June 29, 2007
Remember Oscar Micheaux! An Interview with Patrick McGilligan Posted by Allen Barra at 11:30 AM EST Patrick McGilligan’s Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only—The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker (HarperCollins, 461 pages, $29.95) opens a door into a secret past, the world of black Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century. McGilligan, a biographer of Robert Altman, James Cagney, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others, discussed his book on the legendary Micheaux from his home in Milwaukee. The story of Oscar Micheaux—filmmaker, novelist, black pioneer, and shameless self promoter—is so amazing that one wonders how he could have been forgotten more than half a century after his death. Why has he had to wait so long for a definitive biography? Micheaux has been in the process of being reclaimed ever since the late 1960s, but the reclamation began primarily in scholarly circles and among African-American historians and scholars in particular. It has taken time to bring his legend to the general public. There are many reasons. Since Micheaux never set foot in Jim Crow Hollywood, he didn’t benefit from the studio record-keeping and public-relations machinery that other (white) directors of his era took for granted. He drew attention and reviews from the black press only, and the black press has dwindled today. The film-critic establishment is still predominantly white and oriented toward Hollywood, so even now critics either know little about him or don’t care. Hopefully that will change. Many of his films are lost; the prints of those that survive are tattered. He had very few prints of his films made to begin with, compared with the films of major Hollywood studios. And Micheaux did not have children or close surviving relatives to speak up for him after his death. That death transpired a long time ago, more than 50 years ago; few people are alive nowadays who can claim to have known him first-hand or to have experienced his films. This is true of many who worked in “race pictures,” the bulk of which are lost. To a certain extent Micheaux lived a flamboyant life, but at the same time he covered his tracks with mystery and secrecy to elude the creditors who dogged him. So even though there were some good interviews on record with people who worked with him, and even though scholars have done a lot of very good digging into his life story and career, there were large gaps and blank areas. Most people warned me that a biography of him couldn’t be written. That intrigued me all the more. I liked the challenge.
Do you like Micheaux himself? You seem to be intrigued by him, but he certainly seems to have been something of a scoundrel. It’s said that every biography at one time or another must come to terms with whether or not he likes his subject. How do you feel about Oscar? I like and admire him without qualification, and the journey of the book convinced me of his greatness as well as his likeability. I have written about Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, both of whom have exhibited questionable behavior in their private lives, to put it nicely. I ended up disliking one of them. Fritz Lang, another of my subjects, is believed to have shot his first wife; he flirted with Nazism; and he was a devotee of prostitutes and call girls. On the set Lang was a tyrant who bullied people. Hollywood is full of scoundrels and worse. People are always trying to cheat other people out of their rightful share of credit and money. Micheaux had to cope with racism and poverty, and he had to make his own way in life against tremendous obstacles. In order to write his books and make his films—very personal works with brave social commentary—he had to lie, cheat, and steal on occasion. The very definition of an artist! Do enough of Micheaux’s films survive to give us an accurate sense of his ability as a director? Is there anyone in mainstream Hollywood you might compare him to? Only about one third of Micheaux’s nearly four dozen films survive, and those that do survive exist in truncated form, largely because Micheaux could not afford to manufacture numerous prints of his films, and the handful that circulated were diminished by censorship and by usage. His first heyday was the silent era, and those films are the rarest. However, two of his most famous silent pictures survive in fair condition: The Symbol of the Unconquered, from 1920, and Body and Soul, from 1925, the first motion picture to star Paul Robeson. Judging these two films on content and style, they are indeed stellar works. Content-wise because they depict black America at a time when Hollywood didn’t have a clue, and because they touch on important racially-sensitive issues—from Southern peonage and lynching to religious hypocrisy and miscegenation. Style-wise, in spite of low-budget limitations, they are very sophisticated films, showing the influences of both German Expressionist and Soviet editing ideas. His casting was as sharp as his stories, and he launched many, many performers from different areas of black show business into film careers. This shouldn’t be underrated. Micheaux had a very good run after sound came in the early 1930s, and two of his most enduring films from this decade also survive: Lem Hawkins Confession, from 1935, and God’s Stepchildren, from 1938. The first is an ingenious all-black (all his films are all-black) retelling of the real-life Leo Frank case from 1913, a murder mystery that fascinated Micheaux. He had passed through Atlanta at the time of the controversial trial. And the second was his consummate parable about “passing”—black people passing as whites—one of his obsessive themes. Both have flaws; both are exceptional films. I think of Micheaux as an “auteur” before the French coined the word. Not only did he write and direct all his films, (often editing them and making small on-camera appearances too, but many of his stories were unmistakable allegories of his own life. In this respect, too, he was important and unique. I really can’t compare him to anyone in Hollywood. Maybe you could think of him as a combination of Roger Corman and Spike Lee, ahead of their time. I try not to rank or rate people that way in my books, and Micheaux was not only great, he was singular; hence the title of my book: The Great and Only. A film about Oscar Micheaux’s life would be an opportunity to rediscover a lost world. I suppose the inevitable question is who should play him in a film on his life. And who would direct? I agree with you that a film about Micheaux would have the attraction of a lost world, and it would give back a folk hero to America. So the lead character would have to be acted by a man able to display genius and charisma as well as human failings. His second wife, Alice B. Russell, is also a major part. Often she was his lead actress, sometimes his co-writer, usually his producer, always his muse. Mrs. Micheaux loomed in her husband’s career more significantly than any of the dutiful or invisible wives of Hollywood directors. Someone like Will Smith could play Micheaux to the hilt, I’m sure. But there are also many young black actors and actresses nowadays, some just beginning to make their names in film or crossing over from pop music, so it is just as likely that a relative newcomer is lurking out there, whose name we do not yet know, who would be perfect. I should add that we are already getting feelers from film companies. Micheaux’s inspiring story of struggle and conquest is a natural for a movie. Who should direct? It could be anyone from Spike Lee to Spielberg to someone like Taylor Hackford, who brought Ray Charles’s story to the screen and made a very good Chuck Berry documentary. I don’t think the color of a director’s skin is as important as their passion for the subject, but I think the script would benefit from a screenwriter with the imagination to fill in some of the mysteries of that lost world, someone who can empathize with Micheaux’s predicament living in a Jim Crow world. And that should really be someone either African-American or who can strongly identify with African-American history.
