REVIEWS
Faux, Jeff & Beadle, Gordon & Sleeper, Jim & Isserman, Maurice & Arani, Sharif
NEW DEALS: THE CHRYSLER REVIVAL AND THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, by Robert Reich and John Donahue. New York: Times Books. 359 pp. $17.95. "D odge Main"—the name of the huge Chrysler plant in...
...If this assumption is correct, we will remain in the political wilderness until we define a viable and practical economic strategy that allows people to put down permanent roots and nurtures the social institutions that bind us to each other where we live and work...
...290 pp...
...Rosa Parks had been secretary of the local NAACP chapter since 1945...
...Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito to Jonathan Rieder Neither liar nor squealer, Jonathan Rieder is something perhaps equally problematic in this book: an ethnographer with an argument, reaching for readers politically engaged...
...I wanted to kill those men—not with bullets, but with my fingers around their throats...
...Suddenly," Reddick wrote, "Montgomery, Alabama, has become one of the world's most interesting cities...
...Farmer argued that a small, disciplined group of activists, trained in the spirit and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience, could spark a mass movement against racial discrimination...
...Popular mythology attributes the recovery to Iacocca's genius...
...The Truman administration and the Vatican spent large sums of money to defeat the Communists in the Italian election of 1948...
...What gave was jobs...
...Yet there is very little sense in Morris's book of how changes in the larger national political climate affected those local struggles in the late 1950s and early '60s...
...They tell us that such dependency offends not only their selfishness but, in some cases, their fading socialist vision of a collective to which all contribute...
...many things are happening on stage...
...Most accounts, consistent with the view that social movements arise spontaneously, describe Mrs...
...but the maintenance of employment soon became hostage to the less rational objective of saving the corporate entity...
...In the end they were victorious: Montgomery's bus system was desegregated and civil rights was on its way to the center of the nation's domestic concerns...
...Spellman supported Senator McCarthy's domestic Red-baiting campaigns...
...The first consisted of the Shah's revolution, his attempt to use the petro-dollars to create a Great Civilization and make Iran one of the five most powerful nations...
...The rationalizations vary but by and large the motivation is the same...
...This is good writing, and had its point not been made before several times, it would be more welcome than one feels it to be...
...Yes, they're throwing away the script and making up lines on their own...
...The book's central message is that many conservative, racist Italian and Jewish Americans in lower-middle-class urban neighborhoods weren't always that way...
...Radical priests openly defied him and politicians soon discovered that the Cardinal's demands could be safely ignored...
...What he sees in the chambers of the Islamic committees are unshaven, uneducated men assuming positions of power...
...MONTGOMERY, as Lawrence Reddick observed in Dissent, was an interesting city in 1956...
...His campaign aide, Dave Powers, thoughtfully replied: "Right now Spellman is the most powerful Catholic...
...The people did not actively participate in the Shah's revolution but began their own in 1978...
...This in itself was a major departure from past precedents, in which the government had typically saved the corporation free of charge...
...I was not King...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...There are quite a few inaccuracies of historical detail...
...And yet, these many years later, the origins of the Montgomery boycott and of the civil rights movement in general remain obscure...
...Then, with great verve, Kapuicifiski proceeds with the unfolding of the revolution as pure drama: The play takes place on several levels at the same time...
...Indeed, the legal, financial, and ideological environment in which they acted posed the false choice of whether or not Chrysler should be saved—rather than whether and how to preserve an economically hard-hit work force and its communities...
...We meet onceradical Jewish women who'd worked for the Scottsboro Boys and stayed on defiantly in racially "tipped" public housing projects in Brooklyn...
...His ultrahawkish stand on the Vietnam War deprived him of influence in the Vatican of Paul VI and discredited him at home...
...Kapuicifiski sees the rejection of the civilization the Shah wished to transplant to Iran as the essence of the revolution...
...James Farmer was born in Texas in 1920, and was raised as a "PK"—a preacher's kid...
...Farmer outlived his historical moment...
...Khomeini's uprising in June 1963 did not go on "for five months" and Mossadegh's party did not play a leading role in it...
...These chambers of the Iranian committees reminded me of what I had seen in Bolivia, Mozambique, the Sudan, Benin...
...The scenery begins to move and light up, wheels turn, chimneys smoke, tanks roll back and forth, ministers kiss the Shah's hand, officials hurry after rewards, policemen frown, mullahs talk and talk, extras keep their mouths shut and work...
...The major complaint from Iacocca, by the way, was not about the government's insistence that payrolls be pared and plants be closed, but about its demand that Chrysler executives give up their fleet of private jets...
...In Canarsians' experience, minority crime and government interventions in their neighborhood turf constitute extortions of gains they won by following the strict discipline of an upward mobility to which most of them had been ready to help admit blacks until at least the mid-1960s...
...Italians warned against the threat with unembarrassed candor...
...With the upsurge of civil rights activity in the late 1950s, CORE and Farmer came into their own...
...Roosevelt, his attempts to control the press, the ruthless handling of the Catholic gravediggers' strike of 1949, and the fanatical nature of his anticommunism are described at considerable length...
...CORE members were active in direct-action campaigns from San Francisco to tiny parishes in Louisiana...
