Glory Days Research Articles

ETHICAL TENSIONS IN THE PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP WITHIN MANAGED CARE

ETHICAL TENSIONS IN THE PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP WITHIN MANAGED CARE

New Negro, old Left: African-American writing and communism between the wars

Maxwell, William J.1999. New Negro, Old Left AfricanAmerican Writing and Communism Between Wars New York: Columbia University Press. $49.50 hc. $17.50 sc. 254 pp James Grove Mount Mercy College For past fifty years, a powerful cultural narrative has defined how many readers approach and discuss history of African-American writing during critical junction between First and Second World Wars. It tells cautionary story of how creative energy of Harlem Renaissance was appropriated, undermined, and finally gutted when so many of its writers were idealistically drawn to Communist Party, then smothered by its reductive proletarian dictates about art. This is a dramatic, alluring story of good versus evil-heightened by its rather clean separation of Harlem Renaissance's glory days (now so often hallowed and mythologized) from high time of American Communism (now so discredited and misunderstood). Populated by striking personalities and talents, narrative is filled with tales of commitment, manipulation, and betrayal, of rebellion, resurrection and redemption-in short, an epic tale where Marxist snake slyly enters Eden and does irreparable damage before being repudiated by so much of African-American literary history. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between Wars is a closely argued, thoroughly researched attempt to show how this dominant narrative has often been misleading and reductive. Following lead of revisionist critics such as Barbara Foley and James A. Miller, Maxwell wants us to rethink debilitating premises behind narrative: there was a white communist seduction and betrayal of black mouthpieces, and that black intellectuals were incapable of transforming their party or their white radical counterparts, save through denunciations issued after escape (5). By painstakingly revealing constant reciprocity between African-American literature and Communist Party during this time, Maxwell persuasively shows these interracial exchanges occurred throughout Harlem Renaissance. They, in fact, energized both sides to examine new ways to solve race problem in United States and did not evaporate in more proletarian 1930's, even though black writers (most notably Claude McKay and Richard Wright) were gradually moving away from party. In short, Maxwell argues for a history of race-radical modernism resists schematic attempts to make this radicalism a product fitting into an ideologically convenient anti-Communist lock-step (whether specific to race, gender, and/or politics). Maxwell's entry into this argument is through his close, Bourdieu-like consideration of long forgotten Andy Rozof, black Bolshevik poet and Tin Pan Alley lyricist, whose career demonstrates how fertile Old Left's intellectual practice was in the full history of renaissance cultural field (59). Maxwell closely analyzes Rozof's unstudied poems (most notably sonnet Don't Tread on Me, convincingly seen as a powerful forerunner of Claude McKay's landmark cry for Negro selfdefense, If I must Die) as well as his songs (especially Black and Blue played so famously by Louis Armstrong and by Ralph Ellison in opening of Invisible Man). Maxwell also examines McKay's relationship to Marxist publication The Crusader and his 1930% musical A Kitchen Mechanic's Revue, a rich mixture of proletarian themes and black folklore. …

