Disagreeing with Thomas Sowell on the sixties

(Guest Column from the 11 June 2006 op-ed page of the Pine Bluff Commercial.)

In his May 31st column criticizing liberalism in the 1960s ("Liberals are staying busy preserving their own vision of history"), Thomas Sowell tries to refute the recollection of a liberal political activist who is quoted as saying [to Sowell], "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Sowell says it was instead people like Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley who kept the country together during the riots of the '60s: "Even during the 1960s, riots were far more common and deadly in liberal bastions like New York City than in Chicago, where the original Mayor Daley announced on television that he had given his police orders to 'shoot to kill' if riots broke out."

Because of this, Sowell says, "the net effect was that Daley saved lives while liberals saved their vision." But it seems to me that the net effect of Sowell's comparison of rioting in New York and Chicago, and his quoting of Mayor Daley, is to give the wrong impression.

The 1969 Britannica Book of the Year, in an article on race relations, describes the contrast between Chicago and New York right after the April 4, 1968, murder of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis:  "In Chicago, angry blacks burned down blocks and, in the end, 12,500 troops were needed to bring the city under control.  In New York, a cool mayor kept violence to a minimum by walking the streets of Harlem three nights in a row, but many wondered if nonviolence was dead."

The yearbook says that on April 15, 1968, Daley called for police to "shoot to maim" looters as well as "shoot to kill" any arsonists.  It also reports that after complaints from civil rights activists, both orders were "subsequently modified."  The orders therefore represent failures on the part of Daley and the Chicago police, not successes.  And Daley's iron-fisted tactics failed again during the antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968.

Sowell makes an issue of the fact that more congressional Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But liberals and conservatives didn't fall neatly into Democrat or Republican affiliations in the 1960s.

Mayor Daley was famously a big-time Democratic party boss, while the "cool mayor" of New York mentioned in the Britannica yearbook was John V. Lindsay, a Republican who had his share of problems of his own making, but not when it came to the success of his liberal-minded riot control response in 1968.

Lindsay's career says a lot about what happened to the Republican party after the 1960s.  

When he was defeated in the 1969 New York Republican mayoral primary, Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party ticket and was re-elected to a second term.  Then he switched his party affiliation to Democrat in 1971 and made an unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 [which went to George McGovern]. Of course, that was the year Richard Nixon—promising “law and order”—was re-elected in a landslide.

Lindsay's December 20, 2000, obituary on CNN's website quotes his reasoning for becoming a Democrat in 1971: "It has become clear that the Republican Party and its leaders in Washington have finally abandoned the fight for a government that will respond to the real needs of most of our people— and those most in need."

That is nearly a textbook definition of what liberalism is all about, and is also a fitting indictment of the Republican Party and its leaders in Washington today.

David Trulock is a writer and physicist who grew up in Pine Bluff in the 1960s and 1970s and recently moved back after living in Austin, Texas, for 17 years.  

1991 Ode to Walker Percy

This appeared in Spectrum Weekly (Little Rock), May 22, 1991.  Percy died on May 10, 1990, from prostate cancer or its complications.  I only got around to reading The Moviegoer in 1990, after I borrowed it from a friend in Austin. If I recall correctly, I'd barely finished reading it when Percy died.

Walker Percy, the Southern writer who died last May at the age of 74, was interested in what he once called "the dislocation of man in the modern age.”  But unlike some other writers and philosophers—Thoreau comes most vividly to mind—Percy did not draw any sharp conclusions on that subject.

Whereas Thoreau concluded most people "lead lives of quiet desperation," a protagonist in a Percy novel is more likely to move about in an open-ended wandering, wondering if a little quiet desperation isn't better than the alternative.

Percy's first and last novels consider that alternative—something the protagonist in the first novel sees as sort of a living death and something the last novel examines as a way to head off the existential search for meaning before it's begun.

Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for fiction when it was published in 1961. In a way, however, it later served as the model for The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy's last and best novel, published in 1987. As a model, The Moviegoer offered new insights, new angles from which to view [freud, said the OCR!] familiar subjects, including one of the primary ways Americans identify with the world at large —by going to the movies.

Percy himself spent a good deal of time going to the movie houses of upper Manhattan in the late 1930s, when he was earning his psychiatry M.D. from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.  However, while interning at Bellevue Hospital, Percy contracted tuberculosis, and thus spent the next few years convalescing in sanatoriums, where he read the Russian novelists, French existentialists such as Sartre, and the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

Percy had spent his childhood in Alabama and in Greenville, Mississippi, and after surviving his bout with tuberculosis, he returned to the South in 1943, to live near New Orleans.  In the mid 1950s he began work on The Moviegoer.

The book takes place in New Orleans, where John Bickerson Bolling, the thoughtful and observant 29-year old narrator, has become happily entrenched in the American way of life:  selling stocks and bonds, watching television, dating his secretaries, and going to the movies, "Where Happiness Costs So Little," as the permanent lettering on the marquee at his neighborhood theater notes.   

Bolling is "a model tenant and a model citizen," with "a wallet full of identity, cards, library cards, credit cards . . . certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.  But underneath his bon vivant lifestyle, and that of his contemporaries, he senses a problem.  “For some time now,” Bolling confides to the reader, “the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.”  It is during ordinary conversations that he senses this phenomenon.  “As I listen to Eddie speak plausibly and at length of one thing or another—business, his wife Nell, the old house they are redecorating—the fabric pulls together into one bright texture of investments, family projects, lovely old houses, little theater readings and such. 

"But the fabric unravels as rapidly as it is woven, and "it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say.  Everyone seems to talk like a politician. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: 'In my opinion the Russian people are a great people but ...' or 'Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However ...' and Ithink to myself: this is death."

Bolling escapes death by going to the movies.  "Other people; so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives…  What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

Percy is partly poking fun at himseif and his New York movie-golng period.  But he is also taking a deep satirical look into the relationship that has developed between people and movies. In that respect, The Moviegoer is more relevant today than it was 30 years ago.  More than ever, movies are a part of or possibly a substitute for something Percy also identified in the book.  He called it “the search.”

Bolling first thought of pursuing the search when he was wounded during the Korean War. "I came to myself under a chindolea bosh," he remembers. "My shoulder didn't hurt but it was pressed hard against the ground, as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves.  As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as soon as I recovered and got home I forgot all about it.”

But the idea of the search unexpectedly returns to him. One morning he notices that his wallet, watch, pen and keys look unfamiliar. What was unfamiliar about them he says, "was that I could see them.  They might have belonged to someone else.  A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible."

The search in one form or another remained one of the central themes in Percy 's later novels. It is “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life,” Bolling explains 'To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Yet how does one tell if one is onto something or in despair, and does desperation become invisible to the person experiencing it?  Percy uses a quotation from Kierkegaard at the beginning of The Moviegoer to identify that state of being out of touch with one’s own emotions as true despair:  “The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Throughout all this Percy allows for the possibility that it is just his point of view, or Bolling's point of view, that makes some people seem to be truly in despair.  “Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?" he wonders.

In The Moviegoer the search remains an abstraction. In The Thanatos Syndrome the search crystallizes into something specific and meaningful—namely the protagonist’s search for the cause of the syndrome.   Echoing a phrase from The Moviegoer, and also written in first person, the The Thanatos Syndrome opens with this line:  "For some time now I have noticed that something strange is occurring in our region."

The region is southeast Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, and the narrator is Dr. Tom More, a thoughtful, observant, and unfettered psychiatrist who is trying to figure out what the problem is with some of his patients and old friends—and also with his wife. Thanatos is a Greek word for death, hence the repetition of the moviegoer's observation, but as less of a metaphor.

