Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

Merle Miller's Coming Out

The writer Merle Miller was born, in 1919, in Marshalltown, Iowa, and grew up knowing something was wrong with him. From third grade on, the boys called him sissy and worse. He had three friends, all “aliens” like him: a Jewish boy, a girl in a wheelchair, and a woman with a clubfoot who sold tickets at the movies.

He was a great reader, and “read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates,” but no boy who was “tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, for instance, my mother insisted I go to the ‘Y’ to learn to swim. They swam nude at the ‘Y,’ and I never went. Lead me not into temptation.” Then,

I was fourteen when I happened on book called Winesburg, Ohio. I don’t know how. Maybe it was recommended by the librarian, a kind and knowing woman with the happy name of Alice Story. Anyway, there at last, in a story called “Hands,” were the words I had been looking for. I was not the only sissy in the world:

Adolph Myers was meant to be a teacher . . . In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

Sherwood Anderson’s story ended unhappily. Of course. How else could it end?

And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school becomes enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unthinkable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts.

I must have read “Hands” more than any story before or since. I can still quote it from beginning to end:

They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran into the darkness, they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster into the darkness.

Winesburg was published in 1919, and one of the terrifying things is that the people in any town in the United States, quite likely any city, too, would react very much the same way today, wouldn’t they?

I’ve just quoted from Miller’s landmark article, “What It Means to be a Homosexual.” The article was commissioned by and appeared in The New York Times Magazine in January 1971, a year and a half after the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969, during which the patrons of a gay bar in New York City’s West Village fought back against police trying to arrest them. Miller was the first mainstream American writer-journalist to declare his homosexuality. (His article, with an afterword, appears in his book On Being Different: What It Means to be a Homosexual [1971].)

In 1977 he was in Austin, Texas, working on a magazine article, and my boss, Elspeth Rostow, introduced me to him. Miller was a grinning, square-faced, bespeckled man, rather like Harry Truman, the subject of his biggest bestseller, Plain Speaking (1974). We made affable small talk. Then, perhaps challenged by the presence of someone who had shown so much courage, I mentioned his Times article and said I’d been touched at his naming the woman who led him to Anderson’s story.

“I knew she was dead,” he said. “They couldn’t hurt her.”

Dorothy Parker, To Whom We Owe So Much

Today’s politically correct anthologies of American literature are filled with rediscovered writing by rediscovered women and ethnic minority writers. Their writing is sometimes as interesting as well-known writing by well-known writers, but it’s nonsense to pretend that, in general, it is as culturally important. You can tell me that Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Rolla Lynn Riggs, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who all have work in the p.c. Heath Anthology of American Literature, are as central to understanding the 1920s as Dorothy Parker, but I won’t believe you.

I use the old-fashioned Norton Anthology of American Literature because, unlike the Heath, it includes Parker. Norton gives her only two and one-third pages and her overdone story “The Waltz,” but at least they say the right things about Parker and the 1920s:

This was the decade of “flaming youth,” the beginning of the “youth culture” that still characterizes American society. All over America, the activities of trend-setting and privileged young people were considered newsworthy. Dorothy Parker, a talented writer of wit and charm [question: are there untalented writers of wit and charm?], was among those whose sayings and doings were recorded in the gossip columns of New York newspapers and repeated around the country.

The anthology mentions that wisecracking suddenly came out of the closet and into newsprint and that “nobody was more skilled at it than Parker,” but it doesn’t print any of her wisecracks, nor her one immortal poem: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Here are some of Parker’s wisecracks:

He’s a writer for the ages -- four to eight.

One more drink and I’d have been under the host.

[Of the young actress Katharine Hepburn]
She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B, and put some distance between herself and a more experience colleague lest she catch acting from her.

If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

[Her contribution to the Algonquin Roundtable’s “Most Unlikely Headline” contest]
“POPE ELOPES”

If you’ve got to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

[Scene: two women meet before a door. The women: Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous, witty writer-politician wife of Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc.]
Luce (with a smile, gesturing for Parker to precede her): Age before Beauty.
Parker (stepping forward): Pearls before swine.

[On hearing that Miss Luce was kind to her inferiors]
And where does she find them?

Parker was a drunk and a perfectionist, which meant that her writing, unlike her fast mouth, pressed against deadlines. Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker (1925---), sometimes sent a copyboy round to her apartment to get what she’d written, superbly finished or not. One mid-day the copyboy pounded on Parker’s door for a long time before her hoarse voice came from within: “Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy. And vice-versa.”

Though not a twenties feminist in her personal life, Parker the public figure opened doors for women to be as funny and as raunchy as men. But at least once, we now know, one of her immortal wisecracks was topped by something even better, though then unprintable. The wits at the Algonquin Roundtable were told one lunchtime that President Calvin Coolidge had just died. "How can they tell?" Parker blurted out.

"He had an erection," said humorist Robert Benchley, Parker's sometime lover. Benchley’s comment passed down through his family and was only published in 1987.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (1924-2006)

Bill Coffin's mug shots after his arrest for civil disobedience in Montgomery, Ala., May 25, 1961.


