerald, however, detects only a "pious" new version of civics...
...A good "educationist" is a contradiction in terms...
...DeLeon's unionism of that day was mainly concerned with changing society...
...Because anger undermines her style as well as her judgment, America Revised rivals many texts in glibness, disorganization, preachiness, and naivete...
...Ultimately, he became the advocate of a very sophisticated syndicalism—a lawyer's version, perhaps...
...The apprehensiveness resulting from the play of uncontrolled economic forces is reinforced by such specific government policies as affirmative action...
...My minimal sense of kinship with the historical profession expands substantially whenever it is glibly attacked by journalists...
...His clarity is best demonstrated in his often repeated warning that a socialist movement that found itself in office without a strong economic organization by its side would discover that the day of victory was also the day of defeat...
...But his analysis of neoconservative thought also alerts us to a significant aspect of our political life...
...Moynihan possesses many of Kristol's characteristics, though in a more elegant and selfserving form...
...Now, though intellectually convinced that hope for objectivity is "foolish," she still hankers, perhaps unconsciously, for permanent "truth...
...In his two most recent works, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, the story of a Schweik-like simpleton during World War II, and The Ivankiad, treating Voinovich's own attempts to secure an apartment, he creates devastatingly funny, and terrifyingly accurate, pictures of Soviet life...
...Despite a reassertion of orthodoxy during the 1970s, a few textbooks now "ask real questions...
...Steinfels summarizes the basic principles of neoconservative thought as the postulate that there is a "crisis of authority" in America and the West generally and, consequently, the "stability and legacy of Western civilization are threatened...
...I never concealed what I think of literary servility, toadyism and coat changing...
...Ambivalence tends to make people vulnerable to attacks, like that of Michael Novak's, on "the cultural nihilism" of intellectuals who oppose "the traditional values of honesty, decency, hard work, competitive advancement, religious faith, compassion for suffering and social cooperation...
...Neoconservative thought is important precisely because of its potential for deflecting liberal society from its traditional goals and encouraging a belief that the ends of freedom, justice, and equality are not worth pursuing in the first place...
...This quest for certainty is not the only legacy from the 1950s...
...The first is more important than it may seem, for though the triumphs are almost pathetically minor (outwitting cops sent to sniff out illicit vodka, obtaining hardtoget supplies, sneaking a game of chess during a meeting), they are nonetheless triumphs...
...In a democracy, all beliefs are open to question...
...and cost 98 223 cents...
...9.95...
...Decidedly an intellectual, DeLeon was somewhat later in his life to come under the spell of Marxism and to idolize an abstraction—the working class...
...Grateful that texts finally criticized containment, she nevertheless accuses them of remaining "distinctly conservative...
...Two things save us from despair as we read "What I Might Have Been": the petty, often comic triumphs of individuals over the system, and the personality of Samokhin...
...Some further evidence in this direction is his involvement, upon arrival in America, as an associate editor, with a Cuban exiles' paper advocating independence for that lonely relic of Spanish colonialism...
...Certainly, this change of environment could have meant a considerable shock to a Spanish-speaking boy, fresh from the Dutch island of Curacao, who also had recently lost his father...
...Finally, "cultural fundamentalists" explicitly demanded a curriculum dedicated to basic skills while implicitly discouraging critical thinking...
...To document their pernicious impact, FitzGerald ends by tracing the failure of educational reform...
...Affirmative action is linked to the civil rights and feminist movements, which represent fundamental shifts in the position of minorities and women...
...Neoconservatives strongly resist this principle...
...They have gathered to spend the night of June 21, 1941, with Stalin...
...DeLeon's frontier theory perceived a "skewed" capitalist development with "the odd phenomenon . . . visible . . . of families with members in all classes...
...Thereby, "a painful Jewish identity," Seretan plausibly suggests, "would be submerged and lost in the more comprehensive and sustaining concept of the proletarian, its final interment awaiting only the 'new day' to follow...