June 28, 2007
Some Further Thoughts on Race, Money, and Justice Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:00 PM EST I, too, admired John Steele Gordon’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, but I agree with Joshua Zeitz that money was not ultimately an issue in the defense of the Scottsboro boys, as they were called. Though the boys’ poverty did lead to shamefully inadequate representation in the first round of trials in 1931—one attorney was from Tennessee and claimed he knew little Alabama law; both lawyers were reported by contemporaries to be inebriated during the entirety of the speedy trials—once the case became an international cause, funds for the defense began to flow in not only from the North but from around the world. Samuel Leibowitz, the lead attorney in the 1933 trial, which followed the Supreme Court’s overturning of the convictions, was known as the next Clarence Darrow, and, thanks to the money he had made defending Al Capone (twice), Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll, and others of their ilk, he could afford to represent the boys without a fee and even pay his own expenses. Leibowitz was no more successful in the second trial in 1933 than his inebriated, incompetent colleagues had been in 1931, though he did make history when he appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court a second time. The court overturned the verdict on the grounds that Alabama barred blacks, or as the terms was then, Negroes, from sitting on juries. The ruling supposedly changed the way justice was meted out in the South, and, presumably, throughout the country. In a biographical sketch of Sam Leibowitz, Quentin Reynolds tells a story that is so good it’s hard not to suspect it’s apocryphal. Forced by his wife to take a holiday, Leibowitz found himself in Miami, but bored with sand and sea, he headed straight for the local courthouse. The case he stumbled upon was uninteresting, but the jury, made up of eleven white men and one black, captured his attention. When the court recessed for lunch, Leibowitz approached the defense counsel and, without introducing himself, expressed his surprise at finding a Negro on the jury. As Reynolds tells the story, the lawyer answered, “It’s all on account of a son-of-a-bitch named Leibowitz from New York. He came down to Alabama a few years ago to try a case and somehow he got to the Supreme Court in Washington, and damned if we haven’t had to put [them] on our juries ever since.” The Supreme Court’s second overturning of the Scottsboro convictions made history, but history has a way of refusing to stay made. In an article in The New York Times earlier this month, Adam Liptak wrote about Allen Snyder, a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Louisiana. “It took some work to get an all-white jury in a parish that is almost one-quarter black, but the prosecutors . . . used peremptory strikes—ones not requiring a reason—to remove all five eligible potential jurors who were black.” Some years ago Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote of “the racial discrimination that peremptories inject into the jury selection process.” Race still skews American justice, and the fact that it usually skews it against people of color does not make the injustice at Duke less shameful. But what of the less lurid and therefore not headline-making aspects of our legal system that perpetuate this racial rush to judgment?
June 28, 2007
The Heart of the West—in the South: An Interview with Jim Dunham Posted by Allen Barra at 10:15 AM EST Jim Dunham’s heroes have always been cowboys and Indians. As an actor (he has toured in a one-man show as Mark Twain), fast-draw artist and frontier historian (most recently in several episodes of the Tales of The Gun series on the History Channel), Dunham has spent more than four decades collecting information and artifacts on the West and sharing his knowledge with fellow enthusiasts all over the country. He is also an accomplished painter and a Western art scholar and is director of special projects and historian for the Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Georgia. The museum’s slogan: “Explore the West without leaving the South.” Dunham recently curated Beautiful Utility: Decorated Objects from Cowboy and Indian Culture, which runs through September 16. (To see examples of artists Jim mentions and others whose work is on display in the museum, go to the Booth’s website, click on “Collections,” and then click through to individual artists to view their work.) Let’s start with the obvious question: How did one of the most remarkable museums in the country of Old West art and culture come to be in Georgia? There are several museums in the Eastern United States that are devoted to Western American art. Frederic Remington was born in upstate New York, so it stands to reason that his museum should be in his home state. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indiana and our museum, the Booth in Georgia, have similar histories. Both grew out of collections put together by families over a number of decades, and both families decided to build museums to house their collections in their hometowns, so that they could visit often. What becomes clear when you think about it is the fact that all of us who were raised in the years following World War II had our lives filled with Wild West entertainment. It mattered little what part of the country you were raised in. I love the West and was born in a Chicago suburb. There were more Westerns on TV in the 1950s than there are reality and CSI shows today. The oil boom in America made rich people out of struggling Oklahoma and Texas ranchers, and they began to pay handsomely for cowboy- and Indian-themed art for their homes. The result was that during the time when the art world was enthralled with abstraction, many an outstanding painter or illustrator was turning to Western subjects to make a living. The Booth collection is dominated by living artists who were influenced by the movies, just like the people who bought the art. What we are finding out is that people from all over the United States personally relate to these romantic, storytelling works. So it’s a case of life imitating art imitating life? Or something like that? Which Western artists are the most representative among current Western-themed artists? And which artists whose work is in the Booth are among your favorites? The most honored and prizewinning Western artist working today is Howard Terpning, who had a painting sold at auction last year for $1.4 million. The Booth collection includes five of his best. My favorite is called River Crow, which shows two Native American Crow Indians on horseback with their image reflected in a pool of water. [To see this painting on Mr. Terpning’s website, go here.] I also like the artists that came out of an illustration background, i.e., Harold Von Schmidt, Tom Ryan, John Clymer, W. H. D. Koerner, and John Hampton. The most popular artists with the public are those who paint in a very realistic style. Don Crowley, Paul Calle, and Frank MacCarthy are the best examples. The museum, however, has great diversity, and we also have works by Andy Warhol, Fritz Scholder, and Thom Ross, who portray the West in a unique way. You can see many of these artists on our website. The Booth’s