BOOKS

...Elayne Rapping, a professor of communications at Robert Morris College and a cultural contributor to The Guardian in New York, is a close observer of television and a shrewd analyst of its foibles and stratagems...

...She became a strong advocate of legislation to end sweatshops and child labor, and worked at Hull House—founded by Jane Addams, who came from a Quaker family and was later the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize...

...How the Hoffmans, and particularly Eva, reconcile their conflicting feelings about this pathetic yet unlikable family makes this novel arresting reading...

...J. Edgar Hoover, the Post Office, and high-ranking Army officers, among others, pressed for suppression of the black press and other "subversive" organs at the outbreak of war...

...Francis Biddle, Roosevelt's Attorney General, was instrumental in preventing the wholesale suppression of the country's spirited black newspapers, Washburn argues...

...In the course of the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer attempted to link the NAACP and DuBois to other radical groups...

...More characteristically, fit, harmony of color, congruence, and balance of the elements of costume, all the aspects of good taste in fashion, are dissolved in a rejection of taste—an absurdist celebration of anti-taste—the antithesis of what Silverman asserts as a dominant theme...

...in that, he differed significantly from his boss...

...One would like more on the editors themselves, and on the role of the black press as a lightning rod for dissent during the most popular war (an unfortunate phrase) in American history...

...Although Foster resigned from— and then was disowned by—her meeting, she continued to consider herself a Friend and to attack religious groups for supporting slavery...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Bigotry at Their Door THE FLOOD by Carol Ascher The Crossing Press...

...In The Looking Glass World of Nonfic-tion Television, Rapping covers local news programs, talk shows, games, documentaries and special reports, news magazine programs, sports events, extravaganzas, beauty pageants, and commercials...

...This is not to say, however, that their Friends meetings gave them full approval and support...

...Rapping stresses the tendency toward a fusion of fiction and nonfiction on television, with news dominated by "personalities" and dramatic episodes often linked to personalities and show business, and with drama and other fictional forms frequently yielding more insight into reality than the purported news...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a writer, editor, teacher, and Quaker fellow-traveler...

...These few paragraphs implicitly destroy her theoretical house of cards...

...Margaret Hope Bacon's book, Mothers of Feminism, is more than just "the story of Quaker women in America...

...To understand the dilemma that Biddle faced, a little historical background may be helpful (and is provided quite adequately in the book...

...Despite these qualifications, Rapping has written a valuable book that will afford students of the media much pleasure as well as enlightenment...

...And, in fact, our most admired elite is that of the entertainment world...

...Despite the increasing Reaganiza-tion of public television, a disproportionate number of the better programs on Central America, such as the Charlie Clements documentary on El Salvador, have been shown on noncommercial stations...

...Inserted into the chapters on Vreeland's exhibits at the Metropolitan on "The Eighteenth Century Woman" and "La Belle Epoque," these are used both to point to the complex reality which Vreeland ignored in her fashion show presentations at the Museum and also to bolster the connection Silverman makes between Vreeland's career and Reagan's Presidency...

...Where educational intent and historical perspective had been seen as the essence of museum display, Vreeland substituted an assault on the senses—drenching the rooms of her exhibits with recently marketed perfumes, filling them with recorded music, surprising the eye with dehumanized mannequins—bald, elongated, neutered...

...by Marjorie Rosenberg The shelf-lives of supermarket staples and of newly published books approach equality as chemical processes enhance the one and book-industry marketing techniques deplete the other...

...Reagan have public influence, it is not manifested in the shaping of a new aristocracy of taste...

...George Logan, a book regarded today as a "literary achievement as well as a historical source...

...But their connection has nothing to do with a relationship between fashion and politics, nor with their membership in an imagined "aristocratic movement...

...At the root of the furor was a hard and bitter truth: The American war effort, directed though it was at the racist philosophy of Nazism, imbued with the rhetoric of democracy and equality, was shot through with a grim racism all its own...

...His most recent book, with Frank Brodhead, is "The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection...

...publication...

...Laurent retrospective and "Man and the Horse," sponsored by Polo/Ralph Lauren—the line between museum exhibit and promotion of multimillion-dollar fashion empire had been obliterated...

...Moreover, Ascher's compelling portrait of the Hoffmans, still partially in shock from the war, is a reminder that Hitler's victims were not only those sent to the concentration camps and that the consequences of bigotry transcend the suffering of its victims...

...Few people—including myself—ever heard of Abby Kelley Foster, who traveled across the nation with Lucretia Mott advocating women's rights and the abolition of slavery...

...Apart from the fact that cultural elitists are people too, Rapping ignores the evidence that public broadcasting has long been more open to dissent than commercial television...

...war effort, The Crisis denounced lynching, mob violence against blacks, and systematic discrimination in the Armed Forces...

