BOOKS
BOOKS Race, class, and justice Arthur S. Miller FROM BROWN TO BAKKE. THE SUPREME COURT AND SCHOOL INTEGRATION: 1954-1978 by I. Harvie Wilkinson III Oxford University Press. 368 pp. $17.95. THE...
...The chapter on blood is particularly fascinating...
...Thus, the special-interest process is characterized as an arena of competition between "self-interested" sectors of the corporate community (the oil lobby versus the steel lobby) pursuing short-term and narrowly defined favors from government...
...Miller is the formidably talented English physician who co-authored and starred in the delightful revue "Beyond the Fringe...
...362 pp...
...He finally won admission to medical school, but in a Solomonic compromise in which the nine Justices spoke in many voices with the majority approving race as one criterion of medical school admission...
...The wonder is that Brown / got decided the way it did, and by a unanimous vote — a tribute to the late Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Felix Frankfurter, as Richard Kluger showed in his classic book, Simple Justice...
...The issue is both one of race and of class...
...The question of race will not go away...
...As long as basic market structures remain intact, government will necessarily operate in the interests of the corporations, even if it does not operate at their behest...
...In the United States, no other figure on the Left has devoted more effort to the study of the American power structure than G. William Domhoff, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
...In other words, democracy is vulnerable because it is taken seriously by the demos...
...Like the pluralists, the structuralists claim that the capitalist class is too variegated to achieve class rule in a direct sense...
...Their analysis of race, labor, and the automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s traces the roots of the race issue among automobile workers to Ford's racial policies...
...What we have today is "tokenism" rather than segregation...
...THE BAKKE CASE: THE POLITICS OF INEQUALITY by loel Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence III Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...Neither of these books gives one much hope that such changes will occur...
...According to Domhoff, this fragmentation is overcome at the level of general policy formation, where the long-term interests of the business community are examined and articulated in a noncompetitive atmosphere of solidarity and mutual aid...
...Meier and Rudwick, throughout their rich collection of material, make it clear that most of the battles in Detroit could have been resolved differently...
...The political system thus far has effected rough compromises...
...White has collected here the fourteen articles on gardening his wife wrote for The New Yorker between 1958 and 1970...
...In Ford's opinion, it was worth the cost of equal wages to win the blacks over to capitalism and prevent their being captured by Communist organizers or "malevolent Jews...
...In 1885 Woodrow Wilson asserted that the Constitution "in operation is manifestly a very different thing from the Constitution of the books...
...August Meier's and Elliott Rudwick's Black Detroit and the Rise of the UA W does precisely that...
...This is where The Bakke Case by Joel Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence is of value...
...289 pp...
...But they are falling back...
...Who should they be...
...Ford's highly individualized brand of paternalistic philanthropy provided a haven for black workers in an otherwise unfriendly industrial world...
...it is moral and economic' expand upon them...
...Virtually the same can be said of the ideology and candidate-selection processes...
...While they were an important protection of job security, seniority provisions gave white workers with more experience advantages in job advancement over recently hired black employes...
...In each section, he examines the process at hand with the aid of several case studies...
...many worked in all-black divisions, and their overall participation was limited by segregationist policies...
...15.95...
...Wilkinson's book deserves to rank with Kluger's as the definitive accounts of Supreme Court treatment of school desegregation...
...Income blacks earned from Ford became a cornerstone of black community prosperity...
...12.95...
...Wilkinson, a lawyer and newsman, documents that ArthurS...
...The alliance was cemented when the UAW visibly supported the black community during the 1943 Detroit riots, and the earlier neutrality of the blacks was replaced by a strong alliance between the union and the black community...
...Fritz briefly discusses the Houston conference and some of the reactions to it and then outlines the last decade of feminism as the evolution of schisms within the movement today...
...On the left, Domhoff has been criticized by a new wave of Marxian "structuralists" typified by the esoteric Greek scholar Nicos Poulantzas...
...That, of course, is good and can be traced in substantial part to the Supreme Court's courageous decision in Brown I. It "may be the most important political, social, and legal event in America's Twentieth Century history," Harvie Wilkinson tells us in From Brown to Bakke, a superbly written and carefully documented narrative of school integration since 1954...
...Where the union moved slowly, careful not to provoke the smoldering racism of its white members, the black community activists, with the support of the Federal Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), were willing to blame shop stewards and other union officials, as well as management, for the slow progress of black workers...
...Meier and Rudwick devote the second half of their book to the shift from this neutrality to a position of solidarity with the UAW...