...Although FitzGerald is probably correct to conclude that "educationists" and "cultural fundamentalists" exaggerate student malleability, she slights the valid insight of progressive education that teachers encounter a "whole child"—and vice versa...
...In these new circumstances, the young Sephardic Jew would likely have found all too little to bind him to other Jews...
...Yet they have their dark side...
...He could pass his pocket watch around a circle of acquaintances to see if they could discover a very remarkable quality it possessed: that it actually kept time...
...He saw most clearly by then that huge industrial combines were using a technology that would wipe out the older craft divisions, and thereby restrict craft unionism...
...661 I know that I have the very uncomfortable habit of saying not what is advantageous at a given moment, but whatever I believe to be the truth...
...Even in a period of rapid economic growth, affirmative action was not a popular policy, and now as the job market shrinks it comes to be seen as a threat...
...The difficulty is overcome by an ideology that does not disavow liberalism but claims to be defending it...
...But teachers must be careful to shun demagogy, beware of replacing one superstition with another, and recognize that ideas produce pain and conflict as well as access to a wider world...
...It would be a mistake to see this as purely the operation of naked self-interest...
...The world requires a strong, disciplined society, and the requisite unity can be attained by "renewed emphasis on the Communist threat and the Third World's rejection of liberal values...
...For the first time, FitzGerald writes, the United States appeared as a "multiracial society" and its diplomacy was distinguishable from "sacred revelation...
...Luckily, more subtle and accurate summaries of the amorphous progressive "movement" are available in several texts that FitzGerald dislikes...
...Students react at least as much to an instructor's manner as to the subject matter...
...This lapse from detachment, frankly confessed, has advantages for a reviewer, if not for the author under review...
...As taxes rise and real income declines, this argument becomes more attractive to those who are now in advantaged positions...
...Much like Solzhenitsyn's chapters about Stalin in The First Circle, this story shows the craven fear and obscene pandering to which Russia's demigods were reduced...
...They are not opposed, for example, to the principle that government must use its power, as it did during the New Deal, to cope with problems that cannot be solved by private enterprise...
...Thus he made his decision for an independent socialist unionism, correctly described and justly deplored as "dual unionism...
...Samokhin, at his own risk, does attempt to change things...
...Skillfully discussed, questions of this sort show students that history is not an abstraction "in the book," but something that can happen to them...
...Then they tried to adapt to the turbulent market of the 1960s...
...Translated by Richard Lourie...
...These words were written nearly 50 years ago, by the Soviet writer Evgeny Zamyatin, in a letter to Stalin requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union...
...In addition to prominent neoconservatives once identified with the left (e.g., Nathan Glazer's confession to a "mild radicalism"), there are others, such as Robert Nisbet and Samuel Huntington, who have been unreconstructed conservatives since the end of World War II...
...When such principles become guidelines to action, little action results...
...He is more knowledgeable about a wider range of affairs and a more disciplined thinker...
...The view that demands for day-to-day improvements in the workers' living standards are largely tactical devices to build strong unions of revolutionary intent is one that only radical intellectuals, divorced from the realities of the workplace, can harbor...
...q IN PLAIN RUSSIAN, by Vladimir Voinovich...
...programs that aim at the structural sources of problems are automatically suspect...
...Nor does he seem to have recognized that in the more frontierlike areas of the country the rival Socialist party, with its freer manner, related more ably to a diverse and variegated Americanism...
...His stupidity, his paranoia, his crudeness are refracted in their obsequiousness...
...For instance, they can verbally supplement skimpy narratives in "inquiry" texts, discuss biases in all books, and assign additional reading by serious scholars...
...His speeches were a species of entertainment and opportunities for catharsis as he articulated the passions, prejudices, and fears of his listeners—he was a man of the people not afraid to give hell to the powers that be...
...THE INSIGHTS OF DANIEL DELEON were sometimes brilliant...
...In the political field he was busily denouncing populists and monetary reformers, but his compromises and deals with populist and reformminded leaders of the Knights displayed what Glen Seretan justly describes as "pragmatism and shrewd political calculation...
