Book Reviews

But he doesn't tackle the funda mental question of why the schools turn out so many functional illit erates who slide through grade after grade without really learn ing how to read, write, or pursue a logical sequence to a correct con clusion. What particularly concerns Mr. Black is the fact that our textbook publishers tend to be pusillani mous when it comes to combating the social and moral prej udices of the State Boards of Education. He tells some fascinating stories about the veto which Florida, for instance, exercises on frank dis cussion of animal reproduction in basic texts on science ("Look, Ma, No Sperm Cells") . Georgia gets a going-over because several of its school districts won't accept "in tercultural" books which include illustrations of whites and Ne groes swimming in the same pools or occupying the same large grandfather's chair. Mr. Black complains that fifth grade social studies texts have been kept from picturing such things as cows about to calve ("It is against company policy to show pregnancy in animals"). He also complains about silly southern educators who reject anthologies which contain Shakespeare's Othello (a play abou t "miscegenation"). He doesn't approve of northern com munities which outlaw The Mer chant of Venice for fear that it might offend the Jewish popula tion. And he delivers a neat rep rimand to the individual who thought Ha1nlet might be danger ous fare for school children be cause it depicted a loose-living mother.

When it comes to the history1968 THE FREEMAN 379 pardon me, the social studies textbooks, Mr. Black finds bland ness every\vhere. Four textbooks, he says, describe Soviet interven tion in Hungary but fail to men tion U.S. intervention in Guate mala. Other texts omit the Battle of Stalingrad when talking about World War II. An eighth grade textbook used in the Detroit school system once contained a passage about a good-hearted slave-owning family in Tennessee, the Austins, who were nice to their field hands, which hardly seemed "objective" history to the son~ and daughters of Negro automobile workers. Tex as is duly chastised for making it difficult to mention the theory of evolution. And so it goes. Learning to Read With a lot of Mr. Black's stric tures most reasonable men and women would agree. But Mr. Black does not get to the bottom of what is the matter with our schools. The n1ain trouble \vith primary educa tion is that it doesn't concentrate on giving all our boys and girls the intellectual tools which would enable them to read anything, whether it is bland or not. After all, if a boy can read, it hardly matters whether he discovers in grade school that the Russians won at Stalingrad; he will surely come upon that fact at some point in his life if he has any curiosity about history whatsoever. And as for the failure of biology texts to talk about sperm cells, that is a joke. The grapevine spreads such knowledge at an early age whether the Boards of Education are aware of it or not. So why cry over an omission that really conceals noth ing? The important thing is to teach the student to unlock the lit erature of science for himself \vhen he is of an age to go to the library and look things up.

Ears and Eyes Mr. Black doesn't seem to be in terested in the great controversy that has been raging over phonics versus the "look-say" method of teaching first, second, and third graders to "attack" words. No doubt he would consider this a matter for cranks and crackpots to quarrel over. I would have felt the same way if I hadn't had one child who couldn't learn to read by "whole word recognition" the way his brothers and sisters seemed to do. It became plain to me from ex perience with my own young that some people are ear-nlinded and some are eye-minded. A reading system that ignores the predomi nantly ear-minded students is bound to produce a certain per centage of dropouts. rfhere was a period when Henry Luce, the publisher, couldn't find good young writers. This was in 380 THE FREEMAN JunE the forties and early fifties. Well, the "look-say" method of teaching kids to read was at its most viru lent in the thirties and early for ties. When the "phonics" partisans began to win some victories, and the more extreme advocates of "whole world recognition" had fi nally to admi t that language has sound and is con1posed of conso nants, .. vowels, and blends, it be came possible for magazine edi tors to recruit good young writers once more. Mr. Black has been an editor of The Saturday Evening Post, and it is amazing that he doesn't see the relevance of train ing in syllabic sound to the writ ing of good rhythmic prose. Quite absurdly, the word "phonics"

doesn't appear in his index. If I hadn't seen Negro children with IQs of eighty-five reading \vith fluency after a few months of phonics drill in the first grade of the old Amidon School· in Wash ington' D.C., and in one of the worst slum schools in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, I wouldn't consider Mr. Black's oversight to be of any great significance. But I have seen what I have seen, and I know that Mr. Black misses the nlost important point of all. A "Liberal" Bias When it comes to upper grade points about the mastering of language and literature, Mr. Black is much better. He hates such clas· sic Shakespeare adaptations .,..- and abominations - as "Friends, Ro mans, countrymen, listen to me.'l He can't stand the juicelessnesE of committee-written texts. The Dick and Jane type of reader leaves him cold. He is all for in corporating wider racial and cul tural horizons in the schoolbooks, but if it's just a matter of intro ducing Dick and Jane in blackface, it isn't enough.

