Jefferson Flanders

The website of author Jefferson Flanders

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American voices, American exceptionalism

January 23, 2006 /

Is there a distinctly American artistic voice? What adjectives might begin to describe that voice? Open. Direct. Optimistic. Democratic. Enthusiastic. Conscious of the natural order. Impatient. Naive. Experimental. Religious. Business-like. Experential. Bluff.

This isn’t just American exceptionalism speaking. There is something different about the American experiment (“a shining city upon a hill”) that should naturally be reflected in its art and literature. Hear Louis Simpson in his poem, American Poetry:

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Wait, you may argue; are these qualities truly unique to American writers, poets, filmmakers? Aren’t they universal?

Perhaps. The proof is in the artistic pudding, however, and it isn’t hard to point to a number of recent American writers, poets and filmmakers whose voices are unmistakenly American. Cormac McCarthy. Tim O’Brien. Toni Morrison. Billy Collins. Rita Dove. Gary Snyder. Paul Mazursky. Steven Spielberg. Ron Howard.

You don’t have to be born in the United States to echo these characteristics: think of Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies or Peter Weir’s Witness, movies which fit this uniquely American category (or is it that these directors “get it” because the Australian experience mirrors the American one at some level?)

The point can be proved in another way. The Scandanavian film Insomnia, remade and set in Alaska (with Robert DeNiro replacing Stellan Skarsgård), never quites feels American; nor does The Birdcage, the 1996 remake of La Cage Aux Folles, even if Robin Williams and Gene Hackman are part of the Americanization.

Even a novel like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which explicitly draws on the Odyssey for some of its themes and structure, is made authentically American by the depth of Frazier’s understanding of the hardscrabble life led by the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachians and the culture they established.

Yes, the film version of Cold Mountain features an English director, English and Australian leads, and a Canadian and an Irishman in key supporting parts, which perhaps suggests that as the world becomes flatter (to borrow Thomas Friedman’s metaphor), the appeal of a distinctly American voice will not be diminished.

Copyright © 2006 Jefferson Flanders
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The Fire in France: Which American Solution?

December 31, 2005 / / 0 Comments

Many journalists and commentators have cited French reluctance to adopt “the American solution” of affirmative action for its ethnic Arab and African minorities as a crucial factor in triggering the riots in France’s troubled suburbs this October and November.

Affirmative action is why the United States has enjoyed greater racial and social integration, and why France’s disaffected Muslim minority has turned to violence, according to much of the elite media (such as the New York Times and other major metro newspapers, the major networks, and CNN). USA Today, for example, called affirmative action “a policy prescription that could help move France’s immigrants and their descendants into mainstream society.” An NBC report noted “experts” arguing that affirmative action “ is just what is needed to level the playing field and to give the Arab and African immigrant families a kick-start to break the cycle of poverty…”

The truth, however, is that our progress towards racial harmony is not the result of affirmative action, a controversial approach (often employing race-based preferences or quotas) that was late-coming to the civil rights struggle. Rather, America’s pursuit of equal opportunity in education and employment, a growing societal acceptance of non-whites as social equals, and a free market economy that has generated millions of jobs, have been the keys to the emergence of a stable and prosperous black middle class.

So if the French are serious about assimilating their ethnic Arab and African minorities they will not turn to the “quick fix” of state-imposed affirmative action—or as the Europeans term it, “positive discrimination” —but, instead, will try the other “American solution,” racial equality based on access, inclusion and economic expansion.

The first giant step for the U.S. on the journey to greater social justice was a series of legal and political civil rights victories in the 1950s and 1960s removing barriers that prevented blacks from voting, attending quality schools, and finding and competing for decent jobs. Federal anti-discrimination laws followed, to insure that minorities received fair treatment in the job market. Affirmative action programs emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to accelerate racial progress. Where voluntary in nature, they had some success, but generated opposition as violating the spirit of a merit-based society.

In contrast, France has yet to confront its corrosive racial and religious prejudice (including rampant anti-Semitism). A French government study found that youths with Arab-sounding names had their job applications rejected up to five times as often as those with traditional Gallic names. Addressing these iniquities is an unaddressed task—one best handled by enforcing tough, and currently non-existent, French anti-discrimination laws.

