REVIEWS
Levinson, Mark & Fredrickson, George M. & Rosenberg, Jan & Rodney, Lester & Siegel, Fred
LYDIA MARIA CHILD: SELECTED LETTERS, 1817-1880, edited by Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland; Francine Krasno, Associate Editor. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. 583 pp....
...After Keynes, governments that were concerned with maintaining the level of employment had a theory to act on...
...16.95...
...New York: Anchor/Doubleday...
...By arguing that men, throughout the 1950s, had articulated an attack on the family, Ehrenreich strains to exonerate feminists from the charge that it was the women's movement (of the '60s and '70s) that undermined the family...
...The male revolt against commitment and the feminist search for independence draw on common values, ideas, and sentiments...
...The comment became the tail of a tornado that is threatening to democratize the national pastime of our Democracy...
...If she carried the best values of the mid-Victorian middle class to their logical reformist conclusions, these same values prevented her from sympathizing with the struggles of working-class Americans faced with proletarianization...
...There are reports that Thurow's next book will attempt to provide an alternative theory...
...Lester," said Grimes unhappily, "let's talk about something else...
...No longer were hard work and family responsibility the compelling values they once had been...
...The result of misinformation and random shocks is that the economy can be knocked off its normal path for substantial periods of time—hence unemployment and the business cycle...
...the racism of American society...
...IF CHILD IS A GOOD BAROMETER of the ebb and flow of middle-class idealism and reformism in the middle decades of the 19th century, she also provides invaluable insights into the problems faced by creative and ambitious women in a male-dominated society and reveals much about the origins of 238 the feminist movement...
...I must confess that I could never fully figure him out (something I would never admit as a Daily Worker writer...
...and that is unusual...
...Ehrenreich begins with the "gray-flannel dissidents," "trapped" in their well-paying professional and managerial careers and posh suburban homes, chafing at the conformity of their lives...
...If one takes the theory literally, as monetarists and supply-siders do, there is one main conclusion: if the economy is performing poorly, then something must be interfering with the well-oiled mechanism of the market economy...
...He is the most perfect man who is affectionate as well as intellectual...
...The result is that, since Keynes, economic policy (based largely on Keynesian macro-economics) and economic theory (based on the price auction equilibrium model) have coexisted in a state of mutual suspicion and tolerance...
...q Re: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept within bounds, about 225 words...
...247 pp...
...Ehrenreich charts the intersections of these ideas with great agility, but she has the wrong map...
...Just think of the trains, hotels, restaurants, the spring-training and exhibition games down south...
...You're wasting your time...
...Thurow's argument is quite simple: the price auction equilibrium model of the economy, while internally consistent and mathematically elegant, is valueless as a guide to the actual economy...
...First, there is nothing in the automatic mechanism of the system that would make capitalists plan just the right amount of investment to ensure full employment...
...It was Pittsburgh owner Bill Benswanger's troubled but favorable reply that led to the agreement to a tryout for Roy Campanella, on which Benswanger subsequently reneged under pressure from the other owners...
...Rest with good marks, Branch Rickey...
...The demands for explanation seem only reasonable since economics claims a special status among social sciences as the most "scientific...
...a casual remark dropped three years ago by Leo Durocher [then manager of the Dodgers] which he "can't remember" may carve a larger niche in baseball history than all his shortstopping and managerial heroics...
...WHERE EHRENREICH FAILS to see the ambiguities in family life, the Bergers are best at describing those complexities...
...Her letters show that she persistently denounced racial prejudice and all forms of discrimination...
...Gunnar Myrdal anticipated much of Keynes's analysis while Joan Robinson and E. H. Chamberlain rejected the equilibrium, perfect competition model and tried to develop theories of price based on imperfect and monopolistic competition...
...Only when there is substantial idle plant capacity and large-scale unemployment is the upward thrust of wages and prices averted...
...women's life expectancy was outdistancing men's...
...My own opinion," she wrote in 1842, "is that the perfection of the individual is the sure way to regenerate the mass...
...In other words there are real economic problems, but there are no economic solutions...
...And I wouldn't bet against at least one reply along the lines of "Oh, was that, like, when there was slavery...
...Baseball's Great Experiment is a superb and sorely needed book, one that strikes a balance between according baseball desegregation its historic significance, and not being conned by it into an "everything is peachy now" outlook...
...What strikes the modern reader is not only the vigor and forthrightness of her views but also how well informed and perceptive she normally was...
...Tygiel deals well with the double standard applied to black players coming in, offers an accurate surmise on the St...
...In her eagerness to prove that men, not women, launched the attack on the family and the antifeminist politics this spawned, she draws artificial linguistic and conceptual boundaries...
...But he is an honest man and conscientiously hates slavery...
...and there is nothing for it but to subdue them with a strong hand...