...They have also seen the modest new Brownsville homes developed recently by working-poor minority people in the East Brooklyn Churches' "Nehemiah" housing program, and EBC's successes at closing local "smoke" shops, and I wonder whether that gives them pause...
...They tell how feelings of betrayal and bitterness grew uneasily but ineradicably in their hearts, winning inner dialogues with statements like: "It's a physical reality...
...By 1984 the company had closed Dodge Main and 17 other plants...
...Jack Kennedy was confused...
...In fact, I was surprised at how small a role he gets to play in their version—which will probably be the definitive one—of the Chrysler bailout...
...12.95...
...You mean lend Chrysler money...
...The popular mythology of that revolution had it that the dagger with which the third Shiite Imam was killed in the year 680 was held by the then reigning House of Qajar...
...The doctrine of separation of church and state was a tiresome "shibboleth" he refused to recognize in his campaigns to secure American diplomatic recognition of the Vatican, state aid to Catholic schools, and federal money to promote the interests of his church in Europe, Asia, and South America...
...In dollar terms, labor made more concessions than any other party involved, including the shareholders whose function it was to bear the risk...
...122...
...residues of Italian peasant earthiness, by contrast, sometimes foster visceral sympathy with individual blacks, who are more likely to work as peers with Italians than with Jews...
...This he does very well, emphasizing the spontaneity of this fundamental transformation...
...THE CHRYSLER BAILOUT, as Reich and Donahue recount, was but one of a series of recent direct interventions by the federal government to save big companies from failure...
...After years of pouring their depositors' money into the company with little effort to find out what was going on, suddenly they got cold feet and wanted their money back...
...Nearly every other claim on Chrysler, including wage levels and the government's stake, was fixed and defended by contract, covenant, or law...
...Cardinal Spellman was widely admired in conservative circles for his patriotism during World War II and the Vietnam era, but it was a patriotism rooted in a desire to link the fortunes of his church with the rising power and wealth of a new American empire...
...It is an article of faith in economic-policy circles that government assistance is inevitably inefficient because, unlike the private sector, the government has no capacity to say no...
...Joseph Kennedy, his longtime ally and benefactor, was furious...
...A woman petitioner remaining motionless in the waiting room impresses him with the fantastic talent of the people in Iran for waiting...
...By the time school integration comes to Canarsie in 1973 through mandates from on high, we understand them when they say, "And now they're coming for my kid...
...Their report is intelligently written, often fascinating, and full of useful observations about the evolving government-business nexus in a modern economy...
...q CANARSIE: THE JEWS AND ITALIANS OF BROOKLYN AGAINST LIBERALISM, by Jonathan Rieder...
...Not only can these struggling lower-middle-class Italian and Jewish Brooklynites "tell" their own stories...
...This is of course not a scholarly book about Iranian history or the late Shah...
...The Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger...
...Chrysler's bankers, led by Manufacturers Hanover Trust, scarcely managed any better...
...But the experience of the Chrysler bailout was just the opposite...
...As Kapuicifiski's account makes clear, the decade of the 1970s did witness the revolution of the Shah and of the People, but in two distinct stages...
...Cooney is to be congratulated for clarifying the political dimensions of that debate...
...Public disclosure of the agreement might have cost Truman the presidential election of 1948...
...16.95...
...Chrysler workers as a whole fared poorly compared to these groups...
...Dissent, which had not been the most cheerful magazine to read in its first few years, responded to the events in Montgomery with enthusiasm...
...SOME READERS may have to work a bit to extract these insights from the bewildering thicket of the book's sociological generalities...
...But this is not to say that the biography is merely a rehash of . the well-known events of Spellman's career...
...There were no dramatic episodes in Farmer's life in this period, just the endless, dreary task of keeping certain organizations, ideas, and traditions alive, a variety of heroism too little appreciated...
...but the fact remains that, as Rieder puts it, genuine "indignation, an emotion born of the perception of injustice" done them by both minorities and governing elites, lies at the heart of their transformation...
...It is a measure of the meager expectations Americans have of their leaders that Iacocca has become a folk hero...
...some gave their lives...
...Parks as a quiet dignified older lady who, on that fateful day, spontaneously refused to move from her seat because she "had had enough" and was tired after a long hard day at work...
...in America in the 1960s, it often worked the other way, to the detriment of the civil rights movement...
...But one thing was invariable, indestructible, and—I dread saying it—eternal: the helplessness...
...The Chrysler bailout became a financial deal, and the measure of success was a financially profitable company...
...Farmer spent four years in the early 1950s as field secretary of a minuscule campus group called the Student League for Industrial Democracy—a group that would achieve greater recognition when it was reincarnated in the early 1960s as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...CORE scraped by through the self-sacrifice of a few stalwart members, while Farmer supported himself with a series of union and movement jobs too small for his talents as a political leader...
...Given everyone else's track record, it is of course not much of a criticism that the authors of New Deals have failed to solve the tension between human values and the marketplace...
...In 1982 Chrysler was in the black, and in 1984 profits reached almost $2.5 billion...
...What follows the revolution as a spontaneous experience of freedom and "an adventure of the heart...
...auto industry was booming...
...Dodge Main may have been hopelessly obsolete, but it should clearly be within our capacity to find useful work in Detroit for the people there who depended on it...