...By emphasizing his individual qualities (especially his trustworthiness), Carter managed to conceal his pro-business attitudes, evade the nation's real problems, and elude public scrutiny all the way to the White House...
...It is a book with few individual heroes...
...Of the two, there can be little doubt that Wilkinson's book will be considered the more important, but that is not to slight the Dreyfuss and Lawrence book, which is a sensitive account of the tribulations of millions of people living in a caste system...
...UAW leaders appealed to black community leaders to encourage black strikebreakers to leave the struck plant and prevent a race riot...
...His basic thesis is that "there are four general processes through which economically and politically active members of the ruling class, working with the aid of highly trained and carefully selected employes, are able to dominate the United States at all levels...
...Books Briefly One woman's voice Dreamers and Dealers, by Leah Fritz (Beacon Press...
...While there is a wealth here of practical information, it is not a "how to" guide...
...In an essay Samuel Huntington, a leading neoconservative and recent White House functionary, speaks of a "democratic distemper" and of the idea that democracies are becoming "ungovernable...
...Whether The Powers That Be ultimately softens such criticisms is open to speculation and is of secondary importance to whatever practical impact the book may achieve...
...When stripped of its customarily arcane prose, the structuralist counter-thesis holds that the class character of the capitalist state is determined not by the influence of corporate lobbies, foundations, and think tanks, or by the direct participation of members of the upper class in government, but by the objective functions performed by government as a protector of private property and business prerogatives...
...Meier and Rudwick attribute the UAW success to the alliance formed between the union and black community organizations, a coalition which was able, after being tested by strikes and riots, to overcome the combination of Ford philanthropy, company intimidation, and historic black skepticism of white-dominated unions...
...Dreyfuss is a journalist, and Lawrence teaches constitutional law at the University of San Francisco...
...intervention in Vietnam, the actual motivation at this level is the basic interest of the class as a whole...
...Allan Bakke's case exemplified the present situation...
...In the past, DomhofPs works have come under sharp attack from both the left and the right, and, ironically, for strikingly similar reasons...
...The answer of the neoconservatives, and I suppose of most whites, is to play by the numbers: those with the best grades and best test scores get the brass rings...
...They should not be compared, for their perspectives and goals are different...
...Compare Dreyfuss and Lawrence: "As long as race remains an issue in America, we will be unable to address the country's major structural deficiencies...
...Domhoff also draws upon a variety of academic studies to demonstrate how the rich maintain ultimate control over electoral activity by means of campaign financing and an electoral process which discourages policy discussion and political education in favor of personal image-building...
...How the body works The Body in Question, by Jonathan Miller (Random House...
...Any account of the automobile industry in America should begin with a consideration of Henry Ford...
...In general, Domhoff s evaluation is quite engaging...
...She describes the dreaming and dealing of feminist (often self-appointed) leaders, lesbians, and feminists in the Left as well as the class differences and similarities among women...
...The success of the UAW in Detroit in achieving solidarity among its black and white members can be attributed to the alliance forged among activist community leaders, aggressive organizers and supportive unions, committed Federal agencies, and responsive community organizations...
...Whether they fall on the left or on the right, they all target government as an obstacle to social and economic progress...
...Today, black Americans have formal equality under the law...
...The question asks much and brings forth the human interest side of the "zero-sum game...
...England, she points out, "has since the Elizabethan Age regarded books that deal with horticulture and plants as a true branch of literature," and truly good books on gardening, although rare, give pleasure to general readers as well as to gardeners...
...Finally, in dealing with the ideology process, Domhoff reveals that the same corporations, foundations, and policy-planning groups that operate in the policy-formation field are at the center of the activity to shape the political beliefs, attitudes, and opinions of the underlying population...
...In 1954, when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, a new era seemed to be in the making...
...As such, The Bakke Case complements but does not duplicate Wilkinson's book...
...In Bakke the issue of color had enabled many Americans to avoid issues of class and privilege that contradict our most enduring myths...
...The ultimate issue in Bakke is who is to get a government-financed license to coin money as a doctor...
...Not until the late 1960s did it get around to fulfilling the promise of Brown...
...Each of the four processes is seen as a necessary but by no means sufficient incident of ruling class domination...
...True, Jim Crow is dead...
...So it is with racial integration...
...Those black workers who did join the UAW in its early days ran into problems of segregation at union social affairs and at establishments that would serve whites but not blacks...
...The book is the unanticipated result of research the two — Meier is a historian and Rudwick a sociologist at Kent State University — had undertaken on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...We are given an insider's view of the corrosive influence wielded by business advisory committees and lobbies over executive and legislative functions...
...He approves Brown II but "just barely...
