REVIEWS
Rule, James B. & Feldman, Ron H. & Krouse, Richard W. & Seeger, Murray & Glusman, John A. & Trachtenberg, Alan
THE AIR-LINE TO SEATTLE: STUDIES IN LITERARY AND HISTORICAL WRITING ABOUT AMERICA, by Kenneth S. Lynn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 227 pp. $17.50. The first oddity about Kenneth Lynn's...
...PELLEY, WINROD, AND SMITH are remembered as three of a type—one-time fundamentalist preachers transformed into home-grown fascists, using religious rhetoric as a lever for virulent anti-Semitism...
...Does anyone believe that Emerson's reason for marrying can matter as much as his theory, say, of selfreliance...
...But the radicals of the Masses weren't professional revolutionaries, and prewar America wasn't prerevolutionary Russia...
...Thus the direction taken by grass-roots movements in America may depend on such adventitious matters as the leadership or alliances that happen to present themselves at a particular moment...
...His evidence is of a kind that can only be developed by a hard-working, sensitive, and skilled reporter covering this vast land and society...
...Oz is horrified and dumbfounded by this man and can only wonder whether "Hitler not only killed the Jews but also infected them with his poison...
...Chicago: The University of Chicago Press...
...The lengthy prosecution did the government no credit...
...Oz finds these Arab journalists prepared to accept territorial compromise and coexistence with Israel...
...And the exercise of choice in turn is a necessary condition for the development of those powers and capacities—above all, reason and individuality— that define us as essentially human...
...like the town itself, those who still believe in it seem like museum pieces...
...freethinking parents fostered religious latitude...
...There is, for example, the intense fascination with superficial aspects of Western society—printed tee-shirts, blue jeans, rock music, chewing gum...
...The essays in this volume had already attracted a great deal of interest when they appeared as a series in Davar, the newspaper of the Histadrut, Israel's labor federation...
...369 pp...
...WHEN SPITZ TURNS to two complex sets of interrelationships— between liberty and law, and between liberty and equality—these essays are most consistently powerful and rewarding...
...the same miasma of the long Russian fall and winter in drab Moscow prevails...
...Many of the jokes of a decade ago are still told...
...But in the place where the Devil is at work the Spirit of God can be found...
...Fishbein criticizes the radicals for their lack of discipline, ideological unity, and theoretical sophistication, which Lenin had insisted on in What Is To Be Done...
...He imagined Joseph Stalin to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, and suggested that President Hoover was "manipulated by agents of the 'International Shylock.' " His "Silver Shirts" were a bizarre mixture of abstracted spiritualists and Nazi-like thugs...
...God alone decides...
...During the 1930s and 1940s—the golden age of the labor movementDavar played a decisive role in shaping the culture of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in the Land of Israel...
...If for no other reason, we won't let you give back those territories...
...For the Harvard philosopher "genteel" meant conservative and reactionary...
...I reread Stevens's Russian adventure after finishing David Shipler's new book, Russia, the latest in a long line of correspondents' books about Russia and the Soviet Union...
...Insofar as he identifies the value of (negative) liberty with the value of a field of choice, Spitz's, too, is a doctrine of "positive" liberty...
...She had also read many of my stories and concluded that little had changed since Stevens's visit...
...She accuses the radicals of a lack of aesthetic discipline, of failing to articulate the role of the artist, and of being unable to achieve a synthesis between art and politics...
...A sense of one's own fallibility, a spirit of intellectual openness and humility, is the frame of mind most appropriate to liberalism...
...Shipler's fine book confirms that conclusion...
...Eastman began a series of political commentaries, "Knowledge and Revolution," vowing to make the Masses "a popular Socialist magazine of pictures and lively writing" that would be open to "free and spirited expressions of every kind," but no longer associated with the "dogmatic spirit" and "factional disputes" of the Socialist party...
...Oz uses his literary skills to create highly polished portraits of the people who live in this land of harsh landscapes and brilliant light...
...Write: They're sick of wars...
...On this point, accounts written by foreign travelers as far back as the 16th century bear remarkable resemblance to contemporary reports...
...God also figures in the perspective of Father Dubois, a long-time Jerusalem resident who teaches philosophy at the Hebrew University...
...strong maternal figures nurtured feminism...
...SHIPLER NOTES in his foreword that he felt a "driving need to write in a more . . . durable manner on the themes of Soviet life, on the values that shaped the society as it entered the last quarter of the twentieth century...
...Known recently as an acerbic neoright reviewer for Commentary and the American Scholar, where most of these pieces first appeared, Lynn holds his book together more by a consistency of tone and stance than by any clear and positive statement of his point of view (as distinct from his positions on particular issues...
...To appease the Post Office, the editorial staff reorganized as the Liberator in 1918...
...he actively opposed the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana at a time when it wielded great influence...
...24.50...
...But it is an important omission nonetheless...
...From a description of this toy and clothing store, Shipler proceeds to Detsky Sod 104 (a kindergarten) and a thorough discussion of "The Collective and the Individual...
...The earlier, cumbersome design was changed to allow greater freedom for artists 376 such as Charles Winter, Frank Waits, and Stuart Davis...
...Along with Jefferson, Emerson is the figure most often claimed by critical intellectuals as fountainhead and inspiration...
...Yet I found one element in the book troubling, namely, Shipler's reaction to Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner...
...In the neighborhood where he grew up he encounters the rebirth of the Diaspora in the heart of the Jewish state...
...But we can let that pass as a fine distinction, accuracy of literary interpretation not being one of the higher virtues professed by the book...
...Spitz's discussions of the relationships between liberty and equality run interestingly and importantly parallel to his discussion of liberty and law...
...and close family environments, like those of Eastman, Dell, and Bourne, cultivated the seeds of rebellion...
...232 pp...
...While the shift to internationalism in public opinion undercut its ideological appeal, the final blow came from overt repression by the Roosevelt administration...
...Eastman couldn't resist...
...As it was, the authority Eastman exerted came to be resented...
...Every person who has the Spirit of God in him loves the People of Israel and prays for its triumph in the struggle—for its triumph over itself...
...Frank, irreverent, colorful, and arrogant, the Masses was the voice of the prewar Village, and young leftists, like Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold, drank up every word...
...Then one tries to keep the momentum going as the ideological and meteorological grayness of Moscow erodes enthusiasm...
...Is there also a current here of the phenomenon Richard Hofstadter portrayed, the paranoid hatred of what Lynn calls "modern-day intellectuals and their terrible need for radical myths...
...This something may be unassimilated immigrant groups, racial or ethnic minorities, communism, the papacy, international bankers, Jewish conspiracies, progressive education—or, more likely, some eclectic combination of these things...
...Liberals, he argues, ought not to disparage the value of property both as a bulwark of liberty and a basis of human personality...
...More to the point is the purpose of this portrayal of Emerson as a deceiver of the young who hid the "dirty little secret" that he enjoyed "a subsidy and that the source of the subsidy was the business fortune of a Boston merchant...
...And liberal egalitarianism: Spitz is, quite properly, wary of those radical extensions of equality—such as the absolute equality of background condition, including suppression of the family, that would be essential to achieve perfect equality of opportunity— which would entail a prohibitive loss of liberal freedom...
...The Old Christian Right chronicles the surge of right-wing nativism that crested in the mid- and late '30s...
...There is a logical fallacy in this argument...