newest current exhibit, for which you are the curator, is called Beautiful Utility: Decorated Objects from Cowboy and Indian Culture. That’s an intriguing title. What does it mean? What objects does it include? The Booth’s collection is essentially made up of paintings and sculpture, plus an original 1865 Abbott-Downing company stagecoach and an antique Western mud wagon. Our 80,000-square-foot museum particularly features living artists who paint, draw, and sculpt the American frontier movement and today’s ranch life. For a change of pace, our executive director, Seth Hopkins, asked me to curate an exhibition of gear or “trappings” of both the cattle-punching era and the Native Americans. I accepted, and it turned out to be quite a challenge. My goal was to display practical items and clothing used in everyday life, with the stipulation that they must be highly decorated—cowboy and Indian equipment that transcended its useful purposes and was art as well. Working with a few collectors in the greater Atlanta area led us to some absolutely magnificent examples of Plains Indian quill and bead work, pottery, basketry, and silver work from the Southwest, and wonderful examples of artistic expression from each area of Native Americans. For examples of cowboy “beautiful utility,” we were loaned silver mounted saddles, engraved guns, tooled-leather equipment, and silver- and gold-enhanced spurs. Eventually 14 collectors contributed to the exhibit, and about 180 objects are now on display, until September 16th, 2007. The Western artist Charles M. Russell wrote about a cowboy who was the fashion leader in camp and had the best gear that could be bought. Lacking mirrors on the trail, he would admire the shadow he and his horse cast on sunny days. The other punchers called him “Pretty Shadow.” We chose the name “Beautiful Utility” to capture the essence of gear like that cowboy’s and similar Native American objects and clothing, whose aesthetic far exceeded what was required for their utility. A unique feature of the Booth is the way it goes beyond art objects to encompass other aspects of the frontier tradition. For instance, one exhibit I saw featured a history of Western film posters, from the early silents to the twenty-first century. You also have a state-of-the-art theater. What goes on there? We generally use the theater, which seats 145, for live performances, art lectures, and music groups. Once a month we have “Western Movie Sunday” and show a double feature of classic old Western films. I usually give a talk, and sometimes we have a trivia-and-fact-filled handout for the folks who attend. It’s a very popular event with folks who grew up with Westerns and want to see them again and share them with their kids and grandkids. In October you have the Fifth Annual Southeastern Cowboy Symposium and Festival. Can you give us a brief definition of cowboy poetry? The tradition of cowboy poetry can be traced back to the old days when cowboys entertained one another around the chuck wagon with songs, stories, and poems. Poetry gatherings have become popular in recent years due especially to Elko, Nevada’s Cowboy Poetry Gathering and publicity from The Tonight Show and other media coverage. And in addition to our annual Cowboy Symposium and Festival, the Booth hosts a special cowboy poetry event every March. Past performers have included Don Edwards, Rex Allen, Jr., and Michael Martin Murphy. What would we be able to do if we attended the event? The annual Cowboy Symposium and Festival is the single biggest weekend event that the museum hosts. We call it a symposium because we include writers, artists, and historians, and present a series of lectures. Last year, for example, we had author Gary Roberts discuss his book Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, a biography of John H. “Doc” Holliday, the Georgia dentist who became famous for his adventures with Wyatt Earp. We also feature nationally known cowboy poets and cowboy singers, and this year Riders in the Sky will return for a pair of concerts. Most of the activities are on the four-acre grounds around the museum building, and they include vendors selling everything from saddles to oil paintings. We focus on hands-on activities for the whole family, with a Native American village, Indian dancing, storytelling, Civil and Indian Wars military encampments, demonstrations, and talks. Perhaps the most popular event of the Cowboy Symposium and Festival is the reenactment of the famous O.K. Corral gunfight. With a local group of actors who are interested in Western history, I have put together a 30-minute program that tells the events that led up to the shootout in the vacant lot that cold October day in 1881 Tombstone. We run the actual gunfight in slow motion with explanation and then perform it in real time. The actors fire about 30 blanks in about 30 seconds. Finally, as emcee I talk a little about the aftermath of the event and how we came to know so much about this half minute in history. You’ve been portraying, working with, and lecturing about cowboys and Indians your entire life. I’ve seen you perform several times, and I’m still amazed at the facility with which you can handle a six-gun. Tell us about some of your favorite performances. And which celebrities have you coached in the art of fancy gun handling? After several summers performing at Colorado chuck-wagon supper-entertainment venues in the 1960s for the tourist industry, I was hired by 20th Century–Fox in Los Angeles to perform a fast and fancy gun-handling act for their studio tours. This led to working with actors who needed to learn gun handling. By this time, 1967, most of the famous Western stars like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, etc., had long ago been coached by people like Arvo Ojala and Rod Redwing. However, I did get to work with Bob Hastings from McHale’s Navy, Clu Gulager from The Virginian, Bill Bixby from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and others. Bixby was a magician and a fast learner. I told him if he got interested in fast draw the sport, he could be a contender. Years later, I taught Armand Assante gun spinning and did the stunt closeup inserts for the HBO Western Blind Justice. I also taught Scott Bacula and Dean Stockwell how to draw for an episode of Quantum Leap titled “The Last Gunfighter.” My personal favorite program experience came in 1990, when I got to perform my act at the Golden Boot Awards in Hollywood. Gene Autry, along with Pat Buttram, had founded the awards program to honor excellence in Western film and television programming. When I got on stage, in the front row I saw Roy and Dale Rogers, Gene Autry, Pat Buttram, Iron Eyes Cody, Burt Lancaster, Rex Allen, Clayton Moore, Denver Pyle, Noah Beery, Jr., Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, and Charlton Heston. I said from the stage, “You know, Willie Nelson wrote a song called ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.’ That’s also true for me—and tonight my heroes are here in the room with me.” The icing on the cake was that after my show Gene Autry got up and said my act was the best part of the evening. A clip of me spinning my guns and Gene’s remarks were on Entertainment Tonight the next night. Sadly most of those greats have now passed away, but it was a special night I’ll never forget.