An Examination of Conscience in Times of Change

Christophe Bataille. Absinthe. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Pierre Michon. Masters and Servants. Translated by Wyatt Alexander Mason. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997. For the average English-speaking reader, the contemporary French novel has effectively disappeared from the radar screen of world literature. With the possible exception of Michel Tournier (whose novel Ogre was turned into an uninspired cinematic vehicle for John Malkovich), few French writers have managed to make an impression on the American book-buying public since the glory days of Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and the nouveau roman. Indeed, as French writers become increasingly associated with the arcana of contemporary criticism, francophones in other parts of the world (one thinks immediately of Patrick Chamoiseau in Martinique and Anne Hebert in Quebec) have become the standard bearers of imaginative literature in French. recent publication of two excellent novels-Christophe Bataille's Absinthe and Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants (in superb translations by Richard Howard and Wyatt Alexander Mason, respectively)-attests to the fact that, despite this eclipse, contemporary French letters are alive and well. Absinthe is the second novel by the young prodigy Christophe Bataille who in 1993, at the age of twenty-one, won the Prix du Premier Roman for Annam, a story of French missionaries who sail to Vietnam in the eighteenth century. Although far removed from the setting of Annam, Bataille's sophomore effort shares his first novel's austere beauty. A lovely and delicate piece, Absinthe presents the reminiscences of its narrator, who details his boyhood in Provence around the time of the First World War, and particularly his relationship with the mysterious and reclusive Jose, a distiller of absinthe. A frequent visitor to Jose's laboratory, the narrator is slowly inducted into the esoteric cult of the narcotic liqueur,, and seems poised to become the master's apprentice and heir when the French government bans the alcohol and Jos6 disappears. Years later, the narrator discovers a manuscript penned by his mother that reveals the distiller's early life and, like a Proustian madeleine, serves as the catalyst for his reflections on his own youth, and for the penning of Absinthe itself. Shrouded in the melancholy of nostalgia, Absinthe is on one level a novel about loss: of childhood, of culture, of home. It lovingly describes a cohesive community as yet undivided by the horrors of war and the unwanted instrusions of bumbling government officials, a mythic Provence before the mass death and paternalistic bureaucracy of modernity. It is a place that now exists only in memory: The region itself has changed, the narrator wistfully concludes following a visit to his parents' house after the Second World War. But Bataille's interest in themes of regional identity, memory, and modernity ultimately take a back seat to his fascination with the mysterious green liqueur itself. In concise but exquisitely crafted prose, he describes the lost culture of absinthe: the various stages of the distillation process and the bizarre tools used to accomplish it, the rituals of its consumption, and its mystical, visionary effects. Unfortunately his minute reconstruction of these vanished practices sometimes comes at the expense of characterization and the full development of the weightier themes mentioned above. While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, in too many places motives remain obscure, relationships unexplored and undeveloped, leaving the reader with the impression of a rococo artwork-an elegant but ultimately insubstantial aesthetic object. same cannot be said for Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants, a novel as profound and powerful as it is beautiful. book consists of five separate pieces on art and artists: the first concerns Joseph Roulin, a poor postman painted by Vincent van Gogh; the second considers Goya's rise to fame from humble beginnings; the third gives us the death of Watteau; the fourth reconstructs the life of Lorentino, an almost unknown quattrocento painter, from a few lines in Vasari; and the fifth shows us Claude Lorraine as he chooses an illiterate swineherd to be his apprentice. …

Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period

Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization ofan Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period. By Walter Stix Glazer. Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 184. Illustrations, tables. Cloth, $40.00; paper, $18.95.) Of the twenty-four books now in the Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series, Walter Glazer's is the eighth on urban Ohio. Given also that this short, concise monograph is a revised dissertation originally written in 1974, one might wonder, what about this study of the Queen City makes it worthy of publication? As it turns out, Glazer's ambitious methodology and exhaustive quantitative research offer valuable insights into the social organization of a dynamic antebellum city. His overall thesis, however, rests on a selective interpretation of evidence and ultimately is untenable. As one might expect, reading Cincinnati in 1840 is to revisit the glory days of urban history, when cities were very much in the public's attention and quantitative methods were utilized cheerfully to pick them apart. Thankfully, Glazer avoids the worst excesses of cliometrics. Although he sometimes lapses into cold social scientific language, he never lets the numbers overwhelm his narrative. He neatly supplements his numbercrunching with biographical snippets and interesting stories, such as that of the suicide of a reformist minister. His main objective is to analyze the social organization of the city. He focuses on four aspects: ideology, demography, social structure, and leadership. In his first chapter on ideology, Glazer argues that Cincinnati was unified by a community ideology of optimism, confidence, and progress. Although this booster vision was promulgated by the city's leadership, it was nevertheless a shared image that all with some sense of a unique corporate identity (42). It is in his second chapter concerning demography that Glazer first puts into service his quantitative methodology. At its heart is a correlation between census data and information from the city directory. The result is a field of society, which organizes the population in terms of how long they had lived there. Glazer argues that the old settlers, who had resided in Cincinnati for over a decade, were a coherent group, which provided much of the leadership for the community. On the outskirts of the magnetic field, German immigrants and transients had little stake in society, and their association with crime and riots put strains on the vision of an organic social order. Applying a tax list to his model, Glazer next analyzes the social structure of Cincinnati. As the city matured, a wealthy elite emerged, the existence of which challenged the prevailing assumption that social status rested on the natural foundation of morality and virtue. Glazer comes up with a cone-shaped socioeconomic model correlating socioeconomic class and demographic composition. From this research he concludes that upward mobility was possible for only a select few householders, and the majority of businessmen and mechanics moved away within ten years. Glazer notes, however, that this very mobility lent support to the spirit of optimism about the future of the community. The year 1840 marked a transition at which time this booster ideology gave way to divisiveness and disorder. …