...The pope was reimbursed for the Vatican's share of the election expenses when Spellman negotiated an agreement with Secretary of State George Marshall that secretly "released large sums of 'black currency' in Italy to the Catholic Church...
...Blacks in Montgomery, Greensboro, and Birmingham were living in the United States as well as in their local communities...
...As a matter of historical fact, the soldier cannot with any plausibility be identified with Pahlavi's grandfather who, to the best of our uncertain knowledge, was an obscure sergeant of the cavalry...
...Therewith began a twoanda-half-year saga of financial and political wheeling and dealing that absorbs the bulk of the book...
...To be sure, some of what they say and do is ugly and dispiriting...
...Without an understanding of these people, intimate and engaged, the left has no future in the United States.D THE AMERICAN POPE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN, by John Cooney...
...nor were they simply lured by greed or beguiled by political hucksters away from lunchpail liberalism into reactionary bigotry...
...THE CHRYSLER BAILOUT, argue Reich and Donahue, reflected a national penchant for "programmed serendipity"—the determination of policy-makers to avoid the ideological discomfort involved in using the most straightforward means of carrying out public interventions in the private market...
...In 1960 Spellman supported Richard Nixon for the presidency...
...116 In the 1940s CORE was an insignificant subcommittee of a marginal movement...
...q SHAH OF SHAHS, by Ryszard Kapuiciriski...
...What distinguishes these men's rage from across-the-board reactionary ideology or the "blood" racism of Nazis and the Klan is its focus against specific, wrenching interventions in their own neighborhood turf—or, at the workplace, against directives that affront their notions of fairness and merit...
...If I had been working at a Chrysler plant, I would also have identified more with a surviving corporation than with a government training program...
...CARDINAL SPELLMAN'S FALL FROM POWER was probably inevitable, but it was ironic that the papacy and the first Catholic president of the United States should figure so prominently in his political demise...
...D odge Main"—the name of the huge Chrysler plant in Hamtramck—was often the first English phrase learned by Poles arriving in Detroit...
...Southern Italian peasant traditions may not nurture the same leaps of moral imagination, the same penchant for thinking by analogy and abstraction that temper Jewish self-interest...
...But what the Supreme Court had to say about civil rights did not carry much weight with white Southerners in 1947, and 12 of the participants were arrested...
...These "New Deals" date from the Penn Central and Lockheed bailouts under Nixon and Ford in the early '70s and continue up to the rescue of Harley-Davidson and Continental-Illinois by the "free marketeers" now occupying the White House...
...Reich and Donahue complain that there is no political support for such efforts...
...In 1961 Farmer became CORE's national director, a post he would hold for the next five years...
...He was privately contemptuous of John XXIII...
...His undignified attack on Mrs...
...Internal organization," Morris argues, "was the critical factor that enabled the [civil rights] movement to gather momentum...
...This rumor about the alleged ancestor of the upstart Pahlavi dynasty reminds one of a more colorful story circulating during Iran's earlier revolution, the constitutional revolution of 1906...
...In 1947 CORE made its first serious foray into the South with the "Journey of Reconciliation...
...In contrast to those historians who celebrate spontaneity and argue that organization smothers the initiative of rankandfile protest, Morris insists that "the civil rights movement grew out of the conscious and deliberate efforts of organizers who understood the organizational nature and capacity of black society...
...Reading these accounts, one wonders how so many on the left could have forgotten what is after all a central socialist tenet—that in a capitalist society, the amelioration of the plight of the poor is often accomplished at the expense of the next most vulnerable stratum, here the first-time homeowners in trade unions and the petty bourgeoisie...
...People need to learn how to organize, need to learn that they can organize, before they can challenge injustice...
...We learn, too, how the move to homeownership plunged many Canarsians so deep into debt that any property devaluation would foreclose modest retirement and medical care...
...No proven antiCommunist regime was—in Spellman's eyes—too brutal or unpopular to be denied American support...
...Spellman set his face firmly against all of the proposed innovations of Vatican II...
...It is possible," the authors write, "to keep a firm in operation while stranding many of the people and communities that depend on it...
...These are not just issues of economic policy...
...But I suspect the perception of Kennedy's sympathy to civil rights was as important to the success of the SCLC 118 in Birmingham in 1963 as the perception of Roosevelt's sympathy for organized labor had been to the success of CIO organizers in the late 1930s...
...It now seems almost certain that it was Spellman who pressured Mayor LaGuardia into rescinding Bertrand Russell's appointment to City College in 1940...
...The book's last chapters convey the sense of a life winding down: the organization Farmer had led was in disarray (and one of the few problems with Lay Bare the Heart is Farmer's silence on the subsequent decline of CORE under Roy Innis's leadership...
...Overcome by depression, Kapuicifiski seeks solace in the store of a friendly merchant who shows him Persian carpets and reflects on their importance in relieving the tedium of daily life throughout millennia of Iranian history...
...The Shah called his last reform program "The Revolution of the Shah and the People...
...The soldier is taken to be Shah Mohammad Reza's grandfather...
...During World War II she was once thrown off a city bus for objecting to segregated seating, and in a fitting coincidence, the same bus driver who ejected her the first time had her arrested in 1955...
...0 115 LAY BARE THE HEART: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, by James Farmer...
...Hey, Yale kid, you know who writes books...
...The late 1940s and early '50s were, to say the least, not hospitable times for civil disobedience...
