[PEN-L:2698] Review of Olasky, THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION (Long) (fwd)

[mmeeropo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mike Meeropol)]

Dear Penners:  THis is a LONG review of a very popular book among the right
wing.  It's quite influential and according to the following review,
HORRIBLE.  I think we need to continuously arm ourselves against the
intellectual hatchet-men who advance the right wing agenda with political
tracts masquerading as scholarship.  All the best, Mike

> From: "E. Wayne Carp" <carpw@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: Review of Olasky, THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION (Long)
>
> Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 07:36:49 PST
> From: David Hammack (Forwarded by Peter Bobkin Hall)
>
> NONPROFIT & VOLUNTARY SECTOR QUARTERLY (NVSQ), the journal of the
> Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action
> (ARNOVA) is pleased to post this abidged version of an important review by
> Case Western Reserve University historian David Hammack. The full text of
> the review will appear in the Spring 1996 issue of NVSQ.
>
> Because Olasky's book is the "Bible" of the new right welfare reformers in
> Congress and because Olasky's ideas draw heavily on the history of
> religion,  we at the journal believe that the book -- and Hammack's
> critique -- merit the attention of scholars.
>
> For futher information about NVSQ and ARNOVA as venues especially friendly
> to the history of social welfare, public poilicy, and religion, please
> contact phall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Dobkin Hall).
>
>                                                                                                                                                                         ********************
>
> Marvin Olasky, THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION (Washington, D.C.:
> Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1992).
>
> THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION, reissued in a paperback edition in 1995
> with its original preface by Charles Murray, poses an interesting challenge
> to an academic reviewer. The book was almost entirely ignored when first
> published in 1992, receiving no reviews in scholarly publications and few
> in mainstream journals. Thus I was not well prepared when several
> journalists called for opinions on Olasky's book when the paperback edition
> was released with great fanfare a year ago. The new edition comes with new
> recommendations by William J. Bennett ("the most important book on welfare
> and social policy in a decade. Period"), Charles Colson ("another great
> work by one of today's foremost thinkers"), Cal Thomas ("Gives the
> historical definition . . . of compassion [and] assistance for the poor"),
> and, most importantly, Newt Gingrich (Olasky shows "what has worked in
> America"). Clearly, many influential readers have taken this tightly
> organized, insistent, and almost quotable work seriously. These readers
> include not only many of the freshman Republicans in the current Congress,
> but more importantly the conservative political entrepreneurs and religious
> leaders who promoted their candidacies, and perhaps a good number of
> conservative religious leaders -- and even some of the voters themselves.
> Many of his readers may well think that Olasky's academic and
> quasi-academic credentials -- Yale B.A., Michigan Ph.D. in American
> Studies, University of Texas Professorship in Journalism, stints as Bradley
> Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and as a participant in the "Villars
> Committee on International Relief and Development" -- lend credibility to
> his work. He reports many forays into the Library of Congress, the Chicago
> Historical Society, and the New York Public Library, and he equips this
> book with a blizzard of (quite accurate) references. And he is indeed
> widely read and accurate in his references to sources. But Olasky's work is
> a political tract that makes no effort to be a convincing history: it
> ignores other historians, defines questions narrowly and arbitrarily, and
> picks facts from here and there to support a preconceived thesis. It is
> easy for a professional historian to critique the scholarship in THE
> TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION. But it is more important to identify the
> notions in the book that confirm the presuppositions of so many readers,
> and to ask what historians might do to introduce a greater sense of reality
> to discussions of social policy.
>
> In the virtuous past, Olasky begins -- that is, during an unchanging
> colonial period and through the urbanizing nineteenth century -- the
> American people followed godly and (hence) effective social care practices
> based in revealed religion. These practices -- the "Early American Model of
> Compassion" -- included the direct, personal provision of spiritual and
> material care by relatives wherever possible, by neighbors, or by the local
> church; hospitality to victims of disaster; the provision of charity
> schools for all poor children; a sometimes confrontational insistence on
> decent living by recipients of help; and a willingness to withhold assistanc
> e from those who were not worthy.
>
> According to Olasky, false prophets of socialism and "Social Universalism"
> misled the American people early in the twentieth century. Their ideas won
> national prominence through Theodore Roosevelt's thoughtless acquiescence
> in the 1909 White House conference on the Care of Dependent Children and
> through Warren G. Harding's feckless contemplation of a Federal Department
> of Welfare.