...Because of the subjective nature of their revolt and the weakness of their vision, Fishbein concludes, "the left shattered after World War I into bohemians and radicals who could neither communicate nor cooperate in the interests of social change...
...Things go wrong, at home or abroad, and an explanation is demanded...
...This recognition moves his liberalism, inexorably, beyond considerations of formal equality of civil and political rights to considerations of material equality of social and economic power...
...Typically, he opens a chapter by describing a visit to a Soviet institution such as Detsky Mir, the huge store for children's needs that stands on the same immense central Moscow square as the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the ubiquitous Committee on State Security—the KGB...
...The pattern repeats itself every generation or so in America...
...12.95...
...He is worried that "if my hosts succeed in their cause, they may drag both me and my children with them, to kill and die in a perpetual and unnecessary war, or perhaps turn Israel into a monster like Belfast, Rhodesia, or South Africa...
...We might get better policy-planning, even from a right-wing White House, if more of its occupants read books like this one...
...But, more than most, he recognizes that without these material preconditions liberal freedom is a hollow shell—preferable to illiberal unfreedom, to be sure, but no less fraudulent...
...Here young boys are given basic training in handling rifles...
...Art was seen as an instrument of social influence, but content and form were left to the creativity of the artist...
...Since he does not provide footnotes or clear guidelines, it is not at all clear whether, in the following sentence, Lynn is paraphrasing or quoting directly from Santayana, though the disapproval is unmistakable: James simply could not see that in the context of America's drive to acquire far-flung bases for which Alfred Thayer Mahan had persuasively argued in his recent book on the influence of naval power upon history, the Declaration of Independence was nothing but "a piece of literature, a salad of illusions...
...And she is not quite the grandiose fulfillment of the vision of the Prophets and of the dream of generations...
...The labor Zionist dream symbolized by Bat Shlomo has been realized and abandoned...
...Like a number of other contemporary liberal theorists, Spitz distinguishes between liberty and the material preconditions, or powers, essential to its effective exercise...
...It is a polemicist's logic, not that of an analyst, a critic, or a historian...
...Oz's decision to first publish these essays in Davar provides a clue...
...But Israel has changed after 15 years of occupying the West Bank and Gaza, six years of rule by the Likud and, finally, the war in Lebanon...
...The quality of these books turned upward in the 1970s when detente made it easier for resident correspondents to travel outside the city of Moscow and meet a greater variety of Soviet citizens...
...The riveting portrayals of their sworn opponents are meant to awaken them to this new Israel, to show them exactly what they are up against, to shake them from passive resignation into action...
...Fishbein then wonders why the writers and artists of the Masses weren't more technically innovative or more attuned to the modernist movement...
...Marx was Justice," Joseph Freeman wrote, and "The Masses was both...
...THIS SHIFTING of the grounds of explanation and interpretation is the most significant feature of Lynn's book, obscured as it might be by the splenetic character of the writing...
...Fishbein acknowledges these intentions only to pass judgment on those who lived up to them...
...Having read the best of the academic literature, he applied its lessons to what he saw during his four years in Moscow...
...Significantly, a preponderant number of essays (9 out of 16) deal with biographies or autobiographies...
...The Arabs who live in the land do so not by right but by the mercy of its Jewish owners...
...On the face of it, a number of Lynn's particular discussions seem to trivialize their subjects...
...Earlier, he had written a book about his travels in East Africa, and a second volume with the marvelous title Around the World on a Bicycle...
...Soviet citizens have seen their fondest dreams dissolve, their few heroes proved misguided at best and psychotic killers at the worst, and their greatest minds consumed by the 375 society that created them...
...individuals must be free to choose between competing conceptions, through the exercise of autonomous deliberation, if they are to grasp the grounds of truth...
...It evokes "reality," and as he explains in his prologue, Lynn wants to pursue Santayana's theme into the present, to show that a "hermetic mentality" still rules "the nation's intelligentsia," that indeed "the spirit of the genteel tradition is triumphantly alive in American thought...
...Floyd Dell, for instance, one of the first Americans to popularize psychoanalysis, seemed untroubled by the discrepancy between a Marxian and a Freudian point of view...
...What Shipler saw in Sakharov, before he was dispatched into exile, was probably the effect of years of official condemnation, psychological pressure, and physical abuse...
...How much of this tendency is a true religious response and how much a reaction to the drabness of everyday Soviet life is an open question...
...His book offers a powerful and persuasive defense of the liberal egalitarian perspective, pointing the way to a reconciliation of liberalism and democratic socialism...
...In what is probably the book's most shocking essay, Oz encounters a self-described "JudeoNazi" in one of the old and well-established agricultural villages...
...while they preached violence, they seem to have been as often its victims as perpetrators...
...As the essay on Emerson makes clear, the focus on private life, moreover, serves a distinctly ideological purpose...
...American journalists have released a stream of books on Russia, varying in quality...
...She virtually overlooks, for example, the superb reportage the Masses featured on the domestic class struggle—such as John Reed's "War in Paterson" on the silk workers' strike of 1913...
...There's nothing we can do about it: here in this land we are welded together, Jews and Arabs, forever...
...These historical and literary studies by the "professoriat" (the term, like "intelligentsia," fairly reeks of contempt in Lynn's frequent use of it) followed the path of William James and condemned the war in Vietnam as "a wicked sin...
...Our appeal," Eastman concluded, "will be to the masses, both Socialist and non-Socialist, with entertainment, education, and the livelier kinds of propaganda...
...As Reed once put it, "This class struggle plays hell with your poetry...
...Drafted by John Reed and toned down by Eastman, the statement proclaimed the Masses "a revolutionary and not a reform magazine," one that would search for "the true causes," stand opposed to convention, and publish what the capitalist press couldn't print...
...q IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL, by Amos Oz...
...Whatever her intention, she is unsympathetic to the aims of the Masses, which was united not by ideology, but in its diversity, the true source of its spirit, color, and life...
...Fishbein argues that their failure to articulate a socialist critique of everyday life prevented them from shaping sound policies and from surviving the divisive effects of the First World War...
...In fact, the opposite was true...
...But since the Masses group was committed to free expression—artistic and literary decisions being made at open, often anarchic editorial meetings—the demand for ideological coherence would have amounted to a contradiction in terms...
...Grass-roots movements for democracy or equality do not necessarily embody sensitivity to rights of minorities or support for liberties of expression and thought...
...All three figures gained influence as the '30s wore on, grouping around themselves diverse opponents of New Deal foreign and domestic policies...
...And whoever does evil will pay the price: God will pass ov,:r him and forget him...
...He also had an advantage supplied by his wise employers— time to develop a facility in the Russian language and some academic background in history and political science before taking on this assignment...
...But it does not follow that the two values always stand in this antithetical relationship...
...Sometimes they boil up from below, as in the '30s and '50s, and furnish ammunition for ambitious political entrepreneurs to attack entrenched political elites...
...While ranging far and wide, The Real World of Liberalism is unified by a consistent concern: to rescue what Spitz sees as the authentic liberal tradition from its enemies on left and right...
...What attracted Maxwell Perkins to the glamorous Scott Fitzgerald had less to do with aesthetic judgment or respect for talent than a kind of vicarious compensation for the editor's own repressed, unhappy existence...
...quite the contrary...
...One may wonder why Oz lent the power of his pen to ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists, "Judeo-Nazis," messianic fundamentalists, Palestinian nationalists, and angry Sephardim—who all are his opponents...