...The present pope more closely resembles Spellman's mentor, Pius XII, than any of his immediate predecessors...
...Thanks to the recent publication of James Farmer's autobiography, Lay Bare the Heart, and Aldon D. Morris's scholarly study, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, other actors have begun to emerge from the shadows...
...Spellman was greatly admired by the public for his visits to the troops at the front during World War II...
...A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, when most of the country was preoccupied with mobilizing against the enemy abroad, the 21-year-old FOR secretary sat down and wrote a memo proposing a war against freedom's enemy at home, the Jim Crow system, which enforced de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North...
...Yes, some Canarsians have heard of structural unemployment...
...JAMES FARMER'S Lay Bare the Heart is a first-hand account of the long, slow, frustrating process of building an effective movement...
...anarsians do speak extensively, thoughtfully, sometimes eloquently in this book...
...Conservative Catholics are making tentative political alliances with their old enemies, the southern fundamentalists...
...The authors are on to a larger theme...
...Yet one senses a longing among conservative Catholics for the old authoritarian church of dogma and certainty that we tend to associate with Spellman...
...Mercifully, Lee Iacocca is not the subject of Robert Reich and John Donahue's valuable book...
...Martin Luther King is an important figure in Morris's book, but no more so than a number of other key local and national organizers, including E. D. Nixon, Ella Baker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Bayard Rustin...
...Here is the one place where the book falters...
...That Kennedy's commitment to civil rights was largely symbolic, and undermined by his appeasement of powerful white Southern politicians, is easy to demonstrate...
...Factions and caucuses multiplied...
...Incredibly, many of the smaller banks in the multibank syndicate had agreed to enormous lines of credit on the assumption that they'd never be used...
...It was defeated at the polls by a margin of three to one...
...using techniques recently perfected in the suppression of the Communist party, a number of Southern states made it illegal for teachers and state employees to belong to the NAACP In Alabama the organization was completely outlawed...
...Suddenly confusion breaks out on stage as if everyone had forgotten his part...
...The past, too, has been torn from them: discreetly, secondhand, we learn of the private yet widely shared experience of weeping unaffectedly in a car during a visit to "the old neighborhood," now devastated, a part of the visitor devastated, too...
...Is it because it is not I who leads it...
...That may not seem like much, but it was long enough for Farmer to see the end of the Southern Jim Crow system, and to know that he had something to do with its demise...
...Any coalition that fails to understand the grievances that collected in places like Canarsie all across America in the past two decades will achieve neither justice nor incumbency," he warns...
...The book should be read by all who speak of racism abstractly as a pivot of an oppressive political economy yet never seem to find time to understand, in human terms, how racism works its way into the lives of people whose positive social aspirations triumph daily over their afflictions in so many dimensions of family, neighborhood, and work life...
...Time and time again it looked like the arrangement would fly apart when some last-minute concession was wrung out of a weary participant...
...All they need is an editor to help them overcome precisely their central frustration of not being listened to, understood, and—what would surely come from letting them speak more for themselves—respected...
...Reich and Donahue report that "indeed, we learned of no instance when any elected official intervened with the loan board or its staff in order to limit the pain...
...I was not Gandhi...
...Sixteen participants, half of them black, half white, rode on interstate bus systems in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and deliberately sat in the "wrong" seats...
...The closing pages deal with this "melancholy topic": Iran—it was the twenty-seventh revolution I have seen in the Third World...
...he asked...
...For a full year after her arrest blacks in Montgomery defied custom, law, and violent intimidation, and refused to ride in the segregated city buses...
...When it became apparent, in the late '70s, that the days of American manufacturing hegemony were over, Chrysler was out of gas...
...The Treasury Department officials—particularly a civil servant named Brian Freeman and then the secretary, G. William Miller—played hardball, rejecting overoptimistic business projections, demanding cutbacks, and forcing concessions including a demand that every single creditor involved sign on to the complex agreement...
...when big companies go down the financial tubes they tend to take lots of voters and campaign contributors with them...
...And when the turnabout did come, say Reich and Donahue, "It was not the blue-collar employees but stockholders, managers, lenders, consultants, lawyers and lobbyists—all relatively wealthy—who benefited most from the bailout...
...Morris's thesis is, simply put, that you can't make something out of nothing...
...They did not so often apologize for seeming mean and unenlightened...
...He had a calling as a young 117 man, spent many years in the wilderness, and then enjoyed three or four very good years fighting a very good fight...
...Why am I not more exuberant...
...That puts the question too narrowly...
...Lackluster styling, poorly timed expansion, and some bad luck plagued the company even when the U.S...
...When the company started to draw the money, the bankers were flabbergasted...
...The problem is that Canarsie is Rieder's doctoral dissertation, pruned for the trade market of its methodological preoccupations but not of its overweening analysis, which too often gilds the native lily...
...Here is the irony: pressure to save jobs for the United Auto Workers and the cities and states where Chrysler facilities were located triggered the rescue effort...
...Busing and the siting of low-income projects in middle-class housing markets, for example, are seldom fair or even efficient means to real social integration when they're imposed by distant elites who are doing nothing to provide poor minorities with educational and work opportunities that might nurture aspiration and disciplined effort where they are now...
...The negotiations involved hundreds of banks, state and local governments, and union locals in a huge interlocking puzzle where the pieces kept trying to wriggle out of place...
