May 31, 2006
Eleemosynary Immortality Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST Since the days of George Peabody and Peter Cooper 150 years ago, American businessmen have been the world’s greatest philanthropists. The size and number of their donations to schools, colleges, hospitals, research institutes, libraries, symphony orchestras, opera companies, museums, and who knows how many other worthy causes have been staggering.
Partly, I’m sure, this generosity has been a way of giving thanks to the nation and society that allowed them to flourish so abundantly. And partly, I’m equally sure, it has been a way of assuring that their names would live after them, blazoned across the entrances to such places as Carnegie Hall, Vanderbilt University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Field Museum, the Morgan Library, and the Ford Foundation.
Now, I have nothing against tooting one’s own horn, especially when the tooting does such great good as these places have. If my next book outsells The Da Vinci Code, I will be more than happy to join in the tooting.
But the natural tendency to seek eleemosynary immortality is not universal. Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932), who was instrumental in turning Sears, Roebuck from a tiny mail-order business and total corporate mess into the Wal-Mart of its day, made a colossal personal fortune in the process. He gave much of it away—over $70 million, when such a sum would have put you in the top ten of the Forbes 400 List, had it existed back then—paying for the construction of more than 5,300 schools for rural blacks in the American South, among numerous other worthy causes.
Yet today his name is hardly remembered at all outside of business-school courses, for he deliberately arranged things so that the foundation he established would spend all its money on good works and then go out of business, which it did in 1948. He thought his boundless generosity was a moral obligation, one he was more than happy to fulfill, not an opportunity to advance his own interests while also doing good.
But he shouldn’t be forgotten, for that reason alone, as well as the fact that he led a great American life and was one of the foremost businessmen of his time. Happily there is a new biography out on Julius Rosenwald, the first full-length one in more than sixty years: Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, by Peter M. Ascoli (who is Rosenwald’s grandson).
May 30, 2006
Beat Me, Congress, With a Title IX Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:20 PM EST Go to any .edu website, or look at an official publication from any American university, and tucked away in a corner you will find a statement saying something like: “The University complies with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, related Executive Orders 11246 and 11375, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1973 . . .” And on and on through dozens of federal, state, and local regulations, to the point where it almost sounds like a law-school reading list.
It’s nice to know that our colleges are so law-abiding. Yet as one surveys the ever-growing list of legislative enactments, court decisions, and bureaucratic guidelines that have been imposed on our institutions of higher education—as recipients of federal funds, as employers, and in many cases as government bodies themselves—to keep them from discriminating against disadvantaged groups, the question inevitably arises: Why? These laws may have been necessary when they were enacted, but why do they still exist? Leaving aside the question of whether affirmative-action regulations are ever justified, why apply them to colleges, by far the most left-wing, diversity-craving, less-racist-and-sexist-than-thou of any major group of institutions in American life? Why make a legal requirement of something they’re desperate to do anyway? It’s like forcing your kids to eat candy.
Liberated from the shackles of government rules, colleges would be free to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court, impose racial quotas and ethnic point systems at will, and practice any kind of affirmative action they want, with no need to dissemble. After all, academics have always been fiercely defensive of their freedoms and prerogatives. Here, for example, Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, objects vociferously to the extension of federal regulations to universities: “Faculty members should stand their ground: appeal to the libertarian streak in American culture, which says the government that governs least governs best, especially in [the] intellectual realm, where the quality of our ideas legitimizes our pursuit of truth, unmediated by ideology, positive law, or cultural bias.” (The regulations that Bowen is objecting to in this case are the Sarbanes-Oxley rules on financial transparency.)
So why do academics meekly accept, even welcome, the hundreds of externally imposed rules that mandate nondiscrimination in admissions, hiring, promotion, and many other facets of university life? Is it to preserve the jobs of affirmative-action and government-compliance officers, with whom faculty members tend to be in political sympathy? Do they want to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules, so that nonpractitioners of affirmative action won’t gain an advantage? Might it be the intellectual persistence of Progressive and New Deal policies, with their command-and-control approach? Or even a sneaking admiration for totalitarianism, as long as it comes from the left?
