Public Letters Research Articles

Seminars on Controversial Issues

The paper printed below and the four commentaries which follow make up the second in our occasional series of Seminars on Controversial Issues. In this case, the subject addressed is the timing and purpose of a child's first dental visit. Letters for publication from readers on the subject would be welcome.Editor.

Chevron USA, Inc. v. Mario Echazabal.

Center for Research on Occupational & Environmental Toxicology Oregon Health & Science University Portland, Oregon Readers are invited to submit letters for publication in this department. Submit them to: The Editor, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, PO Box 10619, Towson, MD 21285-0619. Letters should be sent as hard copy with an accompanying diskette and should be designated “For Publication.”

Nurses’ addresses will not enter public domain

While the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has to retain a certain amount of personal information on the register, such as address and date of birth, it has no intention of making this available to the public (letters June 4). That is a guarantee. However, we have to ‘publish the register’ in some format and that is what we are consulting on this summer.

Henry Clay and the Election of 1844: The Limits of a Rhetoric of Compromise

Henry Clay's reputation was based on his skill in formulating legislative compromises between competing positions, enacting the attribute of prudence. This approach proved unsuccessful in the context of a heated election campaign. Focusing on a series of public letters Clay issued during 1844, this analysis traces his rhetorical difficulties in the campaign and suggests the limitations of a rhetorical stance based on compromise.

In the grip of the python: Conflicts at the university-industry interface

When the University of Toronto withdrew a contract it held with me in December 2000, it initiated a sequence of events that led to a public letter to the University from senior figures in the world psychopharmacology community protesting against the infringement of academic freedom involved and a first ever legal action, undertake by this author, seeking redress for a violation of academic freedom. The issues of academic freedom surrounding this case have been intertwined with a debate about the possibility that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) group of antidepressants have the potential to trigger suicidality in a subgroup of patients. Whether the SSRIs do trigger suicidality or not, exploration of this issue has given rise to a number of worrying sets of observations. First, in my view, there is evidence that pharmaceutical companies have miscoded raw data on suicidal acts and suicidal ideation. Second, this author also maintains that there is a growing body of examples of ghostwriting of articles in the therapeutics domain. Many of the tensions evident in this case, therefore, can be linked to company abilities to keep clinical trial data out of the public domain--this is the point at which the pharmaceutical python gets a grip on academia.

Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the "Negro Problem" during World War II

On January 9, 1942, almost seventeen thousand boxing fans sat on the edge of their seats in Madison Square Garden. American flags hung from the rafters and were plastered on every square inch of wall space. Here at the Navy Relief Society benefit fight, the heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis Barrow, would challenge the formidable Buddy Baer. Louis would risk his title and donate his earnings of approximately one hundred thousand dollars to the victims of the Pearl Harbor bombing. On the eve of the benefit fight, Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), expressed great hope that the patriotic actions of Louis, the most famous black fighter, could stir America's racial conscience—after all, Louis was fighting on behalf of a navy that relegated black Americans to menial positions. Urging Sen. Arthur Capper to write a letter for publication in the New York Times “appealing for the removal of discrimination in the armed services,” White asserted that Capper's antiracist pronouncement would have “tremendous effect appearing at the psychological moment when newspapers will be carrying accounts of the Louis-Baer fight and of Joe's generosity despite the discrimination in the Navy.”1

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation. Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political outrages committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument - the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately - did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare. Dew's discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunion - often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause - have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 1860-61. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war - indeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.

The Justification of Florentine Foreign Policy Offered by Leonardo Bruni in His Public Letters (1428-1444). Gordon Griffiths

<i>The Justification of Florentine Foreign Policy Offered by Leonardo Bruni in His Public Letters (1428-1444)</i>. Gordon Griffiths

Conflicting Interests in Toronto: Anatomy of a Controversy at the Interface of Academia and Industry

In December 2000, the University of Toronto breached a contract it held with me, initiating a sequence of events that has led to a public letter to the University from a large number of senior figures in the psychopharmacology community, protesting against the infringement of academic freedom involved, and a first-ever legal action seeking redress for violation of academic freedom. This case has been intertwined from the start with a longer running debate about the possibility that the SSRI group of antidepressants may have the potential to trigger suicidality or other serious effects in a subgroup of takers. And this specific issue connects to concerns about conflict of interest in the domain of therapeutics, as well as in science in general, the ghostwriting of scientific articles, and a series of other hot-spots on the interface between academia and industry.