>
> Meanwhile, as Olasky tells the story, indifference (and even hostility) to
> religion and support for federal power spread hand-in-hand through new
> national associations and foundations. By 1920, the president of the
> National Conference of Social Work was noting that most social workers "did
> not wish to 'defend' the Bible, the Church, the flag or the Constitution,"
> (p. 144). All this led, Olasky goes on, directly to Rockefeller Foundation
> reports that supported the provision of government aid to "families without
> fathers" and to the efforts of Russell Sage Foundation staffer Mary Van
> Kleeck to promote "industrial democracy" in 1924 (p. 146) and then "a
> socialized, planned economy" -- to the great applause of social workers in
> 1934 (p. 156). By 1943 another Russell Sage Foundation product, Donald
> Howard's study of the WPA and other federal welfare programs, "seemed" to
> support efforts "to extend [public] relief in every direction at once,"
> without regard to the recipients' personal behavior or beliefs.
>
> But in Olasky's view worse was yet to come, through "Revolution -- and Its
> Heartbreak" in the 1960s. Before the Great Society, he writes, "recipients
> themselves often viewed welfare as a necessary wrong, but not a right. Two
> gatekeepers -- the welfare office and the applicant's own conscience --
> scrutinized each applicant. A sense of shame . . . . (p. 167). Michael
> Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA and the New York School of Social Work at
> Columbia University, Olasky says, successfully advocated a war on the sense
> of shame, telling young men "that shining shoes was demeaning" and telling
> women that society should support them while they were taking care of their
> own children. Paul Ylvisaker and others at the Ford Foundation, aided by
> the University of Michigan and other institutions and by liberal columnists
> like Sterwart Alsop, persuaded presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
> Johnson that "cash was king," that federal spending could eliminate poverty
> in America. Rather than oppose such views as counter to Christian
> understanding of man's sinful nature, the National Council of Churches
> "became one of the leading sellers of entitlement." (p. 171) The skeptical
> National Association of Evangelicals, unfortunately in Olasky's view, "had
> only minor influence at the time." (p. 172).
>
> Olasky goes on to describe the Great Society as consisting exclusively of
> what he views as the ill-considered and "radical" movements for welfare
> rights, legal services, and community action. As he tells it, the Great
> Society was the work of Ylvisaker and Saul Alinsky, of Harvard Divinity
> School professor Harvey Cox, and of Columbia School of Social Work
> professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. He pays no attention to
> the Civil Rights movement. Indirectly, he suggests that poor people raised
> many demands in the late 1960s and 1970s because liberal intellectuals had
> encouraged them to abandon their traditional sense of shame.
>
> "By 1980," Olasky concludes, "it was clear that the entitlement revolution
> had created several big losers." Among the first losers were were "social
> mobility;" "the remnant of private, challenging organizations" that sought
> to reform souls one at a time, like the Jerry McAuley Mission in New York;
> and "marriage," which fell victim he insists to permissiveness and the
> availability of a government dole for unwed mothers. Other losers included
> the ill-considered dreams of social workers; "individual giving as a
> proportion of personal income"; public belief in the integrity of the
> welfare system; and poor people who had strong values. (p. 190.) Olasky
> does not balance these (mostly unsupported) assertions with any discussion
> at all of the virtual elimination of abject poverty among America's elderly
> achieved through Medicare, Medicaid, and the expansion of Social Security.
> Nor does he have a word for Head Start or college student loan programs.
> Olasky concludes with an interesting discussion of current debates about
> social policy among conservative evangelical theologians and with
> enthusiastic accounts of contemporary efforts to "apply history" by putting
> the "Early American Model of Compassion" into practice. In practice this
> would require that government agents (local rather than federal government
> agents) enforce a system in which relatives, often fairly distant
> relatives, cared, within their own households, for every disabled and
> enfeebled person. Government agents would place orphans and family-less
> adults in households or institutions run by religious groups -- or leave
> the adults to cope as best as they could. In practice Olasky's solution
> would also seem to require that one member of each family -- presumably the
> adult woman -- devote herself to the compassionate care of relatives and
> other dependents. But Olasky does not explore the practical implications of
> his prescriptions in enough detail to permit an extensive discussion.
>
>
> Olasky's "history" collapses under scrutiny. The "Early American Model of
> Compassion" was never uniformly accepted and was nowhere put
> comprehensively into practice. Social care practices and the role of
> religion varied widely from place to place and changed a great deal over
> the nearly two hundred years of colonial development (the first English
> visitors to Maine and Virginia landed as many years before the American
> Revolution as have elapsed since that event!). American households during
> the colonial period and through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth
> century included slaves, a fact Olasky fails to mention. When colonial
> towns did follow the dictates of the Elizabethan Poor Law, they often
> "warned out" people who could not demonstrate a right to "settlement;" in
> the eighteenth century significant numbers of landless, friendless,
> isolated individuals gravitated to the port towns, where they were often
> left to scramble for a meagre living. Nearly all of the colonies had, by
> law that was often if not universally enforced, an exclusive, established,
> tax-supported church: and every established church was denounced by
> significant numbers of colonists as absurd and oppressive. Elementary
> education was never provided to all, even in colonial New England, and in
> the American South education was more nearly denied to all, white as well
> as black, not only before the Civil War but until well into the twentieth
> century. Southern white churches and white-dominated governments denied
> "compassion" of any sort to African-Americans right into the 1970s.