Bill Coffin and I came to Yale in fall 1958, he as chaplain and I as freshman. At the ceremony to welcome my class (1000 males—coeducation at Yale, though only a decade off, was unthinkable), he stood out from all the other academics in dark blue robes because of his straight-shouldered leanness, youth (33), good looks, and smile. I had no idea who he was but I felt like smiling back. He was introduced and gave the invocation. My mother, in the balcony and more sensitive to eloquence than I, thought his prayer the best thing said all morning. “There wasn’t anything specifically Christian about it,” she said. “It was about courage and facing up to challenges.”

Later that semester, Coffin spoke to the 120 boys in the freshman program I was in. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and tie. I was again impressed by his muscularity and the ease with which he vaulted up to the stage. He made a joke about the vault, saying he was getting too old to do it. “I was in sports car last week,” he said. “Hardly could get in. Saw what it was like to return to the womb.” I remember nothing else he said, but I do remember thinking that he used his black-framed glasses and his occasional slurring of words to offset the overwhelming impression he gave of physical strength and beauty.

Still later that fall, he had an evening Q&A with our program. By then I would have heard that, before Yale, he had been chaplain at Williams College for a year and that the president had been glad for him move on because Coffin had attacked as undemocratic the College’s all-powerful fraternity system. Amazingly to me now, none of us boys asked Coffin about his past. I never heard him speak of his infantry service and spy work in World War II or his three years with the CIA at the start of the Cold War. I remember that he said of Yale “You’re in a place where people ask ‘What do I need to know to be certain?’ and would never think of asking ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” And later: “Look, if you guys want to go out and lay every woman you can, that’s fine,” though he was telling us there was a better way to live. I was amazed he would permit us such liberty.

In 1959 or ’60 or ’61 I learned that Coffin and some of the boys gathered around him in the campus chapel, Battell Hall, were going as “Freedom Riders” to border states like Maryland and further south. They put their bodies on the line, nonviolently, to try to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, and hotels that didn’t serve Negroes. As a well-brought-up northern liberal, I opposed segregation, but I don’t think it occurred to me to join Coffin. If it did, I rejected the idea out of cowardice, not wanting to be arrested (Coffin was three times) or beaten up by the lunatics, as I thought of them, down south.

At the end of my undergraduate years I went to see Coffin during his open office hours. I was now grown up, 22, married, and I found life to be just as I had expected: desperate, sad, and boring. I was prepared for this by my temperament and, certainly no less, by the literature classes I'd taken. Sophocles and Shakespeare, Melville and Chekhov—all the greats demonstrate that suffering is inescapable, there being no forgiveness from the responsibility of fate and time. Students more sensible than I shrugged off this knowledge as soon as they left the classroom. I believed it. I felt it deep within me.

Not only did literature teach me that life was tragic, it taught me how to respond to tragedy. With stoicism. With unembittered resignation. I was so good at doing this I got the idea that perhaps I should go into religion. Though he didn't say so, Coffin was annoyed that I, not a member of his church, of any church, was bothering him with my problems. Didn't I know he had important things to do? He folded into a soft chair across the room and listened with impatience while I wondered aloud whether I was religious enough to go to divinity school. I said—and how long it took me to get it out—that, though I wasn't at all sure I believed in God, I knew I was looking for Him. "Have you ever thought that maybe God is looking for you?" Coffin said.

I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to seem swell-headed (was I important enough for God to look for?) or too humble. It struck me as a good idea for God to be on the lookout for people since otherwise, if God really tried to hide, no one was going to find Him. "I don't know," I said. "That hadn't occurred to me. It's a nice idea." It was Karl Barth's idea, but I didn't know this.

I remember another thing from our interview. Coffin was talking about one's vocation when he said, with great feeling, "What we hope to avoid is being in the position of the man who, on his wedding night, suddenly realizes he married the wrong woman." "My God!" I thought, "he knows!" Then, "But he can't."

When I returned to Yale for graduate school in 1968, Coffin was nationally famous for leading the fight against our war in Vietnam. With Dr. Spock—the Dr. Spock—he had been convicted of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid to draft. In 1970, their convictions were overturned on appeal, and the NYT ran a front-page photo of Coffin just after he got the news while playing tennis. He was smiling, sweating, and holding a racket. By then he had divorced his first wife, the mother of his three children, and announced his engagement to his second in a curious press release that mentioned her first husband’s success as head of Encyclopedia Britannica sales in Japan.

I next encountered Coffin in his 1977 memoir, Once to Every Man, which I read to find out what happened to that first marriage, because his wife had been the pianist Artur Rubinstein’s gorgeous daughter Eva, who played Anne Frank’s sister in the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Coffin didn’t discuss their problems but he did say something that helped me justify to myself my later getting a divorce. He said, though not in these words, that he had come to realize that he wasn’t as special as he’d hoped—indeed, wasn’t special at all. If other people sometimes needed to divorce, there was no reason for him to think he would escape.

In 2002, I saw Coffin when he officiated at the memorial service for his friend R.W.B. Lewis, the Yale professor who’d been my mentor. Coffin was suffering the heart problems that killed him, his hair was white, and he walked with a cane in one hand and with his third wife holding his other arm. But his welcoming smile was unchanged. In the service he spoke about why death was necessary, giving several reasons. The one I remember was environmental: we had to make room in the world for others. If no one died, then “no Aaron Copland. No Dick Lewis. No you. No me.” He was smiling.