Citizen Reaction to a Proposed Time Zone Boundary Change in Kentucky: Juxtaposing Boundaries on the Land / In the Mind

Changes in time zone boundaries are rare but are the result of initiatives at local levels where businesses and employees have stronger linkages to counties and cities in a time zone other than their own. I investigate the October 2000 change in Wayne County, a rural county in southcentral Kentucky that petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation to join the Eastern Time Zone. Public meetings, letters and petitions demonstrated the divided sentiment regarding the change. Almost 70% of the 2500 signatures supported the change. I investigate the content of 660 individual letters to identify the major reasons supporting and opposing the change. Linkages to places of employment and shopping and visits to physicians were major reasons in support of the change. Objections were a dissatisfaction with no referendum, concerns about children's safety waiting for buses in the dark, "liking it the way it is," and inconveniences for farmers.

Responding to Public Issues: An Exercise in Managerial Communication

Communicating about issues or crises has become one of the most important tasks for managers who must address various stakeholders that have become more influential in the decisions, values, policies, and practices of the organization. This article describes an issue communication exercise for upper-level undergraduate and graduate business students. The students learn to examine public issues that companies face and to use traditional communication formats to address internal audiences (via memos, flyers, and reports) and external audiences (via personal letters, public letters, and reports) by using discourse appropriate to the rhetorical contexts of the issues.

'The One Jarring Note'

The literary production of women in Queensland from Separation to World War II records and reflects on various aspects of colonial life and Australian nationhood in a period when white women's participation in public life and letters was steadily increasing. Unease with the colonial experience underpins many of the key themes of this body of work: the difficulty of finding a literary voice in a new land, a conflicted sense ofplace, the linking of masculinity with violence, and the promotion of racial purity. This chapter will explore how white women writers – for there were no published Indigenous women writers in this era – responded to the conditions of living and writing in Queensland prior to the social and cultural changes initiated by World War II.

