Category: readings

arduous days ahead

While reading FDR’s first inaugural recently, I was struck by just how forceful it is. Most of the time when I see quotes from FDR’s speeches they’re statements about specific events: “date that will live in infamy”; universal statements: “only thing to fear is fear itself,” or the four freedoms; or evocative descriptions of the conditions of the Depression: “one third of a nation.” But I rarely see people bring up statements like the following, from just after the “fear itself” quote:

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

This isn’t FDR at his most left or populist or radical or progressive or whatever the term should be – especially not when compared with his 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden (familiar quote: “For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government”).* But of course Roosevelt, under pressure from groups on the left, from people like Huey Long, and from the effect of slowly improving but still difficult economic conditions shifted leftward from 1932 to 1936. (At least I think that’s still the current accepted interpretation.)

What’s surprising is how left (or whatever) he already was – at least that’s how it appears to me, reading him today – when he was sworn in. I suppose that’s a sign both of how dire the emergency then was, and also of how much the political spectrum has shifted the other way in more recent years.

_____

*However, near the end of the 1933 inaugural he does say:

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Which is pretty ominous-sounding, and though a dramatic increase in executive power isn’t clearly a right or left shift – it depends on what’s done with the power – it certainly is radical.

how amusing

The new administration and new Congress are bringing change to the federal government and that change has to be covered. But how deeply? Institutions are important, but except to those who love this sort of stuff, reading writing about institutions can be numbingly dull. So you get Ezra Klein writing things like

Clinton partially repealed 12291 with Executive Order 12866. I’m not going to explain it because, frankly, you all will stop visiting this blog if I do, but suffice to say it pulled many of Reagan’s changes back.

or Elana Schor cutting off an excerpt from a budget resolution, saying

Okay, I had to stop it there at the risk of driving people away with Congress-speak.

Of course these kinds of disclaimers or apologies aren’t really new: Mark Schmitt, for example, who often writes about political process issues, put a number of them into his posts back when he was blogging regularly at The Decembrist. Here’s one from a post on campaign finance

My apologies to readers for a long post on a subject that, evidence shows, is of interest to almost no one.

(And readers who made it to – or at least near – the end of my post on Senate campaign finance disclosures last summer might remember seeing an aside along the same lines.)

I highlight these because I keep seeing them – probably because I appear to be one of those people who finds this stuff interesting – and it keeps reminding me of one of my favorite quotations, from Richard White’s book on the Columbia River:

Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

counts of corruption, 2

Noonan, as I wrote below, decided not to attempt to compare levels of corruption across time and space. His explanation is worth quoting at length, as it gets into a lot of the problems surrounding attempts to quantify corruption. (Note that he describes the practice of indexing corruption to numbers of convictions as a “mistake.”)

What I have resisted is a temptation almost equally irresistible–to  quantify. Modern moral argument, not to mention sociology and criminology, depends heavily on quotable numbers. When the subject is bribery, an economic transaction, it seems that numbers should be available. Tourists and journalists are very free in judging that a society is “corrupt” or “very corrupt.” Historians and political scientists have not been far behind them. Surely, it may be supposed, the confident judgements that have often been made rest on a foundation of figures.

Quantification is conceivable. It has never been systematically attempted. There are no existing sets of figures by which one could conclude that the Roman Empire, for example, was more or less corrupt that the British Empire or the United States. In the absence of this kind of data it is wrong, I believe, to create an illusory certainty by using comparative terms.

Judgment about corruption in a society need not rest on a statistical basis. But with bribery several factors operate to make unquantified judgment difficult.

First,* the act is criminal and consensual; the victim where there is one is not made aware of the arrangement as it affects his case; consequently a number of acts of bribery remain secret and undiscovered.

Second, accusations of bribery are often politically motivated or are made in order to satisfy certain social or psychic needs; one cannot judge from the accusation along whether acts of bribery have actually occurred.

Third, the amount of legal attention bribery receives is misleading. One society may be uncensorious of most reciprocities with its officeholders; there may be no legal response to them a all, and the appearance will be given of integrity everywhere. A different society may define bribes, legislate against bribetakers, and prosecute bribery in such a way as to suggest that the crime is ubiquitous. A common mistake is to use the number of laws enacted or convictions obtained as an index of corruption.