I know I am not the only Yalie between age 50 and 65 for whom his death comes as a reproof. Coffin lived boldly, involving himself in the great public questions of his day—civil rights, Viet Nam, nuclear-war planning. The world could easily have done without me. It was damn lucky to have him.

Anthem of 1950s America

It was common for educated liberal Americans in the 1950s to feel, as the novelist John Cheever wrote in 1959, that we were living in hell. The tragedy of life was then as much talked about as multiculturalism is today. The "tragic vision" was smuggled aboard in the New Critical ideology we learned in our college English classes. This vision fed upon the Cold War and on what we'd learned of human depravity in World War II and Korea. The vision emphasized our profound limits: said we couldn't expect to improve life much -- would fail to overcome our own failings, to say nothing of society's. All we could do was stoically keep muddling on, as we had in the war, pushing toward small, nearby, mainly private goals. At times we almost felt we were living a “long day’s journey into night,” which Eugene O’Neill play burst on the scene in 1956 and won all the prizes.

This narrow view of human possibility was set to music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur in their failed 1956 comic operetta, Candide. At the end of the show, Candide -- having been many times seduced, swindled, and murdered -- turns up in Westphalia, where he began, and finds Cunegonde, the woman he's always loved, who herself has been raped and killed again and again. Her optimism absurdly undiminished, Cunegonde says now they can start over and make a life as harmonious and noble as their "master," the tutor Pangloss, promised them. Candide interrupts:

No, we won't "think noble," because we're not noble. We won't live in beautiful harmony, because there's no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best, and live out our lives. Dear God! that's all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.

And he sings the anthem of the fifties as I knew the decade:

You’ve been a fool, and so have I
But come and be my wife.
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.

Cunegonde immediately sees the wisdom of this new vision of life; she sings:

I thought the world was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

The whole chorus takes up the song, their sound so big the words blur and you have to get them from the script:

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please,
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

And now the chorus overwhelms the orchestra, goes a cappella in multipart harmony for a Messiah-like climax that shakes the stage and phonograph speaker:

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow!
And make our garden grow!

In the original cast recording, you can hear a woman’s voice -- Barbara Cook’s as Cunegonde, I assume -- enter a split second early on the final “And.” I like thinking that much that was positive in my youth is symbolized by Miss Cook’s impulsiveness and energy too great to be contained.

Abortion and Capital Punishment

This article will offend some readers. If you find you are offended, please stop reading it and try another article.

As you may have found from reading other articles on this website, I believe feelings have an enormous influence on what many people--not all--think about this or that issue. Such people (I am one) find it tiresome or difficult to make much of abstract ideas; instead, their emotions get caught up by concrete instances that “illustrate” an abstraction. These people arrive at many of their opinions, then, via an epiphany, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking.”

Take me and abortion. Abortion was illegal and totally disreputable in my youth (I was born in 1940). Countless tears and shotgun marriages and two great American novels--An American Tragedy (1925) and The End of the Road (1958)--turned on this fact. In the late 1960s, my former college roommate the late Joe Chubb got a small celebrity on New York nighttime radio by espousing far-out opinions, among them abortion on demand.

I thought Joe was nuts. I thought abortion--I still think it--a clumsy and cruel way to practice birth control, though I knew it was the method postwar Japan had used to keep its population from growing beyond what its landmass could support. Abortion sickened me morally and physically; like many males, I was squeamish about blood and the body’s liquids.

Then in 1971, my sister Missy’s five-year-old daughter, Julie Woods, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, fanconi anemia, in which, like leukemia, the marrow fails to produce sufficient red blood cells. Julie underwent many transfusions and spinal taps. My father wept telling me about the little girl’s courage. “She’ll do anything Missy says she has to,” he said. “She just holds out her arms to be picked up.”

The doctors said Julie would probably live until puberty, and by that time science might have a solution, because real progress was being made against leukemia. My father took early retirement, and my parents moved from the New York suburbs to Vermont to be near Missy and her family.

Julie died three months later. My sister and brother-in-law, Woody, were in shock. So was their older child, a seven-year-old boy. My mother tried to act as though nothing had happened. My father drank and raged. Because there would always be a 50 percent chance that their offspring would inherit the anemia, Missy and Woody started adoption procedures.

Several months later, though she was on the IUD, my sister got pregnant. By this time, a year before Roe-vs.-Wade, Vermont had laws to permit abortion when there was a likelihood the fetus was damaged. Missy decided to have an abortion and told my parents after a Sunday lunch. My father fainted. My sister had the abortion.

Having seen what Julie’s suffering and death did to my family, I realized I would have done a lot, certainly broken the law, to get Missy that abortion. If I wanted my sister to have an abortion when she needed one, I realized also that I had to allow other women that choice. If a woman’s reasons for aborting weren’t as good as my sister’s, well, they were good enough for the woman. Who was I to say that her suffering was less than Missy’s?

Thus I came to accept abortion because of an emotion-charged event; I had an epiphany. The Pope or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can say abortion is always wrong, goes against God’s law, etc., etc., and I will answer by pointing to a specific instance where I know it was right.