...He deprecates his own integrity, and he is as capable of deluding himself as anyone else, but he can also rise above the petty satisfaction of beating the system and actually challenge its underlying falseness...
...If he is honest and refuses to turn over the building until the doors fit, the railings are firmly welded, the leaks repaired, he will lose his promised promotion and be forced to 225 move on to another building site...
...I am not surprised, however, that texts during the late 1960s favored an impossible compromise in Vietnam since most Americans wanted the same thing...
...My friend was happy to turn his salary over to his boss, since he made over 1,000 rubles a month as a handyman...
...Before the full impact of Zionism had given Jews something more than a religious orthodoxy to cling to, this was not an unusual reaction...
...With amused pride he explained how he had made the system work for him: on paper, he was still employed at the lab...
...The book also exemplifies the "ahistoricism" against which FitzGerald preaches...
...302 pp...
...America Revised is overwhelmingly a litany of complaint...
...When people are free to pursue their interests in the political arena, there is less certainty that those who now wield influence and power will continue to do so...
...q AMERICA REVISED: HISTORY SCHOOLBOOKS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, by Francis FitzGerald...
...Yet, more deeply affected than she was by 1960s educational criticism, I remain a generous grader...
...More often she leaps from textbook prose to generalizations about American education...
...Sophisticated narratives and collections of documents, varying in approach and ideology, occasionally get through...
...Amid the jumble, FitzGerald's view of foreign policy emerges with relative clarity...
...He persists in acting as if things are as they are said to be...
...Voinovich signed letters of protest in 1965, when Siniaysky and Daniel were tried, and again when Solzhenitsyn was attacked...
...Indeed, FitzGerald condemns publishers for doing something and condemns them again when they stop...
...Academic reformers" ranging from Admiral Hyman G. Rickover to psychologist Jerome Bruner reiterated Eliot's call for intellectual excellence...
...This is an anachronism...
...But again, from 1905 to 1908, DeLeon showed in his IWW period an ability to conciliate and compromise that, while ultimately unproductive, was at some variance with his unbending image...
...DeLeon believed that the labor movement was "essentially a political movement," and that its educational and agitational purposes should be openly proclaimed and democratically defended...
...Originally published in Novyi Mir (then the leading liberal journal), the story focuses on Samokhin's dilemma...
...Needed instead is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," many will be inclined to listen sympathetically...
...Tilting toward "academic reformers," however, she fails to see that Eliot as much as Dewey supported schooling for citizenship (though he sought a more docile citizen...
...Fairly ordinary modifications seem "remarkable," "startling," even "shocking...
...He is ordered to turn over a building before it is finished, so that the Party may bestow it upon Komsomol members on the occasion of the anniversary of the Revolution...
...it has subverted its own authority because it has tried to do too much...
...Many of FitzGerald's historical interpretations are of similar vintage...
...They defend meritocracy on the traditional grounds that inequality is simply the outcome of superior individual virtue rather than class location...
...Kristol is the kind of man who lives off ideas and, as such, the prototypical neoconservative ideologue...
...Thus America Revised is marked less by originality than by the author's anger...
...This means, among other things, that the government should not undertake initiatives that "will fuel the fires of egalitarianism, be wasted on the intractable problems linked to the underclass, or increase the influence of the new class...
...Nor does she appear to have observed many—or any— teachers and students using the books...
...Steinfels explores the elaboration and application of basic ideas in the work of Irving Kristol, 217 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Daniel Bell— representatives of the range of neoconservative thought and style...
...It was his clear conclusion by 1904-05 that the key to the organization of workers was in the burgeoning industrial structure itself...
...For Voinovich—in the honorable tradition of Russian literature that extends from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Zoshchenko to Siniaysky—is a moralist...
...Whereas progressive educators face a slippery slope to "life adjustment," the apostles of intellect tend to forget that thinking is not a valuefree enterprise...
...While her last chapter touches on important issues, FitzGerald remains too angry to think them through...
...The "New Trade Unionism," with which his name became associated, is retrospectively viewed as a militant form of industrial unionism...