...She also includes television movies...

...It was a triumph achieved in the face of overwhelming odds...

...191 pp...

...She was bodily removed from the Orthodox Ohio Yearly Meeting in 1845 when she tried to preach there against slavery...

...His focus is perhaps too much on the activities of the various Government agencies...

...In 1821, Deborah Norris Logan wrote the biography of her deceased husband, Dr...

...Just as today some feisty Friends find themselves at odds with their meetings on matters such as giving sanctuary to Central American refugees, payment of war taxes, the right of women to control their bodies, and symbolic nonviolent direct action against weapons of war, many Quaker women in the past— and sometimes their spouses— had to challenge their own meetings, and frequently left them...

...its dust jacket caricature of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and Diana Vreeland by David Levine heralds a self-satisfying attack on easy targets, a promise which is underlined by the subtitle, Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America...

...Its slender size is filled out with fifty-one poorly reproduced photographs, apparently intended to attract partisans of Vogue or People magazines...

...George Robinson (George Robinson, a member of the National Writers Union, writes on film, sports, and civil liberties for a number of publications...

...25 hardcover...

...Standing in the President's way was Biddle, who, as some critics had feared, took constitutional guarantees seriously...

...She twice refers to recent outstanding documentaries on Central America, without citation, failing to point out that documentaries on this subject have been sparse and that most of those on the networks have adhered closely to the Administration line...

...16.95...

...At the outbreak of the war, the Marines and Coast Guard were all-white, the Navy permitted blacks to serve only as messboys, and the Army was rigidly segregated...

...Rapping is also frequently convincing and enlightening in her analyses of individual programs {Entertainment Tonight, The Burning Bed, and Roots), where she points up their strengths and bases of appeal, the extent to which they are confined to acceptable parameters of success, and their common failure to illuminate and address real causes...

...that during the Vietnam war, for example, public television carried a number of important documentaries that the commercial vehicles wouldn't touch...

...The author, the same dust jacket informs us, has three degrees from Princeton and teaches European cultural history at UCLA...

...Silverman thus begins with an attempt to force her contemporary observations into the pattern of her scholarly research, both sets of problems for her being grounded in a view of politics as First Cause...

...It is the description and evaluation of her performance as producer of five extravaganzas for the Museum, seen by millions of people and paid for by large corporate grants, which is the heart of the book...

...Of this last charge, incidentally, Washburn is skeptical...

...To the extent that the President and Mrs...

...Vreeland's making over of the museum world she entered, and the fact that she was recruited to do it and applauded for her blasphemies, is certainly a phenomenon worthy of analysis...

...Only in the last few pages of her book, abandoning theory and using the psychological astuteness which is her principal asset, does Silverman get at an important truth—the element of self-fashioning, the ability to enact and promote fantasy, which has allowed our actor-President and a fashion editor turned museum consultant to manipulate the fantasies of others...

...201 pp...

...The result was a power struggle that took place in many forums, between those Rooseveltians who would have gladly suppressed the black press for sedition, and Biddle, who almost single-handedly prevented such prosecutions...

...296 pp...

...Contemporary American elites recruit their members on the basis of qualities widely available in the population at large— a talent for self-promotion, the ability to manipulate others, ruthlessness, energy...

...Because television is such a powerful influence, it has taken over many important social functions, carrying them out, as Rapping notes, on its own restrictive terms...

...Rapping devotes only two pages to public television, with a heavy put-down based on its undistinguished quality and elitist role...

...In one was Roosevelt, who did not want to hear about legal technicalities when the United States was engaged in a war for survival...

...Anna Botsford Comstock wrote and illustrated books on entomology and nature study...

...Biddle was a fervent believer in the importance of a free press...

...relief and reconstruction in areas devastated by wars and famine, and the application of nonviolent, direct action to effect these changes...

...Like wary fighters circling and assessing their opponent, they viewed each other at long range in the war's opening months...

...What Silverman has to say would perhaps have been most suitably presented as a couple of articles on the life, times, and recent career of Diana Vreeland, for more than thirty years editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, who was, at the beginning of this decade, elevated to the position of special consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum...

...This material, perceptively evaluated, serves Silverman as a basis for what she advertises in a fulsome academic preface as serious social analysis...

...16.95...

...Lydia Pinkham developed homemade remedies for female disorders...

...At the same time, a connection was made, increasingly with each of the exhibits, to its corporate sponsors until with the last two—the Yves St...

...Rapping is at her best in the chapters on local news, national rituals, magazines, talk shows, soft news, movies, mini-series, and commercials...

...even before the declaration of war, the black press vociferously denounced the Jim Crow conditions existing in the armed forces and the continuing violence against black Americans...