(Later reflection. "If we could get this issue away from the abortion professionals and their orthodoxies, we could reach a sensible solution," the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on April 22, 2007. "Abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward." I would accept this with the proviso, which I image Brooks would agree to, that pregnant girls who feared to inform their parents could seek a judge's authorization to have an abortion.)

•

I am less sure how I feel about capital punishment. Innocent people can be judged guilty and executed, and that is terribly wrong. Further, those whom the state seeks to put to death are, in huge disproportion, the poor, especially poor African-Americans. This is wrong too.

But . . . another epiphany. In the aftermath of the movie Dead Man Walking (1995), PBS’s Frontline series did a program on Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who counsels Louisiana death row inmates and who wrote the autobiography on which the film was based. Sister Helen was shown being feted by those who agree with her anti-capital punishment position and applaud the fact that she and the movie have made such punishment a matter of national debate.

Frontline showed several scenes of a scared white man on death row for the rape and murder of a young woman. Evenhandedly, the program also showed two small scenes of the woman’s parents, who want the condemned man executed. The wife of the couple said of him something like, “His life isn’t much, but he gets to see his family and celebrate Christmas. I don’t see why he should. We will never see or speak with our daughter again.”

To me, that seems an unanswerable argument. If that man, being of sound mind, raped and killed that woman, he should die. Sister Helen argues that to kill him is wrong because it implies that he isn’t human and that it isn’t fair to judge him by the worst thing he did. I agree he is human but think there are some acts so bad that there is no forgiveness for them except from God.

Though human, he, by his act, has cut himself off from the human community. Humanity, acting through the impersonal instrument of the state, may choose to make his estrangement permanent--to say, in effect: “When you murdered, you forfeited the right to live among us. We the people of this state have therefore decided to cast you out.”

Thinking about Hiroshima

According to a 1995 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approve of our dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The younger the people, the less they approve: among people 18-29, approval was 46 percent, with 49 percent disapproving. The students I taught in the late 1990s almost all disapproved.

I do too, intellectually. I know the Japanese were giving signs, albeit ambiguous, that they might sue for peace. I think there must have been some way to demonstrate the power of the bomb without killing 80,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer. But that’s my intellect talking.

Another me speaks when I read about the bombing in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s No High Ground (1960). The Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb, was accompanied by another plane, the Great Artiste, which parachuted equipment to record the blast.

The anti-aircraft gunners on Mukay-Shima Island in Hiroshima harbor could now see two planes, approaching the eastern edge of the city at very high altitude. As they watched, at precisely seventeen seconds after 8:15 [a.m.], the planes suddenly separated. The leading aircraft made a tight, diving turn to the right. The second plane performed an identical maneuver to the left, and from it fell three parachutes which opened and floated slowly down toward the city.

The few people in Hiroshima who caught sight of the two planes saw the parachutes blossom as the aircraft turned away from the city. Some cheered when they saw them, thinking the enemy planes must be in trouble and the crews were starting to bail out.

When I first read this, I thought, “Ah, gotcha, you bastards!” rather as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did in the 1991 Gulf War when he realized the Iraqi air force and thus the enemy’s eyes were wiped out and so couldn’t know what he was cooking up on the western flank. “You think our guys are in trouble,” I thought. “Sorry, Charlie! It’s you.”

I believe this is a useful response for an American to have, even if one quickly despises it, because it shows us--shows you, reader, if you're an American--that, had you had the authority, you might have dropped the bomb to protect the lives of our soldiers or at least been among the 85 percent of our citizens who told Gallup in August 1945 they approved of the bombing.

Now an embarrassing confession. I thought this insight of mine important enough to share with John Hersey, who wrote Hiroshima (1946), the classic account of the bombing. In 1970, he was the Master of Pierson College at Yale College, and I sought him out during his office hours. He was tall, thin, and immaculate looking in blue slacks and white sweater; he reminded me of a Greek column with a capital of gray hair. What I was saying, as I trust I understood then, was that his book told only one side of the story--which was of course all he intended to do. I said that American students at that time (Vietnam!) needed to know the other side. He said he had told that story in his novel The War Lover (1959). He also said he agreed that it was wrong to draw a moral equivalence, as some on the left were doing (and do), between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. He also told me how touched he was by the mail he got from young people all over the world thanking him for informing them about the horror of nuclear bombs.

I didn’t bring up the question of our bombing Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. I don’t think that can be justified.

William Graham Sumner

One of the most influential of all Yalies lived exactly 100 hundred years before me: William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). He belonged to the half century-plus of American academics who asserted the importance of what they did by using all three of their names. Charles William Eliot, William Lyon Phelps, George Herbert Mead, G. Stanley Hall, Henry Seidel Canby: it’s gravy on the tongue. These men -- and with few exceptions (M. Carey Thomas, for instance) they were men -- were fighting to establish the seriousness of the American research university against the acknowledged leadership of the German universities.

Sumner taught social economy at Yale for 37 years, but he wasn’t a researcher in our terms: he was a propagandist, the Johnny Appleseed of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. His belief was that society is best served when the strong crush the weak. He adamantly opposed aid to the poor. He was also an Episcopal minister. He saw no contradiction.

His 1881 essay “Sociology” has this marvelous sentence:

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

In other words, you can’t change society and, if you try to do so, you make it worse.