Fourth, some critics have strong inclinations to exaggerate the corruption of their own day, and others have strong inclinations to denigrate past times or aliens or members of another race, religion, or class. Their criticisms will then be used as evidence that corruption is worse now or worse then, or worse with certain groups than others. Impassioned complaint will function as though it were hard evidence.

Fifth, there is the fallacy of the perfectly corrupt man–the belief that vices are linked and that unless a man is thoroughly corrupt in every aspect he can be no bribetaker or bribegiver. Moral judgment is held at bay by the kindly family man or illustrious genius who is also a taker or giver of bribes. Francis Bacon, Samuel Pepys, Warren Hastings are not merely respectable; they are heroes–respectively the founders, in the view of their admirers, of British science, the British navy, and British India. Bacon was a bribee by the law as actually enforced; Pepys a bribee by his own measure; Hastings a bribee by the law that was being made. Apologists by the score have hesitated to give their bribetaking its proper name. As for bribers, judgment has always been even more charitable, the underlying assumption being that they are the victims of extortion. When the persons involved have been preeminently just, judgment has often been entirely suspended. Who thinks of Thomas Becket or John Quincy Adams as giving bribes? The fallacy of the perfectly corrupt man prevents seeing bribery in transactions which, measured by at least one of the standards in use in their own time, were corrupt although executed by men of otherwise eminent virtue.

Finally, there is great difficulty in accepting a society’s own standards when one approaches the society as a traveler or as a historian. Bribes are a species of reciprocity. Human life is full of reciprocities. The particular reciprocities that count as bribes in particular cultures are distinguished by intentionality, form, and context. What is a bribe depends on the cultural treatment of the constituent elements. The observer outside the culture, like the cynic or rigorist within it, is inclined to see the conventional differences as arbitrary and to reduce all reciprocities of a given kind to bribes–to treat, say, any gift to an officeholder as a bribe. Doing so, the outsider imposes his own standard and reaches a judgment that is unreasonable if the culture’s own norms are used.

These major reasons for mistake–the rarity of proof of actual bribery; the abundance of accusations; the misleading impressions given by legal activity in its regard; prejudices of many kinds; the fallacy of the perfectly corrupt man; and the reductionism that eliminates conventions and looks only at function–mean that broad generalizations about the amount of bribery in a society must be made with caution and with caveats and without great confidence in their reliability.

_____

*I’ve broken items 1-4 on this list into separate paragraphs for easier reading.

counts of corruption, 1

Back when the Blagojevich scandal broke in the news, there was a lot of discussion of which state is the most corrupt, no doubt prompted in part by the claim that

“If it [Illinois] isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States it’s certainly one hell of a competitor,” Robert Grant, head of the FBI’s Chicago office, said Tuesday.

USA Today looked into the comparison and came up with a surprising result (click through for a map):

On a per-capita basis, however, Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

Louisiana, Alaska and North Dakota all fared worse than the Land of Lincoln in that analysis.

Meanwhile, an earlier analysis by the Corporate Crime Reporter ranked Illinois sixth in federal corruption convictions on a per capita basis from 1997 to 2006, behind Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Ohio. (For the visually inclined, The Monkey Cage and its readers have you covered with a list, graph, and map.) If you’re wondering what happened to Alaska and North Dakota, Corporate Crime Reporter did not analyze the states with fewer than 2 million residents; only 35 states are included in the rankings.

Neither ranking includes state-level convictions. And of course they also leave out all those corrupt officials who were never convicted at all. As Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, put it

Also, public officials in any given state can be corrupt to the core, and if a federal prosecutor doesn’t have the resources or the sheer political will to bring the case and win a conviction, the public corruption will not be reflected in the Justice Department’s data set.

(So there may be hope for Illinois yet!)

The flip side of this is that a relatively high conviction rate may be partly attributable to better detection, as the USA Today notes:

Don Morrison, executive director of the non-partisan North Dakota Center for the Public Good, said it may be that North Dakotans are better at rooting out corruption when it occurs.

“Being a sparsely populated state, people know each other,” he said. “We know our elected officials and so certainly to do what the governor of Illinois did is much more difficult here.”

Still, you have to have corruption first in order for it to be detected, and North Dakota’s prevention abilities don’t appear to be very strong:

Morrison said the state has encouraged bad government practices in some cases by weakening disclosure laws. North Dakota does not require legislative or statewide candidates to disclose their campaign expenses.