...Patrick's Cathedral...
...152 pp...
...Lay Bare the Heart and The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement remind us that, although the wheels of political change turn slowly, still they turn...
...After all, in a decent society, human values ought to be at least as important a basis for public policy as supply-and-demand curves...
...At first, Catholic and American interests seemed to coincide...
...By and large, this is a first-rate job...
...In this short and very readable book Ryszard Kapuicifiski offers us lively, snapshot descriptions of scenes from the life and 37-year reign of the last King of Kings together with a dramaturgical perspective on the revolution that put an end to it...
...I can't imagine that the intended national appeal of the book would have been compromised by a study of this complex political relationship...
...For Jews it could not be so simple...
...This attempt was the cause of major social dislocation as well as the emergence of a "petrobourgeoisie" that "produces nothing, and unbridled consumption that makes up its whole occupation...
...his health declined...
...Canarsie suggests that whatever the great structural bases of our discontents, the prospect of a decent American society depends less on the visionary solidarities invoked by some on the left than on the more modest ability of self-described "middleofthe-road" working people to do two things: find some redress for their grievances against government mandates that impose abrupt changes on their neighborhood markets and schools, and find in themselves the strength to hear the racist agitators in their midst and respond, as many Canarsians still do, "That's bullshit...
...This is not an "inspirational" book, like some of the biographies written of King...
...370 pp...
...Over half a century it produced 14 million cars and helped integrate into mainstream society successive waves of immigrants from Europe and the American South...
...J ohn Cooney's study of the life and times of Cardinal Spellman inevitably points to the liberating changes that have taken place within the American Catholic church...
...Long before the fall of Dienbienphu, Spellman was calling for armed American intervention in Vietnam...
...Morris's search for the origins of the civil rights movement led him to an emphasis on local communities, a necessary corrective to popular misconceptions about the movement...
...I found Farmer's description of these lean years the most interesting part of his book...
...The Cardinal vowed that "no change will get past the Statue of Liberty...
...Labor, the constituency in whose name the bailout took place, suffered most through layoffs and cuts in wages and benefits...
...The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement also neatly complements Farmer's autobiography: Farmer describes his own experiences as a leader in a national, Northern-based, interracial civil rights group, while Morris's focus is on local, Southern, black communities and the black civil rights groups they created...
...That debt has not diminished in the intervening decades, nor has the debt owed to such individuals as James Farmer, who fought lonely battles to keep alive the spirit of radical egalitarianism in a dark time...
...Morris argues that studies of "resource mobilization" in the civil rights movement have laid too heavy a stress on the role of "outside elites," specifically Northern white liberal donors: "My research demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of local movements were indigenously organized and financed...
...We are all indebted to the Negroes of Montgomery," Lawrence Reddick wrote in Dissent in 1956...
...Of that injustice there can be no question, and one needn't minimize black and Hispanic suffering to say so...
...This part of the book is as much a history of the left as of the civil rights movement...
...The question isn't whether one agrees with that warning, as I do, or whether the canons of classical sociology permit him to issue it, as I think they do, but whether the method he uses to flesh out his warning succeeds as well as more literary, historical, journalistic, or intellectually rigorous methods might...
...but Rieder tells us that they've also seen the long lines outside ghetto liquor stores on welfare check-cashing days...
...One example is the use of "national defense" to justify everything from a highway program enacted for the benefit of the auto and construction industries to aid to education...
...but neither are the values they believe have been affronted always invalid...
...The boundless energies of the CORE movement," Farmer writes, "unable to zero in on a clearly defined enemy, focused instead on itself, and we devoured each other...
...THE ORIGINS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: BLACK COMMUNITIES ORGANIZING FOR CHANGE, by Aldon D. Morris...
...Hard times and oppression in and of themselves do not lead people to risk their livelihoods and safety by joining radical movements (and given the context of its time and place, no movement was ever more radical than the civil rights movement...
...In 1978 the factory supported 5,000 workers, their families, and the small businesses that served them...
...The first issue of Dissent to appear after the start of the bus boycott carried a report from Montgomery by Lawrence Reddick, a black historian at Alabama State College (soon to become one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference...
...Why is Spellman against me...
...A growing nationalist fervor among blacks in CORE led to the eventual expulsion of the group's white members, including some who had dedicated themselves to CORE since its founding in 1942...
...According to the authors, Chrysler's problems lay primarily in a combination of mismanagement, outmoded labor agreements, and the shock of Japanese competition and the high interest rates that hit the economy in the 1970s...
...If not, what kind of national and local planning is required to preserve the economic base of our communities...
...The Shah walks, beckoning here and pointing a finger there, always in the spotlight...
...19.95...
...Amid the smoke and the roar, rulers would change, governments fall, new people take their seat...
...Then we learn of the war vets' wives mugged several times by young blacks, and of those once-radical women assaulted by black girls in their projects' laundromats...
...We watch even those 119 with no visceral objection to a black family moving next door join neighbors to forestall a stampede that could destroy their future security...
...I don't think it does, but it deserves serious attention all the same...
...In this instance Kapuicifiski is nevertheless reporting a historical reality of a different order, one pertaining to the popular mythology of the Iranian revolution...
...From the standpoint of social policy, the deal seems less successful...