The Somewhat Exaggerated Death of Primitive Art

The Somewhat Exaggerated Death of Primitive Art Denis Dutton The status and treatment of so-called primitive art is an important topic, and caused me to pick up Shelly Errington’s The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) with some excitement. There are elements to admire in the book, not the least of which is a clear and unpretentious writing style. This probably owes little to her copy editor who, as she explains in the preface, tried to get her to change the phrase “Freud’s construction of the primitive” to “Freud’s construction of indigenous people.” Errington says that although she, like her copy editor, does not want to offend, she does not want to be anachronistic either. We can applaud that intention, but I fear anachronism remains one of the incidental faults of a book which fails more seriously to mount anything resembling an argument, replete though it is with feelings and opinions. It doesn’t adduce evidence for its central sentiments so much as assemble reminders of what Correct Thinking People agree about the generally deplorable attitude of Western Civilization toward primitive art: the book frequently employs ironizing capitals, especially for such apparently delusional entities as “Reason” and “Objectivity.” Conditions for reader acceptance are set out conveniently at the beginning. An introductory page informs us that the book begins from the “Foucault-friendly premise” that primitive art is not a “timeless category existing in the abstract world of ideas and essences” but rather “a constructed category that appeared at a certain moment.” This category has remained unstable ever since it was “invented,” depending on “the [End Page 243] semantic field in which the term exists” and the objects to which it refers. So Errington naturally treats with predictable quotation marks the “discovery” of primitive art by Picasso and Co. around the turn of the century. This art, she explains, “reached the peak of its rise to fame” in 1982 with the opening of the Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art at the Metropolitan Museum. There was also an Amazonian art show at Macy’s that winter which Errington “rushed to see,” camera in hand, presumably to record a more commercial manifestation of primitive-art construction. Since these glory days, however, primitive art has fallen on hard times. First it suffered the condemnation occasioned by the “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” exhibition in 1984. This show “marked the fact that authentic primitive art had died, or at least had become moribund.” Moreover, in the aftermath of the “Primitivism” exhibition, the concept of “authentic primitive art” had been attacked “head-on by a pack of cultural critics, leaving it bloody and for dead. (Well, at least deconstructed.)” Why, the increasingly confused reader might ask, was authentic primitive art dead—or moribund? Or was it bloodied and left for dead? Or was it “deconstructed”? Just disputing an idea doesn’t murder it. Before we can get an answer, Errington jumps to a second sense in which authentic primitive art had died: authentic primitive artifacts “were disappearing at an alarming rate.” In 1984? Complaints by collectors and dealers that artifacts were disappearing in New Guinea were heard as far back as the late nineteenth century and were encountered even earlier in New Zealand. To report such alarm in the early 1980s is peculiar indeed. And who exactly was “alarmed”? Here is Errington’s elaboration: This second type of “death” of primitive art—the limiting of its supply— does not kill the concept of primitive art, of course. Quite the contrary. The concept of authentic primitive art is alive and well among collectors, primitive art galleries, and the art market generally. But the supply is more limited than ever, just at the point when the art has achieved mass appeal. As a consequence, a new generation of artifacts claiming to be “art” or art-like, “authentic” and “ethnic” if not “primitive,” in various permutations of the terms, has rushed in to expand its market share. But wait: now we are told that the putative death of primitive art did not affect the concept of authentic primitive art, because dealers...

Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus's Le premier homme

Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus’s Le premier homme 1 Edward J. Hughes (bio) [Les morts] vivent maintenant avec nous qui nous sentons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi se fait une famille, une cité commune entre les vivants et les morts. [The dead] now live with us and we feel that we are their parents [their relatives], their friends. In this way, a city shared by the living and the dead comes into being. —Michelet 2 La “tristesse africaine” du père. The father’s “African sadness.” —Camus, Le premier homme (297/240)3 Camus was working on Le premier homme in 1959, in what was to be the last year of his life (he died in January 1960). In chronological terms, he was writing against the backdrop of the Algerian War. In political and cultural terms, he was writing against decolonization. This unfinished, fictionalized autobiography recounts the life of the Cormery family, seen by Camus as typifying the lot of those descendants of nineteenth-century French settlers of Algeria. Camus’s tactic is to defend the position of the pieds noirs, whom he regularly depicts as innocents, accidents of a colonial history that has not brought them economic and cultural advantage but rather hardship and the virtues of stubbornness and resilience needed to face up to such difficulty. In short, Le premier homme is an unapologetic defense and illustration of the French Algerians. 4 Were this unfinished novel to have been published in 1960, soon after its author’s death, it would have been an embarrassment for many in metropolitan France. Its unfashionable promotion of the “Français d’Algérie” ‘French Algerians’ would have jarred in a nation that was in the throes of a colonial war. Along the painful road towards decolonization, the protests of loyal, would-be innocent colonizers could only stand as an unwelcome reminder of colonial failure. On the other hand, 1994, when the book was first published, proved a more auspicious date if we are to go by the massive sales of Le premier homme in France and beyond. More than thirty years on, then, it was as though postcolonial France was in a better position to remember and perhaps to indulge its sense of colonial nostalgia, or nostalgérie, by revisiting a past that had been revered and mythified. “Settler self-mystification,” to borrow a term from Philip Dine, finds a latter-day correlative in contemporary nostalgia for the would-be glory days of empire. 5 In this paper, I wish to consider three central areas: first, the linkage Camus makes between commemoration and memory-loss. In that respect, we will see “l’oubli” ‘oblivion’ working circuitously—perversely, one might [End Page 176] argue—as a powerful weapon in the legitimization of the French Algerian legacy; in this connection I shall also briefly consider, by way of instructive contrast, Tahar Djaout’s reading of commemoration in a native Algerian context in Les chercheurs d’os [The Bone searchers]. Second, I want to examine the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intertexts that play a crucial role in informing the rhetoric of persuasion around which Le premier homme is constructed. And third, and by way of conclusion, I shall explore briefly the extent to which Camus’s selective memory may be read as an indirect appeal to irrationalism. Le premier homme reflects urgently on spatial sensibilities in the colonial context. It strives to effect significant cultural reversals, in which the metropolitan center may, from the vantage point of the “littoral algérien” ‘Algerian shoreline,’ lose prestige or indeed acquire it, and the so-called outpost may become a place of peril and yet also a locus of heroism and beauty. Significantly, there is a regular turning away from contemporaneity. Repeatedly, Le premier homme summons up the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At one level, this is entirely to be expected since Camus’s aim is to celebrate his tribal ancestors, whose lives were shaped by such events as the 1848 Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and the First World War. Yet there is an abiding sense in which, for Camus, the past (heroic and sacrificial) is to be preferred to the...

Culture/Cultivation: Thoughts on Painting the Landscape

Occasionally here in Vermont there are glorious early fall days—clear and mild, the air as moist as in summer. I abandon the studio to walk in the woods with my dog. I gather fallen apples from the orchard and pick tomatoes. The harvesting chores are demanding at this time of the year—canning, freezing, filling the root cellar. On the easel in my studio is a large painting of bright yellow plastic tubing coiled up on a rusty red cart. This is farming equipment used for draining wet fields. (As I was driving through the Midwest on a painting trip a couple of years ago, that yellow plastic screamed at me across the flat terrain of Ohio, the site of a prehistoric sea.)