Joyce in Galsworthy

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001© 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 CO [Charles Osborne], “John Galsworthy,” The Penguin Companion to Literature Vol. I: Britain and the Commonwealth, ed. David Daiches (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 201. 2 Arno Schmidt, “Brand’s Heath,” Nobodaddy’s Children, trans. John E. Woods (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 147. Joyce in Galsworthy FRIEDHELM RATHJEN John Galsworthy is not a name which usually springs to one’s mind if thinking about the traces James Joyce left in his fellow writers’ works. The standard opinion about Galsworthy and his best-remembered effort, the Forsyte Saga trilogy, is something like Charles Osborne’s summary in the Penguin Companion to Literature: “The cycle is notable more for its painstaking completeness than for any specific literary virtues.”1 If high modernist novelists condescend to comment anything on Galsworthy at all, the outcome usually sounds like Arno Schmidt’s remarks in his 1951 novella “Brand’s Heath”: “Greasylivered Galsworthy!: . . . I mean, talk about selfmade problems (as if English society itself were one! . . . ).”2 In a way, Galsworthy stands for the whole late victorian culture and aesthetics that was thrown overboard by Joyce and other modernist writers and artists. It should not be forgotten, however, that Galsworthy (1867– 1933) and Joyce were contemporaries. It is true that nowhere in Joyce’s writings have any traces of Galsworthy’s extremely popular works been discovered so far (nor does it seem likely that any will ever be discovered), but Joyce must have been aware of the tremendous commercial success of the Forsyte Saga, which was completed by the third part of the trilogy, To Let, in 1921, just one year before Joyce published his Ulysses. When in 1926 Joyce (assisted by Ludwig Lewisohn and Archibald MacLeish) assembled an international phalanx of 167 writers to sign a public letter of protest against Samuel friedhelm rathjen 177 3 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 586. 4 John Galsworthy, Maid in Waiting (London: William Heinemann, 1931), 275–76. Roth’s piracy of Ulysses, Galsworthy was one of the signers (which of course does not necessarily mean that Galsworthy took any interest in the pirated book).3 A few years later, in December 1931, Joyce in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver expressed his suspicion that Galsworthy had his hands in an attempt to prevent Harold Nicholson from lecturing on Joyce on BBC radio (L I 307). Apart from these two very minute details, not the least cross-connections between Joyce and Galsworthy (who in 1932 was awarded the Nobel Prize) have been discovered by anyone inside or outside the Joyce industry. All the more interesting it seems that in one of his later novels, Galsworthy alludes to the circumstances of the publication of Ulysses in Paris. Chapter XXXI of Maid in Waiting, a novel set in a mid-1920s London and published in 1931, includes the following piece of ladies’ conversation, incited by Dinny Conway, the novel’s heroine: “It would be delicious if you could work up a scandal. . . . Uncle Lawrence would love it.” Lady Mont seemed to go into a sort of coma. . . . “. . . He’s been readin’ me Gulliver’s Travels, Dinny. The man was coarse, you know.” “Not so coarse as Rabelais, or even as Voltaire.” “Do you read coarse books?” “Oh! well, those are classics.” “They say there was a book—Achilles, or something; your Uncle bought it in Paris; and they took it away from him at Dover. Have you read that?” “No,” said Dinny. “I have,” said Clare. “From what your Uncle tells me, you oughtn’t to.” “Oh! one reads anything now, Auntie, it never makes any difference.” Lady Mont looked from one niece to the other. “Well,” she said, cryptically, “there’s the Bible. . . .”4 There can be no doubt that in this scene, the ladies confuse one classic hero with another: instead of Achilles, the reference is meant to be to Ulysses. Joyce’s novel, then, is included in the list of “coarse books”— but it seems that in Maid in Waiting, Ulysses has already begun its conversion...

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

Letters: “Consideration of copollutants” by S. H. Moolgavkar (20 Oct., p. 453). Editing of the letter for publication changed the meaning of a sentence in the first paragraph. In reference to the morbidity study, it is the method, not the study, as stated in the letter, that “has little power to control confounding by copollutants.”

The Exploitation of Captured Royal Correspondence and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the British Civil Wars, 1645–46

During 1645 the reputation of the British royal family and court was seri ously damaged as a result of the intrusive attention of the press, which, on the orders of the English Parliament, published captured correspon dence, causing sensation and lasting political impact. This article ex plores the exploitation of the papers of the king seized at the battle of Naseby (14June 1645), and those of George, Lord Digby, taken after the battle of Sherburn later that year. It illustrates not simply the importance of the letters themselves, but the extent to which political pamphlets can be considered as political events. The letters were more useful to some parliamentarians than to others, and there was a degree of factional struggle surrounding the selection of letters for publication. Such events provide illuminating evidence regarding both the manipulation of the press during the 1640s, and the strength of various factions within the parliamentarian cause. In particular, they offer an intriguing insight into the relations between English parliamentarians and their Scottish allies at a crucial stage in the conflict with the king. It is the dynamic of An glo-Scottish politics in the mid-1640s that provides the key to under standing why the printed editions of these royalist papers appeared in the way that they did.

Weather and security

In December 1999, a public letter from the heads of the US and UK meteorological offices highlighted the dangers of global warming. Among the likely consequences is a partial melting both of glaciers and of the polar icecaps, leading to increased flooding in low-lying riverine and coastal areas, and the flight of their populations. The delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in India and Bangladesh is particularly at risk. In recent decades, the migration of Bengalis from the delta to the surrounding tribal hills has led to six small-scale local conflicts, and these are likely to intensify if ecological disaster and consequent population movement increase.