All these reasons are possible. But another explanation may be found in Shelby Steele’s recently published White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Tracing the roots of the titular phenomenon back half a century and more, Steele’s thesis is this: With the passage of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, and their swift acceptance by most Americans, the hostile phase of the civil-rights revolution was over, and the battle for black advancement should have shifted to different arenas. Instead the fighting continued, even gained strength, and grew heated, often violent; and with no more discriminatory laws to topple, civil-rights firebrands had to find new dragons to slay. Soon it was no longer enough for white Americans to simply not be racist; they had to prove that they weren’t, by both word and deed, and keep proving it over and over. This need for perpetual revolution and endless self-criticism, says Steele, has distorted American politics and life over the last several decades. And although Steele concentrates on race, the same principle applies to sexism, “able-ism,” and various other purported forms of prejudice.
An example of this sort of thinking can be found in, of all places, a recent article in Chemical & Engineering News by Prof. Richard Zare, chairman of the chemistry department at Stanford University (where Steele also works).
Zare notes that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, is starting to be used to enforce “gender equity” in university science departments, including such areas as faculty recruitment, retention of students, and professional advancement. He makes clear that he thinks this is a good idea. Now, I’ve met a few chemists in my day, and most of them would welcome yet another round of compliance reviews and requests for data about as much as they welcome teaching premeds. Yet Professor Zare is enthusiastic, almost giddy, about this extension of Title IX enforcement.
Here’s why: “I paraphrase what Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.) is reported to have said at a congressional breakfast: ‘I am Richard Zare, and I appear before you as a recovering racist and a recovering sexist.’ We are all embedded in a culture that broadcasts signals about the innate superiority of men, and it is very easy to suffer a relapse. Although I have a wife who works full-time at Stanford University and three professional daughters who make me very proud, I still can catch myself downplaying the worth of women scientists, even though I know better.”
Sentiments like these exemplify the notion that white guilt, or in this case white-male guilt, is like original sin: You’re born with it, everyone has it, and you can only get rid of it through an elaborate series of rituals. Like self-flagellating medieval monks, even enlightened souls who have impeccable nonsexist credentials (and will tell you about them) bemoan their inherently evil nature and cry out for correction. This explains many of the follies of current academia, both large (the diversity obsession) and small (linguistic tics like opposing the use of “American” to refer to the United States). A previous scholarly generation may have expiated its own racist-sexist-classist-colonialist-orientalist original sin, but any expiation quickly becomes standard practice, and each new generation must search ever harder to find new isms that can be added to the list of evils and ever more minute sins that can be magnified, bewailed, and subjected to ceremonial death by committee.
In the end, that may be the greatest perversion caused by white guilt. The fearless intellectuals of our college faculties, impenetrably protected by tenure from retaliation or discipline, have always boldly explored the frontiers of society, science, thought, and life itself, free from constraints and roving wherever their restless minds take them in search of truth. Bravely and tirelessly they fight off all attempts at restriction or punishment—yet when it comes to affirmative action, their response is: “Tie me up! Beat me! Tighter! Harder!” Regardless of how you feel about academics, it’s sad to see these doughty battlers and rugged individualists timidly submitting to the iron hand of oppression—or it would be, that is, if you didn’t get the sneaking feeling that they’re actually enjoying it.