June 27, 2007
Duke University and the Scottsboro Boys II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:30 AM EST Like Joshua Zeitz, I enjoyed Mr. Gordon’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. I don’t regularly read the Journal’s editorial page, so it was much to my surprise that I found an item by a fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributor on one of the half-dozen days this year that I’ve done so. I have a question, though, for Messrs. Gordon and Zeitz. I’m instinctively persuaded by the argument that the Duke Lacrosse case, like the Scottsboro case, was driven at least in part by race. I think the comparison between the two cases can be overstated—there shouldn’t be, for example, an implied argument that affluent whites are as discriminated against today as poor blacks were 80 years ago—but Mr. Gordon’s piece doesn’t really fall into that trap. I also find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a “rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.” Beyond my gut sense that this is plausible, however, I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?
June 27, 2007
Re: “Sucker MC’s” Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:15 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s post “Sucker MC’s,” responds to Fred Smoler’s review of a new novel by Michael Chabon. Mr. Schwarz takes on a couple of Mr. Smoler’s assertions, namely that alternative history has lacked writers “of the first rank,” and that writers can effectively be organized into ranks at all. After discoursing on his personal dislike for the works of Ian McEwan, Mr. Schwarz concludes: “Will Chabon make the cut 40 years from now? At this point it’s a matter of guesswork. And—a different question—is [Philip K.] Dick not only major but ‘of the first rank’? Here, as with Chabon and McEwan and every other writer, past and present, it’s simply a matter of opinion.” At least part of this observation is well worth considering. As much as it is an engrossing and challenging activity to review new books, it is important to remain humble in one’s judgments. The overconfident literary critic risks ending up in the same academic dustbin as the self-satisfied reviewer who (quoting from Macbeth) called one of William Faulkner’s greatest works “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet at the same time as Mr. Schwarz is right to counsel a certain degree of restraint and humility in literary criticism, I balk at his assertion that the literary value of “every . . . writer, past and present” is “simply a matter of opinion.” This is a pretty sweeping thesis, and it’s arrived at a bit too hastily. Calling the evaluation of novels entirely subjective, and utterly without objective criteria, can be a serious proposition—or it can be the refuge of a fairly unreflective reader. I’m not saying that Mr. Schwarz’s argument falls into the latter category, but I do think it’s worth considering a couple of his points a little more closely. First: Ian McEwan. I tend to agree with Mr. Schwarz that McEwan’s work has been overrated. I thought Atonement was quite good, especially insofar as it attempted to portray tragedy and memory in the context of modern medicine. But having since read a number of McEwan’s other works, it’s clear to me that the man has shortcomings as a writer. He often relies on gimmicks—implausible or unsatisfying narrative twists grounded in complex biology—to give his novels gravitas; and Saturday’s allegory and parallelism were disappointingly obvious for a writer of McEwan’s technical capabilities. Looking at Mr. Schwarz’s assessment of McEwan, though, I’m not sure it’s really fair to the author. Citing a couple of phrases from the novelist’s latest, Schwarz writes: “To me, these sentences are no more impressive than saying, ‘I bought a hot dog and ate it.’ Does this make me a snob? No, I just don’t like Ian McEwan.” That’s okay, but it’s hard for me to see how this is a serious and respectful assessment of McEwan’s work; these words express a blunt, negative preference, not a studied judgment. It’s not totally unlike saying, “Thomas Jefferson was a bad man and I just don’t like him.” That would be a fine, emotional reaction to express, but it would be a reaction without intellectual or scholarly value. There is admittedly a lot of disagreement about what constitutes good literature, and even more about what constitutes great literature. But the fact that there can be multiple assessments of a single work—say, Atonement–doesn’t have to mean that all critical judgments are necessarily useless and slapdash. In his controversial essay “An Elegy for the Canon,” Yale’s Harold Bloom asks his readers to consider where humans got the idea to create “literary work that the world would not willingly let die.” The essay, and Bloom’s criticism in general, is unrelenting in its confidence that some literary works are, indeed, better than others. The criteria Bloom uses to judge them are broad but useful. Novels and poems that are cliché or unoriginal in subject or style, or created for a practical or political purpose, or tritely psychoanalytical, or wholly specific to a single identity group, are quickly thrown aside. Works that transcend cultural boundaries, endure over time, and demonstrate extreme aesthetic sophistication are candidates for greatness. This is, of course, only an incomplete list of Bloom’s demands upon writers. Bloom’s is not the only system by which criticism can be guided, but it’s a good example of an approach to judging literature that is more intellectually rigorous than the easy pronouncement of likes and dislikes. It’s a scholarly approach, that is, that forces readers to reflect on why some literature is of lasting force and why some is forgotten as soon as CVS gets a new shipment from Harlequin. We can still go into any decent bookstore and buy a copy of Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and the explanation for this is more complex than the preferences of the average reader. Bloom’s essay, despite its flaws, at least has the virtue of explaining why respected English professors teach Dante instead of Dan Brown, and Jane Austen instead of Danielle Steel.