Robert Lowell and the Cold War

E know Robert Lowell (1917-77) as a pacifist poet, a Vman who consistently opposed militarism and war in his life and writings. After denouncing World War II in an eloquent public letter to President Roosevelt, he served time in prison as a conscientious objector and then published poems critical of the war in Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946). A quarter of a century later, those events and responses uncannily repeated themselves. After denouncing the Vietnam War in an eloquent public letter to President Johnson, Lowell participated in Senator Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign for the presidency and the March on the Pentagon and then published poems critical of the war in Near the Ocean (1966) and Notebook 1967-68 (1969).' Stated that succinctly, Lowell's pacifism may appear to be steadfast and principled. A closer examination, however, reveals a more complex and ambiguous narrative. Lowell's attitudes and behaviors were volatile rather than stable. He ricocheted

Reinventing Woman Suffrage

Reinventing Woman Suffrage Kathryn Kish Sklar (bio) Ellen Carol DuBois. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. x + 353 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $37.50. Historians of women have been slow to exploit the potential richness of the suffrage movement as a research topic, daunted perhaps by its scale and duration. Two generations of women produced 480 campaigns in state legislatures, 277 campaigns in state party conventions, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive congresses in addition to the ratification campaign of 1919–1920. 1 Until recently historians have left the field to three classic studies, The History of Woman Suffrage, 6 volumes compiled by suffrage leaders (1881–1922); Eleanor Flexner’s magisterial Century of Struggle: History of Women’s Rights in the United States (1959); and Aileen Kraditor’s “revisionist” Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965). Recent writings on the movement have begun to break new ground, however, not only by pursuing local case studies, but by posing questions that connect woman suffrage with other topics in women’s history and American history—race relations during the Jim Crow era, for example, or partisan politics in the Gilded Age. 2 Focusing on class relations in the Progressive era, Ellen DuBois’s important new book, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, adds substantially to this growing literature. Since the publication of her first book, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), DuBois has been the chief exception to our scholarly avoidance of the suffrage movement. Now she embodies the field’s robust monographic growth. Centering her study on one of the most vibrant suffrage leaders, Harriot Stanton Blatch, who, (not incidentally) was a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, DuBois convincingly demonstrates Blatch’s importance as an institutional innovator of cross-class coalitions that built a working-class constituency for suffrage. Through show-business gimmicks Blatch also sold the movement to a wider public. By telling Blatch’s story DuBois puts flesh and bones on our heretofore abstract understanding of how suffrage was achieved. [End Page 243] Showing us how the suffrage movement became part of labor history, reform history, and class relations in the Progressive era, she has given us a new more inclusive model for writing on those topics. As a biography the book also has much to offer. We follow Harriot Blatch’s development as a person and an activist through four action-packed decades that bring her into contact with some of the era’s leading social reformers. Ultimately, however, the book is more successful as a study of the suffrage movement than as a biography. Blatch’s life contained sudden shifts that the author only partially explains, and we are left guessing about the larger pattern of disconnections within her activism. Nevertheless, the book is rewarding reading on many counts. Its central chapters on the New York suffrage movement show us the remarkable range and diversity of that movement at a moment of transforming change in its style and constituencies. Harriot Stanton Blatch joined that movement after residing in England for twenty years. Graduating from Vassar in 1878, Blatch married an Englishman, largely, it seems, to escape her mother’s long shadow. In England in the 1890s Harriot became an active member of the Women’s Local Government Society, worked with the Women’s Franchise League, affiliated with Fabian socialism, and developed an interest in “the industrial question” and a commitment to working-class women. In a dramatic public letter to her mother in 1894, she declared, “Every workingman needs the suffrage more than I do, but there is another who needs it more than he does, just because [her] conditions are more galling, and that is the working woman” (p. 73). Blatch and her family returned permanently to the United States around the time of her mother’s death in 1902, and Harriot began to build a series of innovative suffrage organizations. The first of these, the Equal Suffrage League of New York, found no constituency, but between 1907 and 1909 Blatch’s Equality League of Self Supporting Women did much to...