...Despite her feminist sentiments, Child did not assume a leading role in the women's rights movement...
...It'll never happen...
...they are spared the task of explaining their highly abstract and often irrelevant models...
...But as Keynes pointed out, investment plans depend on anticipation of future profits and hence are characterized by uncertainty...
...A liberal Unitarian who disliked creeds and formal religiosity, she had as exacting a conscience and commitment to individual moral perfection as the most fervent evangelical Christian, and this concern with her own rectitude made it difficult for her to adopt expedient means for even the most exalted of ends...
...As in much of their writing, there is little sense that we live in a material world...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...these are the Bergers' heroes, the putative defenders of bourgeois norms and morality...
...It was exactly as inconceivable to Burleigh Grimes that such players as Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, and their black brothers of more ordinary big-league skills would ever play in the leagues as it is to many of today's 244 fans that there was a time when such players were barred because their skin wasn't the right color...
...This mixture resulted in two contradictory policies: an expansion of the economy to be encouraged by tax cuts, and a contraction of the economy to be brought on by monetary policy...
...In 1867 she concluded that the whole issue of whether there were inherent differences between the male and female character was moot: "It is vain to speculate about the nature of woman, so long as her nature is every way repressed by false customs, which men perpetuate for their own convenience, and then quarrel with the consequences...
...For myself," she wrote in 1862, "I have no prejudice against color...
...I was not indignant for my own account," she wrote, "for David respects the freedom of all women upon principle...
...Perhaps she should have left it at that...
...Those who believe it is somehow more honorable to rely on an individual than on agencies created by public wealth are, I think, simply clinging to an idealized memory of male paternalism...
...She had a longstanding devotion to the fair treatment of Indians, despite the fact that she acknowledged "considerable repugnance toward them" (principally because of what she took to be their warlike habits...
...Their quiet doubts quickly gave way to Playboy's clamorous attacks on wives (depicted as grasping and greedy) and the family...
...Insightful recollections by Jackie's widow, Rachel, fill in the homely details of life during the tumultuous year with Montreal (then the Dodgers' top minor-league affiliate) in 1946...
...Paige, portrayed at his death two years ago as a benign and nonmilitant 245 man, challenged the World Series winners to a winner-take-all game against his black All-Stars...
...Can she really mean this...
...But sometimes she wrote in an ambivalent way about the emotionalism attributed to women by this ideology of sex differences...
...The supply-siders made the appealingly simple argument that if taxes for individuals and corporations are reduced, production will expand and public revenues eventually increase...
...In an eloquent letter of 1856, Lydia revealed her basic feminism when she recorded her "towering indignation" at the fact that her husband had to sign her will to make it valid...
...THE WAR OVER THE FAMILY: CAPTURING THE MID DLE GROUND, by Brigitte Berger and Peter Berger...
...At the same time, Reagan attempted to expand the economy, using free-market principles provided by the supply-siders...
...q DANGEROUS CURRENTS: THE STATE OF ECONOMICS, by Lester Thurow...
...Tygiel is wise enough to recognize that the segregated Negro leagues did create a lively and rich life in their time, and to conclude, "But the ability of people to survive and sustain a flourishing culture in the face of discrimination does not erase the stain...
...In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that it was the previously neglected "male revolt" of the 1950s, centered in Playboy, the Beat writers, and the medical profession—but not feminism— that initiated the contemporary attack on the family...
...q 239 THE HEARTS OF MEN: AMERICAN DREAMS AND THE FLIGHT FROM COMMITMENT, by Barbara Ehrenreich...
...Keynes believed that although the system was selfequilibrating there was no inherent tendency for the system to move toward full employment...
...In 1939, John Hicks (later Sir John Hicks and a winner of the Nobel Prize) described the effects of the new work in economics as "the wreckage of the greater part of economic theory...
...This is an economics in sync with the times...
...Not feminists, she assures us, but men first laid bare the oppressive, confining "roles" (always in quotes for Ehrenreich) within the nuclear family...
...in her schema, social class/cultural differences dissolve before the enormity of gender conflict...
...The uncomfortable fact for previous chroniclers is that the Communist party and its organ, the Daily Worker, played a significant role in the campaign that finally turned Branch Rickey into an Abe Lincoln...
...The Worker followed the lead of the Courier, the nation's leading Negro weekly, in interviewing the white managers and players of local and visiting teams, with startling results that shot down the allegation that "white players would never stand for it...
...In the '30s, the paper forced National League prexy Ford Frick to state there was no written ban, and then put each owner on the spot...
...Into the void marched self-expression and personal development, extreme formulations of the individualism at the heart of bourgeois culture...
...Her willingness to subordinate female emancipation to the cause of black freedom held firm throughout her career as a reformer...
