Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes Tales Out of School Joseph Fernandez Little, Brown, $24.95 The media devoted most if its page-one stories about the memoirs of Joe Fernandez, the ex-chancellor of education...
...It was no Mr...
...His father, John William Thurmond, became a state senator and ally of "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the charismatic, viciously racist South Carolina governor and senator whom six-year-old Strom met and idolized...
...He picked up just 3 percent of the nation's popular vote but did carry four states in the old Confederacy...
...Strom Thurmond is one of the great ideological losers in post-war American politics...
...criminal justice system and that this inequality is intimately related to their skin color...
...If interested, send your resume, two recommendations, writing samples (articles, term papers, etc...
...Today, the Japanese consider Deming a national hero—and sell some of the best cars in America...
...He was utterly unmoved by the eloquent pleas of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Especially instructive is Cohodas's comparison of Thurmond with Waties Waring, an older South Carolinian cut from the same genetic cloth as Thurmond...
...Fernandez found that with 32 districts, each with its own superintendent and school board, New York "had tyranny of local dominions . . . So going in, I made up my mind I would attack bad governance whenever and wherever I saw it, and if it meant finding out exactly how much clout the chancellor had for what he needed to do, all the better...
...He spends much of the remainder of the book delving into the play-by-play nuances of his original salary negotiations and subsequent personality conflicts with the city's school board, along with explanations of why he wasn't after New York Mayor David Dinkins's job or why the city provided him with an expensive brownstone in Brooklyn...
...Senate seat he's held ever since...
...No one can handle a system that large...
...He fought even the mildest of civil rights measures, employed demagogic rhetoric, and cloaked calls for a white-dominated Southern culture in the code of states' rights...
...She rightly sees Thurmond's political career and life—for Thurmond, the two are indistinguishable—as the struggle of a man of great political talent but little vision to cope with the shifting dynamics of race in the 20th century...
...Worse, Thurmond's moral vision appeared so narrow that he professed not to understand how Jim Crow hurt blacks...
...auto manufacturers poo-pooed the importance of customers and employees...
...The story begins with Fernandez as a troubled teenager in Harlem...
...The great statistics guru W. Edwards Deming first proA Question of Color Coramae Richey Mann "Mann has produced an illuminating, thoroughly researched, and comprehensive treatment of the experiences of minorities in the criminal Justice system...
...Cohodas rightly takes pains to place Thurmond in his proper context...
...Simon & Schuster, $27.50...
...Though he can try, one chancellor can't enforce accountability on a system as mammoth as New York's (more than 120,000 employees, 1 million students, and a budget of $7 billion a year...
...Fernandez was able to build a coalition of editorial boards and public support on the outside but seemed to get trapped in the politics of blame on the inside...
...We know that Strom Thurmond now has a black secretary and that some blacks in South Carolina vote for him...
...Washington, D.C...
...The real scandal, as Fernandez aptly demonstrates in his book, occurs silently every day...
...Why not involve those who battle with the system the most—and who understand its problems the best...
...In fact, Thurmond still holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history...
...Brendan Foley Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change...
...Daniel Gross Upon This dock March 1993/The Washington Monthly 61...
...From this he derived a solution to education bureaucracy called "School-based Management," which he implemented with some success in Dade County as superintendent in the late eighties...
...Occasionally, Cohodas seems too willing to take such quotations at face value...
...School districts in New York, and the nation, for that matter, need to be broken down into manageable independent entities run by competent reformers —rather than one gung-ho chancellor trying to move a glacier, or one secretary of Education with a strategy and no fiscal clout —for Fernandez's system of school-based management to have the support and accountability it requires...
...But the most significant story about Fernandez was still ignored by the press: He had, through his memoirs, offered the public its first hard tour inside the beleaguered New York City school system...
...A nearly fatal drug overdose at age 18 convinced him to change course and join the Air Force, leading to his college degree at age 27...
...Here Fernandez provides lessons on why janitors in New York City are paid $58,000 annually but don't do windows...
...Political Booknotes Tales Out of School Joseph Fernandez Little, Brown, $24.95 The media devoted most if its page-one stories about the memoirs of Joe Fernandez, the ex-chancellor of education for the New York City school system, to the juicy tidbits that sell newspapers: The revelation that Fernandez nearly overdosed 40 years ago as a teenager and his political snub of Mario Cuomo...
...Smith-like rage against corruption...
...and Thurgood Marshall, and his rhetoric and militant defense of segregation remained untempered by the changes afoot...
...In a way, Thurmond became the first Reagan Democrat, and, Cohodas argues, helped pave the way for future Republican candidates to win in the South...
...Cohodas then moves on to Thurmond's run for the state Senate, his state judgeship, his heroic service in World War II, and his election as governor in 1946...
...In 1964, repulsed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' civil rights advocacy, Thurmond bolted from the Democratic party again and committed what was, at the time, a heretical act for a Southerner: He became a Republican...
...20009 60 The Washington Monthly/March 1993 purpose unmatched by any other senator...
...Nadine Cohodas...
...Nadine Cohodas, a former reporter for Congressional Quarterly, has written a balanced, fair, comprehensive, and useful account of Thurmond's lengthy public life...
...All this would be boring except that it reveals how the reformer can become a prisoner of his own office...