***

The uncertainty surrounding the detection and reporting of corruption is one of the reasons John Noonan does not provide comparative measures of corruption for the places and periods he discusses in Bribes. (Working across history, Noonan also lacks good data sets.) Since his discussion of quantification is quite lengthy, I’ve put it in the next post.

a history of bribery

Aside from visualizing the criminal complaint against him a few weeks ago, I’ve been waiting to see what Rod Blagojevich is actually going to be indicted for before blogging about the case. But if the indictment is postponed, I’ll probably pick it up sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, with corruption so much in the news, I’ve begun reading John Noonan’s history of the concept of bribery, appropriately entitled Bribes, parts of which I read a few years ago while researching 19th century corruption in graduate school. In pursuit of the idea, Noonan ranges from the ancient world, to medieval Europe, to early modern Britain, to the United States, to bribery on an international scale in the late 20th century (the book came out in the mid-1980s).

Is it really possible to follow a single concept of bribery through so many places and times? Noonan argues yes, provided the concept is properly abstracted:

The core concept of a bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised. The core turns out to be remarkably constant if its elements are taken with enough abstractness. The concrete constituent elements–what counts as “an inducement,” what counts as “improperly influencing,” what counts as “a public function,” what functions are “meant to be gratuitously exercised”–change with the culture. The concept of a bribe contracts or expands with conventions, laws, practices. Relativized, it does not disappear. The idea is used in postexilic Jerusalem, late Republican Rome, imperial Ravenna, seventh-century Yorkshire, thirteenth-century Paris, seventeenth-century London, eighteenth-century Calcutta, nineteenth-century Washington, twentieth-century Tokyo. Cross-culturally compared in these very varied settings, the abstract central concept–with no forcing of the evidence–recurs.

Noonan also provides a helpful framework for understanding the different standards of bribery that may prevail at any one time in a given context:

Bribery is a legal concept, hence the law determines what counts as bribery in a particular society. This is easy to say but legal definitions turn out to be only superficially helpful. Is the law the edict issued by the prince and the statute written on the books or is the law that which is actually enforced? If one takes the proclaimed rule as the measure, one chooses a standard that is often demonstrably unreal. If one answers that the law is that which is actually enforced, then one is led to ask: How many trials must take place before a law is enforced? Is prosecution enough for enforcement or must conviction follow? Is conviction enough or must serious punishment be imposed? Is there enforcement if only small offenders but not large ones are seriously sanctioned? Actual enforcement is not a clear and simple measure.

Probing the various meanings of any law on bribery leads to perception of a tension between it and the morals of any community. Typically, the morals in practice are less demanding than the law on the books and the morals in public expression are more exigent than the law enforced. Often a society has at least four definitions of a bribe–that of the more advanced moralists; that of the law as written; that of the law as in any degree enforced; that of common practice. If one is to say that an act of bribery has been committed, one should know which standard one is using. The great advantage of the concrete materials drawn on here–trials, confessions, letters, poems–is that one can see what bribery means in these contexts; one can conclude with some assurance as to which standard was in play and what a bribe meant for a particular prosecutor or poet, politician or publicist in a particular society.

This is particularly relevant to the Blagojevich case, where the “morals in public expression” were expressed quite literally in the form of the arrests and the ensuing press conference, while the standard of the law as enforced has yet to be determined. Additionally, I’ve seen the question come up in a number of places of whether there’s a meaningful distinction between what Blagojevich is alleged to have done and more conventional practices of deal-making or logrolling, with some arguing that both types of activities are a kind of bribery, and others arguing that there’s a real difference between trading support for public activities for support for other public activities and trading support for public activities for personal, private enrichment. I’m more in agreement with the latter group, but in any case the difference of opinion suggests that there are different standards in play here.

I’ll be posting more on Bribes as I work my way through the book.

chance coincidence

When I heard that Blagojevich quoted Kipling in his press conference, I wondered if he quoted the same poem Grandpa Simpson quotes in a casino in the episode where he almost gambles away all the money he inherits. Turns out, he did. Here’s Blagojevich:

Here’s a transcript of the Kipling quotation:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating…

That’s from the start of the poem. Grandpa Simpson picks it up at a later point, quotes a few lines, then skips to the end:

I think Rudyard Kipling said it best: If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss, yours is the earth is [sic] everything that is in it, and, which is more, you’ll be a man, my son.