...Taxes in their view are a major constraint on economic effort and investment, so the result of the supply-side theory has been a large and regressive cut in personal and corporate taxes...
...She argues that...
...Yet it lives on...
...Enter, finally, the medical establishment, alarmed by the increasing signs of male fragility relative to female strength...
...Therefore, the role of the state is to manipulate demand within a framework of progressive taxation so as to achieve full employment and steady growth...
...New York: Random House...
...In 242 Keynes's view it was the level of investment spending planned by capitalists that was the crucial factor in determining the level of output and employment...
...Yet he was an unscrupulous businessman and had to be called to account by Landis, and he was something of a demagogue and was often patronizing toward blacks...
...Her opinions on a wide range of subjects exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of the mid-Victorian humanitarian sensibility and include some especially revealing reflections on the role or place of women in American society...
...Louis Cardinal "strike" against Robinson, chops away some of the benign aura around Yankee Manager Casey Stengel, and goes into the human drama of the conflicted Dodger radio announcer of the time, Mississippi-born Red Barber...
...CHILD'S PERSONAL ATTITUDE toward the blacks whose liberation she was espousing was complicated...
...Her literary output was enormous and included novels, children's books, historical-philosophical works, humanitarian tracts, and thousands of letters...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Aside from the Negro weeklies, it was the Daily Worker that picked up the cudgels...
...I admire a manly woman though I dislike a masculine one...
...Her difficulties in acting as an official representative of the American AntiSlavery Society were caused in part by the attitude that historian Stanley Elkins has called "anti-institutionalism...
...The letters suggest that she retained a strong affection for her feckless mate or at least could not free herself of a sense of wifely duty...
...Contemporary accounts of working-class and middle-class men suggest that, Playboy or not, the "breadwinner ethic" is still alive and well for many people in our society (though increasingly difficult to live by, given unemployment rates and wrenching economic shifts...
...There were of course those who resisted the change...
...Economists may adhere to the same underlying theory, but that does not mean there are no significant policy differences among them...
...Lest you miss the point...
...But Thurow argues that no matter what one thinks of the supply-siders, they can claim to have grounded their policy on accepted economic theory...
...In an inversion of Ehrenreich, who seeks to dissolve social norms and focus exclusively on observable behavior, the Bergers take the norms as tantamount to the reality...
...The two antifamily positions (feminists and professionals) represent the interests of the ascendant "new class...
...Henceforth she was saddled with a husband who was constantly in deep financial trouble...
...In fact, working too hard was deemed unhealthy...
...For economists, it is perhaps just as well...
...This was in part brought about by Keynes himself: But if our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practicable, the classical theory comes into its own again from this point onward...
...Nevertheless, she did not seek to impose her perfectionist views on other abolitionists and had the sense to realize that cooperation in a good cause did not require all participants to share a single view of the proper methods to be employed...
...Rejecting both family and work, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and others smashed the cornerstone of the traditional American family: the breadwinner ethic and the "family-wage system...
...But the consequence of not presenting an alternative theory is that Thurow's terms of opposition sustain what he argues against...
...When we recently spoke with Burt Zollo, one of the writers Ehrenreich cites 240 as a captain on Hefner's General Staff of the male revolt—"Hefner laid out the male strategic initiative"— about his essays deriding the marriage trap, he quickly asked that we drop the subject lest his wife get wind of what he had once said...
...THE CONTRADICTIONS between economic reality and the price-auction model have led some professional economists to perform sophisticated intellectual gymnastics to "save" the theory...
...She could not leave it alone, because it involved the understanding of her own identity as a woman who had no wish to deny her gender but had, in her role as an intellectual and reformer, intruded into what was generally considered "the male sphere...
...Far smarter than the other magnates, he cashed in on the first black players and received credit for the inevitable...
...The Chinese, on the other hand, aroused her unqualified admiration—"their industry and patience will prove a blessing to this country"—and she raised a lonely voice in the 1870s against efforts to restrict Asian immigration...
...In attempting to combat inflation Reagan employed monetary policy, cutting back on the money supply...
...Government intervention might be desired because society would like to alleviate economic pain but intervention is not useful since it cannot cure the pain even if implemented...
...To some extent Child's willingness to postpone strong advocacy of women's rights until blacks were secure in theirs reflected the "domestic feminist" view that women revealed their superiority to men by demonstrating a greater capacity for selfsacrifice...
...Ehrenreich ignores social structure and class in most of her book, focusing instead on selected ideological and cultural contours of gender conflict...
...We see Robinson evolve from the artificially restrained Dodger rookie of '47 to become Most Valuable Player (and probably "Most Voluble," as his true aggressive self happily emerged), to a coffee executive, a brief supporter of Richard Nixon (!), and finally to the deeper critic of our society's waning commitment to full equality, refusing a Yankee invitation to a 1969 oldtimers' game because "my pride in my blackness...