June 27, 2007
Duke University and the Scottsboro Boys Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 AM EST The front page of AmericanHeritage.com contains a link to John Steele Gordon’s fine piece in The Wall Street Journal comparing the Duke University lacrosse team case to the Scottsboro Boys case. It’s an interesting comparison, and rather than try to repeat Mr. Gordon’s argument, I’ll simply recommend his original essay to readers. As Mr. Gordon argued in the Journal, the “two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.” I have only one criticism of Mr. Gordon’s op-ed. After reviewing the history of the Scottsboro and Duke University cases, he writes, “Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.” On one level, this paragraph undercuts Mr. Gordon’s larger argument. If he means to argue that race drove both cases, then it only complicates matters to suggest that the operative difference between them was the financial resources of the respective defendants. That said, life is complicated, and race and class are often hopelessly intertwined in America. But on a more fundamental level, it’s worth remembering that the Scottsboro Boys had a very well-financed legal team, courtesy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense committee, both of which financed and coordinated the defendants’ various jury trials and appeals, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which conducted the initial outside review of the case. Because of the support they enjoyed from wealthy civil rights and left-wing activists, most of whom were based in Northern cities, the Scottsboro defendants enjoyed access to some of the nation’s finest attorneys; indeed, their legal defense team ultimately compelled the United States Supreme Court to issue landmark rulings on the constitutionality of all-white juries. In this sense, the key difference between the Scottsboro case and the Duke University case was not money. In both cases, the accused enjoyed full access to some of the best lawyers money could buy. In the Jim Crow South, not even the best attorneys could overcome the hardened racial sensibilities of an all-white jury; today, the best attorneys can see to it that facts overcome sentiment. Mr. Gordon is right to draw the comparison, and I agree with much of what he wrote in his piece. But I would draw a somewhat different conclusion. We are capable today of overcoming racial divisions in a way that was not possible in 1931. But money and resources still determine where the weight of justice falls, and when money correlates with race, as it so often does, it is not wealthy white college students who suffer the full weight of the law.
June 26, 2007
Literary Merit Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST Responding to a piece I wrote for this web site on Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Fred Schwarz blogged about what, if anything, it means to call someone a “writer of the first rank,” which is what I called Chabon. I had written that Chabon, Philip Roth, and perhaps Kingsley Amis were the only writers of the first rank to write novels of alternate history, and Fred Schwarz pointed out that The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s novel of alternate history, which I have praised on this web site, has just been reissued by the Library of America. Assuming the point at issue—that there is such a thing as a writer of the first rank—an edition by the Library of America is suggestive (it probably has a distinguished advisory board) but not necessarily decisive. The Library of America also publishes Harriet Beecher Stowe, an immensely influential writer—Lincoln called her “the little woman who started this great big war”—but I do not think influence, or emotional power, or moral clarity, are the same things as literary merit. For my money, Stowe is not in Fielding’s league as a literary artist. If there are ranks, I’d put Fielding in the first rank, and Stowe somewhere else. Fred Schwarz at one point states that literary ranking is “simply a matter of opinion.” Let us assume that is true, but granting the assumption, are all opinions of equal worth and weight? Put bluntly, does my opinion matter any more than Fred Schwarz’s? Not as a measure of literary value, if such a thing exists, but it may matter more in a practical sense. I am (with almost no relevant professional training, but that is another story) a tenured professor of literature, which means I get to assign old books to young people, which may help keep an author in print. So my actions matter to the fate of some books, a very little bit, even if my opinion doesn’t, or shouldn’t. However, if my opinion is wrong, and also shared by all the professors of literature in the United States, my feeling is that a great book will still be a great book, no matter what professors (and other critics) say. There was a time when the professors thought ill of Dickens. I believe they were fools to so think, but professors have some influence, and a dead author they despise may disappear from the stores and eventually from most of the libraries. I think some such authors then await rediscovery in a more enlightened age (which is what happened to Dickens, who was in any case dismissed only by the professors, never by the reading public, and was always in the stores and libraries—not all writers the professors despise are so fortunate). Many people in my profession think otherwise, consider my belief to the contrary mysticism or vulgar error, and think the question of literary merit an empty one, even an absurdity. It may amuse Fred Schwarz to know that his views of literary merit are to some degree more representative of what professors of literature nowadays allege than are my own. As it happens, my profession thought otherwise a few decades ago, and it may think otherwise again; I certainly hope so. One other factor: Fred Schwarz is a skillful writer and an effective polemicist, and he may thereby influence popular taste more than I do—I teach as few as 30 students a year, and never more than 150. That is not too much influence on popular taste, or on publishers’ decisions. When I publish anything, it is rarely on what is sometimes called canonical literature, the writing I had called literature of the first rank (I am by professional training a historian). Dickens rose in critical esteem in some part because a non-professor (Edmund Wilson) wrote an important essay praising his genius. Fred Schwarz at one point suggests that “the only way to say for sure that a writer is major (which is not the same as being good) is if his or her works are still available decades later. This uses what is effectively a popular vote, the only objective method, to decide, but restricts the franchise to literature lovers, the only people who buy books that are more than a few years old.” There is quite a lot to be said for this view, but I also think some very old books are in print only because they are old, and some very good old books drop out of print for a while because people in my profession stop forcing the young to read them. If, by some mischance, Dryden drops out of print (and fewer and fewer people seem to assign Dryden), I think Mcflecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel will still be works of genius. Fred Schwarz writes that “I just don’t like Ian McEwan. And people who don’t like Michael Chabon just don’t like Michael Chabon.” I have heard professors of literature say the same thing about Dryden. There is another possibility. People who cannot understand the greatness of Dryden may be wrong, sadly wrong, denying themselves wisdom and pleasure because they will not do the work to comprehend something initially inaccessible to them. I cannot prove that, and my view is currently an unfashionable one, but I hold it nonetheless, and not only about Dryden. When I was 15 or 16, I tried to read The Faerie Queene. I found it incomprehensible. Luckily, I tried again: in my late thirties, I heard a colleague lecture on it for a couple of weeks. My life was the richer for the experience.