...Although the subject matter is inherently abstract, Domhoff s easy and nonrhetorical narrative style makes the book accessible even to readers with little or no background in political theory...
...Seniority rules proved to be a divisive issue...
...In support of their position, structuralists are quick to point out that many social reforms which have greatly benefited big business, such as the programs of the New Deal, have been enacted over the strenuous opposition of large and powerful sectors of the corporate community...
...What he does accomplish, however, is a clear-sighted and balanced examination of the complex social system we hope some day to change...
...Black Detroit and the Rise of the UA W is rich in historical detail, cognizant of the complexity of the issue, and clear in its analysis...
...She singles out Gertrude Jekyll and V. Sackville-West in England, and Elizabeth Lawrence in this country, as informed and gifted writers on gardening...
...These are the processes of special interest competition, general policy formation, candidate selection, and the perpetuation of conventional ideology...
...While Ford was obsessed with the prospect of organized labor making advances in his company (he introduced the $5-a-day wage in 1914 in an attempt to maintain the loyalty of his employes), he held black Americans in special regard...
...In it, Domhoff attempts to articulate the systematic channels and mechanisms through which the American ruling class expresses and exercises its dominion...
...Similarly, in the chapter on policy formation, Domhoff explains how corporate-funded foundations and think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Business Roundtable have framed and shaped such major Twentieth Century policies as the postwar practice of containment and the creation and promotion of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund...
...By that time a counterrevolution had set in — although it is important to note that the spirit of Brown was extended from schools to all public facilities, so that by the early 1960s separation by race in public facilities was "no longer a litigable issue...
...The promise of Brown has not been fulfilled: blacks (and other disadvantaged citizens) are still treated as inferior beings...
...Their book is a case study of the personalities involved in the Bakke decision, a journalistic account of one of the most complex constitutional decisions in American history...
...They raise a fundamental question of political philosophy: Who holds political power in the United States and toward what end is that power exercised...
...There were still gaps between what the union stood for and what it delivered...
...3.95 Vintage paperback...
...I believe that their label of "the new racism" as applicable to the neoconservatives and others is right on target...
...He illustrates in detail how Federal and state regulatory agencies fall prey to the interests of the industries they are designed to oversee...
...Well he might...
...Those two classes are the ruling class, which owns and manages the major business enterprises, and the working class, which owns no income-producing property...
...Indeed, they outweigh the notion of "equal justice under law," the phrase carved deeply in the facade of the Supreme Court building in Washington...
...As a fast-reading assessment of feminists' progress to date and the struggles to come, this book is a welcome addition to the popular media's selectively shallow treatment of the women's movement...
...As Roy Wilkins put it, "Will the union give us a square deal and a chance at some of the good jobs...
...After providing some working definitions of the central concepts of the state, the ruling class, and the power elite, Domhoff moves chapter by chapter through the four processes...
...But is that sufficient...
...Like other Marxist writers, Domhoff shares the premise that social classes are central to an analysis of power in contemporary America...
...293 pp...
...Besides all that, he is interested in the history and philosophy of science, and that is the subject of this book, based on a BBC series recounting how man found out about his own body and how it works...
...Meier and Rudwick do not make the lessons to be drawn from this era explicit, but some conclusions are easily drawn from their analysis...
...The still-growing union wasn't strong enough in 1940 to risk losing white workers' support by going out on a limb for the black workers...
...He also is a director of television films and plays, and recently he began directing opera...
...When the workers complied, the UAW was clearly victorious, and the National Labor Relations Board ordered a representation election...
...In the face of UAW organizing advances in 1941, Ford hired 2,000 blacks as potential strikebreakers at the company's Rouge plant...
...Since the publication in 1967 of Who Rules America?, his piercing expose of the sociological structure of the corporate rich, Domhoff has been absorbed with demonstrating that a "ruling class" exists in the United States and dominates governmental institutions...
...Still, some problems remain unresolved...
...At the same time, Meier and Rudwick point out, the union was constrained by racial problems within its own organization...
...restaurants and hotels and other facilities open to the public are now open to all...
...A New Englander of sense and sensibility, Katharine White had a keen interest in horticultural history and lore...
...When President Carter opined that life is unfair and that blacks and other disadvantaged citizens should not expect more from the Federal Government, he brought the Second Reconstruction to an end...
...12.95...
...Victory was never assured for the UAW...
...On the right, Domhoff has been criticized by pluralists (such as Yale political scientist Robert Dahl), who contend that the special interests that constitute the capitalist class are too numerous and too competitive to achieve the internal coherence required for genuine class rule...
