Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:
 
      In “‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas'” (JAH, March 2006), Anthony Chen documents a New York civil rights legislative dispute decades before the national debate. “Critics of fair employment,” Chen writes, “found it useful to profess a strong belief in racial tolerance but continued to oppose FEP [fair employment practices] legislation on the grounds that it would promote preferential treatment, lead to racial quotas, and exacerbate racial divisions” (p. 1261). Chen presumes that “fair employment legislation” objectively describes FEP. And when Chen tendentiously labels FEP opponent State Senator Frederic Bontecou a “ringleader” (p. 1239), he undermines the incredulity animating his rhetorical question: “Since the bill mandated nondiscrimination, what was their [FEP opponents’] basis for expressing fear of quotas?”(ibid.). 
      “Ives-Quinn called strictly for equal treatment …,” Chen protests; “[it] epitomized a color-blind, individualized model of social regulation. Yet, it provoked much the same hue and cry as affirmative action would years afterward” (p. 1263). Yes, in 1945 Americans feared that a nominally color-blind model would transmogrify into a social engineering monstrosity. Did not later events vindicate them? Chen shows neither interest in this issue nor cognizance of Hugh Graham’s The Civil Rights Era (1990), which shows how the eeoc (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) circumvented the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s color-blind stipulations. 
      Chen cites Robert Moses, the powerful New York parks official, whom Senator Bontecou quoted in debate: [the proposed bill] “will inevitably lead to the establishment of what in European universities and institutions … was … the quota system under which Jews and other minorities were permitted only up to a fixed number proportionate to their percentage of the total population” (p. 1256). Given Europe’s then-recent trauma, rooted in ethnic quota–fixation, Moses knew whereof he wrote. 
      Oddly, “Hitlerian rule of quotas” dies in Chen’s title. In Europe the issue of ethnic over/under-representation was linked to “the Jewish Question.” Even in the United States during the early twentieth century the elite was concerned about Ivy League admissions. Because poor Jews often outperformed wealthier gentiles, university administrations created “holistic” criteria to achieve gentile-friendly “diversity.” (See Steven Farron’s The Affirmative Action Hoax [2005] and, published later that year, Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen.) Meanwhile, in Europe resentment erupted over ethnically disparate distributions of wealth, professional positions, etc., so some governments enacted affirmative action policies to “redress” the under-representation of Aryans and eventually attempted genocide against non-Aryans. (See both my “Affirmative Action and the Nazis” at http://www.anthonyflood.com/, 2003, and Steven Farron’s “Prejudice Is Free, but Discrimination Has Costs,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Summer 2000.) Stalin’s use of affirmative action to achieve diversity-celebrating (and leader-deifying) ends is also worth noting. (See my “From Communist Policy to Affirmative Action,” Telos, Summer 1996.) 
      By the 1960s a new prey was targeted for legalized discrimination. (See my “White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 1998–1999.) Of course, if Chen favors racial balance, diversity, and other conceptual facilitators of legal discrimination, his oversights are no mystery. 
Hugh MurrayMilwaukee, Wisconsin

To the Editor:
 