...Instead of analyzing the economic and 377 historical conditions that shattered the revolutionary dream in America, she delves into Freudian psychology...
...toward narrow nativism and persecution of the powerless, on the other...
...Similarly, we learn more about the complexities of Walter Lippmann's mind from his personal life than from the public positions he took, particularly his opposition to the Vietnam war toward the end of his career...
...Washington policy-makers seeking inside information on Soviet goals, or clues to the endless maneuvering among Kremlin leaders, will find little guidance in this book...
...And there have been reminiscences by the few reporters who witnessed the grim realities of Stalin's final days...
...While many of these new sources were eccentric in their protests and opinions, they did offer hitherto unavailable insights into the everyday functioning of Soviet life...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Thank you for your kind cooperation...
...In his efforts to crush his right-wing critics, Ribuffo argues, Roosevelt reinforced both theory and practice of mobilizing state power against internal dissent...
...Pelley, though also a fundamentalist preacher, had been a writer of sentimental novels and Hollywood screenplays before a mystical experience convinced him of his true destiny in politics...
...q Re: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept within bounds, about 225 words...
...Privately, youngsters talk about religion...
...In writing about a thinker, how is it possible to overemphasize "his life as a thinker...
...Those of us who watched him join a silent demonstration for civil rights on a snowy December night in Pushkin Square, when no other "name" intellectuals appeared, have to find this criticism unwarranted...
...Like its actions against the powerless Japanese Americans, the Administration's attack on these admittedly unsavory personalities showed a darker side to centrist liberalism...
...He would have us believe that Santayana's poem of 1900 as well as his lecture of 1911 were addressed against the likes of William James, whose denunciation of the annexation of the Philippines as a "shameless betrayal of American principles" that reeked of "greed, ambition, corruption, and imperialism" Lynn characterizes as "moralistic lamentations," a prefiguring of the latter-day gentility, which so upsets him—that of "the sons of the genteel tradition" who are "too affronted by their native land to study it with care...
...It was the conflict of desire and fact, idea and reality—the failure, as William L. O'Neill pointed out in his excellent anthology, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917, "of the revolutionary ideal...
...A reader sent me Stevens's book ten years ago, after she and her husband had completed a guided tour of major Soviet cities...
...It divides the world into the dependent and the independent, the dominant and the submissive, master and (formally free) servant...
...Smith's hero Huey Long, after all...
...Just as Emerson himself denied the inherent worth of sensuous experience and gloried in the vaporousness of an ideal world, so his biographers have traditionally underemphasized his life as a man and overemphasized his life as thinker...
...Smith may have reached the high point of public attention when he preached to 150,000 mourners at Huey Long's funeral in 1935, but he continued to 379 attract crowds to his anti-Semitic diatribes even in the 1940s...
...WHY SUCH AN EXTREME DISTORTION...
...After noting the disheartening tendency of Soviet dissidents to disparage each other, and singling out a handful of intellectuals who seemed to understand Western values, Shipler writes: I wish I could also count Andrei Sakharov among them, but it pains me to say that his towering courage and devotion to speaking for humaneness, which entitles him to all the immense respect he receives, did little to revise his Soviet-made impulses and preconceptions, which often proved more powerful than his contact with Western ideals...
...Palgrave was Beauty...
...These essays are directed first and foremost at his own constituency— the kibbutzniks and Labor party functionaries who are virtually the only people who read Davar today...
...If Smith, for instance, had encountered Senator George Norris instead of Huey Long during the early 1930's," Ribuffo writes, "he could have become . . . dean of the social gospel instead of the dean of anti-Semitism...
...No matter all the propaganda and self-deception —the Soviet Union remains a state that cannot decently feed its own people and destroys its most creative citizens...
...In January 1913 an editorial note appeared that redefined the aim and scope of the Masses, henceforth carried on the masthead of each issue...
...One need not deny all relevant difference in order to affirm, as does Spitz, a greater commonality...
...Worse than the Nazis...
...Even the modest improvements in living standards that generated some optimism in the 1960s and 1970s have ended...
...You love the Arabs as much as you hate the Oriental Jews," they tell Oz...
...in addition, the longest, most substantial essay, "The Rebels of Greenwich Village" (its point is to show that they did not fit the stereotype of Midwesterners in flight from a small town) consists of many biographies interwoven skillfully into a collective portrait...
...But Shipler made his own way too, cutting paths through the dense snow that covers most of the Soviet reality...
...Here is backlash with a vengeance, and not a little frightening: habitual tendency...
...371 The question Oz leaves in doubt is whether his modest and reasonable vision of Ashdod stands a chance against passionate fanatics who put their faith in guns, believe God is on their side, and are certain that the Messiah is at the gate...
...She is particularly unsatisfactory in her discussion of the Masses' art work, which first attracted public attention, and its fiction, perhaps the magazine's most distinguished feature...
...I=1 REBELS IN BOHEMIA: THE RADICALS OF THE MASSES, 1911-1917, by Leslie Fishbein...
...Sometimes these ugly impulses are orchestrated from the top, as under the current Administration...
...Freedom of choice is secured by the liberal value of tolerance...
...therefore, "the war over the Land of Israel is a war over life and death, and it is still very far from over...
...Like Isaiah Berlin and others, Spitz distinguishes between "negative" and "positive" liberty...
...The net effect of what Ribuffo calls "the Brown Scare" was to ease the way for similar actions against leftists during the McCarthy and Vietnam periods...
...Sensitive to all new winds that blow, never rigid in a single...
...The Kingdom of Yiddishkeit" spreads out from the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Mea Shearim...
...Yet the trial and the antisubversive activities leading up to it left some important repercussions, none of them heartening...
...Here Spitz is an unreconstructed follower of John Stuart Mill...
...Moreover, Fishbein's "leftist" critique runs only skin-deep...
...Thus his book, while similar in some ways to Smith's, stands by itself as an important contribution to an understanding of the uniqueness of Soviet society, its weaknesses and strengths, and its seeming permanence...
...Here hatred for the Labor party, the kibbutzim, and the Ashkenazic establishment runs deep...
...After many months, the bizarre and acrimonious trial ended without a verdict...
...That year he mounted a campaign in the Republican primary for U.S...
...He had serious discussions with Soviet citizens who were neither mental robots programmed by the Central Committee nor harassed, frightened, or disillusioned individuals waiting for their chance to flee...
...257 pp...
...They thus have a vested interest in not learning anything about the author of the address that might...
...It was history, not personality, that betrayed the radicals of the Masses...
...There is sleight-ofhand here...
...Lacking the revolutionary heritage of their European comrades and the commitment to "a narrow political ideal," they sought to transform society by changing themselves instead and effecting a cultural rebellion...
...As Shipler notes: Nothing in Communist rule has diminished the old instincts of insularity that thrived under the czars...
...it urges young scholars to take an active role in practical life, to leave their studies for the street, to "embrace the common," to "explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low," not to spurn the marketplace but to learn from it...
...A large portion of the book relates Shipler's visits to schools, where the Soviet men and women of the future are first exposed to political indoctrination, to the overwhelming power of the "collective" that dominates all of Soviet life, and to the oppressive air of patriotism that requires constant vigilance and an immense defense budget...
...THESE ESSAYS, which have been ably edited by Elaine Spitz, stand as a fitting remembrance to David Spitz...