Jefferson's Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826

Reviewed by: Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826* C. M. Harris (bio) Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826. Edited by James A. Bear Jr.> and Lucia C. Stanton. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. lv+1624; illustrations, tables, notes/references. $200 (hardcover). After several decades of preeminence as a biographical subject and test case, Thomas Jefferson has begun one of his infrequent cyclical descents into historiographical disfavor. Exhausted in their efforts to explain what the late twentieth century regards as the enigmatic and paradoxical qualities of the man—to reconcile his head and his heart, his rhetoric and his actions—political and social historians have joined to give Jefferson a hard push from his lofty pedestal in the American pantheon. In a review of Joseph J. Ellis’s depreciating study of Jefferson’s “character,” American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997), Robert Middlekauff summed up the third president as a “strange romantic of a man, whose mind played tricks on itself.” Recalling Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), Middlekauff pronounced: “today, the reputation [of Jefferson] has also been lost” (William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 55 [July 1998]: 435–38, quote 438). If this scholarly trend continues, if Jefferson loses some of his premium as defining hero and symbol, it will not be without benefits. The frequency with which he has been invoked for the purposes of explaining the present has so bloated him with interpretive meanings that the outlines of the historical figure have become increasingly difficult to distinguish. Yet however they spin the Jefferson image in the next century, it is certain that the great range of Jefferson’s interests and extent and richness of his surviving [End Page 662] papers will insure his continuing importance to investigative scholarship in many fields. The study of the world Jefferson inhabited has been advanced significantly by the first comprehensive edition of his memorandum books. This well-designed publication reunites fourteen original booklets, now held by six different libraries; the texts have been prepared and annotated by Jefferson scholars long and intimately acquainted with their many-sided subject. As a result, scattered manuscripts previously consulted only by the most diligent researchers have been transformed into an accessible, intelligible, and broadly useful reference work. That we have the particulars of Jefferson’s life—itemized purchases and receipts, returns from his farms and other businesses, itineraries and notices of sites visited, of amusements and of experiments witnessed, records of debts owed and paid and of charity—seems an extraordinary thing. Few of the great thinkers and shapers of history have been so thoughtful (or careless) as to leave behind the residue of their daily lives. Moreover, few children of the Enlightenment, however much in thrall of their Newtonian world, possessed Jefferson’s eye for and appreciation of detail. Because he relished opportunities to expand his knowledge of people and the physical world and took thoughtful measure of what he saw, at home and abroad, his memoranda form an invaluable compendium of the material culture of his age. The earliest surviving entries relate to Jefferson’s law practice, but those that followed reflect the full scope of his nonpolitical activities and his great passion for improvement. Comments, explanatory phrases, occasionally small drawings—notably for the siting, design, and construction of Monticello—early intruded on the bare facts. Jefferson’s principal purpose in recordkeeping remained practical (and moral): it provided him an accurate accounting of financial obligations. Yet the care he took in it—recopying rough notations (often made on small slatelike ivory leaves or books) into a finished record, later indexing the entries—suggests that he valued the recollection as much as the sense of orderliness he gained from the process (however illusory for his finances). Lacking the finish and purpose of his public letters and speeches and the intimacy of his personal correspondence, the memoranda nevertheless accurately convey the rhythms of Jefferson’s life and the connectivity in it, to family, friends, servants, clients, agents, animals, weather, seasons, landscape. James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton...

Reader Reflection

We appreciate the interest and value the views of those who write. Readers commenting on articles are encouraged to send copies of their correspondence to the authors. For publication: All letters for publication are acknowledged, but because of the large number submitted, we do not send letters of acceptance or rejection. Please double-space all letters to be considered for publication. Letters should not exceed 250 words and are subject to abridgment. At the end of the letter include your name and affiliation, if any, including zip or postal code and e-mail address, in the style of the section.