Then there is our halting, but persistent, progress towards heart-felt social equality. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders appealed to America’s sense of fairness and commitment to equality. They offered a vision of judging others “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” a vision well suited for a nation of immigrants. It meant accepting minorities not only in schools or the workplace, but also as social equals. As evidenced in the 2005 Gallup Minority Rights and Relations poll, America has made progress on this notion, judging from the attitudes expressed towards interracial dating (one proxy for the fundamental acceptance of other races). More than 70% of Americans surveyed approved of whites and blacks dating and some 95% of those between 18-29 wholeheartedly endorsed interracial romance. It is hard to imagine similar results in a poll of the French, who have been slow to address issues of intolerance.

A final factor has been the part America’s dynamic economy has played in fashioning a more inclusive society. Equal opportunity without economic opportunity is meaningless. Free market policies encouraging innovators and entrepreneurs have generated millions of new jobs in the U.S., “expanding the pie.” In comparison, France has discouraged initiative and closed markets to competition, resulting in a “zero sum” economy. Consequently, gains for one group come at the expense of another. There are successful free-market European models to emulate—Ireland comes to mind—but the French must first abandon decades of misguided economic policy.

True, the U.S. has yet to fully achieve its lofty goals of racial equality. Racism remains a virulent problem in many pockets of our society; Hurricane Katrina exposed the sad reality of poverty for many African-Americans and the work yet to be done. Nonetheless, however imperfectly, there is progress.

So which “American solution” will France adopt? Prime minister Dominique de Villepin proposes showering the volatile banlieus with multicultural rhetoric and state-subsidized jobs, while his rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, hints at “American-style affirmative action.” Neither approach will work; France’s leadership ignores the fundamental success factors in America’s long-horizon pursuit of racial and social justice—access, inclusion and economic expansion—in favor of immediate statist answers. France will suffer from that short sidedness; slighting the need for authentic and fundamental reform will not avert “the fire next time.”

Autumn in New York, 2005

December 30, 2005 /

What will future social historians think when they look back at photos of New York City’s street scene during this improbably warm autumn of 2005?

Chances are they will find New Yorkers of the early 21st century to be remarkably distinctive: individualistic, idiosyncratic, multiethnic, multiracial and, no doubt, prisoners of their specific time and place when it comes to fashions, customs and behavior.

We can’t see it, of course, the magnificent uniqueness of the here and now. It’s too comfortably familiar. It might take a Louis Trimble, the protagonist of a marvelous F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, to do our city streetscape credit. In Fitzgerald’s tale, Trimble wanders around New York soaking up its simple wonders. “I simply want to see how people walk and what their clothes and shoes and hats are made of,” he explains.

Yet, we later learn, Trimble is no stranger to the city; a native, he hasn’t left its environs in ten years—in fact, he has designed one of its premier buildings. But Trimble has been blind to its sights and sounds because he’s been “every-which-way drunk” for a “Lost Decade,” and has now only just emerged from his alcoholic stupor to begin to appreciate New York anew.

Most of us are so caught up in our daily routines that, perceptions dulled, we miss or ignore the fabulous in front of us. Unlike Trimble, we don’t stop and delight in the human parade passing us by—garment workers with hand trucks, mothers pushing strollers, bicycle messengers careening, street vendors and deal-making businessmen, students with backpacks, tourists slightly-dazed by the speed and scale of New York.

Perhaps only an observer with the keen fashion eye of Tom Wolfe could adequately chronicle the variety of styles and individual statements being made on New York’s streets. Thin women in fashionable black (some things never change). Men in traditional business attire, but without the fedoras of the past. Instead, today’s hats of choice are from the Boys of Summer—baseball caps worn sideways, backwards, with the brim flat, with the brim curved, with ponytails protruding (yes, it’s a unisex style), with Yankees caps the most popular (New York has always loved a winner).

What is also different—and invisible and unremarkable, but passing strange none-the-less—is the ubiquitous electronic invasion of our city streets by cell phones, Blackberrys and iPods. It seems every third person is jawing away on a cell-phone. I chat, therefore I am, has become the motto of the age.