...Regardless of what kind of fan you are, or aren't, you will find the book fascinating...
...In 1833 she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which ranks among the most persuasive and influential of abolitionist writings...
...but prolonged, structurally induced unemployment mocks the values of discipline and hard work, while taking a heavy toll on personal and, often, family life...
...Caught up in a literal-minded reading of Playboy, she is unable to distinguish between schoolboy raffishness (the bulk of the Playboy readership were students) and rebellion...
...In addition to spelling out the main premises and linguistic/conceptual orthodoxies of each group, the book attempts to locate these various ideological positions in the social class structure of contemporary America...
...To remedy that, government must be taken out of the economy...
...I am not certain that one can fill such a 237 position without injury to [one's] own soul...
...Michael Harrington's recent article on unemployed steel workers (Harpers, April 1983) unearthed once again the deep sense of failure and shame brought on by unemployment— by a man's inability to support his family in the way they had all come to expect...
...Without a consistent microeconomic theory, it was only a matter of time until Keynesian analysis would be intellectually done in...
...She opposed the eight-hour workday movement of the late 1860s as a violation of free contract and panicked when confronted with the violent railroad strikes of 1877...
...I t might be illuminating for someone in the stands at a big-league baseball game to ask youthful white fans, randomly, "Did you know that until 1947 black players were not allowed on big-league teams...
...CHILD'S VIEW OF REFORM reflected the characteristic pre-Civil War notion that the only way to regenerate society was the moral suasion of individuals...
...and she is the most perfect woman who is intellectual as well as affectionate...
...More than 36 years now have passed since a very black man with number 42 on his uniform stepped out of the Ebbets Field dugout to quite literally change the complexion of "America's National Pastime," and one can attribute the delay to the traditional condescension of historians toward sports, which they tend to see as kid stuff off to one side of real life...
...In the most valuable part of their book they describe and celebrate the coexistence of opposed virtues and values (such as individualism and family-centeredness, stability and change, continuity and innovation) at the heart of the family, although in a striking omission they fail to link these values to the structure of gender roles...
...q 246...
...The complex interchanges of material and emotional support, of the tensions between commitment to the family and pursuit of self-interest, the mix of sentiment and interest at the heart of our family norms all are flattened out and buried by this inappropriate analogy, conceived in antipathy to the experiences she's invoking...
...The campaign, which included successful petition drives at ballparks launched by young Communists, grew in the war years into a broad committee that included the muscle of the "establishment...
...In general, no one fact can beat the equilibrium price auction model...
...When informed in 1855 that the critics of a work on religious ideas that she had published anonymously could not decide whether the author was a man or a woman, she replied with ironic self-deprecation: "I have been such a fool, such a slave, of my affections, all my life long, that I know very well that I am very much of a woman...
...He briefly details some of the ways in which the Daily Worker ". . attacked the baseball establishment," part of what he terms the necessary effort in the face of the conspiracy of silence that nourished baseball segregation...
...But it would be anachronistic to label her a white supremacist because of such opinions...
...He offered to pay his own way to any big-league spring training camp for a tryout, and said he would forget the whole thing if he didn't make the grade...
...Lester Thurow, in Dangerous Currents, agrees with a verdict once pronounced by Robert Heilbroner that "the prestige accorded to mathematics in economics has given it rigor but, alas, also mortis...
...Is it credible that 35 years into the 20th century an absolute ban against blacks in our "national pastime" evoked no indignant blasts in our great newspapers, brought forth no articles listing the qualified and overqualified black stars available, no incredulous queries directed to the commissioner, the league heads, the white team owners, managers, and players...
...It is fair to say that she evaluated individuals and groups not by the color of their skin but in terms of how nearly they seemed to approximate the Protestant middle-class cultural ideals that inspired her humanitarian efforts...
...The Courier, hardly a radical paper, would undoubtedly have preferred to congratulate the New York Times or the Post, but that's the way it was...
...So it was that the New York Daily News, with the largest circulation in the land, on July 21, 1942, reported...
...Wideranging interviews and examination of personal papers supplement contemporary accounts, some found in obscure publications...
...This has led to what Thurow calls a return to economic fundamentalism, preKeynesian economics, with policy once again being based on a literal interpretation of the price-auction equilibrium theory...
...Theoretical economics, for understandable reasons, is rarely a topic of public discussion...
...243 That the promises of the supply-siders were wildly exaggerated is now widely accepted...
...It also shows that she had many other things on her mind...
...13.95...
...During the Civil War Child lamented the fact that emancipation came about as a "military necessity" and not because the majority had acknowledged the full humanity and equality of blacks...
...As for the future of economics: we should remember that in the 1930s the price auction view of the economy was destroyed and nothing replaced it...