> Northern efforts to rescue people from poverty by challenging them to
> overcome their personal problems simply failed -- although the expanding
> industrial economy did raise the standard of living.
>
> In one of his most extraordinary reinterpretations of history, Olasky
> refers to several aspects of the nineteenth-century Protestant crusade
> without acknowledging either that Protestant sects quarrelled bitterly
> among themselves, or that Protestants often united in (sometimes violent)
> hostility against others. Eager to promote the notion of an "American Model
> of Compassion" based in religious commitment, he says nothing about the
> conflicts that led to the disestablishment of religion in Virginia and then
> throughout the nation through the First Amendment and comparable provisions
> in the state consitutions. Concerned, perhaps, to sustain a political
> alliance among conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, he passes in
> silence over the "nativist" Protestant attacks on Catholics and Jews late
> in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth.
>
> Similarly, Olasky ignores both the continuing strength of evangelical
> commitments on the part of many Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and other
> foundation leaders -- and their determination to overcome petty, narrow
> squabbling among Protestant sects and the intellectual foolishness of
> discrimination against Catholics and Jews. He ignores the ties between the
> national foundations and what many in the 1920s and 1930s saw as a
> conservative social welfare tradition. Nor does he say a word about
> regional variations in the roles of foundations, federations, and
> universities: the community foundations, community chests, and private
> comprehensive research universities characteristic of the midwest, the
> east, and the far west after 1920 failed to take root or flourish in most
> of the South until after the Civil Rights Movement.
>
> Olasky devotes more effort to his critique of Progressive Republicans,
> foundations, leading universities, and the mainline Protestant
> denominations than to the Democratic Party. Unfortunately his attack on the
> old "establishment" consists of slogans and innuendo rather than a reasoned
> discussion of American traditions of applied Calvinism and the
> Republicanism of Theodore Roosevelt, the Tafts, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
> Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. Olasky devotes few pages to the New Deal,
> ignores the Fair Deal, and offers a cartoon charicature of the Kennedy and
> Johnson administrations. saying nothing at all about their efforts --
> further developed by Nixon -- to mitigate market failures, create
> "automatic stabilizers" for the American economy, and maintain full
> employment with a minimum of central planning. For some reason -- political
> calculation? -- he never discusses Social Security, the use of Medicaid to
> pay for nursing homes, or medicare. Remarkably, in view of his belief in
> the efficacy of challenging people to help themselves, he fails even to
> discuss the ways in which Congress has structured the student loan program
> to encourage and reward individual effort and self-improvement. His account
> of commmunity action ignores Sargent Shriver's often unsuccessful struggles
> with Lyndon Johnson and many members of Congress, as well as the fact that
> the entire program was gutted right at the beginning of the Nixon
> administration, or that a good deal of cash assistance to the poor was
> replaced, in the 1970s, by food stamps, rent vouchers, and medicaid, just
> as college scholarship grants were replaced with loans.
>
>
> What accounts for the influence of a book that is so partial and
> incomplete, that ignores the influence of many of the ideas it purports to
> celebrate, and that devotes its most extended analysis to Republican and
> Protestant leaders?
>
> The answer is in part to be found in some long-established American
> cultural and political traditions. THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION
> adopts the classic form of a jeremiad, a form of religious lament that has
> been effectively used by American evangelicals since the 1660s. THE TRAGEDY
> OF AMERICAN COMPASSION blames current troubles on a moral corruption that
> produced a fall from a past state of grace (unlike the best of the
> sevententh-century preachers of jeremiads, however, Olasky emphasizes the
> siren songs of those who misled the American public more than the sins and
> delusions of the public itself). There was a golden past, Olasky says, the
> good old days of Early America, in which Americans lived orderly lives
> according to God's law as expressed in the "American Model of Compassion."
> Following a period of moral decline (produced to a considerable extent by
> false prophets of secular "social universalism"), the United States adopted
> federal policies that have produced disorder: the disingegration of the
> family, the plague of drugs, youth violence.
>
> Olasky's themes are staples of the conservative evangelical tradition: the
> centrality of revealed religion; the innate sinfulness of mankind; the
> apostacy of "mainline" Protestant denominations; the foolishness and vanity
> of the very rich; the treason of the intellectuals; the subversion of
> national foundations and great universities; the selfishness of modern
> professions based on science. To all this Olasky adds an attractive
> emphasis on the importance of personal responsibility.