...From circulation, production, and advertising, to writing, editing, and researching, Monthly interns gain experience in all aspects of magazine publishing...
...Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign fell flat...
...His early story drifts between seminal moments and the obligatory nostalgia better stored in a diary...
...Throughout the fifties and sixties, Thurmond fought civil rights bills with a venom and singularity of Summer Internships The Washington Monthly is accepting applications for summer 1993 interns...
...After the failed presidential bid, Thurmond won a 1954 write-in election to the U.S...
...Despite his undeniable public record, Thurmond says with a straight face, "Well, honestly in my heart, I've never been a racist...
...He was but one of a gaggle of Southern politicians who defended segregation to its death...
...The 1948 break was the first in the long series of political shifts that, 20 years later, would produce the solid Republican South after a century of Democratic dominance in the region...
...In a straightforward narrative style, Cohodas dutifully tracks Thurmond through his student years at Clemson University, his career as a school teacher, and his first campaign, a race for county school superintendent in 1926...
...But longevity without purpose is meaningless...
...That's hardly a reconciliation...
...Thurmond labeled Brown v. Board of Education "the outstanding judicial blunder of all time...
...and a cover letter specifying the dates you will be available, by April 1 to: Summer Interships The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Thurmond emerged on the national stage in 1948, when Southern Democrats rebelled after President Truman insisted on including civil rights planks in the party's platform...
...All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation," Thurmond thundered, over and over again...
...His rhetoric was affecting and fearful, springing from the deep well of South Carolina's historic resistance to national efforts to liberate blacks...
...Or why the Board of Education can't fire principals with tenure no matter how badly they screw up...
...Thurmond, no matter what you think of his politics, has had a hell of a ride...
...She doesn't dig deeply enough past the politician to expose the man's psyche...
...The soap opera was revived in early February when the school board ousted Fernandez after feuding with the chancellor over his stands on gay rights and condom distribution...
...Thurmond was born in 1902, the son of a prosperous lawyer and farmer in the town of Edgefield...
...How has he reconciled his past actions and statements with the history that has unfolded before his eyes...
...The organizational theory of creative, proactive involvement at all levels is not new...
...The truth is that in a job like this you reach a point where it's time to move on anyway...
...But it was as a math teacher in Florida's Dade County that his philosophy on education really began to take shape—a philosophy that centered on parental and teacher involvement in each school's decision-making process...
...Where men like Waring looked forward, Thurmond looked backwards, always backwards...
...Thus, he added to his theory of proactive involvement the need for a strong, centralized backer (himself) to defend reform against the entity which has the most to lose from reform—the bureaucracy of the system itself...
...Cohodas doggedly traces the highlights and low lights of Thurmond's career, and skillfully laces the narrative with vignettes and details from the history of South Carolina, the South, and the civil rights movement...
...His 38-year career is one of the longest in the history of the Senate...
...Commission on Civil Rights Synthesizing research on race and crime through cross-cultural analyses, this monumental study reveals that peoples of color do not receive equal treatment in the U.S...
...In 1965, when the Senate overwhelmingly passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, Thurmond declared, "This is a tragic day for America...
...rather, he took up an entire day of the Senate's time in 1957 fulminating against a mild civil rights bill...
...Finally, create a system of performance feedback so that the effectiveness of strategy introduced at the top can be judged by results rather than politics...
...But there were Southerners brave enough to see the future and not shrink from it: Lyndon Johnson, Albert Gore Sr., and Ernest Hollings come immediately to mind...
...Can education be handled the same way...
...Blacks in tne Diaspora cloth $35.00 paper $14.95 posed these ideas to a ravaged, dispirited Japan in the fifties, a time when U.S...
...Unequal Justice underscores the urgent need to find a way to promote justice in our legal system today...
...The concept is both simple and elegant: Have each school run by a cadre of parents, teachers, and the principal, all working to set school policies in areas from budget to curriculum to personnel...
...You begin to sense it when conflicts start going off in series, like exploding firecrackers," he says with acrimonious prescience...
...Thurmond won't be remembered for the legislation he passed, but for the legislation that passed over his frenetic objections...
...Mary Frances Berry, Member U.S...
...The book dispassionately provides persuasive evidence of the disparate treatment of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in the criminal justice system...
...My feeling was that you gain more by bringing people in than by trying to keep them out," Fernandez writes...
...At every essential juncture in the forties, fifties, and sixties, the veteran senator from South Carolina came down hard on the wrong side of history...
...As a federal judge in South Carolina, Waring made a series of revolutionary rulings in the forties that helped put Jim Crow to rout...
...Eliminate needless middle-men who waste resources in their fights for territory between the school and the school board...
...And in 1968, at the tender age of 66, he married a beauty queen more than 40 years his junior...
...and in 1962, when a court ordered Clemson to admit Harvey Gantt as its first black student, the senator explicitly opposed it...
...He came into the political world with all the baggage of a segregationist South and clung to it as long as he could...
...Thurmond didn't lead the Southern revolt at first, but after several state delegations bolted from the party's Philadelphia convention, the South Carolina governor seized the banner of the States' Rights Party and carried it with gusto...
...How has the Senator worked out the nettle-some question of race in his own life, in his own mind and heart...
Vol. 25 • March 1993 • No. 3