...David's bankruptcies forced Lydia to do a lot of hack writing and editing just to keep the household afloat...
...Only in America, where history is fleeting and elusive...
...requires that until I see genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front-office positions, I will say no...
...Despite all her romantic enthusiasms, however, she had a streak of hard-headed realism that kept her from succumbing to the kind of sentimentalism that sometimes marred the writing of other prominent female humanitarians (Harriet Beecher Stowe's, for example...
...It remained for Jules Tygiel, born two years after Jackie Robinson's Dodger debut, to grow up a historian (at San Francisco State University) and a baseball lover, and to devote five years to the research needed for so mammoth a task...
...The great irony," she asserts, .. is that the right-wing, anti-feminist backlash that emerged in the 1970s is a backlash not so much against feminism as against the male revolt...
...But as Thurow notes, The Keynesian revolution ultimately failed to sustain itself because Keynes's disciples confined their interest to macro-economic problems without constructing a micro-economic theory upon which their analysis could rest...
...But toward the end of her life she returned to the question...
...Their opening discussion of the contemporary war over the family draws the following battle lines: the "Critical Camp" (the feminists), the "Professionals" (those experts denounced by Christopher Lasch), and the "Neo-traditionalists" (an alliance of the old middle class, the working class, and the lower middle class...
...She is best remembered as a major publicist for the cause of immediate black emancipation...
...When some female abolitionists began to agitate for sexual equality during the 1830s, Child held back on grounds that "It is best not to talk about our rights, but simply go forward and do whatsoever we deem our duty...
...In economics, only a more persuasive theory can beat the present theory...
...Cardiologists and humanistic psychologists lent their professional legitimacy to the male revolt against the family...
...What gives the book its special value is that he does not stop with the glow of victory...
...Out of the wreckage emerged a new version of the old theory...
...There is nothing wrong with the economy or economic theory that a dose of diminished expectations won't cure...
...Deploring the "tendency toward a strong demarcation of classes in this country," she concluded that the riotous strikers "are terribly in the wrong...
...Thurow agrees with supply-sider Norman Ture that supplyside economics is simply "the application of price theory in analyzing problems concerning economic aggregates...
...This was the context in which Keynes set about to revolutionize economics...
...Basic economic and demographic changes (the decline of the smokestack industries, the threats posed to those in traditional occupations by the growth of new high-tech industries, and the unprecedented growth of female-headed families) now threaten families' well-being far more than any male revolt...
...Barbara Ehrenreich's witty and original account of contemporary antifamily attitudes and Brigitte and Peter Berger's measured neoconservative account of class, culture, and beliefs about the family provide sharply different explanations for the current conflicts over the family...
...I am more doubtful whether I partake much of the manly nature...
...Rickey hated with a passion to have it appear that pressure had anything to do with the case, which is why he flew into a cold rage when writers from the Negro weekly Amsterdam News and from the Daily Worker showed up at the Dodgers' wartime Bear Mountain spring-training camp with three black players seeking a tryout...
...For two years (1841-43) she served as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society...
...As a woman without independent means, she encountered many obstacles in her efforts to pursue the only career of any dignity and prestige that was open to the women of her generation, that of a professional writer...
...female...
...However, those who resisted the change did not have to worry long...
...But times of crisis produce demands for explanation and remedies, which in turn lead to a reexamination of the theory underlying policy prescriptions...
...In his economic entourage, Reagan brought together various specimens of free-market believers...
...Once again the oppressed have been outwitted by their oppressors—divided against each other instead of confronting the real enemy...
...At one point Thurow seems to acknowledge this: Since economic reality is always much more complex than any theory, it is always possible to shift to an alternative theory to account for any one puzzling fact...
...This is the clear villain of 241 the book, struggling its way to cultural dominance in the name of such decadent values as radical individualism, instant gratification, and personal fulfillment...
...It is convenient for the Northerner's good conscience to forget about the Negro," Myrdal wrote...
...Thurow dissects one of these attempts by a group called Rational Expectationists...
...Everything is sold and everyone employed...
...She well exemplifies the argument of historian David Montgomery (in Beyond Equality) that labor militancy frightened most middle-class radicals and impelled them to take an increasingly conservative posture on social issues during the 1860s and '70s...
...252 pp...
...He told Lester Rodney, Daily Worker sports editor, now in the Army, that he'd use colored players with the Dodgers but for the general ban by club owners...
...It is only in the postmodern period that the sense of balance and tensions (and the risks that these imply) has been rejected...
...How could it be...
...q BASEBALL'S GREAT EXPERIMENT, by Jules Tygiel...
...When the growing clamor brought matters to a head, Rickey seized the moment...
...An author and reformer, she wrote extensively on social and cultural issues, was active in the antislavery movement, and supported women's rights...