June 26, 2007
Sucker MC’s Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:10 PM EST In today’s feature article, Fredric Smoler introduces his review of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with some general remarks on alternative history. Along the way he says: “Almost no writer of the first rank has ever worked this vein. Kingsley Amis is one partial exception, back in 1976, with The Alteration, but the only other example is Philip Roth, in 2004, with The Plot Against America.” Shortly after reading this, I flipped through the latest catalogue from the Library of America, which describes its mission as “preserv[ing] our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing . . . from Thomas Jefferson and Henry James to Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Robert Frost . . .” Among the recent additions to this exclusive company, as listed in the catalogue, are collections of Edmund Wilson, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Saul Bellow—all staples of freshman English—along with Jack Kerouac, who doesn’t have to be good because he’s influential, and the Smoler-certified Philip Roth. And when you turn the page from Roth, you see Philip K. Dick. Remember that weird kid with the glasses in high school who was so geeky that even you could make fun of him? Odds are he was always carrying a Philip K. Dick novel. Now that kid is grown up and has a beautiful wife and his own software firm, and the Library of America has just reprinted four of Dick’s 1960s novels. Among them is The Man in the High Castle (1962), which, according to the catalogue copy, “describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones.” Now, I’ve never read any Philip K. Dick, and I don’t want to, so I won’t try to make a case for whether he is or is not a “writer of the first rank.” It is clear, though, that a lot of people think he was very good—including Fred Smoler, who in this round-up called The Man in the High Castle “first a cult classic, now simply a classic, a novel about America after Germany and Japan won World War II.” Which brings us to the conclusion of Smoler’s review today: “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, however, confirms that Chabon is a major American writer. That he has recently been slyly working in low genres may keep a few snobbish readers from realizing how good he is for a little while longer, but probably not for much longer.” Is Chabon demonstrably “major”? Are there any absolute standards besides taste by which contemporary writers can be judged? I think not. Consider the case of Ian McEwan, for example. A few years back a friend picked up one of his novels in a bookstore, read the first chapter, and was so enthralled that he bought the book and gave it to me. I read the same first chapter and hated it so much that I stopped right there. Now McEwan has another novel out, and reviewers are going into hysterics. They quote sentences like, “She found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking toward a friend from a distance” or “He trod on the backs of his shoes to wrench them from his feet, and snatched his socks off with quick jabs of his thumbs,” citing them as examples of the author’s “genius for the poignantly observed psychological detail” and “supreme attentiveness that goes into crafting a sentence.” To me, these sentences are no more impressive than saying, “I bought a hot dog and ate it.” Does this make me a snob? No, I just don’t like Ian McEwan. And people who don’t like Michael Chabon just don’t like Michael Chabon. In the long run, the only way to say for sure that a writer is major (which is not the same as being good) is if his or her works are still available decades later. This uses what is effectively a popular vote, the only objective method, to decide, but restricts the franchise to literature lovers, the only people who buy books that are more than a few years old. Will Chabon make the cut 40 years from now? At this point it’s a matter of guesswork. And—a different question—is Dick not only major but “of the first rank”? Here, as with Chabon and McEwan and every other writer, past and present, it’s simply a matter of opinion.