...She was jailed three times, and gave up only after opponents organized a boycott among the town merchants so she could not buy supplies, filled her well with manure, and set her school on fire...

...The roster includes campaigns not only for women's suffrage, education, and equal rights, but also for abolition of slavery, lynching, capital punishment, child labor...

...She is unusual among radical critics of the media in her fondness for television and her appreciation of its capacity to meet essential needs— to amuse, entertain, answer questions, and provide a sense of unity and community in a fragmenting world—as well as to serve as a mechanism to divert and propagandize...

...citizens...

...Phebe Hanaford wrote the anti-slavery tract Lucretia the Quakeress and Women of the Century in support of women's rights...

...It is hard to conceive of in this age of Edwin Meese, but from time to time the office of Attorney General has been occupied by men who actually cared about protecting the civil liberties of U.S...

...Rapping is less convincing on documentaries, whose decline in number, quality, and importance she underrates...

...Subsidiary and supportive is the recounting of two corollary promotions at Bloomingdale's, all of this pointing to the underlying theme of how political and social context determines fashion and taste...

...Female Friends MOTHERS OF FEMINISM: The Story of Quaker Women in America by Margaret Hope Bacon Harper & Row...

...Hannah Whitall Smith, an ardent advocate of women's rights, wrote a dozen religious books, one of which sold more than two million copies...

...That, however, is a story that has been told elsewhere, notably in Lee Finkle's Forum for Protest...

...These fascinating biographical vignettes have been extensively researched by Margaret Bacon, herself an active Quaker feminist...

...Informative display cards described only the fabric of the costumes, presenting them as items in a fashion show...

...Even the Red Cross got into the act and refused to accept blood donations from blacks...

...The Tube's Grip THE LOOKING GLASS WORLD OF NONFICTION TELEVISION by Elayne Rapping South End Press...

...for prison reform...

...Even Roosevelt, who was, as Washburn points out, capable of vindictiveness toward journalists who criticized him, was not unsympathetic to calls for censorship., "Two camps existed with opposing views on the value of libertarianism in wartime," Washburn explains...

...She excludes national news programs on the ground of adequate coverage elsewhere...

...For such people, and for those of us who need to be reminded that such people exist, Patrick Washburn's book, A Question of Sedition, a study of the rocky relationships between the black press and the Roosevelt Administration during World II, is highly recommended...

...Could it be that she has something of importance to say to us...

...DuBois, struck a corrosively bitter tone toward the rampant racism it saw all around it...

...She takes advantage of such Reagan-era classics as the "truly amazing" 1985 Inaugural Ball, the 1984 Olympics, and the Liberty Weekend to provide color as well as insight into the quality of television's integrating services...

...Producers of independent programs on Central America have been hard-put even to buy their way on to commercial stations...

...It seems rather the case that her publisher felt that a few lumps of learning would add piquancy to a thin gruel, and Silverman has been five years in the writing of a scholarly work which provided her with some leftovers...

...his evidence suggests strongly that such cutbacks were not politically motivated...

...Marjorie Rosenberg is a psychotherapist in private practice in Chicago...

...At the end of World War I, the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, under the editorship of W.E.B...

...Bacon presents overwhelming evidence for the preponderance of Quaker women as leaders and often instigators of these movements...

...Starting with the same theoretical framework she had used for a five-year scholarly exploration of the revival of aristocratic cultural traditions in late Nineteenth Century France, Silverman looked at Vreeland's work at the Metropolitan and decided that she saw "part of a broad movement of aristocratic invocation in 1980s American culture...

...Supporting this conception are large lumps of research material which Silverman has collected on the relationship between fashion and politics in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century France...

...There is no aristocratic movement, no matter how one qualifies it, no "invocation of aristocratic themes" connected with the Reagan Presidency...

...As for contemporary fashion, intrinsically anti-aristocratic, it has sought to obliterate legitimate distinctions of age, sex, and function, while substituting an absurdist element derived from Twentieth Century art, literature, and philosophy...

...But how many people know of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Quaker women who—taking seriously the principle that "in souls there is no sex"— traveled and preached courageously in meetings around the country...

...Graceanna Lewis became the country's foremost woman naturalist in the mid-18605...

...But her introduction reveals the sources of her failure to produce such an analysis...

...To someone like Meese, who doesn't believe that the Bill of Rights applies to the states, this may seem a radical concept...

...Seven agencies investigated the black press—the Justice Department, the FBI, the Post Office Department, the Office of Censorship, and the Army—and an eighth agency, the War Production Board, may have attempted illegally to tone down the black press by cutting newsprint supplies to some papers," Washburn notes...

...Even though public broadcasting has been badly damaged by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the rehabilitation of public television and the use of public-access cable channels should be rallying points in efforts to recapture the media for public purposes...