May 27, 2006
It’s a Grand Old Flag Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:50 AM EST Americans have always had an unusually intense relationship with the national flag. Unlike many other flags it is never dipped in salute. It should not touch the ground. When old, it should be buried or—the canton cut out, thus making it no longer a flag—respectfully burned. The rules for its display are exact and extensive (no flag may ever fly higher; it must be on the left of all other flags as seen by the audience; it must be illuminated if flown at night; the canton is on the left if flown vertically but on the right when draped on a coffin, etc., etc.). Many songs have been written about , and indeed our national anthem is about it. An Englishman once suggested to me that the flag in America takes the place of the monarchy in Britain, symbolizing the very essence of the nation and its history as nothing else can. I’m not a psychologist, so I’ll have to leave that to others. But there is no doubt as to the power of its symbolism. That’s why there are periodic—and so far happily unavailing—attempts to constitutionally ban disrespect for it. When I was a child my brother and I often stayed with my grandparents on holiday weekends, and there was nothing we both enjoyed more than raising the enormous 46-star American flag that my great uncle, an army officer, had acquired in 1912 after Arizona and New Mexico had raised the number of stars to 48 and the flag had become surplus. It hung between two spruce trees in front of my grandparents’ house, and it took three people to raise it properly, one to hold and two to hoist. One year one of the dogs chased it as it waved gently in the breeze and tore holes in it, so the flag is now about two feet shorter than it ought to be. A few moths have gotten at it over the years, but the holes have been darned. Close on to a hundred years of Gordon children have helped to raise it and lower it. And this Gordon child, now 62, still does if the weather is fair enough. I’m happy to note that the weather report for this Memorial Day is good for flag flying and so up it will go once again. In a few years my brand new great niece—Grace Steele Gordon—will be old enough to help, as her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather did before her. I look forward to that.
May 26, 2006
The War Is Over! Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST Well, at least the Spanish-American one, that is.
Yesterday the Treasury, having lost in no fewer than five circuit courts of appeal, threw in the towel and decided to stop collecting a 3-percent tax on long-distance calls that had been “temporarily” imposed in 1898 to help finance the conflict with Spain. The conflict lasted a few months; the tax lasted 108 years.
There are few phrases more oxymoronic than “temporary tax.” Politicians have an infinite appetite for spending money, differing mostly on what and whom to spend it on. And therefore governments, like drunken sailors, are always short of cash. So yesterday’s temporary tax becomes today’s vital income to meet “real needs” (re-election, of course, being the greatest need of all).
The economic and technological world in which the long-distance tax was imposed vanished decades ago. In 1898 the telephone was only 22 years old, and there were only 681,000 subscribers to phone service in the entire country, which then had a population of about 75 million. Most of those subscribers were businesses. The few individuals who had phones of their own were wealthy, as phone service was very, very expensive. The basic annual charge was about $100, and a call to Chicago from New York, about as far as one could call at the turn of the twentieth century, was priced at $5.45. In 1898 my grandfather, then a 16-year-old runner on Wall Street, was earning $5 a week. (My grandfather would spend a nickel each day to buy lunch; he hated beer all his life, but he would buy one at a bar because that gave him access to the “free lunch,” and he would give the beer to the thirstiest-looking patron in the place.)
Today telephones are somewhere beyond ubiquitous. Six-year-olds take them to school along with their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. I have three lines at home plus a cell phone. I haven’t the faintest idea what it would cost me to call Chicago because the amount is too trivial to bother with.
The very meaning of long distance has more or less vanished. I can remember as a child being told to pipe down because some adult was talking long-distance. An overseas phone call was virtually a state occasion. Today many people pay only a lump sum every month for most long distance, and when you call a company?often toll-free?about something, the person at the other end might well be in Bangalore.
Regardless, the Treasury kept doggedly collecting this tax because Congress doggedly refused to repeal it, even though it had long since become a trivial part of federal income. The tax yielded about $5 billion a year, less than one quarter of one percent of federal revenues. Total federal tax receipts over the last two years have risen more than a hundred times that much. Thus the loss of $5 billion in revenues represents to the federal government about what $250 represents to a man with a take-home income of $100,000 that has been rising at the rate of $10,000 a year.
Finally phone companies began suing, arguing that the tax could only properly be imposed on individual calls, not on plans, and the courts agreed.
But if think your phone is untaxed, it isn’t. About 17 percent of your monthly cell phone bill is taxes and fees.
May 26, 2006
Internet Research with Dimension Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:40 AM EST A website called Internet Archive Wayback Machine has archived 55 billion pages of the Internet through the years, from 1994 to the present. If you’re curious, you can see the first incarnations of signature sites such as Yahoo!—which is not that all that different, graphically, from today’s version—or Amazon or eBay or even AmericanHeritage.com. For historical researchers, the site allows the use of Internet articles and opinion contemporary with unfolding events (some of which are collected in special sections; scroll down the homepage to see). The homepage is at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.
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