...What authentic democrats seek, of course, are programs in which protections for the rights of the vulnerable and the innovative are considered conditions for more equal distribution of power and other scarce resources...
...Eastman tendered his resignation, renouncing his belief in "the principle of co-operative editing," but was reinstated by majority vote, whereupon John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Glenn Coleman, and Robert Carleton Brown quit...
...he explores the extremes in order to define the dimensions of the political, ideological, and social conflicts afflicting the people who live in "The Land" today...
...BY HIGHLIGHTING personal factors as the source of political inconsistency, Fishbein underplays the real importance of the magazine and its contributors...
...Founded in 1911 by Piet Vlag, a Dutchman who ran a cooperative restaurant in the basement of the Rand School of Social Science, the Masses was launched as "a general ILLUSTRATED magazine of art, literature, politics, and science" under the editorship of Thomas Selzer, who gave the magazine its name...
...It may seem strange that Oz, who is one of Israel's foremost literary figures, would need to rediscover his own country...
...The close relationship with the discussion of liberty and law should now be apparent: by restraining the restraints imposed by severe socioeconomic inequality, the liberal-democratic welfare state can enhance liberty on balance...
...Yiddish is the language of the street...
...Today, when the ideological conflict is greater than at any time since 1 9O48z,'s side is on the defensive...
...q THE REAL WORLD OF LIBERALISM, by David Spitz...
...That the capacity of the liberal-democratic state further to reduce the inequalities inherent in capitalist society might, beyond a certain point, be systematically constrained by the imperatives of the economy within which it is embedded is a possibility never considered by Spitz...
...At first it might seem that as a reviewer Lynn is wont to quibble, to pick quarrels, particularly in abusive language...
...And that man is pleased with the war in Lebanon, not only because Israel has further expanded its borders—"the dirty work of Zionism isn't finished yet"—but because it has produced a "bonus" of increased anti-Semitism, which will force Jews to leave the Diaspora for Israel...
...There is yet another trick here...
...Which is understandable enough, since hard reflection upon this dilemma can lead to the despairing conclusion that we are imprisoned within our existing institutions with no way out— and despair as a frame of mind was alien to Spitz's temperament...
...For some, it is inconceivable that the source of the difficulties might lie within the American system itself...
...Though Eastman professed his own brand of "scientific socialism," the Masses never made any claim to consistency...
...Nevertheless, Spitz also effectively demolishes that version of the doctrine of negative liberty according to which there is an inverse, or 372 zero-sum, relationship between liberty and law: according to which, as Hobbes puts it, the liberty of the subject consists in the silence of the laws...
...Or Whitman's attitude toward his own sexual ambivalence as much as the vision of sexuality in the Calamus poems...
...n October and November 1982, following the most controversial military campaign in Israeli history, Amos Oz set out to take the pulse of his country by talking to people from different walks of life...
...While Hitler is alive for the "Judeo-Nazi," the Messiah's footsteps are heard by members of Gush Emunim (the "Bloc of the Faithful"), the movement that spearheaded the settlement drive in the West Bank...
...The fact is that they are not "just like us": the principal trend in the history of the Soviet Union is continuity...
...Write "the Palestinians...
...Women, suffragists argued, were morally superior, pacifists by nature, and acted with their hearts, whereas men had fewer scruples, were naturally aggressive, but somehow more intellectually inclined...
...29.95...
...Early in his career, Smith participated in organizing for the American Federation of Labor...
...Of course, it is obvious that the method of attack is strictly ad hominem, laced in sarcasm...
...Aided by his wife who shared his interest in the assignment, Shipler perceived some of the mysteries of Moscow sooner than most new American correspondents...
...More than half the book is devoted to capsule biographies of three figures particularly identified with the movement—William Dudley Pelley, Gerald Winrod, and Gerald L. K. Smith...
...For someone who once endured the Moscow experience, there is a sense of deja vu in Shipler's book...
...phase of life, such is our ideal for The Masses...
...q 380...
...In the end the ploy does not so much discredit Emerson—after all, is not the hot pursuit of wealth exactly what the airline to Seattle represents?—as it frees those poor maligned businessmen from the imputation of barbarism...
...While his views are implicit in the book, Oz presents them explicitly in only one essay, "An Argument on Life and Death...
...The judgment of dishonesty becomes all but unavoidable when we read that Santayana exempted only Whitman and Henry James from the taint of gentility, when in fact he devoted close to a quarter of his lecture to an account of how William James had "broken the spell of the genteel tradition," had given it "a rude shock" and led it "a merry dance...
...Note that Spitz derives this conclusion, not by shifting to a "positive" conception of liberty, but simply by clear reasoning about the internal requirements of negative liberty itself...
...Eastman's "Class War ih Colorado" and "The Nice Ladies of Trinidad," a harrowing account with follow-up of the 1914 "Ludlow massacre...
...We intend to be arrogant, impertinent, in bad taste, but not vulgar...
...Nor does it obscure the ideological thrust...
...a wide variety of private or nonpolitical factors can equally restrain it...
...One defect of these essays is that they lack a proper sense of political economy...
...Meanwhile a major ideological proposition insinuates itself: wealth, capitalism, inequality may not be so bad after all, perhaps not even imperialism, particularly if we call it something like "the ebullient spirit of a burgeoning empire...
...Oz warns that territorial compromise with the Arabs is essential to Israel's future...
...This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the Israel of today, where the stock market is a national obsession, Arabs do the menial work, and an artificial prosperity has been contrived through a ballooning foreign debt...
...Liberty is a necessary condition for the exercise of choice...
...In fact the lecture can be more properly described as doing just the opposite...
...She is guilty of the same subjectivity that she claims proved the radicals' undoing...
...the expansion of liberty in some directions always requires concomitant restraint (over the liberty to invade that liberty) in others...
...Eastman and Dell may have resisted cubism and futurism, and clung to more conventional forms of verse, but John Sloan helped arrange the revolutionary Armory Show of 1913...
...I think that annexation of these regions endangers the existence of the State of Israel...
...Its contributors included Sherwood Anderson, Stuart Davis, Max Eastman, Walter Lippmann, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, John Sloan, and Lincoln Steffens...
...Part of this process was the politicization of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover...
...Fellow-traveling utopians did their gushing after a keyhole view of the workers' paradise in the naive 1930s...
...For editor, Young recommended Max Eastman, a philosophy professor recently discharged from Columbia University for his unconventional views...
...American intellectuals in general, like Emerson's biographers in particular, have never wished to know that the cold young man who successfully sought the hand of Ellen Tucker was in no less hot pursuit of vulgar prosperity than the most barbaric businessman of the age...
...I n 1890, Thomas Stevens, an American journalist, set off from Moscow for the Crimea, riding a horse he had purchased from a traveling Wild West show...
...Full of hatred for "Zhids"— Jews like Oz who are "tender and delicate"—this "Judeo-Nazi" believes that "a people that let itself be slaughtered and destroyed . . . is a worse criminal than its tormentors...
...In focusing on individual tempers and personal idiosyncrasies, she reveals her own historical nearsightedness...
...If the Oriental Jews feel they have been treated as second-class citizens, then the Arabs who live in the Land of Israel might feel they're third-class, or worse...
...The picture presented is both troubling and unforgettable...