Homer’s response: “You’ll be a bonehead!”

hey diddle diddle

Not sure what a Ponzi scheme is? Or a pyramid scheme? What about a pump and dump, a jitney game, a bucket shop, or front running? Slate‘s explainer answers those questions, but what we really need for today’s world is something a little more thorough, like “Diddling Considered as one of the Exact Sciences,” a look at the scams of the 1840s by that famous economics journalist, Edgar Allen Poe (you may remember him from such works as “The Mortgages in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Debtor,” and “A Scheme within a Scheme”).

What did it mean to diddle? This will give you an idea:

Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.

Minuteness: — Your diddler is minute. His operations are upon a small scale. His business is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight. Should he ever be tempted into magnificent speculation, he then, at once, loses his distinctive features, and becomes what we term “financier.” This latter word conveys the diddling idea in every respect except that of magnitude. A diddler may thus be regarded as a banker in petto — a “financial operation,” as a diddle at Brobdignag. The one is to the other, as Homer to “Flaccus” — as a Mastodon to a mouse — as the tail of a comet to that of a pig.

Interest: — Your diddler is guided by self-interest. He scorns to diddle for the mere sake of the diddle. He has an object in view — his pocket — and yours. He regards always the main chance. He looks to Number One. You are Number Two, and must look to yourself….

There follows a list of diddles, mostly small-scale – furniture sellers tricked, pocketbooks supposedly lost, promissory notes eaten by dogs, fake robberies foiled, and so on – but ending with one quite a bit more ambitious:

But as there is really no end to diddling, so there would be none to this essay, were I even to hint at half the variations, or inflections, of which this science is susceptible. I must bring this paper, perforce, to a conclusion, and this I cannot do better than by a summary notice of a very decent, but rather elaborate diddle, of which our own city was made the theatre, not very long ago, and which was subsequently repeated with success, in other still more verdant localities of the Union. A middle-aged gentleman arrives in town from parts unknown. He is remarkably precise, cautious, staid, and deliberate in his demeanor. His dress is scrupulously neat, but plain, unostentatious. He wears a white cravat, an ample waistcoat, made with an eye to comfort alone; thick-soled cosy-looking shoes, and pantaloons without straps. He has the whole air, in fact, of your well-to-do, sober-sided, exact, and respectable “man of business,” par excellence — one of the stern and outwardly hard, internally soft, sort of people that we see in the crack high comedies — fellows whose words are so many bonds, and who are noted for giving away guineas, in charity, with the one hand, while, in the way of mere bargain, they exact the uttermost fraction of a farthing with the other.

He makes much ado before he can get suited with a boarding-house. He dislikes children. He has been accustomed to quiet. His habits are methodical — and then he would prefer getting into a private and respectable small family, piously inclined. Terms, however, are no object — only he must insist upon settling his bill on the first of every month, (it is now the second) and begs his landlady, when he finally obtains one to his mind, not on any account to forget his instructions upon this point — but to send in a bill, and receipt, precisely at ten o’clock, on the first day of every month, and under no circumstances to put it off to the second.

These arrangements made, our man of business rents an office in a reputable rather than a fashionable quarter of the town. There is nothing he more despises than pretence. “Where there is much show,” he says, “there is seldom anything very solid behind” — an observation which so profoundly impresses his landlady’s fancy, that she makes a pencil memorandum of it forthwith, in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the Proverbs of Solomon.

The next step is to advertise, after some such fashion as this, in the principal business sixpennies of the city — the pennies are eschewed as not “respectable” — and as demanding payment for all advertisements in advance. Our man of business holds it as a point of his faith that work should never be paid for until done.

WANTED — The advertisers, being about to commence extensive business operations in this city, will require the services of three or four intelligent and competent clerks, to whom a liberal salary will be paid. The very best recommendations, not so much for capacity, as for integrity, will be expected. Indeed, as the duties to be performed, involve high responsibilities, and large amounts of money must necessarily pass through the hands of those engaged, it is deemed advisable to demand a deposit of fifty dollars from each clerk employed. No person need apply, therefore, who is not prepared to leave this sum in the possession of the advertisers, and who cannot furnish the most satisfactory testimonials of morality. Young gentlemen piously inclined will be preferred. Application should be made between the hours of ten and eleven A. M., and four and five P. M., of Messrs.