India Defies the Odds: Why Democracy Survives

India Defies the OddsWhy Democracy Survives Ashutosh Varshney (bio) India has long baffled theorists of democracy. Democratic theory holds that poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a deeply hierarchical social structure are inhospitable conditions for the functioning of democracy. 1 Yet except for 18 months in 1975–77, India has maintained its democratic institutions ever since it became independent of Britain in 1947. Over those five decades, there have been 12 parliamentary elections and many more state assembly elections. Peaceful transfers of power between rival political parties have occurred seven times at the central (i.e., federal) level. Since 1967, the party that ruled in New Delhi has not ruled in nearly half of the states. Since 1977, moreover, incumbent governments have been repeatedly defeated in elections. The press has remained vigorous, free, and unafraid to challenge the government, as even a cursory sampling of morning newspapers will show. The judiciary, despite periodic pressure from the federal executive branch, maintains institutional autonomy. Election turnout keeps rising, exceeding the levels typical in several advanced Western democracies. Having started at 45.7 percent in the first general elections (held in 1952), turnout now often rises above 60 percent. Predictions of an imminent collapse of India’s democracy have continued since the 1960s. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended democracy in June 1975 and declared a state of emergency, it seemed that India was finally starting down the path that most of the world’s poorer democracies had already traveled. Yet democracy returned 18 months later, and emergency rule proved to be a conjunctural aberration rather than an emerging structural trend. To be sure, danger signs remain. When unpopular ruling parties are thrown out, hope that the new incumbents will govern wisely and well [End Page 36] too often gives way quickly to anguish, marked by troubling questions. How long can democracy survive if public trust in India’s political leaders continues to decline? How long will short-term benefits—rather than long-term insight—determine the behavior of politicians? Scholars speak of India’s democracy as ungovernable, and clearly its health is not what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 But one should not expect a textbook model to work if there has been a serious rise in political participation and a near-breakdown of the caste hierarchy that long acted as the glue of the social order. Indeed, rising participation by once-marginal groups such as the “lower” castes is, if anything, a sign of how much the democratic process has succeeded. Rising political participation, its desirability on grounds of political inclusion notwithstanding, nearly always comes at the cost of disorder. 3 Therefore, the yardsticks for judging India’s democratic health today should not be derived from the glory days of the 1950s. “Lower” castes, tribes, minorities, women, and citizens’ groups are all exercising their democratic rights to a degree that was unheard of in the 1950s and 1960s. That India still practices democracy is in and of itself unique, and theoretically counterintuitive. The closest parallel cases among developing countries in terms of democratic longevity seem to be those of Venezuela since 1958 and of Costa Rica since 1948. Both, however, are many times richer than India, and therefore less anomalous in the view of democratic theory. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that no less an authority than Robert A. Dahl cites as a leading contemporary exception to democratic theory “India, where polyarchy was established when the population was overwhelmingly agricultural, illiterate, occupationally much less specialized than in a [developed] country, and highly traditional and rule-bound in behavior and beliefs.” 4 Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset come to the same conclusion in their multivolume survey of Third World democracies. 5 Finally, the historical novelty of Indian democracy was noted by Barrington Moore: Economically [India] remains in the pre-industrial age. . . . But as a political species, it does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964, political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham. . . . Political democracy may seem strange both in an Asian setting and one without an industrial revolution. 6 Why...

1830, another revolution: the "quarrel of the analogues".

The year 1830 evokes above all the days of insurrection in Paris, better known by the name of the “three glorious days”. In this year of 1830 there also took place in Paris a conflict that disrupted the scientific world. At this period, in fact, at the Academie Royale des Sciences, for several months, two professors of the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier, were in dispute. Their discussions are known by the name of the “quarrel of the analogues”.

Change of season

I felt a compulsion to return to the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall late last autumn. My son had returned for his third university year, my daughter had left for her first university term. I felt very sad as one glorious autumn day succeeded another and I walked until I was exhausted. I felt full of memories, of endless summer and Easter holidays, of excited children running to beaches, of expeditions, of tired children trailing home, of prawning, sailing, picnics, crabbing—and later of long walks and evenings spent playing chess, racing demon or scrabble. All past. A chapter had closed, everything around me echoed and I mourned for what had passed. I remember vividly sitting alone gazing at a favourite view, acknowledging my womb had done its work, and how immensely sad that felt.