...For Oz this is no mere difference of opinion, but "a controversy over the nature of Zionism and even the meaning of Jewish destiny...
...As Reed stated in his draft of Eastman's policy statement: The broad purpose of The Masses is a social one...
...It fared poorly during its first year of operation...
...Justice, he agrees with Aristotle, is treating equal cases equally and unequal cases unequally...
...Given the ugliness of their "mature" ideas, one would wish to conclude that none of these three figures was capable of a decent or progressive impulse...
...Spitz, it need hardly be emphasized, does not advocate absolute equality of material condition— no plausible egalitarianism does...
...David Spitz does not shrink from the egalitarian implications of his argument, and this is most evident in his discussion of property...
...Oz BEGINS HIS JOURNEY in Jerusalem...
...However unideological for many Oriental Jews, this perspective results in a strong motivation to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza: "If they give back the territories, the Arabs will stop coming to work, and then and there you'll put us back into the dead-end jobs, like 370 before...
...A serious conservative critique of recent American scholarship would be welcome as an opportunity for exchange across ideological lines...
...Al-Fajr's literary editor claims, "My hatred is dead...
...National policy still emphasizes heavy industry and defense at the expense of consumer goods and, most important, farm policy...
...The 30 certainly had many things to answer for, but participating in a "worldwide Nazi movement," Ribuffo concludes, was not one of them...
...The result, In the Land of Israel, is a report of this journey through the human landscape of "The Land...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...THE LESSONS to be drawn from all this are not altogether new, but they are worth reiterating...
...It is a book of angry judgments, not a reasoned analysis and discourse...
...At one point, the artists staged their own revolt against the writers, demanding freedom from Eastman's editorial policy, equal division of responsibilities, the abolition of titles, objecting specifically to the editors' practice of putting captions under their drawings...
...But Spitz fails to take account of the sense in which Kantian notions of individual self-determination and (though he is rightly critical of Rousseau on other grounds) Rousseauean notions of collective self-determination are also doctrines of positive liberty...
...He remained a strident critic of Roosevelt, and a self-proclaimed isolationist for years after Long's assassination in 1935...
...But this book is entirely lacking in self-reflection upon its ideological stance...
...Shipler inherited a vital list of local contacts when he arrived in Moscow in 1975, an advantage shared by all Times correspondents, good and bad, in a foreign post...
...The church itself is permeated with informers and secret police...
...q 378 THE OLD CHRISTIAN RIGHT: THE PROTESTANT FAR RIGHT FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION TO THE COLD WAR, by Leo P. Ribuffo...
...Insensitive to its aims, Fishbein fails to capture the spirit of the Masses—its rambunctiousness, self-mockery, and use of humor as an effective political weapon...
...Everyone in the West Bank wants peace—the big shots and the little people...
...not quite a world premier, but simply a city on a human scale...
...By such a logic Professor Lynn seems to believe he has cut the ground from under the more credulous among his fellows in the professoriat...
...But compared to the Masses, Eastman wistfully admitted, the Liberator lacked "a good deal of the dramatic beauty," and "the glamour of the abstract moral principle" was gone...
...Yes, there has been some modest progress...
...Against ideological interpretation as such (itself faintly tinged with "anti-Americanism") Lynn proposes an anti-ideology of private life, a view in which desire, appetite, and selfseeking replace ideas, institutions, political commitments, and historical forces as sources of explanation...
...More important, the currents of public opinion from which the three drew their support evidently shared the same contradictory potentials...
...Write that the Arabs deserve a piece [of land], too...
...Dell, Eastman, and Hutchins Hapgood could speak out in favor of free love without weighing its effects on the working class and the burden it placed upon women...
...Shipler documents, better than most writers, the odd detachment of Soviet youth, growing up with little to believe in...
...A barely suppressed fury seems to well up, for example, against that "crowd of clever writers" who teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a "condemnation of American life...
...Look to the man, not his ideas, the argument goes, in an inversion of D. H. Lawrence's advice to "trust the tale, not the teller...
...Unwilling to subordinate their art to politics, the radicals of the Masses were incapable of submitting to party ideology and control...
...If the Masses was ideologically handicapped in its analysis of the capitalist class, its coverage of the major industrial strikes was brilliant: sensitive, chilling in its effect, calling out for action...
...Yet we can learn something important from the differences among the three, and here Ribuffo's book is most useful...
...Zionism was here once and was repelled...
...Like most of the correspondents who have lived among the Russians, Shipler learned that there is little evidence to support the notion of "convergence," that Soviet and Western societies are growing more and more alike...
...Spitz adamantly opposes, as a form of newspeak, the Platonic-cum-Hegelian doctrine according to which submission to externally imposed law is freedom...
...Surely the Lord is in this place...
...The land is God's...
...Floyd Dell, of the Chicago Evening Post Literary Supplement, was named managing editor...
...Don't write "the Arabs...
...Now I have only bitterness and anger, but no more hatred...
...To be sure, the ideas put forward by the radicals of the Masses often contradicted one another...
...And if we change our minds about it, well—why shouldn't we...
...He is properly critical of the perverted, totalitarian conception of positive liberty according to which a supraindividual agency—a Platonic elite or Leninist vanguard—comes to embody the "true" needs of our "higher" selves, which it then imposes over and against the actual wants of our poor, benighted, naked and shivering "lower" selves...
...The war years were the undoing of this phase of American nativism...
...The authentic liberal, again, is committed not just to liberty but also to equality —above all, to an equal distribution of liberty itself...
...17.95...
...Not a regime of "simple equality": merely the "tolerable range" that theorists as diverse as Arista 2. and Rousseau have seen as essential to democracy...
...Ten years have passed since Sakharov first met with Western reporters...
...The first parts of Winesburg, Ohio originally appeared in it, and the last issue contained a letter from John Reed, written en route to Halifax to report on the revolution in Russia, which was, the back-cover ad boasted, bound to be "an event in the world's literature...
...Nor would adherence to a party line have helped...
...Little should have surprised this experienced traveler as he made his way through Southern Russia and the Ukraine...
...Fishbein, speaking from the left, finds that the radicals of the Masses were more concerned with eclectic individualism than sustaining collective action...
...Liberals and leftists during this period were not always solicitous of the rights of dissent invoked by the American right, the author observes...
...There is great hope, and perhaps that is why the Devil is angry and interferes in almost everything here...
...Its final policy was to do as it pleased, conciliating nobody, "not even its readers...
...Meanwhile, the sentiments of the Palestinian working class are expressed by two young men Oz meets in a Ramallah cafe...
...Lynn would have us believe it meant something like antibusiness, anticapitalist, even anti-American...
...Pelley was perhaps the most menacing in pretentions but least consequential in political impact...
...270 pp...
...Potboilers were concocted by trotter types who became instant experts during two-week visits...
...Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press...
...Fishbein rebukes them: "There was no concerted effort to view sex and family life in political terms...
...Still, Spitz's commitment to an equal distribution of liberal freedom—or, more broadly, to the formally equal civil and political rights to which liberalism is centrally committed—drives him to consider the material preconditions necessary for equal effective exercise of liberal freedom or rights...
...The cause has to be something quintessentially alien...
...Following this revelation he drew inspiration from Christian Science, theosophy, and spiritualism, deriving from them highly idiosyncratic analyses of the world situation...
...This is the political and philosophical climax of the volume, after which the angry tone abates...