...He sees people whole, treating any soul still salvageable with compassion and tenderness, if often ironic tenderness, and his scorn devolves more upon the sin than the sinner— though certain sinners, as "A Circle of Friends" attests, incarnate their sins...
...This, if anything, was his Achilles heel...
...As he says, with his pleasant, muted sarcasm: "A complete strategic plan...
...Most of the stories of In Plain Russian predate Chonkin and The Ivankiad...
...Such complaints, not necessarily illogical, are sometimes warranted...
...Undoubtedly many teachers place excessive faith in crank educational nostrums and inadequate texts...
...Surprisingly, he got it...
...Steinfels justifies his enterprise by suggesting that political thought is now moving in two directions: on the one hand, democratic socialists are reaching "beyond liberalism in order to fulfill its promises" and, on the other, there are the new conservatives "who feel they must reach beyond liberalism to preserve its heritage...
...To understand the DeLeon personality, therefore, it is necessary to realize that "a subordinate, though revealing, thread of pragmatism ran parallel to the hard line" in his thinking...
...he also produces evidence showing that DeLeon was not invariably rigid...
...It can be an embarrassing position in a society whose political traditions are liberal...
...During the 1950s, FitzGerald recalls, she and her classmates supposed that texts revealed the past as it actually was...
...Both came out in English in 1977...
...they can ignore books but remain vulnerable to the men and women who dispense grades and praise (or humiliation...
...Seretan wisely does not attempt to find the SLP leader free of the faults ascribed to him...
...Yet FitzGerald errs by accusing the whole profession of greater "mindlessness" than, say, law or journalism...
...Unfortunately neither capable teachers nor improved texts are likely to overcome the absurd "usable pasts" disseminated during national celebrations (or countercelebrations), political campaigns, and television "docu-dramas...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press...
...And all for one barrel of linseed oil...
...In this case, moreover, FitzGerald is a hawk...
...At her best, FitzGerald demolishes the conservative postulate that progressive education undermines literacy, allows jargon-mongering educators to damn themselves with their own words, and rightly warns against zealots who expect to remake the world by remaking the eighth grade...
...There is a sense of trouble, a vague apprehensiveness, currents of unhappiness that neoconservative thought can seize upon and give intellectual shape to...
...In the abstract, it is "hardly surprising" to her that modern perspectives filter into the eleventh grade...
...In these circumstances the neoconservative sourness about feminism and complaints about the crisis of authority and morals find sympathetic echoes...
...At least a decade after most scholars, she discovers the "remarkable" fact that Northern writers during the early 1900s were racists who condemned Radical Reconstruction...
...In the Sue context the Wandering Jew is pictured as less identified with his own people and more "as a champion of the proletariat against . . . its oppressors...
...Caution is called for, because not only are there limits to what government programs can achieve but because programs attempting to mitigate social evils produce devastating unanticipated consequences...
...The belated inclusion of blacks and ethnics prompts her to wonder if the United States is "really like Yugoslavia...
...Then too, she sometimes confuses intellectual playfulness with "antiintellectualism...
...The neoconservative opposition to it attracts those who have a head start in the scramble for jobs, since it justifies their advantage in the name of liberal principles...
...The political disorder and turbulence these movements create extend to the private sphere of life where the conflict between new and old values heightens the ambivalence endemic to a liberal society...
...Add an ability to overlook facts that inconvenience an argument and one has the picture of a guru qualified to guide oil-company publicists through the thickets of political economy...
...New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux...
...America Revised inadvertently supports the point: it is "remarkable" that a writer of her intelligence has produced such a bad book...
...But that assessment is too optimistic...
...q DANIEL DELEON: THE ODYSSEY OF AN AMERICAN MARXIST, by L. Glen Seretan...
...For almost two decades publishers promoted containment abroad and uniformity at home...
...To use one of her locutions, the meaning here is not entirely clear...
...But she persistently expresses surprise...
...Add to this a highly critical attitude toward the Jesuits, which DeLeon shared with Sue, and a notion with some credibility emerges...