...Its public stance of support for black workers masked private battles over such resolutions...
...Some of these metaphors are depicted in photographs, which are used copiously in color and black and white...
...10 hardcover...
...who else in the United States has to wait, often too long, for their acknowledged constitutional rights to be enforced...
...The industry's treatment of blacks, while it failed in many regards, tended to encourage the traditional anti-union philosophy among black workers, who seriously questioned whether any white-dominated union would serve them...
...There is no way that the Constitution can satisfy the desires of both the Allan Bakkes (and his counterpart, Brian Weber, who lost in an "affirmative action" case this past spring) and the disadvantaged — blacks, Chicanos, others — who too want to sup at the still groaning table of opulence in America...
...Wilkinson, a white southerner himself, traces the road from Brown to Bakke with care and sympathy, both to blacks and white southerners...
...The Powers That Be (not to be confused with David Halberstam's recent book of the same title) is his sixth and most ambitious work on the subject...
...it is moral and economic...
...As persuasive as Domhoff s account is, however, it is unlikely to go unchallenged in either academic or political circles...
...When that time comes — it will be soon — then these two books will be useful reading for thoughtful Americans, as indeed they are today...
...There can be no doubt that class as well as race is basic to an understanding of the position of blacks in American society...
...Blacks and the UAW BLACK DETROIT AND THE RISE OF THE UAW by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick Oxford University Press...
...What he does not do is to show that Bakke illustrates a judicial version of a zero-sum game, one in which both parties cannot hope to win...
...352 pp...
...This is recognized by Wilkinson, Dreyfuss, and Lawrence, who reach rather similar conclusions but do not 'The question...
...Long overdue rights were finally recognized...
...in his book...
...Black Americans were to take their rightful place in the mainstream of American life...
...8.95...
...Apart from the viewpoint of democratic pluralism, which asserts that power is distributed equitably among the nation's many identifiable interest groups, the only other theoretical tradition to develop a general analysis of politics and the state has been the radical Marxist perspective...
...They range over nursery catalogues, perennials, annuals, wildflowers, roses, fruit trees and shrubs, garden design, and reviews of books on gardening...
...The Court, however, was far from courageous in following through with the enforcement of the Brown decision...
...The UAW response to reluctance among black workers was to educate blacks about the reality of Ford employment practices: Blacks were underrepresented in better-paying jobs and were relegated to janitorial work...
...According to the pluralists, such interests tend to offset and cancel out one another in their attempts to secure political influence, resulting in no single social group being able to rule...
...She has firm opinions on fragrance, dahlias, and gladiola, and she is hilarious in lampooning the changing fads and didactic "abracadabra" of flower "arrangements...
...Thus, in the section on special interests, readers learn how the DuPont family parlayed its great wealth and its relationship with a well-connected Washington attorney named Clark Clifford into monumental tax breaks upon General Motors' divestiture...
...He traces the development of modern biology and medicine, frequently using metaphors to illustrate the workings of the marvelously intricate human machine...
...The re-emergence of the energy crisis, the onset of the second recession within five years, and the continuing deterioration of our rural and urban environments have kindled what President Jimmy Carter has christened "a crisis of the American spirit" — a condition marked by a pervasive and cynical disrespect for institutional authority, especially the governmental variety...
...Although the protest movements of the late 1970s are disunited and diverse, they share one basic feature...
...The bitter heritage of a caste system was going to be sloughed off — or so it seemed...
...The point is fundamental — and little discussed...
...The turning point, in Meier and Rudwick's estimation, came when Ford attempted to use black workers as a shield against union organizing...
...The question, in the final analysis, is not legal or constitutional...
...Ferguson, the 1896 decision that constitutionalized "separate but equal" and ended the First Reconstruction...
...The opportunities for black workers in Detroit were unique among American industry of the time and won Ford the support of all of Detroit's black community...
...No treatise on the American power structure can be expected to tell us how to create a free and fair society, and Domhoff, to his credit, does not attempt to do so...
...The Left can only profit from his labors...
...Judicial pusillanimity, to be sure, is far from unknown...
...The Second Reconstruction was a glorious period in the history of the nation and of the Supreme Court...
...The book sometimes seems more a soapbox for Fritz than a statement representative of feminists' collective self-appraisal...
...278 pp...
...is not legal...
...He spent the summer working in a black community...
...Carter's statement is today's version of Plessyv...
...As the "me decade" agonizes to a close, the symptoms and sources of discontent in the United States are multiplying...
...Despite speculation that the black workers favored the Ford-backed UAW-AFL, the UAW-CIO prevailed in the election...