...An ancient rule among American correspondents decrees that a new arrival in Moscow needs at least six months to become effective, and that maximum competence is reached after 18 months' experience...
...True, the locomotive on the dust jacket gives away what kind of line is an air-line, but who would have guessed that this particular railroad passed through Cambridge on its ineluctable way west—or at least did so in 1900, when the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana delivered himself one October evening before the student Signet Club of a satiric poem joyfully mocking the smug gentility of his Harvard colleagues...
...Spitz, following Mill, derives the imperative of tolerance in part from the fact of human fallibility...
...discredit him...
...Liberty and Equality...
...This anger and its causes are given vent: the people of Beit Shemesh remember with bitterness how they were housed in slums and shantytowns when they arrived, were treated as second-class citizens and were left no option but to do menial labor, and how their selfrespect was torn away...
...Attacks on "the system" may unfortunately bring with them efforts to persecute the weak, as well as efforts to dismantle entrenched power...
...His Silver Shirt movement apparently peaked in 1934 at about 15,000 loosely organized adherents...
...But the disjunction between such themes and the apparently larger, more 367 substantial ones concerning, say, the interpretation of Jefferson in the review of Wills's Inventing America, or the attack on "The Regressive Historians" (Bernard Bailyn, Leo Marx, Eugene Genovese) for permitting their experiences of the 1960s to color their views of the past is only apparent...
...Liberty, Spitz argues, is always a complex system of particular liberties and concomitant restraints...
...Much of the author's attention to the early lives and personal idiosyncrasies of these figures is excessive...
...Why is liberty the overriding liberal good...
...The rare priests willing to challenge authority, like Dmitri Dudko, whom Shipler discusses, are silenced...
...Isadora Duncan could say, "My life has known but two motives—Love and Art," and even a hardened political rebel such as Emma Goldman expressed similar sentiments recollecting her love for Alexander Berkman...
...The belief in a socialist future would be upheld by a new generation, instilled with fresh hope, only to face disillusionment, as Theodore Draper observed, "in its own way, and yet the same way," as the generation before...
...Precisely because they are ideologically motivated, Gush Emunim poses a serious threat to Oz's Zionism...
...You people are convinced that to relinquish Judea and Samaria would endanger the existence of the State of Israel...
...He regarded Mussolini as the Antichrist and the Federal Reserve system as a " 'diabolical scheme' that allowed bankers to 'enslave' millions of citizens...
...While any given legal restraint may, in this view, be warranted (on grounds, for instance, of security or welfare), it comes of necessity at the expense of liberty...
...q RUSSIA: BROKEN IDOLS, SOLEMN DREAMS, by David Shipler...
...But Oz finds a new vision of Israel's future in the development town of Ashdod, a small Mediterranean city, a pleasant city, unpretentious, with a port and a lighthouse, and a power station and factories and many landscaped avenues...
...Well might the Yard believe it has safely enclosed itself against the importunate world, that it has "shut the mucker-village out," wrote the philosopher-poet, Yet the smoke of trade and battle Cannot quite be banished hence, And the air-line to Seattle Whizzes just behind the fence...
...We will be bound by no one creed or theory of social reform, but will express them all, providing they be radical...
...They were blind to their own class biases and claimed to be leading a revolt of the masses, which was, in fact, a rebellion of an elite...
...This book is a posthumous collection of essays and reviews, most of them originally appearing in Dissent, by a leading contemporary political theorist...
...And government, through law, is clearly not the only possible source of restraint upon liberty...
...Senator, "hoping to use the office as a 'sounding board for the gospel of Jesus Christ.' " He laced his appeal with condemnation of "foreign" ideas and ethnic groups, but his 53,000 votes left him in third place...
...Those, on the other hand, who have plunged Soviet-American relations to their lowest point since the darkest days of the Cold War would be well advised to study Shipler's investigation of Soviet society...
...I t was the most radical periodical of its time...
...Liberty and equality stand best when they stand together...
...Confusing desire and idea, they mistook the personal for the political, and their lack of "intellectual rigor" prevented them from discriminating between conflicting ideologies...
...To reduce Emerson's thought to a "dirty little secret" concerning his first wife's wealth (did he marry Ellen Tucker knowing full well the likelihood of her early death and her bequest of a fortune...
...San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...For if individuals develop their powers and capacities only through the exercise of choice, then no conception of truth, however infallible, can simply be imposed ex cathedra...
...Oz 369 concludes that "only Hitler and the Messiah are alive and well here, burning like twin pillars of fire...
...SHIPLER WAS ABLE to accomplish a goal that most Moscow correspondents never achieve...
...A fault perhaps and certainly not "modernist...
...Eastman admired the tough talk and tactics of the Wobblies, and closely followed their industrial and legal battles...
...The final word belongs to an old Arab farmer: Write that the land doesn't belong to the Jews or to the Arabs...
...But their public appeals, and what these appeals can tell us about American politics, command serious interest...
...Calm and compassionate, Father Dubois believes that throughout Israel, but particularly in Jerusalem, a deep struggle between good and evil is taking place, "perhaps the central battle of our time, in universal terms...
...The book is as much an emotional as a political outlet, a venting of revulsion...
...It may well be true that Santayana disagreed with his friend's anti-imperialist stance or even thought it naive...
...373 Liberalism is not necessarily committed to private ownership of the means of production or, still less, to the transmission of concentrated wealth from one generation to the next...
...This is a serious omission, because it fails to acknowledge the important sense in which the Millian liberalism that he affirms conceives of human self-development in just these terms—as the exercise of individual and collective self-determination, as private and public self-legislation...
...The intellectual successor to the dry socialist Comrade, the Masses was a magazine of "free expression" that embraced Marxists and Freudians, socialists, atheists, Wobblies, women's suffragists, feminists, free love advocates, rebels, and bohemians...
...Under the Espionage Act of 1917 the Post Office succeeded in banning the Masses' August issue, revoking the magazine's second-class mailing privileges, and forcing it to shut down by the end of the year...
...368 The passage is so eloquent of motive and strategy one hesitates to comment upon it, it is so perfectly itself...
...He therefore concludes with the question that he repeatedly asks in his interviews: "If the price of a Greater Land of Israel is to tear this nation apart and create a life-and-death issue, is it worth this price...
...A literary allusion, then, the title evokes that workaday world of machines and dirt and blood held at arm's length by what Santayana some years later would dub, in his famous lecture of 1911, "the Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy...
...That is the deepest message of David Spitz's liberal socialism, and it is our great loss that he will no longer be with us to affirm that vision...
...Lynn wishes to recruit Santayana for the sake of a covering argu366 ment for the 16 separate pieces that comprise the book...
...His biblically inspired analysis of the world situation at first put Hitler in an unfavorable light, but Winrod took a more favorable view of the Nazi regime as its antiSemitism became more pronounced...
...And it is here that the conflict between Fishbein's method and material comes to a head...
...Freud was simply too useful in lifting the Victorian taboo on sex to be dismissed on theoretical grounds, even if he was incompatible with Marx's materialism...
...20.00...
...Not only in Mea Shearim, it seems, but elsewhere as well...
...Not only is it no longer the place it used to be, but Israelis like Oz have seen the Israel they tried to build unravel...
...New York: Times Books...
...This was later expanded to embrace some 30 defendants—a heterogeneous lot of right-wingers—including Winrod and Pelley, but not Smith...