"A Country Boy Can Survive": Confessions of an Ex-Shitkicker

Not Forgotten '? Country Boy Can Survive" Confessions of an Ex-Shitkicker BY PATRICK HUBER Every year I make at least two trips home to visit my parents in Ste. Genevieve (pop. 4,411), a predominandy Catholic, mining and farming town in southeastern Missouri. Until it recently closed, my favorite place to hang out while I was home was down at the O.K. Corral, a local watering hole where proprietor Wally Bauman served up cold draft beer in chilled mugs and where fifty cents got you three plays on the jukebox. There, I'd gulp down icy Stag drafts, shoot a few games ofeight-ball, and occasionally eat a pickled egg or two with old high school friends. Once in a while Flick Samples, looking for a litde cheap entertainment, would bet Piss Schweiss a couple of bucks that he wouldn't drink a glass of dill pickle juice from the three-gallon jar on the bar. If Piss was in a good mood, he'd get Wally to set him up with a tall one. Usually, though, nothing much ever happened at the O.K. Corral. We'd just hunker down at the end ofthe bar, watch a hockey game on t.v., and catch up on one another's lives. After three or four beers, our conversation usually turned to reminiscing about the glory days of our fading youth—high school football games, favorite coaches and teachers, old girlfriends, locker room pranks, cruising town on school nights, weekend beer parties. Carl Roth would drop a couple of quarters in the jukebox and invariably he'd select #1 5 5 —Hank Williams, Jr.'s, "A Country Boy Can Survive"—and then, in celebration of our local anthem, Stupe Papin would order another round. No single song, it seems, reminds us of our high school days like that one does. Granted, HankJr. has released some godawful stuff in recent years, "If It Will It Will" and "Born to Boogie," come to mind, but his earlier songs still hold a special place in our memories. Looking back from the vantage point of more than a decade of reflection, I can now more fully comprehend the central role that Hank "Bocephus" Williams , Jr., and country music generally, played in my life as a high-school kid growing up in Ste. Genevieve. As teenage boys wrestling with issues ofmasculinity and peer conformity, my four closest friends and I drew on country music to shape our emerging identities and to help us negotiate that sometimes awkward transition to adulthood. In our limited social world we saw ourselves as different from the rest of our classmates at Valle, our small Catholic high school of less than three hundred students. We weren't like the more popular and upwardly mobile middle-class kids ("preppies" and "pretty boys" we called them) who served 105 on student council, belonged to the National Honor Society, organized Red Cross blood drives, performed in school productions of Oklahoma!, and aspired to go on to snobby Washington University. At the time we despised them, on principle, as brown-nosing overachievers. We poked fun at the way diey mingled uncomfortably at beer parties, nursing warming cans of relatively pricey Budweiser beer (almost $6 a twelve-pack in 1 98 5 ), and tryinginconspicuously to ditch their partially full cans of beer when no one was looking. They were always so fashionable in their trendy deck loafers and pastel-colored Polo shirts with the collars turned up, and seemed to us to be combing their hair incessandy. We weren't what we called "gearheads," either—the group of mechanically minded, working-class kids whose idea of fun was to pop the hood of somebody 's Chevy pickup truck and work on the engine in the bowling alley parking lot on Highway 61. Nor were we "potheads," a gang of boys from the nearby town ofBloomsdale, who, although they hunted and fished like us, also smoked dope, a hobby that my uninitiated group strongly condemned at die time. Rather, my friends and I were, in a word, "shitkickers"—sports-minded country boys who proudly embraced a rural identity and small-town lifestyle. None of us were...