...His morality is a traditional one, a combination of the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments...
...one is a chapter originally intended for inclusion in Chonkin, and there is a series of autobiographical sketches dating from 1974...
...Nonetheless, she errs by concluding that texts "differ from one another not much more than one year's crop of Detroit sedans...
...This illfated venture was soon to tear the SLP apart...
...He had created a whole network of people who stood to gain: he, his lab boss, the factory workers from whom he bought paint (stolen from the plant), the helpers he hired, and his customers who would otherwise have to put their names on a list and wait months for the state to find them a repairman...
...If he was a little slow to grasp the significance of the industrial union idea, he made up for it by lucid writing and eloquent advocacy on that theme during his IWW period...
...The idea that Daniel DeLeon suddenly awakened to politics in the mid- 1880s, then found his way quickly through single-tax, the Bellamy tremor, and by 1890 into the Socialist Labor party is part of a mythology that Glen Seretan ably explores...
...Ignoring the stupidity and illegality of the whole business was far simpler than attempting to change anything...
...Nevertheless, influenced by progressive historians, books published between 1910 and 1930 were, in FitzGerald's view, a "good deal more diverse" than their predecessors...
...Another fundamental belief is related to practical questions: the crisis requires action that supports the authority of government...
...A further point: ambiguity and uncertainty are prevalent in a society that takes seriously basic freedoms...
...Belatedly, DeLeon sought to mend American socialism's broken fences...
...Seretan believes that the young DeLeon felt "cursed" with a Jewish identity...
...Vladimir Voinovich, the extraordinary Soviet satirist, suffers from Zamyatin's disease, if not his "cure...
...In order to get hold of some linseed oil, he compiles a list of what each of his fellow supervisors has on hand and needs—so that if he can swap the tiles he has for the window frames Ermoshin has, he can then swap the window frames for roofing iron, and roofing iron for his oil...
...here she parodies them...
...Specifically, a good history faculty must be pluralistic in the best sense, representing diverse ideologies, teaching styles, and conceptions of "how to think...
...Their successors slighted intellect during the 1940s and 1950s in order to promote patriotism and "life adjustment...
...the neoconservatives support liberal principles but conservative action...
...If, as Steinfels claims, a major function of neoconservative thought is to raise "fundamental questions which do not promise to be resolved in the near future," Bell's capacity for analytical thinking is more likely to help clarify issues than either Kristol's apocalyptic alarms or Moynihan's posturing...
...that is, a society founded on the premise of extending freedom and equality...
...Coming thus without Yiddish language or culture, this may very well have been an easier transition—but it was not necessarily one less damaging emotionally...
...Even relatively sophisticated texts still neglect urban affairs, corporate power, and intellectual history...
...But neoconservatives are very much aware of the limited effectiveness of any government program...
...In effect, Seretan says that it took Daniel DeLeon ten years to realize what Debs was up to in his American Railway Union of 1894...
...Liberalism, in short, promotes a certain ambivalence about its own basic values...
...In an earlier work, The Soldier and the State, Huntington constrasted the village of Highland Falls "with its lack of common unity and purpose" to the "ordered serenity" of nearby West Point where "the parts do not exist on their own, but accept their subordination to the whole...
...they are alert to the unintended consequences...
...In nearly all the earlier stories, the main character has to make a decision, and his choice reflects his existing morality and indicates his future moral path...
...Early in 1968 Moynihan wrote unflatteringly about the prospects of a Nixon administration...
...Peter Steinfels's anatomy of their ideology would be important if only because he documents this facet of recent history...
...Ordered serenity" can be a very attractive vision for those struggling with the ambiguities, the general messiness, of life in a democratic society...
...That the argument is not a wholly meretricious one adds to its strength...
...On the contrary, teaching "how to think" about Puritanism or foreign policy may challenge the basic beliefs of born-again Christians and young cold warriors...
...The first notes of the new conservatism began to be heard toward the end of the last decade in the Public Interest and the conspicuous emergence of today's rightist Commentary...