June 25, 2007
Ages and Angels Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:35 PM EST David Rapp’s cleverly titled homepage article today, “Land of Lincoln: How He Belongs to the Ages,” reviews a book by the Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson about Abraham Lincoln’s place in American culture. I say the title of the piece is clever because I assume it refers to the famous words pronounced on Lincoln’s deathbed by War Secretary Edwin Stanton: “Now he belongs to the ages.” A famously short and elegant epitaph for the fallen President. Inan essay published in The New Yorker last month, the writer Adam Gopnik analyzes and complicates the place of Stanton’s words in American historical memory. Using Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as a touchstone for a wider survey of Lincoln literature, Gopnik notes that there are two schools of thought regarding Stanton’s comments on his President’s death. According to a serious minority of historians, Lincoln’s bearded war minister actually said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” This alternative account comes originally from the records of Cpl. James Tanner, a war veteran and double amputee, who was present at Lincoln’s bedside and took down Stanton’s words as he heard them. This may not seem a very significant factual dispute, but Gopnik reads larger implications, some of them political, into the whole affair. He notes, for example, that the conservative James Swanson uses the word “angels,” whereas Goodwin, “a famous liberal,” sticks with “ages.” As Gopnik presents the disagreement, it’s symptomatic of a wider dispute between those who see Lincoln as a humanist hero, whose greatness comes from the recognition of his fellow men, and those who view the sixteenth President as, first and foremost, a “figure of Christian nobility,” favored and ultimately judged by God. Gopnik’s essay is compelling in composition and wide-ranging in focus. I wonder, though, whether his introductory emphasis on Stanton’s most famous words doesn’t miss the point a little bit. The disagreement among historians about just what, exactly, Stanton said that night is an interesting bit of trivia, and it’s a good case study in how historians use different kinds of historical evidence. I’d contend, though, that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to force Stanton’s hastily chosen words to summarize Lincoln’s place in history. If one sets aside some of the symbolic significance of his language, the difference between “ages” and “angels” is not that dramatic. Whichever noun Stanton chose that morning, his six-word declaration—“Now he belongs to the [insert word here]”—represents a spare, unsatisfying attempt to express comforting sentiments amidst unthinkable grief. When his peers looked to him for emotional leadership, this is the tone and extent of the emotion Stanton was able to express. If the job of historians is to reconstruct and interpret the past, as truthfully and unobtrusively as possible, perhaps it would be best to conclude that this is all we know, and all we need to know.
June 25, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:55 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “By globalization I do not mean simply free trade—trade without the taxes we call tariffs or artificial barriers such as quotas. It is perhaps true that the world had more free trade in 1914 than in 1990. But it had less globalization in 1914 than it had in 1990 and a lot less than it has now. In 1914 the developed world exported manufactured goods to the undeveloped world (much of which the developed world had sovereignty over) and imported mostly raw materials and agricultural products in exchange. . . . By globalization I mean integrated markets and globalized manufacturing. . . . This new and irreversible world came about for three reasons. (1) Led by the United States, the world has been reducing trade barriers since the end of World War II to the point where they are a mere ghost of what they once were. (2) Ocean transportation costs have declined by orders of magnitude. Just as the collapse of overland freight transportation costs, thanks to the railroads, made national markets possible in the nineteenth century, containerization and much cheaper air freight have created global markets that were impossible before. . . . (3) International communications costs have virtually disappeared.” I think this is a very reasonable definition of globalization, although it omits one sense in which the world economy of 1914 was more globalized than today’s: There were fewer legal barriers to emigration and immigration. You did not need a passport to leave or enter the United States, or Great Britain, or many other places. That aside, Mr. Gordon’s stress on technical rather than regulatory changes is certainly plausible: Transport and communications costs have indeed dropped sharply, and the industrialization of much of Asia is another vast change. On the other hand, from the perspective of Great Britain, the first industrialized nation, the industrialization of Germany and the United States was probably as powerful and alarming a change in the world as Asian industrialization is to the United States and European Union today. One comparison I’d draw between the two periods is that Britain was tempted by the allure of de-globalizing policies (protectionism) as we are now, and to draw what is to my mind a much more disturbing parallel, the economic elites in the new industrialized nations were not nearly as wedded to free trade as British elites had been for the previous half century or so. Mr. Gordon writes that the sharply increased costs of de-globalization via protectionism—he thinks there would be massive inflation—are an insuperable barrier to any reversal of policy across the board. Maybe so, but Europeans have long put up with very expensive food, despite their bankers’ powerful fears of inflation; the Japanese retail sector had very high prices because of various trade barriers; and the Chinese, who ought to fear retaliation by way of protectionism for their tolerance of massive theft of intellectual property, seem almost perfectly indifferent to that threat. I am skeptical about whether common sense and fear of probable consequences are a reliable barrier against illiberal economic policies. There seems to be an illiberal wave sweeping a significant portion of Latin America, I have the impression that profoundly illiberal zero-sum thinking is pretty common in Chinese policy making circles, and I think India could go either way; a lot of desperately poor people in India are at significant short- and mid-term risk from a liberalized economy, and they vote in large numbers. Historically, the social tensions generated by liberalized economies have rarely occurred within fully democratic states, and by one theory (I do not share it) they couldn’t have, since voters would have stopped liberalization before the rewards came rolling in. Non-democratic states (China springs to mind) run their own risks. They are too good at repressing protest over the costs, thus avoiding reforms and palliatives until a revolutionary wave swamps the kleptocratic elites. I agree that very bad economic ideas are self-defeating. In some famous cases, though, they are self-defeating because they provoke wars which states with badly run economies then lose. This is a feedback mechanism with a good long-run outcome, but the short-term costs are very high indeed.