      Thanks to Hugh Murray for his interest in my recent article. 
      Let me focus on a substantive point he raises. I quite agree with him that historians should ask whether the critics of the Ives-Quinn bill were at least justified in making their predictions about the likely effects of the law. Murray and I naturally enjoy the benefit of hindsight, but viewing events at a temporal remove is precisely what permits historians to render historical judgments. It gives us a fighting chance of distinguishing change from continuity; beginning from end; accident from intention—and even crackpots from visionaries. 
      I tried to intimate in my article, perhaps too subtly, that the fears of critics were largely off base. In the weeks before Ives-Quinn passed, business associations and their sympathizers openly foretold that the legislation could lead to riots and ruination, over and against the reassurances of liberals (p. 1249). But the darkest prophecies, if any of them, never came to pass in postwar New York State. Ives-Quinn quickly became regarded as a model law. It was praised by employers in New York, some of whom were even willing to have their statements featured in pro-FEP (fair employment practices) pamphlets circulated in other states that were contemplating similar legislation. Time proved liberals prescient. 
      Anxiety over quotas in wartime New York seem especially misplaced to me. As noted by Hugh Davis Graham, when Sen. Sam Erwin (d-nc) raised the charge of quotas at a hearing on what would become Title vii of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he pointed to the language of specific hiring regulations issued by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. Whether his reading distorted their intent is a question well worth exploring. But neither Robert Moses nor Westbrook Pegler pointed to anything comparable when making the same explosive allegation two decades earlier (pp. 1256–57). That is because they could not. No such language existed. Thus their central concern was that the passage of legislation mandating equal treatment would—in and of itself—lead employers to preemptively impose quotas in their hiring practices or to ask for quotas so as to set a clear standard for compliance (ibid.). 
      What they foresaw is not what happened. When the charge of quotas arose in the 1960s and the decades thereafter, it did not emerge for the same reasons. This time, critics of affirmative action were concerned about policies that invoked racial distinctions and that they regarded as functional quotas—and they said so. Ironically, they would probably have accepted the policy that Moses and Pegler used the same rhetoric to reject! 
      This begs the question of why critics of Ives-Quinn missed so widely in their predictions, particular when supporters of the bill managed to come closer to the historical mark. It is possible that Moses and Pegler were sincere, but I regard their ominous pronouncements as a common and time-honored instrument of political combat, a device that students of rhetoric call the parade of horribles. What could be more horrible in a democracy than racial quotas? This technique has been deployed to small and great effect throughout American political history, but few practitioners used it more effectively than organized business, which even today insists that the sky will fall if a new law or regulation is adopted—and then expresses surprise and relief when it does not. 
      I certainly hope that most readers of the JAH will agree with me in this interpretation. But those who wish to do additional reading about the political development of Ives-Quinn before arriving at their own conclusions would be well served by consulting two very different but equally valuable books: Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight (2003) and Paul D. Moreno’s From Direct Action to Affirmative Action (1997). 
Anthony S. ChenUniversity of California
Berkeley, California

To the Editor:
 
      I read with interest Victoria W. Wolcott’s intriguing, extensively researched June 2006 article on Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach riot (“Recreation and Race in the Postwar City”). As a former Buffalonian who lived in the area from 1939 to 1961, I well remember the Canadiana and the amusement park it sailed to, frequently going there with a variety of school groups. 
      Buffalo and many other northern cities suffered through strained race relations during the 1950s and 1960s, and black-white relations at amusement parks like Crystal Beach provide one mirror of them. However, activities at other recreational venues also can be insightful. When it became more difficult for black people to reach Crystal Beach in Canada, many walked or took public transportation to the belt of city parks in Buffalo or drove to the band of county parks in the surrounding suburbs. For example, Como Park in suburban Lancaster was a favorite destination for black families. In the city, the huge wading pool at Humboldt Park (now Martin Luther King Park) was a major attraction for Buffalonians, as was the zoo in Delaware Park. Offerman Stadium, the home of baseball’s Buffalo Bisons of the then Triple-A International League, was located in a black neighborhood and one of the most popular players on the team was black first baseman Luke Easter. In short, there were numerous recreational possibilities in Buffalo and other northern cities other than amusement parks, and a study of them would provide additional insight into black-white relationships. 
      In her in-depth analysis of 1950s Buffalo, moreover, Ms. Wolcott ignores an important characteristic of the city. Buffalo was a place of dense ethnic and Catholic clusters. Heavily ethnic neighborhoods dominated the city, the majority of which were anchored by neighborhood Catholic churches and schools. For someone who was not a member of that ethnic group or a non-Catholic to move into any one of these ethnic-specific neighborhoods was cause for disbelief. Violence between young people of different ethnic groups was not unheard of, and intermarriage was normally disdained. Consequently, for people who were black and non-Catholic to move into a Catholic ethnic area was inconceivable. The saying was that “colored people,” as the term was then used, should stay in “their own neighborhood,” as Polish, Italian, and Irish people allegedly stayed in theirs. The coming together of white and black people in the North was a complicated matter with a great deal of conscious and unconscious racism intertwined with religion and ethnicity and displayed in a variety of ways and places, amusement parks being only one of them. 
John F. Marszalek, EmeritusMississippi State University
Starkville, Mississippi