...Kapuicinski maintains, correctly I think, that books on revolution "should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid...
...We thought it was just a line of credit...
...Martin Luther King's charismatic leadership and martyrdom have, in some accounts, reduced the rest of the civil rights movement to the role of supporting actors...
...Must a shrinking auto industry necessarily mean a shrinking Detroit...
...19.95...
...Black ministerial associations, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP and, later, the SCLC were links in an organizational chain that stretched from Baton Rouge in 1953 to Montgomery in 1955 to Greensboro and Nashville in 1960...
...Plans to continue and broaden the protest had to be put aside...
...Do you know what to do...
...That was a status he held in common with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Black preachers' kids grew up knowing their fathers were exceptional men, honored in their own world--but they also had to learn that this prestige counted for very little outside the black community...
...JOHN COONEY INEVITABLY TAKES US BACK over the familiar ground of many of Spellman's public controversies...
...Throw the books out the window, get out on the streets and learn something...
...Farmer's first reaction to the news from Montgomery was not one of unalloyed joy...
...As John Cooney sees it, Spellman's death in 1969 marked "the end of an era" for the American Catholic church...
...When you become president, you will be...
...Farmers Home Administration and asked the government to guarantee $250 million in bank loans for a new transaxle plant in the town of Richmond...
...Morris challenges the notion that the civil rights movement was a sudden and unprecedented development, called into existence through the fortuitous combination of Rosa Parks's tired feet and Martin Luther King's inspired oratory: Who was Rosa Parks...
...Throughout the campaign, Spellman and the conservative Catholic hierarchy, with the assistance of the Vatican, repeatedly attempted to embarrass Kennedy by tying him politically to his church...
...The old reactionary church of Cardinal Spellman would seem, on the surface, to be as dead and buried as the Legion of Decency...
...But the government's Loan Guarantee Board, which was set up to monitor the deal, continued the hard line...
...Farmer never forgot the humiliation of watching his father, a powerful, distinguished, and learned man, abjectly sign over his paycheck to a couple of surly, shotgun-toting white farfners after having accidentally run over one of their pigs with his car...
...However, while acknowledging Iacocca's flair for marketing, Reich and Donahue point out that the products and basic strategy that pulled out Chrysler were designed by his immediate predecessor, John Riccardo, who was forced to resign early in the game to satisfy a congressional demand for sacrificial blood...
...Puzzled by the tenacity of Jewish liberalism, the Italians railed against it from across a vast divide, as if liberalism were a strange poltergeist...
...Aldon D. Morris argues that it was also well-organized, in its black community as well as its white one...
...Said one: "What...
...Notwithstanding this hostile reception, CORE activists saw the Journey as a successful skirmish in a national campaign against segregation...
...327 pp...
...CORE's sponsorship of the "Freedom Rides" in the summer of 1961 made it one of the four leading civil rights organizations in the nation and Farmer a figure of national prominence...
...Demonstrators against what had come to be known as "Spellman's War" followed him everywhere and even disrupted high mass at St...
...What occupies the authors here is the question of whether these neo-New Deals are the best way to do it...
...Morris, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, has written an important, combative book, which takes issue with theorists of social movements from Max Weber to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward...
...San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...Saving the company was the proxy for saving the jobs...
...Farmer enrolled as a theology student at Howard University, but his involvement in the Methodist student movement and an interest in Gandhi led him to a job as race-relations secretary for the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR...
...Farmer went there the following day to confront their probable murderers, the local sheriff and his deputy, and stared at them in hopeless fury: "I was not Christ...
...His memo, and some successful experiments in using direct-action tactics against segregated eating places in Chicago, led to the formation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) later that year...
...to an extent that might surprise both their celebrants and detractors, many of them can evaluate their experiences with a wit and sophistication drawn from traditions sometimes at odds with immediate impulses and from a more than passing acquaintance with the Enlightenment itself...
...Equally possible...
...Spellman was finished as a political power, even in his own Archdiocese...
...The book is also an example of how the examination of institutions can produce understanding of the real world that escapes the abstract quantifications of most current economic studies...
...New York: Arbor House...
...He has, and he hasn't...
...We now stand at a further remove from the events in Montgomery, and Greensboro, and even Birmingham, than Dissent's writers stood in the mid-1950s from the events in Akron and Flint...
...That same year Lee Iacocca took over as president of the Chrysler Corporation...
...He did not "throw himself body and soul into the game of trying to be the supreme I" upon his return from Rome but some ten years later...
...She had founded and served as the adult adviser to the local NAACP Youth Council...
...I believe, and I suspect that Reich and Donahue might too, that the alternative to both Republican and Democratic versions of marketplace individualism must be built on an idea of community...
...Canarsians distinguish, with pride and muted shame, between the welfare that let their immigrant families get back on their feet after a father's death, and the welfare that seems to penalize working and sustain dependency on monthly payments nearly as large as what Canarsians take home after paying taxes to support the dependents living nearby...
...354 pp...
...The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement begins, not with Montgomery, as one might expect, but with an account of the little known Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953, which served as inspiration and as a model for the better known effort led by Martin Luther King...
...A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book...
...Like Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he admired and supported, Spellman was a patriot who disliked the Constitution and distrusted the Bill of Rights...