The best part of Mr. Black's book is devoted to recent changes and improvements in the teaching of mathematics and the sciences. But the sciences - aside from bio logical theory - aren't controver sial. Mr. Black could hardly go in to the question of economics texts, for economics is not ordinarily a grade school or a high school sub ject. But maybe it ought to be and it would be interesting to know what the effect of Mr. Black's obviously liberal bias would be on his judgment of books on econ omic theory. The liberal bias does spoil some of Mr. Black's passages on the teaching of social science in the schools. He lumps Chiang Kai shek, a good leader who has en abled Taiwan to solve the land question, with Trujillo, calling them both "reactionaries." If Chiang is a "reactionary," then the word is utterly meaningless.

1968 A CRITICAL POINT 381 Mr. Black's attack on historian David Muzzey for saying that "the red hand of communism waS like wise at work in Cuba where dicta tor Castro" went in for confiscat ing American property is hoity toity nitpicking. For Castro is a communist, as Mr. Black very well knows. + ~ AMERICA'S POLITICAL DI LEMMA by Gottfried Dietze (Bal timore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 298 pp., $7.95. Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz THIS BOOK is an analysis of the theory of Popular Sovereignty as this idea has worked itself out in the American experience since 1789. It takes a somber view of these events, arguing that the de velopment has been away from the libertarian ideals of the framers of the Constitution toward a do mestic policy which transgresses individual liberties and a foreign policy which pursues awill-o' -the wisp at a cost which is enormous - however measured. ·This is a scholar's book, closely reasoned and well documented; but its thesis will displease many in the aca demic community because it re fuses obeisance to the shibboleth of "democracy." The serious stu dent of public affairs, however, will find this book helpful as he surveys the present mess and won ders how we got this way.

Professor Dietze aligns himself with that scholarly opinion which maintains that theAmerican Rev olution was not a revolution in the strict sense. "It did not over turn a legitimate order," he writes, "but restored the rule of law and its protection of the individual against the machinations of hu man lawmakers whose acts, while often legal, were not legitimate." There would not be a monarchy in the United States; sanction for the exercise of rule would be the consent of the people-but with constitutional safeguards. "The democratic principle of popular participation in government," he writes, "was to guarantee the lib eral principle of the protection of the individual from the govern ment. Popular government was considered a means for the pro tection of the individual under a Constitution embodying a rule of law which had been cherished for centuries. The American Revolu ti on was in the mainstream of the constitutionalist development of the common law."

In this nicely balanced equation, liberalism acted as a counter balance to democracy; liberalism assured a protected private do main for persons, while democracy put political office within reach of 382 THE FREEMAN June all and gave the masses a place at the polling booth. But circum stances conspired to make democ racy attempt the work of liberal ism, and already in the 1830's Tocqueville warned of the emer gence of "democratic despotism." The warning was not heeded. Some background might be help ful: Many men lust after power, hence the divine right of kings idea which came in with the Ren aissance. James I of England liked the divine right idea, for it placed him above the law. James ,vas not accountable to any man, for his authority was bestowed directly on James by God himself. These notions did not go unchallenged, even in James' day, and the fa mous confrontation with Coke is well remembered.

But today, any power seeker or would-be dictator who claimed his right to rule was authorized by God would be thought mad; to day's dictators claim to derive their authority from The People. This century is the age of Totali tarian Democracy, to borrow J. L. Talmon's phrase. Democratic the ory has worked out its answer to the perennial question: Who shall Rule? And, boiled down, democ racy's answer is: The People. Sovereignty is thought to reside in The People; and once this an swer comes to be accepted without qualification, some people do things to other people in the name of The People which no people would have done or suffered under any mon arch. These dreadful consequences oc cur whenever the idea of Popular Sovereignty crowds the most im portant of all political questions off the boards. This fundamental question has to do with the nature, scope, and functions of govern ment. As the question was phrased by Whig and Classical Liberal the orists it ran: What shall be the extent of rule? Those who pon dered this question elaborated the body of doctrine kno\vn as liberal ism - in the old sense. To be a liberal, then, meant to subscribe to such ideas as limited govern ment, constitutionalism, the rule of law - in order that each in dividual might have sufficient latitude to pursue his personal goals without arbitrary interfer ence from either government or other individuals. Along with its emphasis on individual liberty, liberalism emphasized a man's right to his earnings and his sav ings, that is to say, his right to his property.