A businessman briskly strides along, conducting a conversation with no one, his miniaturized microphone and phone out of plain view. A tourist holds up her camera phone to snap a digital photo of a landmark, her husband offering guidance in German. Some of the younger phone-users pause to punch the phone keys with their thumbs or fingers – the text messaging of the under-30 set.

Will those future social historians regard these vignettes as the precursor of the plugged-in street? A preview of a wireless, digital world to come, where computers and the Internet are built into anything with electricity, and pedestrians glide by always connected to the invisible Web (shades of the Matrix!)?

Perhaps it will be so. But for now, why not abandon those digital props, and like Louis Trimble, simply enjoy this lovely autumn in New York, lingering, observing, and savoring the flavor of this amazing city in the old-fashioned, purely human way?

The "Greatest Generation" Veterans and the Bomb

July 31, 2005 / / 0 Comments

(Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

Sixty years after the bomb fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later, the number of "Greatest Generation" veterans is dwindling.

It is all the more important, then, to heed their perspective on an event–the first use of nuclear weapons–that has haunted the world’s imagination ever since. Why, in the minds of many U.S. veterans with firsthand memories of the war, was President Harry S Truman justified in ordering atomic bomb attacks?

I am reminded of how two veterans, now both gone, thought about America’s use of the bomb, and Truman’s choice to seek a quick and decisive blow to forestall a bloody invasion of Japan.

More than a decade ago, Dallas S. Townsend, who served as a communications officer in the Pacific and later had a distinguished career at CBS, told me about the cable traffic he handled from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and its sobering projections of American casualties in any invasion of Japan.

The figures, Townsend recalled, kept increasing as more was learned about Japanese defenses, and reached nearly half a million Americans–a number widely circulating in the U.S. War Department at the time.1

Pacific commanders had experienced the bloody cost of capturing Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and witnessed the Japanese soldiers’ refusal to surrender.2

Indeed, the Pacific invasion casualty estimates of the 1940s may have been too low. American war planners were under pressure to minimize them, as Pentagon officials feared a war-weary public’s reaction to such possible heavy losses, according to military historians D.M. Giangreco and Richard B. Frank.3

At the time, however, military planners worried that a guerrilla war in Japan might stretch on until 1949 or 1950. 4 according to historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who noted, "It was suicidal."5 A Japanese slogan that summer of 1945 boasted, "100 million die proudly." 6

Some historians now estimate that a prolonged invasion of Japan’s five home islands might have resulted in losses of one million American–and many millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians dead, injured and missing. 7

None of these estimates includes losses suffered by the Allies as they continued to fight the Japanese in China and elsewhere in Asia, nor the possible fate of the hundreds of thousands of American and Allied POWs during a prolonged conflict.8

Winston Churchill argued in his war memoirs that the Japanese found "in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honour and release them from being killed to the last fighting man." The British prime minister termed the bomb a "miracle of deliverance," averting "a vast, indefinite butchery."9 Even so, some in the Emperor’s war cabinet resisted surrender even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another veteran’s perspective came from my father, Steve Flanders, a corporal in General George S. Patton’s Third Army, who took part in the Battle of the Bulge and the victorious Allied advance into Germany.

My father and his comrades knew that the invasion plan, dubbed Operation Downfall by the Pentagon, was to shift combat-hardened divisions from the European theater for an assault on Japan.10 He believed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki avoided a final, climactic battle–and saved him and his buddies.

Like many other veterans, my father considered Truman’s decision inherently ethical: It minimized the total loss of life, both American and Japanese. 11 (Estimates for the number of Japanese killed by the Hiroshima bomb were 140,000 in 1945 and some 200,000 by 2004; in Nagasaki, an estimated 70,000 were killed by the attack, with a cumulative 100,000 deaths.) 12

My father also believed that his sons and daughter owe their existence–like millions of other postwar baby boomers in America, Britain and Japan–to Truman’s use of the bomb. Many of my contemporaries have told me their fathers felt the same way.