BOGS, HOGS, LOGS, FROGS, & Co.
No. 110 Dog Street.

By the thirty-first day of the month, this advertisement has brought to the office of Messrs. Bogs, Hogs, Logs, Frogs and Company, some fifteen or twenty young gentlemen piously inclined. But our man of business is in no hurry to conclude a contract with any — no man of business is ever precipitate — and it is not until the most rigid catechism in respect to the piety of each young gentleman’s inclination, that his services are engaged and his fifty dollars receipted for, just by way of proper precaution, on the part of the respectable firm of Bogs, Hogs, Logs, Frogs, and Company. On the morning of the first day of the next month, the landlady does not present her bill, according to promise — a piece of neglect for which the comfortable head of the house ending in ogs, would no doubt have chided her severely, could he have been prevailed upon to remain in town a day or two for that purpose.

As it is, the constables have had a sad time of it, running hither and thither, and all they can do is to declare the man of business most emphatically, a “hen knee high” — by which some persons imagine them to imply that, in fact, he is n. e. i. — by which again the very classical phrase non est inventus, is supposed to be understood. In the meantime the young gentlemen, one and all, are somewhat less piously inclined than before, while the landlady purchases a shilling’s worth of the best Indian rubber, and very carefully obliterates the pencil memorandum that some fool has made in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the Proverbs of Solomon.

activism and web 0.2

It seems that Obama has been reading Lincoln; this is encouraging. Some of Obama’s reading about Lincoln may be less encouraging. I am not getting ready to lead a nation or form a cabinet; I have been reading Wendell Phillips. Phillips, you may recall, is the only non-politician profiled in Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition: his type is the “agitator” (something Obama once was, not so incidentally).

I’m reading Phillips mostly because I’ve meant to do so ever since I was a TA in a course on the nineteenth century U.S. whose instructor confessed admiration for him, and I saw a reference to Phillips in something else I read just recently. Many of his speeches are now online, but unfortunately not in easily copy-and-pastable form. I’ve only read a few so far, but I can already say that Phillips is worth a look for anyone interested not just in his history, but in political and social movements and agitation in general.

Here’s Phillips in “Public Opinion” (1851) on the theory of change:

We are apt to feel ourselves overshadowed in the presence of colossal institutions. We are apt, in coming up to a meeting of this kind, to ask what a few hundred or a few thousand persons can do against the weight of government, the mountainous odds of majorities, the influence of the press, the power of the pulpit, the organization of parties, the omnipotence of wealth. At times, to carry a favorite purpose, leading statesmen have endeavored to cajole the people into the idea that this age was like the past, and that a “rub-a-dub agitation,” as ours is contemptuously styled, was only to be despised.

The time has been when, as our friend observed, from the steps of the Revere House — yes, and from the depots of New York railroads — Mr. Webster has described this Antislavery Movement as a succession of lectures in school houses, — the mere efforts of a few hundred men and women to talk together, excite each other, arouse the public, and its only result a little noise. He knew better. He knew better the times in which he lived. No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea — wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a Revolution.

Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. The child feels; he grows into a man, and thinks; another, perhaps, speaks, and the world acts out the thought. And this is the history of modern society. Men undervalue the Antislavery Movement, because they imagine you can always put your finger on some illustrious moment in history, and say, here commenced the great change which has come over the nation. Not so. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of a mighty republic, fills the Gulf, and divides a Continent.

“Rub-a-dub agitation” might be sort of a mid-nineteenth century version of “bloggers in their pajamas.” Later in that same speech Phillips takes up the subject of technology and organization:

In working these great changes, in such an age as ours, the so-called statesman has far less influence than the many little men who, at various points, are silently maturing a regeneration of public opinion. This is a reading and thinking age, and great interests at stake quicken the general intellect. Stagnant times have been when a great mind, anchored in error, might snag the slow-moving current of society. Such is not our era. Nothing but Freedom, Justice and Truth is of any permanent advantage to the mass of mankind. To these society, left to itself, is always tending.