Once a people embraces the philosophy of classical liberalism, they have accepted an answer to the question: What shall be the extent of rule? They then face the question of choosing personnel to hold public office (Who shall rule?) 1968 OTHER BOOKS 383 and, given the temper of the eight eenth and nineteenth centuries, the answer was bound to be that offered by democratic theory: Let the masses participate in the po litical process. Thus, liberal democ racy, or the Federal republic, whose features are laid down in the Con stitution and defended in The Fed eralist. We had it all, once upon a time, in these States. What hap pened to it, and where did it come a cropper? Turn back now to Pro fessor Dietze's admirable book. The theory of Popular Sover eignty had no place in it for civil war; habituated to thinking in terms of large abstractions, it could not imagine how The People could revolt against itself! But the American Civil War, a multi dimensioned tragedy, was thrust upon us; and Professor Dietze re opens the academic debate that rages around Lincoln's handling of power. Lincoln did act outside the Constitution, and it might be argued that the means were justi fied by the ends, so perilous were the exigencies of the occasion. But the occasion passed, whereas the precedents remained, resulting in a growing national unitary state and a greatly strengthened execu tive. In the postwar period there was governmental intervention in the areas of price control, wages and hours legislation, rate regula tion, and restrictions on the freedom of contract. "By the end of the nineteenth century," Dietze writes, "there was a general awareness that free property and free enterprise were in for serious challenges."

America's glacial drift away fronl its original institutions and ideals was obscured up until World War I because of the growing ad miration abroad for America's ex panding wealth and power. But as liberalism declined, the strength ened lever of the central govern ment came to be regarded as there to be used by this faction or that for their partisan and personal ends, first on the domestic scene, then anywhere. In the original constitutional plan, domestic and foreign policy were the two faces of one coin. The government was not to try to regulate the peaceful actions of citizens; and in relation to other nations, America was com mitted to a policy of neutrality and noninterference with the internal affairs of other peoples. "The Fed eralist," ,vrites Professor Dietze, "proposes a foreign policy in the long-range national interest, a policy which corresponds to an in ternal policy favoring free gov ernment and the long-range public interest." From the days of the French Revolution on, popular pas sions in America reverberated oc casionally to democratic move ments abroad, but they did not 384 THE FREEMAN June sway the makers of foreign policy who were guided by "constitu tional reason." The shift from neutralism to internationalism oc curred around the turn of the cen tury, but it was the moralisms of \Voodrow Wilson which finally opened the floodgates. Hardheaded considerations of national interest make for peace, but they do not convey the same emotional impact as statements about "national in tegrity," "human rights," and a "world safe for democracy." We abandoned rationality as the guid ing principle of our foreign policy, as domestically we had accepted its correlative, majoritarian de mocracy. Those who manage and further domestic affairs in the in terests of the Great Society will also manage foreign affairs; and because these men vibrate in sym pathy with their like numbers in other nations where these trends are more advanced, our foreign policy has lost its head-so to speak-and makes less and less sense as the years go by. Pro fessor Dietze says it better: Since the democratization of for eign policy makers in a large meas ure was brought about by a move ment which favored social legislation over laissez faire, "liberalism" over liberalism, absolute majority rule over free government, there was also a good chance that the substance of foreign policy would change. This could mean that just as foreign pol icy previously favored liberalism, now it could favor foreign systems and movements that were akin to the programs of the Progressives, the New Freedom, the New Deal and the New Frontier. Since these pro grams emphasized social rather than property rights, "civil" rather than civil rights, national power rather than federalism, a concentration of power in the political branches of government rather than the separa tion of powers, foreign policy could well come to favor similar trends abroad. It could even become capti vated by foreign movements that went further to the left, such as so cialism and Communism.

No one can survey the record of the past generation and argue that the United States has pur sued a foreign policy geared to hardheaded reasons of national interest. Rather, with will numbed, we have witlessly stumbled into one bloody situation after an other, losing prestige abroad and spreading dissension at home. What are the prospects? Can we go beyond the present dilem rna? History is made by men and men are moved by ideas. When a significant number of peo ple, like Professor Dietze, come to identify the wrong ideas which have generated the present mud dle, and discard them for sound ideas, they'll make a different his tory. ~ the Freeman VOL. 18, NO.7. JULY 1968 Moral Education-and History FrederickA. Manchester 387 From the historical record may be drawn some suggestions for a moral regenera tion in our time. Still Life on Fire John Otterson 397 Concerning the vast unknown within ourselves and how to bring it forth.