...Thurow demonstrates in great detail how the economy differs from the model...
...Government intervention in the economy cannot improve economic performance because the improving action by government will be anticipated by economic actors (thus the name, Rational Expectations), and the intended effects will be negated by the anticipated action...
...New York: Anchor/Doubleday...
...Take, for example, the experience of the Reagan administration...
...The experience caused her great pain and helped to prompt a searching examination of the institution of marriage that ultimately led to her advocacy of divorce by mutual consent...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...And it was...
...I have no reason to doubt the basic sincerity of his deep religious impulse against discrimination...
...It is in determining the volume, not the direction of actual employment, that the existing system has broken down...
...It is his nature to potter about details...
...what happens when policy is made according to the model...
...But modern readers are nonetheless likely to find some of her references to blacks insufferably condescending or paternalistic...
...The last clause might have been her epitaph...
...He carries ballast enough for his sails...
...Like Zollo, most of the privates in the male revolt failed to follow their own marching orders...
...They work because they have to support their families, not for the self-fulfillment or inherent satisfaction the work affords...
...TYGIEL'S BOOK IS THE FIRST about Robinson and baseball desegregation to objectively cite the role of the Daily Worker alongside the valiant black weekly sportswriters who began it all—notably Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, and Joe Bostic of New York's Amsterdam News...
...But I was indignant for womankind made chattels personal from the beginning of time, perpetually insulted by literature, law, and custom...
...It is important to remember that whatever the policy implications of Keynes's General Theory (and they were substantial), Keynes had much less of an effect on economic theory...
...The Worker and Courier pooled their results...
...It followed that the role of the state was to modify or remove any friction or imperfection that might prevent these inherent tendencies from working and to oppose all attempts to restrict the free play of market forces...
...Lydia Maria Child was one of the most remarkable American women of the 19th century...
...Rickey, "an American original," is also portrayed in his full complexity...
...Typical working-class and middle-class men still see their jobs primarily as the way to provide for their families...
...The norm of individualism is no longer balanced with that of social responsibility, "liberation" with strong communal ties...
...To save herself from the burden of her husband's debts and the agonies of his failures, she effected a physical and financial separation that lasted for many years...
...The profamily position of the neotraditionalists is rooted in the "politically potent alliance of the old middle class (the business class), the lower middle class, and the working class...
...ECONOMIC TURMOIL in the 1970s and '80s has led once again to dissatisfaction with economics...
...But bitter factionalism among abolitionists made a misery of her attempt to convey the essential antislavery message to a broad middle-class audience, and she resigned in despair, not merely from the editorship but also from organized abolitionism...
...Child reemerged as an antislavery militant during the sectional crisis of the 1850s and drew national attention when she offered to nurse the wounded John Brown as he awaited execution in a Virginia jail after his raid on Harper's Ferry...
...Yet he is the one who took the giant step when the others wouldn't, and, once committed, he fought hard and effectively against those who would sabotage it...
...She would have been the first to admit that she lacked the kind of intellectual depth and creativity that she admired in such contemporaries as Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, and George Sand...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...I form opinions decisively, on what seem to me sufficient grounds," she wrote late in life, "and then I stick to them pertinaciously...
...Indeed, the application of mathematics to economic theory, linear programming, input-output analysis, and econometrics is an impressive technical and analytic tool...
...Next came the Beat poets and writers, the "apotheosis of male criticism...
...This dissatisfaction has focused on Keynesian economics and on its inability to cope with rising inflation and unemployment...
...Her final solution was androgynous: "I think every individual, and every society, is perfected just in proportion to the combination, and cooperation, of masculine and feminine elements of character...
...But later, when the Garrisonians had taken control of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the moderates had withdrawn to form a new organization, she felt equally unhappy when some of the radicals sought to commit the society to the kind of nonviolent anarchism known as "nonresistance...
...One element has overwhelmed the previous balance, the extremes have been posed as irreconcilable alternatives...
...Being a Swede, he didn't know it, but no way can you get more socko "publicity" in this country than through the sports scene, which, for better or worse, commands the avid and unflagging attention of most Americans...
...they succeeded to a remarkable degree in informing the American people of the existence and injustice of Jim Crow athletics...
...The conflicted black owners were taken advantage of by the white big-league owners, who knew the blacks couldn't appear before their own people as blockers of baseball integration...
...and how professional economists struggle with the contradiction between model and reality...
...Thurow points out that the first result of such constraint is not on prices, but on output and employment...
...In the book's conclusion she backtracks and, damning her own argument, admits that: "If the male revolt has roots in a narcissistic consumer culture, it is equally rooted in the tradition of liberal humanism that inspires feminism...
...One point of personal privilege I think necessary for historicity...
...Then 31 years old, Paige would wait 11 more cruel years to take his place on a big-league pitching mound...