...Cardinal O'Connor can never aspire to the level of political power and influence that Spellman once took for granted...
...Another cliche of our political culture is that government involvement in private enterprise leads to political interference with tough business decisions...
...I have let [Canarsians] tell much of the story in their own words," Rieder claims, "and I have kept my own theoretical preoccupations in the background...
...Institutional analysis is the neglected stepchild of the economics profession and its appearance in competent dress at any time should be applauded...
...Not all the painful ironies in Canarsie pertain to Jews...
...When all the deals were cut, the government provided $1.5 billion in guarantees and for three years was the company's de facto board of directors...
...CORE made no inroads in the South in the early 1950s, and it barely survived in the North...
...Spellman's "Last Hurrah" was a $2-million campaign to secure the passage of the proposed New York State Constitution of 1967, which would have provided state aid to Catholic schools...
...This, too," they continue, "flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that governments cannot make or abide by tough decisions the burdens of which fall on identifiable groups...
...It is equally possible to protect the status of people and communities without saving firms...
...Cardinal O'Connor is at present being compared to Spellman, in substance if not style...
...Saving Chrysler, they argue, was more ideologically and politically acceptable than saving jobs...
...Michael Schwerner, a white CORE member, and James Chaney, a black CORE field worker, along with Andrew Goodman, a white Mississippi Summer Project volunteer, disappeared after being arrested in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964...
...But it possessed enormous élan, sustained by its members' youthful enthusiasm and some early victories over segregated facilities in Northern cities...
...And she had a long history of personal resistance to segregation...
...A serious ideological debate is taking place within the American Catholic church, and Mr...
...In addition to its other virtues, the book is a timely reminder that, despite the current national obsession with free-market ideology, underlying economic pressures are continuing to force, for better or worse, a more explicit fusion of public and private sectors...
...He's no pope," Spellman said to his aides...
...Parks was deeply rooted in the black protest tradition...
...Spellman and the Vatican representatives were deliberately snubbed and the new Administration drew the sharpest line between church and state of any presidency in modern times...
...Moreover, the book's own brief discussion of alternatives—job retraining, wage subsidies, encouraging mergers—does not inspire much confidence...
...But in reality he was acting as President Roosevelt's "clandestine agent" and personal envoy in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East...
...And how much ideological discomfort are politicians willing to bear, and are we willing to force them to bear, in order to do so...
...But they are often inquisitive and insightful...
...As Aldon Morris notes, even the cautious, legalistic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was crippled in the South in the 1950s...
...Kennedy wisely met the issue head on and retaliated after the election...
...Reich and Donahue do not think it inappropriate that government should help out people and communities in trouble...
...And afterward...
...In Canarsie we encounter World War II veterans who'd refused to vacate the back seats of public buses while in basic training in the South because "We're from New York and we don't know from Negroes in the back of the bus...
...The stand taken by the American bishops in their pastoral letters on poverty and the nuclear arms race would have been unthinkable during the Spellman era...
...At some points, however, his localism becomes too all-encompassing...
...The "perceptions of injustice" fueling their indignation may not always be accurate...
...The Shah was wounded by a terrorist's bullets in 1949, but not "gravely...
...Cardinal Spellman's fall from power was swift and humiliating...
...We comprehend the spectacle of middle-aged Jewish men beating picketers (some undoubtedly also Jewish) from Youth Against War and Fascism, who've come out to Canarsie to "smash racism" during the 1974 school boycott...
...The results of his research will do little to further the present campaign to elevate Cardinal Spellman to sainthood...
...A loan...
...22.50...
...One reason is that in the absence of a clear national commitment to stabilize employment at the community level, these efforts are unlikely to work...
...Minor differences . . . on tactics became major political issues...
...What should we do...
...Didn't it make a difference to the black rank and file of the movement in those Southern communities that they had "friends" in the North and, most important, after 1960 a "friend" in the White House...
...It is also a compelling personal narrative of growing up black and relatively privileged in a racist society...
...In the same issue Irving Howe predicted that in a few decades "the Montgomery action may be looked upon as a political and social innovation of a magnitude approaching the first sit-down strikes in the Akron rubber plants during the mid-'30s...
...No American cleric had ever been in such a position of power, and Spellman confidently expected to unite his church and nation in a worldwide crusade against communism...
...In late 1978 a Chrysler executive walked into the Indiana branch of the U.S...
...Like biologists examining a specimen for clues of the evolutionary process, Reich and Donahue have dissected the Chrysler bailout for insights into the metamorphosis of American capitalism...
...But Spellman and his conservative allies were eventually defeated on almost every issue...
...The spectacle turns into something else, it becomes a violent, rapacious spectacle...
...He should be selling bananas...
...Beginning with a reporter's brief impressions of life 114 in Iran shortly after the revolution ("Cards, Faces, Fields of Flowers"), Kapuicifiski takes us through the life and troubled last years of the Shah ("Daguerreotypes") to return for a farewell glance at the somber postrevolution Iran of the Islamic committees ("The Dead Flame...
...Perhaps more ominously, they were shoved in that direction by the crime and social disintegration attributed to encroaching poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, and by what they feel is a rigid, often naive illogic of redistribution imposed upon them by liberal social engineering and jurisprudence through busing and "scatter site" and "fair" housing initiatives...
...This account is as mistaken as it is popular...