None of the veterans I’ve known ever downplayed the troubling moral dimensions of using the bomb (concerns expressed afterward by American military leaders like Admiral William Leahy and Dwight D. Eisenhower). But they thought that, in any final calculus, it became a choice of lesser evils, substituting the atomic attacks for a prolonged, uncertain and grisly final campaign.

Were they right in their moral certainty? We may judge the events of August 1945 through a different lens today. Sensitive to the radioactive legacy of nuclear weapons, uneasy with a total-war doctrine that justified the strategic bombing of cities, and sobered by decades of living with the threat of nuclear Armageddon, we may have a more ambiguous answer to the question of the bombings’ morality.13

But it would be a mistake, however, to slight the narrative these veterans offer us. Their perspective should remain a vital part of our national memory.

FOOTNOTES:

1 Townsend may have seen worsening projections by MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles A. Willoughby, especially his July 29, 1945 message about Japanese troop concentrations on Kyushu (where the first U.S. attack was scheduled for November 1945). Willoughby forecast an attacker-to-defender ratio of one-to-one, which, he noted, “is not a recipe for victory.” In a June 1946 assessment Willoughby wrote that Operations Olympic (the invasion of Kyushu) and Coronet (Honshu, near Tokyo) would have cost 600,000 American casualties. See Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, (New York: Random House, 1999), pages 211-212; page 341.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated in 1947 that he had been informed an invasion of Japan would cost “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.” A July 1945 report (commissioned by Stimson’s staff) by scientist William B. Shockley estimated that defeating Japan would cost the U.S. between 1.7 and 4 million casualties (and 400,000 to 800,000 American fatalities) and 5 to 10 million Japanese deaths (Frank, pages 338-341). The casualty estimates have been a subject of significant controversy, with revisionist historians like Kai Bird arguing in the mid-1990s that possible American troop losses had been exaggerated to justify the use of the bomb so that Truman could impress the Soviets with American might. For a complete discussion of this controversy, see J. Samuel Walker’s “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” in Diplomatic History, Vol 29, No. 2 (April 2005), pages 311-334.

2 See George Feifer, Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992)

3 See Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, Chapter 9, and D.M. Giangreco’s “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications” in Journal of Military History, 61 (July 1997), pages 521-582.

4 See Feifer, Tennozan, page 572.

5 Hasegawa quoted in PBS documentary, “American Experience: Victory in the Pacific.” Transcript available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pacific/filmmore/pt.html

6 See Feifer, Tennozoan, page 576.

7 See Walker’s “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” pages 317-319.

8 The probable execution of the 100,000 American POWs (70,000 in Japan) is covered in Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar’s Code-Name Downfall, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pages 284-285. See also Feifer, Tennozan, pages 573-574.

9 Quote from Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Triumph and Tragedy, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), Chapter 19.

10For a discussion of the transfer of U.S. forces from the European theater to the Pacific, see Allen and Polmar, Code-Name Downfall, pages 304-305.

11 None of the non-nuclear options Truman considered offered a quick end to the war. Forgoing an invasion in favor of a blockade and further bombing, as some American naval leaders proposed, would have raised the civilian death toll. Two nights of American conventional bombing in March 1945 had killed some 100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone, and General Curtis LeMay was amassing thousands of B-29s to pound Japanese cities and coastal defenses. Food supplies had dwindled to the point where, as Japanese historian Daikichi Irokawa has noted, some ten million civilians faced possible death by mass starvation in the fall of 1945, and a catastrophe was averted after the surrender only by MacArthur’s decision to rush grain to Japan. (See Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, pages 350-356).

12 There has been a continuing debate about the estimated death toll from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. I have used the highest estimates, which include subsequent deaths. See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 180.

13 Most of the more recent criticism of the morality of the bombings has focused on the Allied decision to insist on an unconditional surrender by the Japanese. Ethicist Michael Walzer has argued that the nature of Japanese aggression was narrower than the Nazi menace and that Truman should have sought a resolution of the war short of unconditional surrender (through negotiation). See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

Another viewpoint questions the morality of any strategic bombing of cities as military targets and consequently sees no moral difference in the use of conventional bombs (such as the incendiary devices used against Dresden and Tokyo) and atomic weapons, condemning both as attacks on innocent civilians.

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