...the family-wage system was itself a kind of private-sector welfare system, in which a woman's only "entitlement" was her share of her husband's wage...
...Yet she never seriously considered dissolving her own marriage...
...He challenged baseball to poll all fans entering big-league ballparks as to whether they wanted black players on the teams...
...The bourgeois family as an institution," they argue, "made it possible to socialize individuals with singular stable personalities (`strong characters'), who were also ready for innovation and risk-taking in a society undergoing historically unprecedented transformations...
...Although she sympathized with the extreme pacifist convictions of the nonresistants, she remained firm in her belief that the only qualification for membership in the society should be a dedication to the immediate abolition of slavery, with individuals retaining freedom of choice as to methods and affiliations with other movements...
...The Rational Expectationists base their theory on the price-auction model, but they drop the idea of perfect knowledge and add the idea that the economy is subject to large random shocks...
...Resign yourself to the fact that the best possible performance may be a rather poor performance...
...One of the main difficulties is simply lack of publicity . . . [which is] of the highest strategic importance...
...The suffrage of women can better afford to wait than that of the colored people" she wrote in 1867, and two years later she denounced Elizabeth Cady Stanton for opposing the Fifteenth Amendment because it enfranchised black males while ignoring the claims of women...
...He painstakingly follows the desegregation story team by team (as late as 1953 only 6 of the 16 big-league teams had black players), and he traces the evolution of southern minor-league cities torn between economics and bigotry...
...Orthodox economists in the midst of the Great Depression, relying on the price auction theory, believed that supply created its own demand and that capitalism automatically tended toward the full employment of labor and the full utilization of all resources—provided, of course, that the mechanism of the market was not impeded...
...Her assessment of "the great emancipator" is worth quoting: Lincoln is a man of slow mind, apparently incapable of large comprehensive views...
...in the doing of which he wastes valuable time and golden opportunities...
...16.95...
...Back on August 20, 1939, when the good fight was being fought, the Daily Worker published a letter to me from Smith then congratulating the Worker on its role in the campaign and its "past great efforts," and suggesting further joint campaign projects...
...Says Tygiel: "Although narrow access to the public limited both sets of advocates...
...In this concluding section Ehrenreich argues that the feminization of poverty is the product more of traditional gender-based occupational segregation than of the male revolt...
...This admirable selection from Child's letters, skillfully edited, introduced, and annotated by Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, provides ample evidence of her zeal on behalf of AfroAmerican liberation...
...She first objected to the efforts of moderate abolitionists to eject the Garrisonian radicals from the movement because the latter refused to vote for antislavery candidates (Garrison viewed the act of voting as sinful complicity with a corrupt political system...
...Back in my first incarnation, as a sportswriter, one day in 1937 I asked Burleigh Grimes, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, how he would feel about a chance to put a Dodger uniform on Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson, two black players of obvious bigleague star caliber...
...Here was the coup de grace to the breadwinner ethic and the family-wage system on which women depended...
...It should be noted that by this time Smith was also working for Rickey, whose line that was...
...Second, since expectations of future profits are volatile, investment plans and hence output and employment levels are prone to wild fluctuations...
...Who actually read and took to heart the attacks on the family in Playboy, Beat poetry, and humanistic psychology...
...Puny or no compensation for signing Negro League players was the result...
...Although she strongly favored woman suffrage, she lent her support to those who said that Reconstruction was "the Negro's hour...
...Neither approach quite gets at the complexity of our social life...
...Ehrenreich seems blind to the seemingly unavoidable element of paternalism in state programs...
...But whether these advances in technique give us greater insight into the functioning of the economy is another question...
...None of the challenges were accepted...
...Monetary policy will control inflation, but at the cost of inducing a recession...
...The book quotes the Courier's Wendell Smith saying, some time after the breakthrough, that "the Communists did more to delay the entrance of Negroes into big-league baseball than any other single factor...
...Keynes's pathbreaking work was the high point of a number of attempts in the 1930s to bring economic theory into accord with the changing reality of capitalism...
...No saint he, for sure...
...The years of the 1930s, when the lonely campaign began, unfortunately receive telescoped, though accurate, treatment...
...n spite of endless analyses and premature obituaries, the subject of the American family continues to draw on a seemingly bottomless well of feelings...
...It is interesting in this connection to recall that Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in his monumental An American Dilemma, viewed white northern unawareness and apathy as a major roadblock to progress toward equality...
...Her one discussion of class, a description of the difference between a "middle-class gaze" and a "working-class stare," approaches parody...
...Thurow attempts to look behind the imposing technical apparatus of modern economics in order to expose its basic postulates, what he calls the price auction equilibrium view of the economy...
...I suspect at least half would respond with something like, "You gotta be kidding...