His belief, and the illogic on which it is based, still poison American public-policy thinking.

A. Philip Randolph

Of 20th century African-Americans who advanced the cause of democracy, certainly half a dozen and probably more will be as much remembered in two hundred years as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Crispus Attucks, Ethan Allen, Molly Pitcher, and Nathan Hale are today.

Consider the obvious candidates: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, Ralph Bunche, Medgar Evers,ß Louie Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Roy Wilkins, Nat King Cole, Ralph Ellison, Sammy Davis Jr., Emmett Till, and, certainly not least, A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979).

Randolph, a man of refinement (he spoke like a Shakespearean actor) and unfailing dignity, changed American history on four occasions. First, he was the founder in 1925 and for 43 years the president of the only successful trade union of black workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Despite enormous pressure against blacks wielding such power, he got his union accepted into the American Federation of Labor and, in 1937, won recognition from the Pullman Car Company.

Second, he forced President Franklin Roosevelt to open defense-industry and government employment to blacks and other minorities on the eve of World War II. By 1940, America had become, in Roosevelt’s memorable phrase, “the arsenal of democracy.” The nation boomed, building weapons for ourselves and our friends (we hoped only they would have to use them). But Negroes, even skilled carpenters, cement workers, and electricians, were getting only a small percentage of these jobs. Standard Steel Corporation in Kansas City said, “We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years, and do not plan to start now.” An official of the International Association of Machinists at Boeing Aircraft said, “Labor has been asked to make many sacrifices in this war and has made them gladly, but this sacrifice [working alongside blacks] is too great.” A war housing project in Newport, Rhode Island, refused to accept Negro families, announcing in a press release, “In these critical times it is more important than ever to preserve the principle of white supremacy.”

Though only 10 percent of the population, Negroes, in part because they couldn’t get work elsewhere, were 16.1 percent of those enlisting in the military in 1940-41. But they were sent to Jim Crow units or into service and supply duties—kitchen work, truck driving. Randolph and other Negro leaders including Mary McLeod Bethune, a college president and Roosevelt’s special advisor on minority affairs, complained about these injustices to the President and, more often, to his wife, Eleanor. At Mrs. Roosevelt’s prompting, the President, the Navy Secretary, and the Under-secretary of War (our Department of Defense was then called the Department of War) met with Randolph and Walter White, head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League on September 27, 1940. Two weeks after the meeting, the White House issued a statement that the meeting’s participants had agreed to the War department policy: “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”

Negroes around the nation were outraged, felt their leaders had sold them out. Randolph announced he was “shocked and amazed” but refrained from publishing the memorandum he and the other black leaders had given the President, calling for immediate integration of the armed forces and colorblind hiring in defense work.

He realized that the time for public statements, however strongly worded, and private meetings with government officials, however cordial, were over. What was needed now was power in the streets, and this could only be achieved through mass action by America’s blacks. On January 15, 1941, he issued a statement to the press: “Negro America must bring its power and pressure to bear upon the agencies and representatives of the Federal government to exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country.” He called for 10,000—later 100,000—black Americans to march together in Washington under the slogan “WE LOYAL NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZENS DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY.”

Today, thanks to Randolph, organized mass meetings in Washington to protest or inspire government action take place every year or so, but one had never happened before. The nearest thing to it was the Bonus March of June-July 1932 when 20,000 World War I veterans, their families and supporters camped out in hovels and got brutally evicted by the U.S. army. Reasonable people were alarmed when Randolph formed his March on Washington Committee and later announced that the event would take place on July 1, a Tuesday. The NAACP and Urban League offered only tepid assistance, and so to persuade the White House that the march would take place and draw thousands of people, Randolph made himself ubiquitous in Harlem, talking it up on the street and in stores, restaurants, pool halls, bars, banks, and beauty shops. He did this not only to tell people about the march but also because he was sure that the FBI was shadowing him and would report how much support he had.

Randolph invited leading New Dealers to address the marchers, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the Secretaries of Labor and War. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him that the march was a bad idea. President Roosevelt and the Office of Production Management sent letters to defense plants asking them to “take the initiative to open the door of employment to all loyal and qualified workers, regardless of race, creed, or color.” Randolph said that wasn’t enough: he wanted something legally enforceable “with teeth in it.” The White House then enlisted New York City’s liberal mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, an old friend of Randolph’s, to persuade him to call off the march.

La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt met with Randolph on June 13. As Randolph remembered:

Mrs. Roosevelt reminded me of her sympathy for the cause of racial justice, and assured me she intended to continue pressuring the President to act. But the march was something else, she said: it just could not go on. Had I considered the problems? she asked. Where would all those thousands of people eat and sleep in Jim Crow Washington?

I told her I myself did not see that as a serious problem. The demonstrators would simply march into the hotels and restaurants, and order food and shelter. But that was just the point, she said; that sort of thing could lead to violence. I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads. I told her I was sorry, but the march would not be called off unless the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry.

Mrs. Roosevelt and La Guardia reported to the President that the march was going to go ahead unless he himself intervened. Roosevelt called for a June 18 meeting of the march leaders, his principle war advisors, and La Guardia. Until the meeting Randolph was asked to suspend all preparations for the march as a goodwill gesture. He refused. In his excellent 1973 biography of Randolph, Jervis Anderson reconstructs the June 18 meeting:

“Hello, Phil,” the President said. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”

“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President.”