...to most educators, Jews and Catholics were in greater need of exposure to Protestant values than were Protestants themselves...
...She mistakenly assumes that most "political" critics of education in the 1960s endorsed cheap relevance...
...When 218 Huntington in a Trilateral Commission report maintains that "some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...
...DeLeon arrived in New York City at the age of twenty in 1872...
...She is so furious with "New Romantics" that she cannot bear to name a single person who fits the category...
...14.00...
...He knows: he has refused before, moved on before...
...She repeats his mistaken notion, for instance, that a "reactionary, Catholic-hating, Jew-baiting strain" afflicted Populists more than Democrats' and Republicans...
...His road to Marxism and the SLP, accordingly, had not in fact been rapid—he was thirty-eight years old in 1890...
...their antinomian kin, the "New Romantics," believed that reason threatened personal fulfillment...
...America Revised lacks the feel for the classroom that enhances the educational journalism of Martin Mayer and Charles E. Silberman...
...Having chosen a life of largely selfimposed deprivation, DeLeon was uncomplaining, and able to joke about it...
...Within two decades, progressive "educationists" captured the NEA and, following John Dewey, preferred to liberate the child's personality or enhance his "democratic values...
...Her position has a venerable ancestry, recent antecedents in the writings of Hofstadter, Rickover, and Arthur Bestor, and a characteristic blindspot...
...We become more receptive to comments on the "excesses of democracy," and more open to seduction by the picture of order that will emerge 219 from the moderation of democracy and everyone knowing her own place...
...Steinfels discusses the neoconservative reaction to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which argues that inequalities must be justified in terms of their consequences for the disadvantaged...
...Having, in the meantime, advocated "amalgamation" of Jews into the general society, he then proceeded to "merge" his own identity with that of the workers...
...The story begins with the 1893 report of the National Education Association Committee of Ten...
...One of its prophets, Irving Kristol, was also a leading light of "hard" anti-Communism, a position Steinfels labels as one type of reaction to the rethinking of politics by the left in the wake of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism...
...Whatever his faults, however, when Daniel DeLeon died a seeming failure in 1914, he left behind insights into both socialism and American society...
...Somehow FitzGerald decided that progressivism was a "cultural revolution" seeking "not just to purge society of corruption but liberate it from dominion of the past—to put an end to respect for established tradition and to the Victorian culture of filial piety, authoritarianism, and class distinction...
...A very good case is made in comparing behavior on one hand and proclaimed SLP policy on the other to indicate that the inelastic image we have of Daniel DeLeon is at odds with the shadow he cast in the Knights of Labor...
...Puppets, they jerk to Stalin's strings and mouth the words he gives them...
...Voinovich is not alone in treating this theme: many other Soviet authors have examined the same issue, often in stories published inside Russia...
...A fascinating thesis that Daniel DeLeon's immersion in the novels of Eugene Sue—many of which he translated into English—had left him deeply influenced by The Wandering Jew, a Sue novel he did translate, is explored in Glen Seretan's informed book on this contentious pioneer of American socialism...
...The latter concept seems to function in neoconservative thinking in much the same way that "the bourgeoisie" functions in vulgar Marxism: as both concept and curse...
...Seretan earnestly sustains this theme in his interpretive biography, but not to the exclusion of a perceptive analysis of DeLeon's socialist theory...
...But his attitude to labor was flawed...
...The "new immigration" of the late 19th century initially enlarged sales without altering the basic message...
...Thus, an ideology that by way of reaction emphasizes the value of limits on freedom promises relief from the stresses liberalism entails...
...She seems to believe that competent research into domestic American history ceased with Richard Hofstadter's death...
...Teaching a largely captive audience "how to think" is especially problematical in a diverse, democratic society...
...Add to this other sources of discontent: our anger at the mugger and rapist combines with an exasperation with graffiti, the "adult bookstore" and pornographic movie, the blaring suitcase radio, and the more strident voices of feminists and cultural nationalists of all kinds...
...The publishers have included four of Voinovich's open letters from the mid-'70s, dealing with the politics of literature in the Soviet Union...