...Ehrenreich can no longer deny this obvious if uncomfortable truth...
...In any case, the Childs were reunited as soon as conditions permitted...
...Thank you for your kind cooperation...
...But in terestingly, she concludes with a more grounded discussion of current changes in the economy and the probable implications for women and their families...
...She also argued, in contrast to some of the more optimistic abolitionists, that it would take generations for freed blacks to shake off the degradation and bad habits engendered by slavery...
...She was essentially a popularizer rather than an original thinker, and her letters (like her published writings) normally represent rather than extend a point of view...
...In fairness to the author, it would take another volume to bring equivalent scholarship to this seminal period...
...Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—idle plant capacity, unsold surpluses, unemployed labor in massive quantities, that is, markets that were not clearing—economists clung to their model...
...Men had a startlingly high incidence of heart attacks...
...392 pp...
...The weakness of Thurow's critique is that he offers no alternative theory...
...Yet she realized that freedom by any means was better than continued slavery, and in 1864 she supported Lincoln's reelection against a movement of antislavery purists to put up a more radical candidate...
...You better believe it...
...Male revolt and feminism spring (in part) from the same tradition of radical individualism...
...In academia the tension was covered up by dividing economics into two separate, largely unrelated, micro and macro segments...
...The Bergers argue that the battle over the family is part of a much larger conflict between classes in America...
...Those who continue to value private over public life, the family over the state, are arrogantly dismissed as reactionary, backward-looking holdovers from an earlier era...
...Thurow can justly say that the purpose of his book was not to present an alternative but rather to criticize the present orthodox theory...
...35.00...
...This led to two conclusions...
...their work derives meaning from their commitment to the breadwinner ethic...
...ROBINSON EMERGES in this book as the many-dimensioned person he was...
...While editing the Anti-Slavery Standard, she wrote: "I have an increasingly uncomfortable sense of being fettered by being the organ of a Society...
...The Bergers applaud the bourgeois virtues as if they existed in a timeless vacuum...
...14.95...
...The Rational Expectation theory, as Thurow notes, leads us to be extremely pessimistic about our ability to do anything...
...Her key intellectual coordinates are male vs...
...The economy, tacked on belatedly in Ehrenreich's book, is altogether absent from the Bergers...
...Later she used the same nautical metaphor to commend Frederick Douglass for being another atypical "colored man...
...Here Ehrenreich's ironic sympathies lead her astray when she tells us she is amazed that men have stuck to the breadwinner trap for so long...
...She eventually concluded that "my husband's deficiencies in business matters are incurable...
...The bulk of her book is an engaging but highly selective description of diverse though, in retrospect, complementary antifemale and antifamily ideas that appeared in opposition to the predominant profamily ideology of the 1950s...
...It is ironic that a book so focused on the conjunctures of social class, family structure, and ideology gives short shrift to the overall structure of the economy and, especially, to the debilitating effects on family life of long-term unemployment, underemployment, and poverty...
...What we get from this detail is a sense of the catalytic importance of baseball's pioneering to the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954...
...It has been destroyed again by Thurow...
...For the rest of her long life (she died in 1880 at the age of 78), she devoted most of her energy and literary effort to the cause of black freedom and equality...
...This theory, first articulated over 100 years ago by the French economist Leon Walras, explains how prices (assuming perfect competition and a free market) fluctuate, rising and falling so that all markets clear...
...Tygiel has done a remarkable job...
...In 1842, for example, she described the black abolitionist Charles Remond as "the first colored person I have met, who seemed to be altogether such an one as I would have him...
...In September 1937, a Daily Worker interview with the nation's leading "invisible man," the nonpareil pitcher Satchel Paige, impinged on "the Northerner's good conscience...
...206 pp...
...He argued that demand creates its own supply and therefore government manipulation of demand is the essential prerequisite to the maintenance of full employment...
...In toiling for the freedom of others we shall find our own...
...THE WAY THE GREAT CHANGE took place, and its major impact on American life (Martin Luther King told black Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, "You'll never know what you and Jackie and Roy did to make it possible to do my job") have never been seriously examined before the publication of Baseball's Great Experiment...
...Her own biases seem to have been mainly those of class and culture rather than race...
...For them, people live on the higher planes of values, ideas, ideologies...
...Equally vexing is the question of the breadth and depth of the male revolt...
...They embody the square bourgeois virtues of thrift, responsibility, obligation, and hard work...
...She published her first novel at the age of 22 (in 1824) and two years later married the journalist and reformer David Child...
...The fact that most economists did not endorse supply-side economics is further evidence of the muddled relationship between economic theory and economic policy...
...Assailed by more than a million letters, telegrams and phone calls, Commissioner Landis . . Among the usually historically overlooked events traced by Tygiel is the fatal impact of baseball integration upon a major black business, the Negro leagues...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