...CANARSIE CARRIES, despite all its faults, though, an important message for anyone who professed surprise at the breadth of support for subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz or who attributed that support to racial bigotry alone...
...And in order to save the company . . . well, as Reich and 113 Donahue put it: "When the crunch came, something had to give...
...The authors came away convinced that most of the actors defended the interests of their constituencies as best they could...
...His book is a paean to the mailing list and the mimeograph machine, and to the organizers who know how to make the best use of them...
...When confronted by irate drivers, policemen, and passengers, they quoted the Supreme Court's recent Irene Morgan decision declaring segregation of interstate passengers on motor carriers unconstitutional...
...THIS BRINGS us to the most interesting feature of the book: its dramaturgical perspective on the revolution in Iran...
...You have to protect your body and your children...
...In Gandhi's model, the nonviolent protester was supposed to convert the violent oppressor...
...The references to the Shiite diaspora, pogroms, and to Shiites in ghettos and in catacombs are quite inaccurate...
...Company management was even slower 112 to react to the energy crisis than competitors' executives, wasting time and resources fighting government regulations while the Japanese were making smaller, more efficient cars...
...Like the Vatican of Pius XII, Spellman's model for the proper relationship between church and state was Franco's Spain, and he defended that regime with fervor...
...He toured Latin America to publicly bestow his blessings on Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Batista in Cuba, Stroessner in Paraguay, and Somoza in Nicaragua...
...Cooney has made extensive use of personal interviews and has had access to Spellman's private 121 diary and the FBI files that relate to events in which the Cardinal's role was only surmised or suspected...
...The real key to success, however, was the federal government's insistence that all the parties involved— managers, workers, creditors, local governments, shareholders, and suppliers—be required to make concessions...
...That these "extortions" reached their peak just when inflation and new configurations of investment were undermining upward mobility itself compounded their desperation...
...The great paradox of the civil rights movement was that the more victories it achieved, the more it revealed the pervasive racism of the country, and the greater grew the anger and frustration of its own adherents...
...yet their observations are hobbled, almost paragraph for paragraph, by the repetitive, doting generalizations of a sociology that tends to stagemanage their entrances and exits...
...Translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand...
...New York: Free Press...
...Given the powerful case they have made that the system itself forced a tragic narrowing of political objectives, their view seems too sanguine...
...But as King himself wrote of the boycott in Stride Toward Freedom, "This is not a drama with only one actor...
...They were wrestling with a buried part of their past that seemed to have turned against them, or with the live pressures of parents and rich relatives on the West Side of Manhattan, on the campuses, in the Great Neck suburbs...
...Even as a child," Farmer recalls, "I hated the lying, the dissembling, the subterfuge, the pretense...
...Talmudic virtuosity, in fact, often serves reactionary Jews quite as nicely as their liberal critics in debates over strategies of neighborhood preservation...
...The PK's father was a model to be emulated—and rejected...
...Better by far are his more literary summaries 120 at the ends of chapters, like this one of Jews' and Italians' differing reactions to dispossession by liberal state interventions...
...He actively collaborated with the CIA in the plot that destroyed the reformist government of Arbenz in Guatemala and installed the dictatorship of Castillo Armas...
...but their counteremphasis on physical rough justice and cunning helps Italians stand fast in neighborhoods that Jews are often first to flee...
...What was the alternative...
...They gave their time and talents...
...It seems that Chrysler had been successfully mismanaged since the early '50s, when Ford overtook it as the second largest American car-maker...
...Yes, interracial unity may be necessary to win such advancement, for minorities and whites alike, but integrated living in capitalist neighborhood housing is more likely to come about as a result of other advancements under way than to be their cause...
...After his flight from Iran in August 1953, he stayed in Rome not a few "weeks" but days...
...King died at the height of his powers and influence...
...A simple coding of responses misses the caveats, the little hesitations, the tortuous reasoning in the Jewish search for an appropriate political idiom...
...Liars and squealers...
...He will have to move aside, and he doesn't want to...
...Revolt in the theater...
...The nonviolent movement in America is airborne," he recalled thinking...
...There is more and more crowding and bustle...
...Being a Preacher's Kid didn't make him a saint, as he is the first to acknowledge...
...Blue-collar employment at the company dropped from 105,000 to about 60,000...
...The significance that Reddick and Howe attributed to the bus boycott was borne out by the subsequent history of the civil rights movement...
...BY MARKETPLACE STANDARDS, this exercise in corporate socialism was no lemon...
...Rieder's observations and citations make clear that the relative provincialism of familycentered Italians carries instructive contradictions, too...
...The bus boycotters] have given us a magnificent case study of the circumstances under which the philosophy of Thoreau and Gandhi can triumph...
...his wife died...
...Photograph 1," the first of the "Daguerreotypes," depicts a pathetic, simple soldier holding a chain with the assassin of Shah Naser al-Din in 1896 at its other end...
...What is needed is a strategy for severing industrial mobility—the inevitable rise and decline of any industry in a competitive, dynamic world— from geographic mobility...
...A troubling omission— given the fairly extensive discussion of politics through Reagan's 1980 election and also of the earlier trials of John Lindsay in Canarsie—is the absence of a single reference to Mayor Ed Koch, who is surely the political embodiment of Canarsians' grievances and hopes...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