“I was sure you did,” Roosevelt replied. “Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”

“That’s right, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt, a man of great charm, had embarked upon one of his favorite filibuster stratagems. But, finding he could not engage Randolph in small talk, he turned raconteur and started regaling his audience with old political anecdotes. Randolph, unfailingly good mannered, allowed himself to be entertained. But the clock was running . . . so, with as much graciousness as he commanded, he broke in:

“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries. Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?”

“Mr. President, we want you to do something that will enable Negro workers to get work in these plants.”

“Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I surely want them to work, too. I’ll call up the heads of the various defense plants and have them see to it that Negroes are given the same opportunity to work in defense plants as any other citizen in the country.”

“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph said. “We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive, and affirmative.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”

“Well, Phil,” Roosevelt replied, “you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Question like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President. The march cannot be called off.”

“How many people do you plan to bring?”

“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt didn’t believe Randolph. He turned to Walter White, whom he knew better, and said, “Walter, how many people will really march?”

White didn’t blink. He said, “One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”

Anderson, Randolph’s biographer, believes Randolph and White were bluffing: that the march would draw many more than 10,000 people but many less than 100,000.

“You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt said. “Somebody might get killed.”

Randolph said that that was unlikely, especially if the President himself came out and addressed the gathering.

The President was not amused. “Call it off,” he said curtly, “and we’ll talk again.”

Randolph said he had a pledge to honor with his people, and he could not go back to them with anything less than an executive order. Budging somewhat, Roosevelt suggested that Randolph and White confer with his presidential assistants over some way of solving the problem with defense contractors.

“Not defense contractors alone,” Randolph broke in. “The government, too. The government is the worst offender.”

This, Roosevelt seemed to feel, was going a bit too far, and he informed the president of the porters’ union that it was not the policy of the President of the United State to rule, or be ruled, with a gun at his head.

“Then,” Randolph replied, “I shall have to stand by the pledge I’ve made to the people.”

At this point Mayor La Guardia intervened. “Gentlemen, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march,” he said. “I suggest we all begin to seek a formula”—a compromise both sides could live with.

A committee was appointed to work it out. On behalf of the committee, Joseph Rauh, a young lawyer in the Office for Emergency Management, drew up drafts of an executive order and read them over the phone to Randolph, back in New York preparing for the march. Randolph turned down draft after draft as not strong enough. Finally, Rauh lost patience. “Who the hell is the guy Randolph?” he asked his superiors. “What the hell has he got over the President of the United States?”

On June 25, six days before the march, the President signed an order Randolph accepted: Executive Order 8802 outlawing discrimination in all defense industries and the government, and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to “investigate complaints of discrimination” and take “appropriate steps to redress grievances.”

Randolph called off the march. When young activists excoriated him for this, Randolph replied: “The Executive Order was issued upon the condition that the march be called off. The march . . . was not to serve as an agency to create a continuous state of sullen unrest and blind resentment among Negroes.” There was enough of that, he said. To have allowed the march go forward “would have promptly and rightly been branded as a lamentable species of infantile leftism and an appeal to sheer prima donna dramatics.”

But Randolph was conscious that he had won from white America only part of what he sought. Negroes were employed in defense industries, but they were still in a segregated military. And here he made his third contribution to our history.

By 1948 it was clear that the U.S. might soon be at war again, this time with the Soviet Union. When President Harry S Truman sent forward a bill renewing the military draft without any mention of desegregation, Randolph saw his chance: he formed the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and demanded Truman issue an executive order ending military segregation. On March 22, the President invited Randolph, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charles Houston, a lawyer for the NAACP, to discuss the matter. The meeting was friendly until Randolph said, “Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”

“I wish you hadn’t made that statement,” Truman said. “I don’t like it at all.”

“But, Mr. President,” said Charles Houston, “don’t you want to know what is happening in the country?”

Truman said he certainly did; a President was surrounding by people who didn’t tell him the truth.

“Well, that’s what I’m giving you, Mr. President,” Randolph said. “I’ve giving you the facts.”
Truman told him to go ahead.

“Mr. President, as you know, we are calling upon you to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces.”

Truman thanked his visitors for coming and said there didn’t seem to be anything more they could “talk fruitfully” about.

Nine days later, Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “This time Negroes will not take a Jim Crow draft lying down.” He said he would personally “advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.” He promised a movement of mass peaceful civil disobedience, like Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British rule, and expected the movement to attract not only blacks. “I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths in schools and colleges who are today vigorously shedding the prejudices of their parents and professors. I shall urge them to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery.”

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal committee member who supported Randolph’s goal, was a former law school professor and was appalled at the means he proposed. Morse and Randolph engaged in a graceful debate that set forth the do-or-die terms under which the Black Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s would take place:

SENATOR MORSE: Your proposal, and put me straight on this, is really based upon conviction that because your Government has not give you certain social, economic, and race protection from discrimination because of race, color, or creed, you feel that even in a time of national emergency when your government and your country itself may be at stake, you are justified in saying to any segment of our populous—whether it is the color group or, as you say in your statement, a white group of like sympathies—that in under those circumstances, you would be justified then in saying, “Do not shoulder arms in protection of your country in this national emergency”?