...Despite misgivings on civil-liberties grounds from Attorney General Francis Biddle, the Justice Department obtained in 1942 an indictment known as United States v. Winrod...
...In the Land of Israel claims neither to be comprehensive nor representative: there are certainly more moderate Israelis and more extreme Palestinians than Oz has portrayed here...
...The aim of the collection seems to be to expose and excoriate what Lynn calls in the prologue the "host of dubious theories, old and new," which have guided studies of America since the 1960s, for him a decade of unspeakable political error and betrayal...
...The essay's final paragraph gives away the motive: Ever since it was delivered, the "American Scholar" address has been a holy text for American intellectuals who like to believe that they are morally superior beings who have risen above their countrymen's worship of money...
...a restraint may be justified, he argues (following Bentham), but it is still a restraint...
...Their tone is predominantly sanguine regarding the capacity of the liberal-democratic welfare state to carry through the egalitarian extension of liberalism to which Spitz was committed...
...What one might observe about individual leaders might also be said about their movements more broadly...
...Philadelphia: Temple University Press...
...Lynn, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins and author of several works in American studies, including a major biography of William Dean Howells, thus appropriates Santayana, yet with a curious twist...
...Shipler's method combines his anecdotal experience with a historic perspective...
...but the impression left by Lynn that Santayana ranked William James among the genteel is so grossly wrong as to seem dishonest and self-serving...
...Oz is a known opponent, yet they openly speak with him in their villages perched on the rocky hills of Judea and Samaria...
...Populist movements in America have often demonstrated such Janus-faced appeals: toward more authentic democracy and more farreaching equality on the one hand...
...A properly egalitarian liberalism, that is to say, may find itself not just permitted but required to press for fundamental alterations in the property regime of capitalism— in Spitz's vision, for democratic socialism...
...But Spitz also demonstrates clearly that there is no necessary connection between liberal tolerance and moral skepticism...
...No pay...
...Eastman was certainly conservative and behind the times in poetic taste to the end of his life, but for the magazine's artists, child abuse, unemployment, destitution, prostitution, jingoism, and racism were subjects for dissection, not literary experimentation...
...Liberty and Law...
...but from this it does not follow that it need necessarily involve a net diminution in the overall system of liberty...
...The views of the Palestinian intelligentsia are expressed by the staff of the East Jerusalem newspaper Al-Fajr...
...We never hear, just as, earlier, the opposition to the Vietnam war is summed up in the ridiculously empty comment, "a wicked sin...
...What in fact do those nameless "intellectuals" have to say about their compatriots' worship of money...
...The conflict between Ashkenazim and Sephardim may not be ideological, but it constitutes one of Israel's most explosive social problems and the labor movement's most critical failure...
...It employs, or at least can employ, an egalitarian form of power to negate those negations of freedom caused by unequal socioeconomic power...
...Similarly Pelley, though ultimately embracing some of the most mean-spirited doctrines imaginable, also claimed to draw inspiration from the cooperative utopia portrayed in Bellamy's Looking Backwards...
...Long's authoritarian tendencies and other unsavory qualities shared the stage with his pleas for more equal distribution of national wealth...
...Lynn wields a pen dripped in bile...
...The reduction of inequalities of power, of hierarchy and domination in economy and society, while of necessity involving restriction of a (nontrivial) range of particular freedoms (such as certain liberties of property, contract, and employment), may nonetheless significantly enhance what might be called "equalityinfreedom from dependence upon the will of others"— thereby strengthening the overall system of liberty...
...Why should they die...
...Thus she criticizes the radicals for mixing Marx with Freud, but at the same time explains their attraction to Marx by borrowing from Freud: paternal failures led to socialism...
...The first issue under the new regime appeared in December 1912...
...Sloan and Untermeyer summoned Eastman: "You are elected Editor of The Masses...
...the same rituals for taking correspondents to outstanding pig farms and shirt factories are followed...
...The Land of Israel" was promised to the Jewish people by God, they tell Oz, and "what the Lord, Blessed be He, gave us we may not give away as a gift...
...Ashdod is what there is...
...And the source of this "Dropoutsville" reading of Mark Twain's classic...
...it permits some to treat others as mere means...
...Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura...
...Just as liberty and equality are the two chief virtues of social institutions, so do liberalism and democratic socialism form the joint means to their full realization: they, too, stand best when they stand together...
...A liberal can believe confidently in certain objective truths yet still favor tolerance of competing untruths...
...The redemption of the People of Israel is tied to the redemption of the Land of Israel...
...This is a remarkable sentence remarkably misleading or simply obtuse in regard to the high importance of direct sensuous experience in Emerson's theory of language and of mind, but even more remarkable for its anti-intellectualism...
...But neither the covering argument that poses the "reality" of the air-line (which we can take as a shorthand symbol for industrial capitalism and its expansive energies) against the "gentility" of professors and intellectuals nor the bravura of namecalling and even red-baiting succeeds in lending the book the substance we might expect from an authority on American culture, one of the professoriat himself...
...Anti-Zionist sentiment is strong in these neighborhoods, despite the destruction of the Holocaust, for these people believe that Jews should piously await the Messiah's arrival...
...With the possible exception of Smith, none was interesting enough as a personality or weighty enough in historical importance to warrant such detailed treatment...
...The habitual tendency of American intellectuals to view family life as dreary, repressive, conducive to the sickness, rather than the health, of husbands and wives, parents and children, has also figured in the critical distortion of the novel, as has the antiAmericanism that has been part of campus life ever since the mid-1960s...
...This attention to private life itself makes a point, underscored in reviews of biographies of Maxwell Perkins, Frederick Lewis Allen, and Walter Lippmann, that relations to parents, wives, husbands and lovers, and to one's own sexuality, ambition, and frustrations count for more than do the conceptual or ideological explanations typically offered by "post-1960s" historians and biographers...
...Gush Emunim has attracted the support of many young Israelis, particularly those educated in the religious public schools...
...Louis Untermeyer handled poetry, and John Sloan took care of the art...
...But detailed elaboration of an argument is really not the purpose of such a book...
...and Frank Bohn's story of the Youngstown steel workers' strike, "Fire in the Steel Trust...
...Historically, orthodoxy has usually compromised with temporal authority...
...Winrod, who maintained closer ties with the mainstream of Protestant fundamentalism, denounced precisely the sort of religious syncretism favored by Pelley...
...The bristling aggression of Lynn's attacks barely disguises the syllogistic tricks and character assassinations—including the rough McCarthy-like beating to which Malcolm Cowley is treated—just beneath the surface...
...Thus law—by "restraining restraints" or "hindering hindrances" that have their origin in social or economic life (here Spitz follows T. H. Green)—can promote a net enhancement in the aggregate system of liberty...
...Smith came to prominence as a follower—one might almost say a worshipper—of Louisiana's Huey Long and as an administrator of Long's Share Our Wealth movement...
...Oz uses religious terminology to attack the cults of militarism, statism, power, and "the integrity of the Land of Israel": "The conversion of statehood and its trappings from a means to an end, to an object of ritual and worship was, as far as I am concerned, idolatry...
...Nevertheless, the Palestinians with whom Oz speaks are moderate in comparison to many right-wing Jews...
...built a national following partly by criticizing Roosevelt for insufficient zeal against big business...
...Most of Beit Shemesh's inhabitants are Jews who immigrated from Arab countries...