More describes the syndrome as the abatement of such things as anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, suicidal tendencies and chemical dependence. "Think of it as a regression from a stressful human existence to a peaceable animal existence."

What has caused it? Nothing less than a plot to create a utopia of happy automatons by treating the water supply with an uncommon isotope of sodium.  Statistics show an 85 percent decrease in violent crime, largely due to a drop in drug abuse, a 76 percent decrease in reported cases of AIDS, an 85 percent decrease in teenage pregnancy, a 95 percent decrease in teenage suicide, and to top all that off, notes one of the perpetrators, "L SU has not lost a football game in three years."

The thanatos syndrome, it seems, is simply life without the possibility of the search, but with a good dose of metaphysical anesthetic thrown in to prevent despair.  Maybe it is also Percy’s last statement about the dislocation of men and women in the modern age.  He seems to be asking us a question about ourselves as individuals:  What are we willing to give up to have safe, secure and also socially impressive lives?

He left us with a partial answer:  Don’t give up the search.

From the Robert Oppenheimer page of my website

In the photocopies I sent out recently to friends and family members, page 614 from The Making of the Atomic Bomb refers to other events that occurred on April 12, 1945 besides the death of President Roosevelt.   The other events were a report from Germany by Allied intelligence officers discussing the first physical evidence that German scientists had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and in Tokyo--where it was Friday, April 13--the burning down due to Allied bombing of the scientific lab where some infinitesimal progress had been made toward a Japanese atomic bomb. Therefore, looking back in historical perspective, as of that date the United States had a monopoly on the Bomb. At the same time, however, the person most likely to wisely use that monopoly--Franklin Roosevelt--died. Also: Hitler's suicide was announced by German radio on May 1. The Germans surrendered on May 7, and within weeks of that date the fierce fighting on the various Pacific islands near Japan was over. The war was then a waiting and bombing game (see below) as the Allies prepared for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. (May 8, 1945 is the official date of the end of the war in Europe, or V-E Day.)

As several people discuss in The Day After Trinity, President Truman merely went along with the program that was already in place for dropping the bombs on Japan. Roosevelt might have done things differently, because as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military he had full authority over the Manhattan Project from the beginning. One thing he might have done differently: on the day of the Trinity test, he might have announced to the world that the U.S. had successfully exploded the first atomic bomb. Instead, the U.S. Army issued its planned press release saying an ammo dump at Alamogordo had exploded. In the name of secrecy, which was conventionally thought to equate to security, the nuclear age began with a government lie. The main intention of the lie was to keep a military secret during wartime, but the secret was to be given up as soon as the bomb was used, so the main result of not publicizing the Trinity test after it happened was to deprive the American people of having a voice in the use of the bomb against Japan. A secondary result was that the Japanese were not given a chance to surrender with knowledge of the Bomb before having it dropped on them.

By July 1945, the time of the Trinity test, the only fighting going on besides the isolated attacks from Japanese submarines was the unimpeded American bombing of Japanese cities with hundreds of new B-29 'Superfortress' planes. This bombing could hardly be called fighting since the Japanese air force had already been almost entirely destroyed, partly by their own kamakazi attacks on Allied ships. The large numbers of estimated lives saved by the use of the atomic bomb are only the estimated casualties of the future invasion of the Japanese homeland had the atomic bomb not been used. That presumes the Japanese would not have surrendered otherwise, which is a rather big question mark and is related to the Allied demand for "unconditional" surrender, which meant to the Japanese they would have to give up their emperor, whom they considered to have a divine right and responsibility for ruling Japan. After the surrender and the American occupation of Japan, the emperor was left in place anyway, so this very reason the Japanese fought so hard and refused the unconditional surrender demand was in the end not turned into the reality they had feared.