...his origins are rather more middle-class than Hell's Kitchen working-class...
...Behind the crisis and decline of authority is "the adversary culture" nourished by intellectuals who are the core of a "new class...
...SEVERAL INSTRUCTIONAL PROBLEMS noted in America Revised are solved in the classroom by competent teachers...
...a revolutionary lawyer, DeLeon impatiently viewed unions as devices for changing society...
...Occasionally she wonders if students are influenced by their reading...
...According to FitzGerald, the Committee, chaired by President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, wanted schools to "train the mind...
...Simply by examining the Constitution or other classic statements in bland document books, they can teach good history, critical thinking, and the art of close reading...
...IN "A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS," the chapter withheld from Chonkin and here included, Voinovich shows the extreme consequences of total corruption...
...His crushing failure to achieve a working relationship with the IWW left him, in the opinion of many, a shattered man...
...While two works of his have since been published in the West, with this collection making a third, he has been unable to publish anything new in his own country for the last 10 or 12 years: how he survives is anybody's guess...
...240 pp...
...The whole book is exceedingly well translated by Richard Laurie, who catches the pithiness and charm of Voinovich's Russian...
...He was prescient in seeing that an IWW that eschewed politics would isolate itself, court an atmosphere of conspiracy, and end as a hole-inthewall organization...
...His pronouncements are characterized by a simplification of complex issues, an exaggeration of tone, and "the certainty with which they are advanced...
...Rather, it rests on an ability to capture the attention and energies of people...
...and, above all, they know that not all problems are solvable...
...Surely, inculcators of Protestant virtue are no less worthy of empathy than the likes of General Ky...
...The concession comes grudgingly...
...WHILE CONCEDING the value of Steinfels's work, one reviewer concluded that he overrates the importance of the new conservatives...
...Voinovich paints a bleak picture of the forces contending with Samokhin's seemingly simple desire to work honestly...
...In Fire in the Lake, her history of the United States in Vietnam, she usually explicated unfamiliar world views...
...The first piece, a novella entitled "What I Might Have Been," is narrated by a construction supervisor named Samokhin...
...Unfortunately the "new social studies" quickly decayed into "citizenship training...
...Chagrined at failure in the Knights, and equally discouraged by the failure of socialist efforts to win support in the AFL, DeLeon decided that work within established labor organizations—all unions under the thumbs of "Labor Fakirs"—was fruitless...
...222 FitzGerald sensibly warns against expecting "too much from schooling...
...But his boss collected his salary, thus earning an extra 130 rubles a month...
...It was only later, in his IWW days, that he became clearly the advocate of the industrial form of unionism...
...it overlooks the continuing attractiveness of conservative ideologies in a liberal society...
...Moynihan also fiddles with his biography...
...A Soviet biochemist I met in 1975 then worked full-time in a lab, and on weekends fixed and painted apartments to make some extra money...
...She objects both to cold-warrior diplomatic history and to sudden shifts to revisionism...
...Treatments of the Indochina War sought an impossible "compromise formula that would offend no one...
...I have always thought and continue to think that such things are as degrading for the writer as they are to the revolution...
...Our experience of a stagnant economy, inflation, unemployment, and oil shortages tends to nurture a pervasive meanspiritedness...
...That it is a shallow and flawed way of thinking is not necessarily fatal, since the effectiveness of an ideology seldom rests on its intellectual quality...
...Population was anything but stagnant, while economic activity was frequently feverish...
...Later, as a lecturer in international law at Columbia, DeLeon joined the mugwumps and in 1884 campaigned for Grover Cleveland...
...Their view of foreign policy, Steinfels notes, is intertwined with their perspectives on domestic politics: "The existence of an ideologically armed and intact elite is a crucial ingredient, and its role in resisting external pressure is only the reverse of its role in resisting internal disintegration...
...Or, tongue in cheek, he could brag that he had the most effective burglar alarm system in existence, causing the would-be thief to die instantly of heart failure . . . at finding nothing but bare walls, home-made furniture, and tin spoons...