...Any given law does, of necessity, involve restraint of some particular liberty...
...For it was not simply ideological incompatibilities and an absence of intellectual discipline, which also characterized the Socialist party, that divided radicals at the time...
...To have doubted one's own first principles," he quotes Justice Holmes approvingly, "is the mark of a civilized man...
...Ribuffo's book should remind us that this important juxtaposition, while by no means unattainable, cannot be taken for granted...
...But the true liberal must, according to Spitz, esteem liberty above all other values—even, in circumstances where they conflict, equality...
...Oz DOES NOT FINISH his pilgrimage in Jerusalem, but in two rather unlikely locales that embody his vision of a "sane" Zionism: the quaint farming village of Bat Shlomo and the new port city of Ashdod...
...The same method is used to explore the entire philosophical structure of modern Soviet society in prose other journalists might well envy...
...Here the right to property becomes a species of sovereignty, more a right over liberty than one in the service of liberty...
...FISHBEIN'S BOOK IS the most comprehensive work to date on the magazine, supplementing what others have written about it, including Albert Parry in Garrets and Pretenders, Granville Hicks in his biography of John Reed, Theodore Draper in The Roots of American Communism, and Daniel Aaron in Writers on the Left...
...These are supposedly manifest in anything from primitive Protestant fundamentalism and curtailment of central government to outright persecution of vulnerable groups...
...crucifixes are prized possessions along with pictures of Christ and miniature ikons...
...His conclusions, not surprisingly, are as depressing as most Western analyses of Soviet society...
...Perhaps the hot pursuit is nothing to be ashamed of in any case...
...In the all-too-recent past they would have been murdered...
...Not unlike Khomeini, Gush Emunim rejects modern Western culture as foreign to the Jews, disdaining secular Israelis for their decadence...
...He advocates a cultural pluralism based on the encounter between Jews and Western humanism that will result in an open, creative, just, and progressive society...
...that's more correct...
...To get to the Lubyanka, you must begin at Detsky Mir (Children's World)," he points out...
...Oz clearly sees himself as the heir to this tradition, within which literature was "mobilized" in an ideological struggle to mold the culture and politics of the Jewish homeland...
...The emotion seems to have a constricting effect upon the book's perspective, indeed, upon the issues to which Professor Lynn attaches critical importance: whether or not Emerson married his first wife for her money, whether Whitman thought of homosexuality as "illness," or whether Hemingway's "wound" is really a key to his work...
...Not surprisingly, one of Oz's most depressing visits is paid to Beit Shemesh, a town in the Jerusalem foothills, not far from his kibbutz...
...Now liberty and equality are not the same thing, and the two are sometimes in tension: certain equalities can be purchased only at the expense of a net diminution in liberty (a price that might or might not be worth paying in any given case...
...The first oddity about Kenneth Lynn's book of once-published pieces is its title...
...But while broadly dispersed ownership of property may affirm these values (as a wide variety of theorists have taught), severe class inequality in control of productive resources negates them...
...While recognizing that these notions form a continuum, not a dichotomy, Spitz emerges as an outspoken proponent of the "negative" conception: liberty as the absence of external impediments to motion, in the Hobbesian formulation that he prefers...
...Many young people explore the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, passing through surveillance lines of police and party hacks to attend services...
...Whoever finds favor in His eyes will receive His land...
...These contacts augmented Shipler's curiosity and helped him penetrate some areas of Soviet society that few other Americans have seen...
...The solution is always simple: a return to the alleged old-time virtues of authentic Americanism...
...But Fishbein's approach is curiously at odds with her subject...
...Hedrick Smith, one of Shipler's predecessors as New York Times Bureau Chief in Moscow, set the standard for all correspondents' books with his 374 monumental The Russians, published in 1976 and recently revised...
...nothing in the scientific futurist doctrine of MarxismLeninism has reduced the distaste for introspection and the compulsion to mask unpleasantness, which were abiding features of Russian culture long before the Bolsheviks took power in 1917...
...The local graffiti read: "There is no Kingdom but the Kingdom of the Messiah" and, next to a Swastika, "Death to the Zionist Hitlerites...
...While the ideological right wing poses the most serious threat to Oz's vision of Israel, the Oriental (Sephardic) Jews provided the mass support that put the Likud in power...
...Liberalism, Spitz argues, opposes this rule of oligarchy in economic no less than in political life...
...He could hardly be more "Israeli": not merely a native and an author, Oz is a kibbutz member, a frequent spokesman for Peace Now, and well-known as a standard-bearer of the labor Zionist movement that has led the country to independence...
...Winrod's greatest influence was through his publication, the Defender, which by 1938 reached some 110,000 subscribers...
...Earlier in the book Lynn performed a similar devastation upon the reputation of Jefferson, charging as "shameless pandering" to a "post-1960s" "cult of equality and 'human rights' " Garry Wills's view of the Declaration of Independence as a document founded in communalism rather than Lockean individualism...
...Ideology here seems inseparable from that strange amalgam of acrimony, self-righteousness, perhaps envy, which makes many of the pieces such lively if also such exasperating reading—the mean-spirited personal attacks, for example, on the likes of Garry Wills ("shameless pandering to leftist prejudices"), C. Vann Woodward ("his own eagerness to please present-day spokesmen for blacks and women"), Alfred Kazin ("this starry-eyed opportunist"), and many others...
...But this was not the case, as Ribuffo carefully shows...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...So, too, ardent feminists weakened their cause by betraying Victorian stereotypes and domestic attachments...
...A pity Professor Lynn chose not to address these issues in their own right, the issues of class, war, and democracy that have vexed American society and its intellectual life for at least a century—an open and serious exposition of his views might have resulted in a more usefully contentious book...
...The essence of liberalism, for Spitz, is its commitment to two sometimes complementary, sometimes competing values: liberty and equality...
...a three-color cover was introduced, and Young was given an unprecedented two-page spread for his cartoon, "The Freedom of the Press...
...When another editor, Horatio Winslow, failed to increase circulation by the summer of 1912, Art Young, John Sloan, Louis Untermeyer, and others took control...
...It is hardly trivial that the modern Soviet rulers send Sakharov off to vegetate in Gorky and Solzhenitsyn to Vermont...
...Through his discussion with an elderly couple in Bat Shlomo, Oz portrays the original Zionist dream of Jews returning to the land, becoming farmers, and living honestly by the sweat of their brow...
...But his aim is to reveal what has changed in the last few years...
...Lynn seems to know he did) is to challenge the integrity especially of the famous Phi Beta Kappa address of 1837, "The American Scholar," which Lynn describes as calling upon students "to avoid involvement in business, spurn material values, dedicate themselves to the life of the mind...
...IN AN IMPASSIONED POLEMIC delivered in a West Bank settlement, Oz defends the principles and actions of the labor movement, which created the kibbutzim and founded the country...
...He suggests that the Jews are being tested, and that the primary struggle is among the Jews themselves...
...Yet he records his surprise as he encountered conflict, suspicion, xenophobia and corruption, interspersed with bursts of kindness and generosity...
...Emerson's assertion of an independent life of the mind as the source of critical ideas regarding culture and politics lies at the heart of that tradition of democratic thought in America—radical as well as liberal— Professor Lynn wishes to denounce...
...404 pp...
...For Emerson has deceived us, Lynn writes, into believing in the autonomy and self-reliance of ideas, of critical thinking...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