MR. RANDOLPH: That is a correct statement, Mr. Senator. I may add that it is my deep conviction that in taking such a position we are doing our country a great service. Our country has come out before the world as a moral leader of democracy, and it is preparing its defense forces and aggressive forces upon the theory that it must do this to protect democracy in the world.

Well, now, I consider that if this country does not develop the democratic process at home and make the democratic process work by giving the very people whom they propose to draft in the Army to fight for them democracy, democracy then is not the type of democracy that ought to be fought for, and, as a matter of fact, the policy of segregation in the armed forces and in other avenues of our life is the greatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands of Russia and international communism today.

SENATOR MORSE: I understand your position, Mr. Randolph, but for the record I want to direct your attention to certain basic legal principles which I want to say, most kindly, are being overlooked in your position. I want to discuss your position from the standpoint of a couple of hypotheticals and relate them to certain legal principles which I think you ought to give very careful consideration to before you follow the course of action which you have indicated.

Let us assume this hypothetical. A country proceeds to attack the United States or commits acts which make it perfectly clear that our choice is only the choice of war. Would you take the position then that unless our Government granted the demands which are set out in your testimony, or most of the demands set out in your testimony, that you could recommend a course of civil disobedience to our Government?

MR. RANDOLPH: In answer to that question, the Government now has time to change its policy on segregation and discrimination, and if the Government does not change its policy on segregation and discrimination in the interests of the very democracy it is fighting for, I would advocate that Negroes take no part in the Army.

SENATOR MORSE: My hypothetical assumes that in the time of emergency set forth in my hypothetical, our Government does not follow in any degree whatsoever the course of action that you recommend.

MR. RANDOLPH: Yes.

SENATOR MORSE: So the facts in the hypothetical then are thrust upon us, and I understand your answer to be that under those circumstances, even though it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight then to exist as a country, you would still recommend the program of civil disobedience?

MR. RANDOLPH: Because I would believe that it is in the best interest of the soul of our country. And I unhesitatingly and very adamantly hold that it is the only way by which we are going to be able to make America wake up and realize that we do not have democracy here as long as one black man is denied all the rights enjoyed by all the white men in this country.

SENATOR MORSE: Now, facing realistically that hypothetical situation and the assumption that it has come to pass, do you have any doubt then that this Government as presently constituted under the Constitution that governs us would necessarily follow a legal course of action of applying the legal doctrine of treason to that conduct? Would you question with me that that is the doctrine that undoubtably will be applied at that time under the circumstances of my hypothetical?

MR. RANDOLPH: I would anticipate nationwide terrorism against Negroes who refuse to participate in the armed forces, but I believe that that is the price we have to pay for the democracy that we want. In other words, if there are sacrifices and sufferings, terrorism, concentration camps, whatever they may be, if that is the only way by which Negroes can get their democratic rights, I unhesitatingly say that we have to face them.åß

SENATOR MORSE: But on the basis of the law as it now exists, going back to my premise that you and I know of no legal exemption from participation in the military service in the defense of our country other than that of conscientious objection on religious grounds, not on the grounds on which you place your civil disobedience, that then the doctrine of treason would be applied to those people participating in that disobedience?

MR. RANDOLPH: Exactly. I would be willing to face that doctrine on the theory and on the grounds that we are serving a Higher Law than the law which applies the act of treason to us when we are attempting to win democracy in this country and to make the soul of America democratic.

I would contend that we are serving a Higher Law than that law with its legal technicalities, which would include the group which fights for democracy even in the face of the crisis you would portray—I would contend that they are serving a Higher Law than that law.

SENATOR MORSE: But you would fully expect that because the law of treason in this country relates to certain specific overt acts on the part of the individual, irrespective of what he considers to be his spiritual or moral motivation and justification, that there would not be any other course of action for our Government to follow but indictments for treason?

MR. RANDOLPH: May I add something there, Mr. Senator?

SENATOR MORSE: First, do you agree with me that that would be certain to follow?

MR. RANDOLPH: Let me add here, in connection with that, that we would participate in no overt acts against our Government, no overt acts of any kind. In other words, ours would be one of non-resistance; ours would be one of non-cooperation; ours would be one of non-participation in the military forces of this country.

I want you to know that we would be willing to absorb the violence, to absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes, and we, as a matter of fact, consider that we are more loyal to our country than the people who perpetrate segregation and discrimination upon Negroes because of race or color.

I want it thoroughly understood that we would certainly not be guilty of any kind of overt act against the country but we would not participate in any military operation as segregated Jim Crow slaves in the Army.

Four months later, on July 26, 1948, not wanting to alienate Negro voters in the North, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the armed forces.

Seven years later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a politically active black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her bus seat to white man and was arrested for violating the city’s Jim Crow laws. Thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first battle of the Black Revolution that led to the sweeping civil rights laws of the mid-1960s. The boycott was led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., a disciple of Gandhi and Randolph who understood the force of nonviolent obedience to a Higher Law.