(The Japanese soldiers not only fought hard, they fought without mercy. Here's a quote that was to accompany the Hiroshima/Nagasaki 50th anniversary exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 1995. Because of complaints by the American Legion and the Air Force Association, the controversial exhibit was dumbed down to make it a simple patriotic exhibit. However, one of the things left out in the process was an accurate historical rendering of Japanese wartime atrocities. This excerpt comes from one of the original, cancelled exhibit labels: "In 1931 the Japanese Army occupied Manchuria; six years later it invaded the rest of China. From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Empire was constantly at war. Japanese expansionism was marked by naked aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and biological experiments on human victims." I got this excerpt from an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995, by Stanley Goldberg, titled "Smithsonian suffers Legionaires' disease.")

The Russians were another issue. The USSR was our ally in WWII but was not allowed any knowledge of the Manhattan Project. This was another secrecy issue that eventually had to be dealt with, but the Russians knew about the Bomb anyway, through espionage, so that part of the huge effort that equated secrecy with security had already failed before the Trinity test. (And the U.S. was aware of the espionage, but not the extent of it.) At the Potsdam conference near Berlin, a few days after Trinity, Truman told Stalin about the successful test of the Bomb, but Stalin was able to brush off the information as of no significance because the Russians were already at work on a bomb of their own. This was in effect the beginning of the Cold War. Announcing the Trinity test to the world at this time would have upstaged Stalin's secret knowledge of the Bomb, but instead Stalin was able to thumb his nose at Truman's uncharacteristic meekness and weakness in sharing the secret with him. Well, perhaps casualness is a better word than either meekness or weakness. Here's an excerpt from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 690:

But in fact Stalin already knew about the Trinity test. His agents in the United States had reported it to him. It appears he was not immediately impressed. There is gallows humor in Truman's elaborately offhand approach to the Soviet Premier at the end of that day's plenary session at the Cecilienhof Palace, stripped and shabby, where pale German mosquitoes homing through unscreened windows dined on the sanguinary conquerors. Truman left behind his translator, rounded the baize-covered conference table and sidled up to his Soviet counterpart, both men dissimulating. "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'" "That," concludes Robert Oppenheimer dryly, knowing how much at that moment the world lost, "was carrying casualness rather far."

Last but not least, Los Alamos scientists, not the American public, later had to bear the responsibility for the first use of the Bomb on a civilian population. Although that made the scientists heros at the end of the war, it turned them into villians for later generations. One of the scientists at the Trinity test, Kenneth Bainbridge, got it right when he said to the others, "Now we're all sons of bitches." Americans during WWII considered Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, to be the embodiment of evil, something like Osama bin Laden is today, and had they known about the Bomb, they--we--probably would have been happy to nuke the Japanese, so the outcome would likely not have been different, but the "physicists have known sin" legacy would likely not exist. And although the American public would have been happy to nuke Hirohito, the hatred was not reflected in military policy. While nearly all of Tokyo was reduced to rubble by American bombing in early 1945, the emperor's palace was intentionally left untouched. This was mainly a practical matter: We needed Hirohito to declare a surrender, when that point eventually was reached.

It's possible to believe that the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the world with an inoculation against future uses of the Bomb, such as during the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. But I see that the instability of the world situation these days, including even the U.S.-Russian situation, points toward the inoculation having worn off. The U.S is going to try to build a nuclear missile defense and Russia, as Vladimir Putin recently warned, is going to attempt to design cruise-type missiles that can dodge the U.S. defense system. China is not being vocal on the issue, but isn't going to twiddle its thumbs while the U.S. builds a nuclear missile shield. Besides that, the risk of an accidental nuclear missile firing is a current problem that is not lessened by political instability in the former U.S.S.R and elsewhere (North Korea mainly) , and this instability or lack of attention to detail in regard to plutonium and enriched uranium also increases the chances of terrorists obtaining a nuclear weapon. Pakistan's notorious Dr. Kahn is an example of how easily things with which to make nuclear weapons can get out of hand. In the future, terrorism may come from places where we aren't expecting it.