...Not only were they quiet and compliant, but they could be "an eager reservoir of workers committed to the American system...
...The presence of the FEPC, Meier and Rudwick believe, heightened the militance of black activists and "spurred the improvements which kindled the foundry workers' hopes and led to dramatic protests against the gradualism that relegated most of them to the least desirable jobs...
...15...
...The hidden underbelly is now coming into view...
...Blacks believed the promise of Brown, and indeed still do...
...The message to the black workers was a clear one: it was the open shop which had provided blacks with unusual opportunities...
...Bill Blum (BillBlum, a Los Angeles lawyer, is a free-lance writer who has contributed to Inquiry and other publications...
...Unfortunately, Fritz's personalized style often betrays a tone of defensiveness, especially in her rejection of the Left and her denial of the oppression of working-class men...
...comes not primarily from external threats, though some threats are real, nor from internal subversion from the left or the right, although both possibilities could exist, but rather from the internal dynamics of a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society...
...In the aftermath of the Ford strike, Ford retreated from its concern with black philanthropy, while blacks began to look to the UAW more often for better jobs and redress of grievances...
...With economic growth slowing and with too many qualified applicants for each position, quite obviously some applicants will be left out...
...Still, black activists were unhappy with the gradual progress made within the union structure...
...The problem of class and caste (for that is what race amounts to, so far as blacks are concerned) will be resolved, if at all, only by structural changes in American government and society...
...Miller, a specialist in constitutional law, wrote "The Supreme Court: Myth and Reality...
...But whether that equality extends to the ways that law is administered is quite another matter...
...JohnDombrink (John Dombrink is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...The Supreme Court, however, was far out in front and got no support from either Congress or President Eisenhower or other Government officers...
...We are in the process of building — perhaps have already built — a de facto caste system in the United States...
...In almost orthodox terms, he declares in the preface: "I believe most political and economic problems in the United States must be understood in terms of the conflicts and compromises between the interests of two basic social classes that are rooted in the social organization of production...
...It is, however, to be seen, at least inferentially, in writings of the Trilateral Commission...
...With these and other obstacles, the UAW faced an uphill struggle in convincing the black workers that unionization would protect, and not undermine, their chances for advancement in the automobile industry...
...With or without ardent black support, the UAW-CIO, in Meier and Rudwick's analysis, was successful in part because of the "hesitant neutrality" of Detroit's black community...
...The 1976 Carter campaign is presented as the archetypal illustration of this tendency...
...Analysis o! power THE POWERS THAT BE: PROCESSES OF RULING CLASS DOMINATION IN AMERICA by G. William Domhoff Random House...
...Through a complex network of organizational links with government, public relations firms, and advertising institutions such as the Ad Council, the corporate rich are able to sustain a subtle ideological climate in which the interests of the power elite find acceptance and alternative radical strategies are discouraged...
...Although differences within the ruling class have existed over such momentous questions as the containment of communism and U.S...
...Union officials and their sympathizers interpreted Ford's move as an attempt to provoke interracial violence in the plant and on the picket line, which would force Michigan's governor to break the strike with state troops...
...Brown II, for example, came in 1955, the case in which the Justices told blacks that while they had a right to attend integrated schools, they had to wait until school administrators, "with all deliberate speed," got around to permitting it...
...Huntington goes on: "The vulnerability of democratic government in the United States...
...200 pp...
...It had to pick its way with care...
...only through the presentation of a powerful and representative united front was the union able to prevail...
...Armchair horticulture Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. White (Far-rar, Straus and Giroux...
...Black workers were advised by UAW organizers to see through Ford's "divide-and-rule" policy of posing as friend while playing off the black workers against the whites...
...It is a successful explanation of the CIO's ability to whittle away the black distrust of unions...
...It is an arena in which the interests of the rich prevail but also one in which the rich appear fragmented and without unity of purpose...
...The Second Reconstruction is dying a slow death...
...He traverses the various human organs, relating the mystical qualities assigned to them in historic times and by primitive peoples, through more recent scientific misconceptions, to the present state of precise knowledge made possible by space-age technology...
...As economic growth slows and the age of frugality becomes ever more apparent, there can be little doubt that both race and class must be faced...
...It may even be," Wilkinson writes, "that 'class has become more important than race in determining black life-chances.' But one should not speak too soon____ Solutions that make race immaterial or minorities equal or understanding total are not now in sight...
...If, however, the question of race will not go away, neither will the question of class...
...Whether they will suffice in the long run is by no means certain...
...Wealth and family and inherited privilege outweigh the myth of equal opportunity...
Vol. 43 • November 1979 • No. 11