...Indeed, contrary to widely held opinion, neither the Knights of Labor nor DeLeon's doomed remnant in the STLA were industrial union organizations in the sense that the IWW, and later the CIO, were to become...
...FITZGERALD'S SOUNDEST JUDGMENTS—that texts usually endorse capitalism, encourage chauvinism, slight ideas, and contain dreary prose—have been presented before, both in works she cites (Ruth Miller Elson's Guardians of Tradition) and in those she misses (Martin Mayer's Social Studies in American Schools...
...But a liberalism that promotes freedom of thought and encourages participation in politics makes it easier to challenge the dominant groups and belief systems...
...But apparently DeLeon was unable to come to terms with his frontier insight, for he did not incorporate it in any discernible way into his 224 social and political theory...
...The record of DeLeon's conduct in his abortive effort to gain control of the Knights of Labor is one of Seretan's major exhibits in proving that the SLP leader was far less rigid than commonly thought...
...As Hitler's troops pour across the border and Comrade Koba (Stalin's revolutionary nickname) sleeps for ten days, Voinovich's icy scorn freezes us into a rictus of horrified laughter...
...For the most part, labor historians have failed to deal adequately with DeLeon...
...Daniel Bell is different...
...Yet it does produce some...
...Perhaps the best way of understanding Moynihan, given the evidence of Steinfels's loving dissection, is to see him as the contemporary incarnation of the rural Southern politician playing up to his constituency...
...FitzGerald chronicles shifting fashions in social studies and history textbooks from early efforts to inculcate patriotism and white Protestant values to current flirtations with pluralism...
...Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...it provides a rationale for ignoring poverty and inequality...
...After an unsuccessful attempt during the early 1890s to capture the declining Knights of Labor, DeLeon set up his own SLPdominated Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance...
...As libertarian shibboleths spread across the political spectrum, I remain convinced that the educational process can—and should—introduce young people to thoughts and feelings proscribed by parents and local communities...
...Voinovich, after publishing in the official Soviet press all through the '60s, was expelled from the Union of Writers in 1974, one week after Solzhenitsyn was deported...
...More imporant, they reveal FitzGerald's habit of giving textbooks less than their due...
...American life today has a rasping, irritating quality that exacerbates the problems of living with the strains of political liberalism and a malfunctioning economy...
...Wasting little time on elementary or secondary "pedagogues," she attacks their mentors, "educationists" whose level of "anti-intellectualism" and "sheer mindlessness" is matched in "few" professions...
...One of the most blighting aspects of life in the Soviet Union is not merely that it is necessary to muster great amounts of energy and cleverness in order to overcome unnecessary obstacles, but that the satisfaction derived from such successes will obscure the fact that the obstacles really are unnecessary...
...But the Socialist party, wracked by some syndicalist dissension in its own ranks, had little need for a further infusion of dissenters...
...300 pp...
...His career bears witness to a studious attention to the main chance...
...Progressive education produced two kinds of mutant progeny...
...America Revised provokes unprecedented solidarity with teachers of history at all levels...
...The final tenet of the neoconservative creed relates to international affairs...
...To sustain her broad critique of education, FitzGerald needed to pay less attention to texts and more to what actually goes on in schools...
...DeLeon's boyhood exposure to European nationalism has been cited—he briefly had admired Bismarck...
...One text, for instance, asks readers what they would have done in 1942 as their Japanese-American friends were removed to detention camps...
...BUT DELEON HAD A PREOCCUPATION With unionism—a field in which he was to make few friends and many enemies...
...The "friends" of the title are Stalin's colleagues —Beria, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, et al., under the transparent aliases of Aria, Borshchev, Vershilov, etc...
...Freed by candor from the necessity of sounding impartial, I can indulge in first-person narrative and speculate about Frances FitzGerald's frame of mind...
...Government is seen as a victim of "overload...
...It was only by the 1930s that the full impact of this insight was forced upon American labor under the prodding of the CIO...
Vol. 27 • April 1980 • No. 2