In any case, terrorism is less of a national security threat than a public health threat, though it's potentially a very big public health threat. The most undesirable future is the use of many nuclear weapons in a short period of time, which only Russia, the U.S. and China can bring about, because of the existence of so many weapons in these particular nuclear arsenals. These arsenals are the biggest security threat in the world today.

To close this nuclear essay I'll just mention one other historical April 12 event related to The Day After Trinity. Robert Oppenheimer's security hearing in Washington D.C. began on April 12, 1954, exactly 50 years ago today. Oppenheimer turned 50 ten days later, and you can be sure he didn't have a happy 50th birthday, sitting through a day of testimony. See below for an excerpt from the April 22 session.

      

---DWT, April 12, 2004.   Updated once (October 13, 2004).  Oppenheimer was  born April 22, 1904

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"In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, Washington D.C., April 12, 1954 through May 6, 1954." The hearing took place at the Atomic Energy Commission, Building T-3, Room 2022. Usually 7 or 8 people were in the room, including the Board, two lawyers for the AEC, and Oppenheimer and his two or three lawyers. The Personnel Security Board consisted of Gordon Gray, Ward T. Evans (a chemistry professor) and Thomas A. Morgan. The following is an excerpt from testimony given on April 22 by Norris Bradbury, a Navy physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the war, and who became director of Los Alamos after Oppenheimer resigned in October 1945. Like most of the witnesses, he testified in favor of Oppenheimer, but the testimony got a little weirder than usual--the hearing itself in retrospect was titanically weird--about 12 pages into the transcript for April 22. The part that is not unusual for the hearing, and is likely to again be a contentious issue in these times of the PATRIOT Act, is the question of loyalty to one's country versus loyalty to friends. ... Dr. EVANS. Do you think that scientific men as a rule are rather peculiar individuals? The WITNESS. When did I stop beating my wife? Mr. GRAY. Especially chemistry professors? Dr. EVANS. No, physics professors. The WITNESS. Scientists are human beings. I think as a class, because their basic task is concerned with the exploration of the facts of nature, understanding, this is a quality of mind philosophy--a scientist wants to know. He wants to know correctly and truthfully and precisely. By this token it seems to me he is more likely than not to be interested in a number of fields, but to be interested in them from the point of view of exploration. What is in them? What do they have to offer. What is their truth. ... Therefore I think you are likely to find among people who have imaginative minds in the scientific field, individuals who are also willing, eager, to look at a number of other fields with the same type of interest, willingness to examine, to be convinced and without a priori convictions as to rightness or wrongness, that this constant or that curve or this or that function is fatal. I think the same sort of willingness to explore other areas of human activity is probably characteristic. If this makes them peculiar, I think it is probably a desirable peculiarity. Dr. EVANS. You didn't do that, did you? The WITNESS. Well--- Dr. EVANS. You didn't investigate these subversive organizations, did you? The WITNESS. No. Perhaps my interest lay along other lines. I don't think one has to investigate all these political systems. Dr. EVANS. Do you go fishing and things like that? The WITNESS. Yes, I have done a number of things. Some people, and perhaps myself among them, I was an experimental physicist in those days, and I was very much preoccupied with my own investigations. Dr. EVANS. But that didn't make you peculiar, did it? The WITNESS. This I would have to leave to others to say. Dr. EVANS. Younger people sometimes make mistakes, don't they? The WITNESS. I think this is part of people's growing up. Dr. EVANS. We all do. ... Dr. EVANS. You spoke of loyalty. Would you put loyalty to your country above loyalty to your friends? The WITNESS. I would. Dr. EVANS. That is all I have. REDIRECT EXAMINATION By Mr. SILVERMAN: [one of Oppenheimer's lawyers] Q. Doctor, from your knowledge of Dr. Oppenheimer, today, do you think he would put loyalty to his country above loyalty to a friend? A. I believe he would. Mr. SILVERMAN. That is all. ... (This excerpt is from pages 491 and 492 of the 992-page transcript.)