January 2011

“Multicultural” societies have, and will probably continue to have, an extreme-violence potential inherently built into them. Such societies need very long periods, usually centuries , before racial, ethnic, and cultural differences may become essentially irrelevant and violence decreases. A lot depends upon whether multiculturalism is celebrated in a constructive or destructive way within a society. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be gaining ascendancy in the United States in particular. Little Switzerland, with its seven-hundred-year-old confederation, is a place where the right mix was achieved, and even there it involved many growing pains along the way.

Oh, come now, Professor Ayers. Surely the South can be given credit for more than just the crime wave now sweeping the country. The nation has suffered many disasters, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, and AIDS, to name a few. Could not the South have been given credit for these, also?

I enjoyed reading the article and learning more about the South’s past. As you well noted, the South’s historic code of honor and the violence manifested in that heritage also have contributed to today’s problems of drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, and other social ills plaguing citizens’ everyday life. During my administration I have worked long and hard to remedy some of these far-reaching problems.

I enjoyed reading “Legacy of Violence.” However, even as “one answer” for urban violence I find it rather convenient to target an institution (the “slave South”) that no longer exists in our society. After all, our nation itself was founded in violence, with many social, economic, and political institutions having long served as role models for violent and criminal means.

An explanation for urban violence that emphasizes an obsolete institution and a people with whom most of us today don’t identify will tend to legitimize or obscure the many ways in which we all (nationally and individually) use or have used brute force to achieve our most immediate ends. The urban thug is more likely mimicking these social traits than that of the slave South.

I found “Legacy of Violence” to be a provocative perspective on the origins of the violence that now plagues our urban centers.

In “Legacy of Violence” (October) Edward L. Ayers makes a case for a Southern propensity to violence. The many examples he cites of mayhem and murderous activity make it hard to dismiss Mr. Ayers as bigoted or rash in his judgments.

Nevertheless, the American frontier was always an intriguing interplay between codes of conduct and our more human traits. The viciousness of backwoods battles, using knives, thumbnails, and teeth, is not so far removed from bar brawls in any American city today. From what I gather, the participants do not act so much out of cultural imperatives but simply out of a desire to survive. It’s the Rule of the Knife Fight: in a knife fight, there are no rules.

I am angry. I was shocked and ashamed that your October issue featured an article and cover on boxing. The same civilized society that forbids bullfights, dogfights, cockfights, and bearbaiting encourages and highly remunerates human beings to maim, cripple, and occasionally kill one another. The promoters and participants should be charged with felonious assault and battery.

The article on boxing (October) was excellent, but I was sorry it did not bear more on the relationship of prize fighting to American ethnicity.

As you pointed out, America was not ready for a black heavyweight champion of the world when Jack Johnson won the title in 1908. But at least America could tolerate a black man as world champ by the time Joe Louis claimed the throne. More important, the black man had moved into the ghetto occupied by an earlier generation of white kids who were using their fists to fight their way out. Between 1901 and 1935 young pugs named Rosenberg, Goldstein, Kaplan, Rosovsky (Barney Ross), Rosenbloom, and Singer showed that Jews were among the current occupants, along with the Grazianos and Lamottas of a few years later. Prize fighting will always be a measure of who lives in the ghettos of America.

On the road again

Once more the magazine devotes an issue to exploring the one thing you are certain to find at the end of every journey—a sense of the people who were there before you. This time we seek out the past in:

The Lower East Side

Marvin Gelfand uses the close-packed Manhattan streets that were home to the children of the great turn-of-thecentury Jewish immigration to tell a tremendous story that is at once colorful, funny, intimate, grim, and moving. For generations this battered precinct was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans, and much of the savor of those days is still to be found there.

Custer country

Andrew Ward walks the high, rolling ground where George Armstrong Custer’s command spent its last dreadful minutes and discovers, as thousands have before him, just what it is about the Last Stand that has such a mysterious power to turn the casual visitor into a lifelong buff.

Edited by Ernest Samuels; Harvard University Press; 612 pages.

In the period that could be described as the golden age of American letters, which rose with the Industrial Revolution and fell with the advent of television, America was blessed with being home to a species of literary animal that now seems all but extinct: the man of letters. The giants among them were men like Emerson, Howells, Holmes, Cowley, Seldes, Wilson, and, of course, Henry Adams.

These selected letters, first published in The Complete Letters of Henry Adams in six massive volumes by Harvard in the early 1980s and now edited by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ernest Samuels, reveal Adams’s personality as he matures from highminded Harvard graduate trying to determine what course he should set for his life to benevolent Washington sage indulging his many pretty nieces and “wish-nieces” and warning of the coming demise of civilization.