In our day, great questions about them have called forth all the energies of the common mind. Error suffers sad treatment in the shock of eager intellects. “Everybody,” said Talleyrand, “is cleverer than anybody”; and any name, however illustrious, which links itself to abuses, is sure to be overwhelmed by the impetuous current of that society which, (thanks to the press and a reading public) is potent, always, to clear its own channel. Thanks to the Printing–Press, the people now do their own thinking, and statesmen, as they are styled — men in office, — have ceased to be either the leaders or the clogs of society.

_____

Note: I have broken up the speech text into more readable paragraph lengths. The hyperlinks, of course, are in the original – that’s just how far ahead of his times Phillips was.

a matter of opinion

Some time ago Alyssa Rosenberg (filling in for Ezra Klein) linked to a piece by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal about authors’ voices and authorial voice. I didn’t particularly like the piece, but Teachout brought up Raymond Chandler and I like Chandler and I have an anthology of Chandler’s letters lying around that I’ve been meaning to read since college. So I decided to pick it up and I’ve been reading a few letters at a time, every now and then, for the past few weeks.

Last week Ari posted an exchange of letters (printed in a recent Harper’s) between a restaurant critic and his editors on the subject of word choice, among other things. Yesterday, I was reminded of that critic’s rant when I read a letter from Chandler to Charles Morton, then Associate Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, dated 12 Dec 1945, containing the following complaint (which I have broken up into two paragraphs for on-screen readability):

In case you are still planning to use this article in your anthology, I should like, if there is time, to point out a few errors. They are not very important, but we might as well get the thing right. Whom do I address? Some of them are probably actual typographical errors of a sort. There is one I should like to mention, because it is the kind of thing I never can understand. It is the 9th line from the end of the piece. It reads: “and not examine the artistic result too critically. The.” What I wrote was; “and not too critically examine the artistic result.” I believe, but am not certain, that it was this last way in the original proofs, perhaps not in the revised proof.

[paragraph break added]

It is obvious that somebody, for no reason save that he thought he was improving the style, changed the order of the words. The length is the same, therefore that could not enter into it. I confess myself completely flabbergasted by the literary attitude this expresses. Because it is the attitude that gets me, the assumption on the part of some editorial hireling that he can write better than the man who sent the stuff in, that he knows more about phrase and cadence and the placing of words, and that he actually thinks that a clause with a strong (stressed) syllable at the end, which was put there because it was strong, is improved by changing the order so that the clause ends in a weak adverbial termination. I don’t mind the guy being wrong about this. That’s nothing. It could even, within limits, be a matter of opinion, although I do not agree. But here is somebody who apparently decided in his own mind that Chandler was using a rhetorical word order, which he was, and that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, didn’t even know he was being rhetorical, and that he, Joe Doakes with the fat red pencil, is the boy to show him how wrong he is, by changing it back to the way the editor of the Weehawken County Gazeteer would have written it in his weekly editorial about the use of steel floss to clean chicken dirt off Grade AA eggs. Christ!

Morton’s reply, if there was one, is not included in the anthology. But you can find the article on the Atlantic‘s website. The offending edit appears at the end of the second page (oddly not linked from the article first page). Here is the entire paragraph with the edit in bold:

I have kept the best hope of all for the last. In spite of all I have said, the writers of Hollywood are winning their battle for prestige. More and more of them are becoming showmen in their own right, producers and directors of their own screenplays. Let us be glad for their additional importance and power, and not examine the artistic result too critically. The boys make good (and some of them might even make good pictures). Let us rejoice together, for the tendency to become showmen is well in the acceptable tradition of the literary art as practiced among the cameras.

Here it is as Chandler wanted it:

I have kept the best hope of all for the last. In spite of all I have said, the writers of Hollywood are winning their battle for prestige. More and more of them are becoming showmen in their own right, producers and directors of their own screenplays. Let us be glad for their additional importance and power, and not too critically examine the artistic result. The boys make good (and some of them might even make good pictures). Let us rejoice together, for the tendency to become showmen is well in the acceptable tradition of the literary art as practiced among the cameras.

I’m not sure Chandler was right. To me, “artistic result” sounds better than “artistic result too critically” but “not examine” sounds better than “not too critically examine.” Would I have thought the same in 1945? I don’t know. Word order conventions with the times change.

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