>
> Finally, Olasky's TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN COMPASSION may well be designed
> intentionally to promote a political alliance among religious conservatives
> north and south, Baptist and Pentacostal, Protestant and Catholic and
> Jewish. It blithely denies the deep conflicts that divided the Protestant
> sects, Catholics, and Jews throughout most of American history. It passes
> in comforting silence over the history of slavery and racism and baldly
> states that early nineteenth-century southerners offered compassionate care
> for African-Americans as well as for whites (p. 15-16). By ignoring the
> real and potentially serious financial problems that face the Social
> Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs in the near future, this book on
> the "ills" of America's social policies manages to avoid any discussion of
> measures that could threaten its older readers, or force them to confront
> the size of the tax burden their current and future beneifts place on
> younger workers. Without directly confronting the achievements of the
> modern American economy or of medicine -- and without taking seriously the
> efforts of business and economic leaders to find ways to stabilize the
> American economy and avoid a repetition of the Great Depression -- the
> book denounces the godlessness of science and the arrogance of
> intellectuals and of the foundations and universities in which they work.
> It blames apostate and misguided upper-class Protestants and Republicans
> for leading the nation into moral collapse. But it insists that all is not
> lost, that humble, homely personal acts can redeem fallen souls, and that a
> determined effort to reclaim the Republican Party can solve the great
> problems of the nation.
>
>
> Marvin Olasky is engaged in a campaign for control of Americans' view of
> their past, with the aim of shaping their actions in the future. His
> endorsers, quoted at the beginning of this review, make it clear that his
> work is part of a larger movement. Lynne V. Cheney, who chaired the
> National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980s, described the larger
> campaign in an essay championing Newt Gingrich's college course, "Renewing
> American Civilization," on a recent editorial page of the WALL STREET
> JOURNAL. Academics on the "left," she writes, "paint a grim and gloomy
> picture of the American past, one that emphasizes failure and makes it seem
> that most of the faults of mankind have here found their most fertile
> ground." Gingrich, by contrast, "starts with the assumption that 'this is a
> good country filled with good people.'" Like Olasky, Gingrich dates
> America's decline from "around 1965," when "intellectual elites began
> telling us another story: that this is 'a racist, sexist, repressive
> society of greedy people who exploit the poor' and that government
> intervention is essential if we are to live up to our ideals." Gingrich,
> Cheney, and Olasky are all seeking to push that story aside.
>
> Will they succeed in popularizing their version of American history? The
> answer will not come from professional historians, because Olasky and his
> associates are appealing over the historians' heads to what they imagine to
> be their own, larger, public. They are certainly correct in their
> calculation that there is an audience for their efforts: most Americans of
> European descent resent histories that demonize all whites or all
> property-owners -- though Olasky, Cheney, and Gingrich greatly exaggerate
> the prevalence of such denunciations in contemporary university classrooms.
>
>
> A professional historian can suggest that many readers will not find
> Olasky's story appealing. Olasky avoids giving direct many direct affronts
> to those who feel they have benefitted from the Civil Rights or Women's
> movements, or from the expansion of social security, medicare, or the
> support for nursing home care provided through medicaid: but he does little
> to attract such people and leaves to others the writing of histories that
> will appeal strongly to them. He avoids direct assaults on women's rights,
> but his story will not appeal to women who aspire to life outside the
> kitchen, the playroom, and the sickroom (and indeed recent opinion polls
> show that many women reject the idea that they should return to the
> sickroom so that taxes can be cut ). Olasky's is certainly not a story that
> will be read with pleasure by anyone who takes his or her identity from
> what he or she views as a modern, science-based profession. Nor is it
> likely to satisfy for long anyone who fears that his or her religious or
> philosophical views may be those of a minority.
>
> Olasky's book may well find an audience among those who feel displaced in
> contemporary society, among those who lament the end of the old order in
> which women and people of color seemed to accept subordinate status, and
> among those who are deeply troubled by the apparent collapse of "family
> values" and by violence among youths. But because his history fails to take
> seriously the concerns of the vast majority of Americans, it is not likely
> to gain anything like general acceptance.
>
> David C. Hammack
> Professor of History and and Director, Social Policy History Ph.D. Program
> Chair, Master's of Nonpforit Organizations Degree Committee, Mandel Center
> for Nonprofit Organizations, Case Western Reserve University
>
> David C. Hammack
> Professor of History
> Case Western Reserve University
> (216)368-2671
>


--
Mike Meeropol
Economics Department
Cultures Past and Present Program
Western New England College
Springfield, Massachusetts
"Don't blame us, we voted for George McGovern!"
Unrepentent Leftist!!
mmeeropo@xxxxxxxx
[if at bitnet node:  in%"mmeeropo@xxxxxxxx" but that's fading fast!]