To the Editor:
 
      I would like to thank John F. Marszalek for his thoughtful response to my article, “Recreation and Race in the Postwar City.” I am in the process of researching and writing a monograph that will address his two major concerns: other “recreational possibilities” for African-Americans and white ethnic conflict in urban neighborhoods. This book, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: Integrated Amusements in the Postwar Urban North, will place the Crystal Beach riot in a wider national context. 
Victoria W. WolcottUniversity of Rochester
Rochester, New York

To the Editor:
 
      Thanks to David Thelen for the tidbit that Rob Kroes was dressed in a cutaway coat as he gulped down herring at the festivities following his valedictory lecture (JAH, Sept. 2006). God forbid, the Emperor had no clothes. 
      Kroes’s lecture, published in your pages, is important as symptom not analysis of the anti-Americanism of the trans-Atlantic intellectuals, which today seems to be fusing with the intellectuals’ longstanding penchant for “the socialism of fools.” 
      A book could be written unpacking Kroes’s animadversions. Here, I’ll limit myself to a couple of points. First, truly droll is his holding up of “the old Europe” as a model of multicultural enlightenment for Americans to emulate at a time when Europeans are not even making a pretense of acculturating, much less assimilating, the Muslim occupants of their seething banlieues, and the continent’s birth rates have fallen so low that one may wonder whether its residents really care whether its civilization will survive another fifty years. No doubt, Americans are guilty as charged of the sins of greater patriotism and piety than most Europeans. But they are also a more resilient, accommodating people who have made efforts, so lacking in Europe, to incorporate their Muslim minority. Two cheers, anyway, for “American exceptionalism.” 
      Second, Kroes might have given some consideration to a less flattering explanation for Europe’s love affair with the Palestinian cause (including even its latest metastasization into Islamic extremism) than his picture of Europeans recoiling from alleged Israeli atrocities that bring back memories of the Nazis. For example, the Ipso Research Institute found in 2003 that 46 percent of Europeans polled in Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Britain feel that Jews are “different,” and 40 percent feel that “Jews have a particular relationship with money.” Could it be that these attitudes—the same ones that made the Holocaust possible and that seem to be on the rise—explain why the Dutch are not shocked by demonstrators marching in the shadow of Anne Frank House shouting: “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas”? 
      I won’t offer here a defense of Israel’s policies. Your journal is not an appropriate venue for such a debate, though your publication of Kroes’s piece indicates you have no compunctions about privileging a polemic gratuitously oozing anti-Israel bias from every pore. 
      Nor will I offer a defense of the Bush administration, but will end with this. At least the president, commendably, has given up the bottle, while the professoriate shows no signs of any remission in its addictions. 
Harold BrackmanSimon Wiesenthal Center
Los Angeles, California

To the Editor:
 
      Anti-Americanism is a worrisome global reality. But featuring Rob Kroes’s polemical farewell speech as the featured piece in the Journal of American History violated the mandate of the journal (Sept. 2006). The scholarly flagship of the Organization of American Historians should not turn into a contemporary partisan voice. Kroes comes across as a European elitist who sanctimoniously tells readers who are the good Americans and who are the bad (p. 426). His diatribe equates Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S. army with the Nazis (p. 424), declares that the European media is less biased than the American one (p. 423), puts forward a revisionist view of the Balkan wars of the 1990s that utterly ignores the shameful role played by the eu (European Union) and the crucial role American power played in ending the bloodshed, and denies the worrisome resurgence of European anti-Semitism. Kroes suggests that all will be well between the Europeans and Americans if it were not for Israel and its Jewish neo-con allies in the United States. Why does this sound so familiar? 
Doron Ben-AtarFordham University
Bronx, New York

To the Editor:
 
      I am indebted to both respondents for illustrating my point about the difficulty of frank and open discussion of controversial and painful current issues in the United States at this time. I also happily use this occasion to add to my positive appraisal of Europe’s top newspapers my admiration for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz. It daringly pursues points I raised in my piece with remarkable courage and candor. 
Rob Kroes, EmeritusUniversity of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands

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