June 25, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST First, I think we have a bit of a semantic problem here. By globalization I do not mean simply free trade—trade without the taxes we call tariffs or artificial barriers such as quotas. It is perhaps true that the world had more free trade in 1914 than in 1990. But it had less globalization in 1914 than it had in 1990 and a lot less than it has now. In 1914 the developed world exported manufactured goods to the undeveloped world (much of which the developed world had sovereignty over) and imported mostly raw materials and agricultural products in exchange. The United States by that time had become a major exporter of manufactured goods while remaining a major exporter of raw materials (such as petroleum and copper) and agricultural products (such as cotton and wheat). As has so often been the case in recent economic history, the United States had the best of both worlds. For a history of American foreign trade see here. But it was much rarer for one developed country to export significant amounts of manufactured goods to another developed country. That’s why the word imported had commercial cachet well into my adulthood: English marmalade, Italian leather, Swiss watches, and so forth. Today, however, it has none, for the simple reason that every developed country (and many not so developed) exports massive amounts of manufactured goods to other developed countries. It’s hard to imagine a shopper at Wal-Mart saying to her friend, “Oh, look, Ethel. Bangladeshi T-shirts. How chic!” Even more, we import and export parts in huge amounts. I own a Subaru. That’s a Japanese car, right? Well the corporate headquarters are in Japan. But the car was assembled in Ohio, out of parts that were manufactured in heaven knows how many countries. Were a misguided American government to put a prohibitive tariff on importing auto parts in order to protect the American market in automobiles for American automobile manufacturers, the result would be the almost instant collapse of the American automobile industry itself, for lack of parts. Ford and General Motors as much as Toyota and Audi manufacture them in many countries. By globalization I mean integrated markets and globalized manufacturing. The gold standard that ruled the world’s currencies in 1914 is long gone, but the international currency market, which operates around the clock and around the globe, has replaced it, trading trillions of dollars worth of currencies in a single day. Any country that adopts what the gnomes of Zurich (and New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bonn, Paris, London, Grand Cayman, Sydney, Mumbai, etc., etc.) perceive as bad economic policies will find its currency headed south and fast. That puts severe constraints on just how dumb the economic policies of governments can be. This new and irreversible world came about for three reasons. (1) Led by the United States, the world has been reducing trade barriers since the end of World War II to the point where they are a mere ghost of what they once were. (2) Ocean transportation costs have declined by orders of magnitude. Just as the collapse of overland freight transportation costs, thanks to the railroads, made national markets possible in the nineteenth century, containerization and much cheaper air freight have created global markets that were impossible before. Chilean fruit can now be profitably sold in American markets that are thousands of miles away in the middle of the American winter. Sweet cherries in January are sweet indeed. (3) International communications costs have virtually disappeared. A company located all over the world can be as tightly integrated as one located entirely in one city. So, while individual industries might resist globalization by getting their friends in government to tilt the playing field in their favor (such as subsidizing ethanol from Iowa but slapping a high tariff on ethanol from Brazil), whole economies can’t now reverse course by such means as a latter-day Smoot-Hawley tariff. Why? The price of nearly everything would go through the roof (T-shirts, six for 12 bucks at Costco? Try six for 25 bucks). This would set off an epic inflation and therefore a nosedive by the country’s currency. All political hell would break loose. Even the individual industrial policies that have adverse long-term consequences probably can’t last for long. People are beginning to notice that the reason chicken is no longer 89 cents a pound, even on special, is because chicken feed is being converted, at high cost and low efficiency, into fuel for automobiles when we could be importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugarcane waste instead. As for democracies making bad political decisions, of course they do. But they make fewer of them and usually correct them sooner than other forms of government. There are several reasons for this. First, short-term national interests often conflict with long-term interests, just as they do for individuals. The short-term need to get the nicotine monkey off the smoker’s back right now trumps his long-term interest in avoiding health problems, no matter how severe, that are 10 or 20 years down the road. Equally, the short-term interest in getting reelected or elected to higher office trumps almost everything else in politics. Politicians are in the reelection business, not the good government business. Ethanol made from corn is a truly stupid idea economically. (The energy in a gallon of ethanol is only about 10 percent more than the energy required to produce it, for one thing; for others see here.) But the first battle of presidential campaigns is fought in Iowa, which is one vast cornfield. Result: mandated ethanol use with tariffs to prevent its importation. As things stand now, one third of the nation’s corn crop will be used to produce ethanol by 2012. That’s going to have very unpleasant consequences for food prices. Second, “what is” is always more powerful than “what might be.” The declining industry has lobbyists by the score in Washington seeking help. The emerging industry usually does not. So the political pressure to impede the “creative destruction” of capitalism can be intense. A third reason, I think, is that the media often does a truly terrible job of informing people about the entirely predictable economic consequences of political policies. And it does an even worse job of asking politicians tough economic questions about their proposed policies. Political reporters, like the people they cover, are interested in politics, not the long-term real-world consequences of political decisions. As with those they cover, the next election is what they are concerned with. Worse, many political reporters are entirely incapable of thinking in economic terms for they have no understanding of the subject at all. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were numerous stories about how sky-high interest rates were hurting people who couldn’t afford mortgages and car payments, etc., etc. In the late 1980s there were numerous stories about how very low interest rates were hurting people who depended on investment incomes to meet expenses. I never saw a story about how these two stories might be related. Also, the media, with its inevitable focus on bad news, does a terrible job of telling the people about the good news of globalization, which would increase support for it. The supposed horrors of “outsourcing” are endlessly retailed (while the near record-low unemployment rate in the United States that refutes the dangers of outsourcing is relegated to the business section). But the fall in prices that has resulted from globalization goes unreported. Nearly all the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and household equipment, cost less as a percentage of income today than they did in the 1950s, often much less. We spend about 10 percent of household income on food today; it was 20 percent half a century ago. Telephone service costs only a small fraction of what it did when I was a kid. Globalization is no small part of the reasons for this.
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