The crowning event of the civil rights movement was the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The march, which drew the largest crowd Washington had seen, more than 200,000 people, was Randolph’s idea and his fourth contribution to our history. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he introduced King to the crowd as “the man who personifies the moral leadership of the civil rights revolution.”

The actual march itself, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, was scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. At 11:20 the eager, well-behaved crowd began strolling down the mall in advance of its leaders—who in fact never caught up, the crush of bodies being too thick.

The media was interviewing Randolph and other march dignitaries near the Washington Monument when Randolph noticed the crowd moving and said, according to one reporter, “Wait! That’s my parade.” According to another reporter, he said, “Wait! Those are my people.”

Both were true.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Stowe (1811-96) began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her first book, in 1851, at age 40, having borne seven children. She would later say the book was dictated by God, but the precipitating earthly cause was certainly the passage, in 1850, of the Fugitive Slave Law, which legally obliged the people of the North to return escaped slaves to their southern owners. Before that law, it was possible for northerners to overlook the Peculiar Institution down South; now northerners became accomplices in maintaining slavery. And what did they know of slavery? Not much. Southerners gave glowing accounts of it or argued that it was necessary to subdue an inferior race. Few northern writers—Frederick Olmsted was the exception—journeyed south and reported what they found.

Stowe, who had lived 18 years in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, knew slavery from people who had endured it and dared to try and escape. She determined, as she says in the book’s autobiographical “Concluding Remarks,” to “exhibit [slavery] in a living dramatic reality.” The picture she painted caused shock waves throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. 562,000 British women signed a proclamation expressing their admiration and gratitude to her. Queen Victoria wrote a fan letter. The book was banned in the South; young southern whites pledged never to read it. But Stowe continued to get vilifying letters from southerners, including an anonymous package that contained a black human ear.

Many historians would agree with the southern writer Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “contributed more than any one thing to slavery’s abolition in [Stowe’s] generation.” When President Lincoln met Stowe at the White House during the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, not entirely in jest, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.”

Literary critics have pooh-poohed the book for sentimentality and structural clumsiness. Stowe herself admitted she wrote with “no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.” Nonetheless, the book has an amazing vitality and variety of character. The English writer George Orwell believed that it will outlive the collected works of Virginia Woolf; the American writer Kurt Vonnegut suggested that literary excellence should be measured in units called “stowes,” in honor of the only fiction writer whose work made a real difference in the world.

That was precisely what Stowe wanted to do. She ends the book by directly addressing her readers, northern and southern, admitting that her story has “given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. . . . Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ.”

Constantly throughout the book Stowe tears her fiction apart to say, in effect, “It’s true! Something like this is going on right now. Only it’s worse!” Her unremitting insistence that readers read through her story into the reality behind it is what moves me most in the book. Nearly all current editions cut the few short footnotes Stowe put in the book, but the cultural historian Russel B. Nye left them in his Washington Square Press edition (1962; out of print), which I read and from whose introduction I have gratefully borrowed here.

In Chapter 12, Haley, a slave-trader, purchases the slave Lucy and sells off her 10-month-old son behind her back. Discovering this, Lucy crumples in tears on the deck of the boat taking her south (a short while later she will commit suicide by throwing herself overboard). Stowe continues:

Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is a vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”* But Tom, as we see, being a poor ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these.

That footnote is Stowe’s. It shows how deep her fury was. She wanted the reverend son-of-a-bitch who said that awful, stupid thing to be known, held accountable, and reviled.

*Dr. Joel Parker, of Philadelphia.

Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

World War II in St. Louis

No doubt the saddest song of World War II is Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, and Buck Ram’s 1943 “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams).” For years it was banned from Armed Forces Radio as defeatist.

A song I find even more moving, and certainly better, is Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the upbeat Vincente Minnelli movie about the life a comfortable St. Louis family, the Alonzo Smiths, in the year of the 1904 World's Fair. Meet Me in St. Louis offers itself as a pure piece of Americana, right down to the Currier and Ivesesque sampler pictures of the four seasons before each of the movie’s four segments. Nonetheless, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is, I suggest, a war song and told WWII audiences how to deal with the circumstances they faced.

Judy Garland sings the song to her sister, six-year-old Margaret O'Brien, who is hysterical because their father, Leon Ames, has told them that the Smith family is moving from St. Louis to New York City so he can get ahead in his company. Garland tries to comfort O’Brien, saying they will soon love New York and have just the sort of joyous Christmases they’ve had in St. Louis. For now, she sings, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas. . . . Some day all your problems will be far away.” Her closing verse:

One day soon we all may be together,
If the fates allow.
Until then we'll try to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Not too cheery that! We “may” be together, “if the fates allow.” Garland isn’t talking here of the Smith family’s changing cities, but of people being reunited, God willing, after a cataclysm like war. And how are the Smiths to get through the bad present time to the—God willing—better future? The expression Garland uses is a Britishism and an anachronistic, "muddle through," a phrase the English poet Louis MacNeice popularized in 1940 to describe the blundering, inexorable way the British were going to win the war.

"Muddle through," though not a phrase we Americans used much, was the way we thought of the British coping with war and the way we were encouraged to deal with the war ourselves: hanging on, hanging tough, pushing slowly ahead, having a merry little Christmas till it was over over there and Johnny came marching home again to sit with us under the apple tree.