The Tail that Wags the Dog: Football and the American University

The Tail That Wags the Dog: Football and the American University Charles H. Martin (bio) Robin Lester. Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. xxii + 301 pp. Photographs, appendixes, notes, and index. $32.95. Fifty-seven years have now passed since the University of Chicago shocked the sports world by abolishing its once prestigious football program in 1939. Most educators and sports fans have long since forgotten this controversial decision, as well as Chicago’s previous gridiron accomplishments. Yet during the first quarter of the twentieth century the original “monsters of the midway,” guided by legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, established themselves as a national powerhouse and a dominant force in the Big Ten Conference. Chicago’s football success played a pivotal role both in attracting public support for the new university and in making football a genuine national sport. No other college better embodied the Faustian bargain of combining big-time football with serious academic life than did Chicago, where Stagg’s athletic empire dominated the campus for decades. To the community and the nation, Chicago truly was “Stagg’s University.” Robin Lester, a social and cultural historian, has rescued those “glory days” from obscurity, but he has done much more than merely revive faded memories of heroic stars, exciting plays, and triumphal seasons. Instead he skillfully develops the Chicago story into a case study of the creation of a national collegiate sporting culture and the construction of football as a secular ritual for both town and gown. Chicago played a central role in this process “because Stagg’s university pioneered in making football a mass entertainment industry on the American campus” (p. xvii). The author also explores in detail the corrosive influence of intercollegiate athletics within the university, a sensitive area that most official college histories prudently avoid. Although Lester’s account ends in 1939, the problems that he identifies concerning the relationship of athletics and academics remain as central to campus life today as they were nearly a century ago. Lester first stumbled onto his topic thirty years ago when as a young Chicago graduate student working in the library he was assigned the task of [End Page 629] unpacking the recently acquired Amos Alonzo Stagg papers. This accidental encounter between student and manuscript collection has produced an important study, though one whose appearance in print has been long delayed. The book’s narrative revolves around the interplay of three major themes: the specific gridiron exploits of Chicago football teams, the educational development and internal politics of the university, and the spread of a national collegiate football culture which created unprecedented public support for American universities. By examining Chicago football within the broader social and cultural forces of the period, the book is representative of the rapidly growing body of outstanding sport history studies now appearing in print. Recent works by such scholars as Susan Cahn, Susan Cayleff, Allen Guttmann, Peter Levine, Michael Oriard, and G. Edward White have clearly demonstrated the growing sophistication of the field. 1 A volume in the pioneering “Sport and Society” series of the University of Illinois Press, Stagg’s University is a worthy addition to this literature. One of Lester’s most valuable contributions is his demythologization of the pre-World War II period of college sports. Readers who expect the book to portray an innocent era when college football was uncorrupted by allegedly modern vices will be severely disappointed. Beginning with unethical recruiting, schools also provided hidden financial assistance and other forms of preferential treatment to their athletes, who in turn were sometimes poorly prepared for college work, frequently absent from class, and often negligent in completing their degrees. Academic fraud was commonplace. Even Stagg himself does not escape Lester’s careful scrutiny. Although his personal ethics were higher than those of many in the profession, the powerful coach regularly convinced administrators and selected professors to provide special consideration for his athletes in order to keep these putative scholars eligible to play. Such problems were not unique to Chicago, of course. Murray Sperber’s recent examination of Knute Rockne and Notre Dame athletics, Shake Down the Thunder...

Birmingham in the good old days

Perhaps it is difficult for a European or American at the end of the 20th century to imagine Birmingham in the year 1953, when I arrived after 5 days on the Queen Elizabeth II, via Southampton and London. It was the chief city of the Midlands because it was in the middle — at the center of gravity of England, I was told — and it was the entrance to the “black country” because it was black. Since those glorious days the socialist city government has managed to clean things up, so that it looks quite pleasant now, but at that time it was not only black it was depressing. The Quakers who ran things saw to it that nothing moved on the streets after about 9 ’clock at night. Why did I leave MIT to pursue graduate study there? My advisors told me that if I wanted to see the world and also study physics then Birmingham was the place to go. Why was this so? Because of the presence of a man, Rudolf Peierls (later Sir Rudolf), who had established a leading center of theoretical physics at the University of Birmingham. (The English called it ‘mathematical physics’, but this is not to be confused with the word as it is currently used or, at least, as I use it.) Peierls had gone there from a threatening situation in Germany and became, initially at least, a professor of mathematics — which was somewhat ironic considering his attitude toward the subject’s significance for theoretical physics. (For instance, one of his most famous ideas was a method of proving the existence of long-range order in Ising-like spin models, but he was never quite happy with the idea that it was later made into a rigorous method with far reaching consequences.) Peierls was, as we all know, a brilliant physicist who understood and contributed heavily to many of the important fields of his day, e.g., solid state physics, nuclear physics, quantum field theory, to name a few. More or less single-handedly he established a center to which very many of the leading theorists of the day made a pilgrimage. There were many students there who later made important contributions. Some in my cohort were Jim Langer

Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France

In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ariege department in the French Pyrenees, describing male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women's clothes, gathering in the forests at night to chase away state guards and charcoalmakers. This was the raucous War of the Demoiselles, a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827, which restricted peasants' rights to use state and private forests. Peter Sahlins unravels the fascinating story of this celebrated popular uprising, and in his telling captures the cultural, historical and political currents that swept the countryside during France's July 1830 Revolution. Sahlins explains how and why the Ariege peasants drew on the practices and rituals of folk culture, as well as on a revolutionary tradition, to defend their inherited rights to the forest. To explore these rights and their expression, he delves into the history of forest management, of peasant conflicts with the state, and of popular culture - particularly the disputed history of Carnival and of local rituals of justice. Sahlins also sheds new light on the French revolutionary tradition and the Three Glorious Days of July 1830. The drama and symbolism of the War of the Demoiselles have inspired nearly a dozen plays, novels, films and even a comic book. Using the concepts of anthropology and cultural studies as transport, Sahlins moves from this rich event to the wider worlds of peasant society in France. Focusing on the years from 1829 to 1832 but drawing on sources since the 16th century, his book should captivate social, cultural and political historians of both early modern and modern Europe.

Hezekiah's Reforms and the Revolt against Assyria

What is the source of the Bible's sympathetic treatment of Hezekiah? He is credited with religious reforms, but these were not isolated pious acts; they were part of Hezekiah's grand scheme, his ambitious plan of returning to the glorious days of his ancestors through revolt against Assyria to regain independence. Archaeological remains witness to Hezekiah's centralization of the sacrifical cult and to construction activities undertaken for the storage and distribution of matériel. Depite his preparations, Hezekiah's revolt failed totally. Despite his failure, the Hebrew Bible did not forget Hezekiah's attempts to repristinate the ancestral glory.

Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics.

In Games Colleges Play, John Thelin chronicles the history of intercollegiate athletics from 1910 to 1990 - from the early, glory days of Knute Rockne and the Gipper to the modern era of big budgets, powerful coaches, and pampered players. He describes how extracurricular sports programmes - seldom accorded equal prominence with teaching and research in mission statements or annual reports - have become central to the life of many universities. As administrators search for a proper balance between athletics and academics, Thelin observes, this peculiar institution in American higher education grows increasingly powerful and controversial. Looking past the playing fields and lavish facilities into board rooms and administrative suites, Thelin finds disturbing patterns of abuse and limited reform and explores the implications of these patterns for today's college presidents, faculty and students. He examines the 1929 Carnegie Foundation Report, the formation of major athletic conferences, the national college basketball scandals after World War II, the dissolution of the Pacific Coast Conference in the 1950s and the Knight Foundation Report of 1991. Games Colleges Play provides historical background that aims to inform current policy discussions about the proper place of intercollegiate athletics within the American university. Thelin is author of Education and its Useful Past, and co-author, with Lawrence L. Wiseman, of The Old College Try: Balancing Academic and Athletics in Higher Education.

Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century.

From the glory days of the railroad to today's gridlocked, six-lane highway, Getting There dramatizes America's shift from rail to road transportation, how it has robbed Americans of the choice of travel options enjoyed by Europeans, and why it threatens the nation's economic future. Stephen B. Goddard reveals how government joined automakers and roadbuilders to nearly destroy the rails, and why the 21st century will witness high-tech remedies and a railroad resurgence.

Magisterial Visions: Recent Anglo-American Scholarship on the Represented Landscape

THE STUDY OF THE REPRESENTED LANDSCAPE-IN TEXT AND IMAGE-IS currently in its glory days. Yet few traditionally minded scholars of landscape art would recognize their subject in much recent work. In the past few years, numerous British and American studies have considered the cultural meanings of Anglo-American landscape representation from widely varied perspectives.' The topic has proved a meeting ground for transatlantic collaborators wielding an array of fields and approaches, from cultural geography and social history to phenomenology, aesthetics, and dis-

Everglade Renaissance

The Army Corps of Engineers unveiled a nearly 2000‐page blueprint last month to reinvigorate hydrological conditions in the South Florida Everglades. If the most ambitious of the six recommended options is carried out, the plan would be the largest environmental restoration project ever undertaken. The plan would attempt to restore one of the world's most biologically vital marshes to its glory days, before the arrival of urban sprawl and agricultural industrialization. Although the Corps did not officially sanction any of the six options, the plan would seek to redirect water flow in South Florida.

Future of U.S. space science arrives at a crossroads this week

Glory days. Some say they are over for the U.S. space program. Others say changes in the direction of the program merely reflect the transition to an increasingly interdependent post‐Cold War world.Either way, the program appears to be entering a new epoch. NASA's track record has already shown that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to space science—especially when smaller may mean the difference between life and death.