...Washburn recounts these facts succinctly, setting the scene for the confrontations of black editors, Biddle, and the President...

...Their connection was to Vreeland's childish and simplified fantasy of a luxurious past, not to social and historical reality...

...Ann Preston founded Woman's Hospital in 1861 and won permission for students of the Female College to attend teaching clinics at the city hospital and later at the University of Pennsylvania, where male medical students threw rocks and bottles at them...

...instead, it rests on their ability to project an untroubled and reassuring version of the middle-class dream of ageless domestic felicity and happy materialism...

...Or of those who opposed war, conscription, war taxes, slavery, and the subjugation of women even before the Nineteenth Century...

...Of the first eleven women physicians in the United States, five were Quakers...

...But to nine-year-old Eva Hoffman it was "an idea too unfair to settle in her mind...

...How many people have heard of Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher in Connecticut in the 1830s who admitted young black women to her school at a time when blacks and women were given no systematic education at all, much less inter-racially...

...His triumph-no black publisher was indicted for sedition during the war—was, as Washburn says, "a milestone in American libertarian history...

...Edward S. Herman (Edward S. Herman teaches a course in "The Political Economy of the Mass Media" in the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania...

...The daughter of liberal Jews who just barely escaped Nazism, Eva has been all too vividly taught the consequences of prejudice, and she innocently extends her belief in equality not only to the blacks but to her father's psychiatric patients at the Menninger Clinic...

...Alone among a docile black press that chose to fall in step with the U.S...

...Black and Free A QUESTION OF SEDITION by Patrick Washburn Oxford University Press...

...Fortunately, The Crisis survived...

...The homeless white family the Hoffmans take in tests their hospitality as the flood victims flaunt their racial bigotry and anti-Semitism...

...8.50 paperback...

...Aristocratic themes, if occasionally invoked, are presented in the spirit of temporary role-playing—theatrical performance as opposed to acknowledgement of class differences...

...The name of astronomer Maria Mitchell is known to scientists and historians, but probably few outside those fields know that Quaker women had a hand in starting the first Female Medical College in 1850, in Pennsylvania...

...A Question of Sedition has a narrower focus and covers it well...

...This "aristocratic movement" is centered, she thinks, in New York with "direct links in both personnel and themes to the center of political power in the White House of Ronald and Nancy Reagan" and affiliates which span the worlds of politics, the media, fashion design, the department store, and the museum...

...With such traits as the qualifying characteristics, luck must be an important element of success, as it has been in the career of our President—and other entertainers...

...By the time World War II approached, the black press was no longer docile...

...In 1918, the Department of Justice had warned the NAACP that the "radical" tone of the magazine could lead to its suppression...

...From the Grimke sisters, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony in the Nineteenth Century to Alice Paul, M. Carey Thomas, and others earlier in this century, the leadership of Quaker women in the struggle for women's rights is by now fairly well known...

...A chapter on Diana Vreeland's best-selling, autobiographical memoir of 1984, D. V., provides personal perspective on this performance...

...273 pp...

...Little progress had been made in the intervening years...

...Rapping claims in the end that television is a "crucial arena of political struggle," but from that vantage point—and given her lack of concrete proposals for resisting commercial hegemony—her abandonment of the much more open public sector without a fight is hard to understand...

...Her description of the evolution of local news programs as airy diversions and the analyses of 20/20 and 60 Minutes are well done...

...Debora Silverman's Selling Culture, targeted for the college-educated liberal, is packaged to assuage any anxiety that painful thought will be stirred up in the reading...

...The racism in Topeka, Kansas, thirty-five years ago flowed as freely as the flood waters that were washing away part of the city...

...Her book is galvanizing enough to make any woman want to do something useful in the world—and perhaps join a Quaker meeting to challenge Friends in some new outrageous battle for humanity...

...Opulent display and the possession of wealth and privilege do not of themselves indicate the presence of an aristocracy, which properly denotes continuity, exclusivity, and definitive qualifications for admission...

...No matter what Nancy Reagan may actually spend on her wardrobe or how many corporate leaders the President consorts with, they remain the Ozzie and Harriet of the 1980s—not the representatives of a self-conscious elite that Silverman would make them...

...19.95...

...The confused outcome of the author's effort to produce a brief, impressionistic, contemporary replay of her scholarly and historical interpretation posits Vreeland's success as product and symbol of the Reagan Presidency and the Presidency as determining taste and style through a self-conscious elite of wealth and cultivation...

...It is the remarkable tale of the origins of almost every humanitarian and progressive movement in this country of the last two centuries—outside of industrial unionization and the direct political process from which women were excluded...

...Florence Kelley corresponded with Friedrich Engels and translated the works of Engels and Marx for U.S...

...peace education and initiatives...