When Music in America Became American Music

This is one of my favorite Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op eds. I hope to be forgiven for posting it again.

The Next Page: The sound of American music

Sunday, September 23, 2007

By Rudolph H. Weingartner

American music: What is it? Who made it? Where did it come from?

It's a sprawling, contentious question. But I am talking about the decades that began around the first World War, when it became meaningful to speak of distinctively American music.

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Rudolph H. Weingartner (rudywein@pitt.edu), a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His most recent book is "A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education" (Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).

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Of course, the music that was written then built on its American and European forebears. But the changes introduced were so powerful that they dominated American music for quite some time. More correctly, I should say American musics, in the plural, since there is hardly a single strain.

I leave out the rich world of jazz, since it would call for more extensive treatment than there is room here. Instead, I want to focus on three other genres. Going from the bottom up -- speaking as a snooty member of the cultural elite -- there are what are most simply called popular songs; then there are the musicals of Broadway; and, finally, the kind of music played by symphony orchestras, recitalists and ensembles in the likes of Carnegie Hall, all known by the misleading term of "classical music."

I've been listening to music for most of my life -- actually listening, not just hearing. And sometimes I even think about what I heard. Thinking about these genres, I came to a mildly startling conclusion, though the facts have been plain to see all my life: Three giants who dominated the American musical landscape were Jews from Eastern Europe, one actually born there, the other two in Brooklyn not long after their parents' passage through Ellis Island.

God bless Irving Berlin

Starting at the "bottom," it is hard to trump Irving Berlin, although that was not the name he was born with, in 1888, in the town of Tyumen, just east of the Ural Mountains, arriving here when he was 5. (Other sources name different towns.) The son of a cantor, he was then Israel Isadore Baline (that last name an immigration official's transcription of Beilin), the youngest of a large Yiddish-speaking family.

While I found no record just when Israel became Irving, the move to Berlin came about through a mistake. In 1906, the 18-year-old wrote the lyrics for "Marie of Sunny Italy" to a melody by a fellow entertainer at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. But when the song was published, the printer put "I. Berlin" on the cover. It would have brought bad luck to the author not to keep the name that gave him his first broader recognition.

Most of us know much of the greater accomplishments that would follow. What we might not know is that at the beginning of his long career, Irving Berlin succeeded as a wordsmith, and only when he was prodded did he compose the melody of his next song.

That prod lasted. From "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Berlin's first big-time success, to "Always," "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," "How Deep Is the Ocean" and "White Christmas" (and many, many more), Irving Berlin wrote both words and music.

It is often noted that Berlin never learned to read notes and that a special piano was built for him that allowed him to play melodies in keys that he otherwise couldn't play since he could play in only one key. But I like to observe another fact: the lyrics and melodies he wrote could not be more distant from the Yiddish he spoke as a child and the cantorial and Eastern European tunes on which he was brought up.

For me, the highlight is Berlin's hymn-like "God Bless America." I empathize with those who want to make that song our national anthem, as more singable and less belligerent than our current one. Were that ever to happen, it would be the zenith of the story of Israel Isadore Beilin that began somewhere in Russia or Belarus.

 

The rhapsody on George Gershwin

Our second innovator who influenced the course of American music managed to steer an unprecedented course between pops and "classical" music and between musical and opera. Jacob Gershowitz was born in 1898 in Brooklyn, but his father, who had emigrated from Russia, soon changed his name to Gershwin; the transformation of Jacob into George somehow followed.

Like Berlin, George Gershwin got an early start, writing a commercially successful song when he was 19 and making his first big hit with "Swanee" when he was 21. The words were by his brother Ira -- who came to write the words to much of George's lyrical output -- and the song's success benefited greatly from being sung by superstar Al Jolson (born in Lithuania as Asa Yoelson).

Gershwin, who died at 38, was prolific, with a large output of works for the stage and the concert hall. As exemplified by the work everyone knows, "Rhapsody in Blue" (of 1924), Gershwin was the first to combine -- perhaps interweave is a better term -- classical compositional techniques with jazz and pop.

Again, no trace of an Eastern European heritage in that unique Gershwin mix. An anecdote is told about the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom Gershwin was said to have asked for lessons in composition. "I would only make you a second-rate Schoenberg, and you are such a good Gershwin already." (The anecdote is also told with Gershwin seeking instruction from the French composer Maurice Ravel and receiving the same complimentary refusal. Take your pick.)

It is worth mentioning that the jazz -- which is, after all, perhaps the most American of musics -- on which Gershwin leaned had also been changing. It became much freer and improvisational than it had been when still closer to the band music, ragtime, spirituals and religious music from which it had sprung.

That Gershwin was able to elevate the musical to new heights is exemplified in two quite different ways. "Of Thee I Sing," reviewed by Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times as "a taut and lethal satire ... funnier than the government, and not nearly so dangerous," was, in 1932, the very first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize for best American play. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the august Pulitzer board at Columbia University debated whether or not to take this radical step toward popular taste.

But "Porgy and Bess" is Gershwin's crowning achievement. It is the only opera by an American composer that has received worldwide acclaim. That is not a trivial distinction: a "selected" list of operas by American composers posted on the US Opera Web site comes to 359, if I counted correctly. Nor is "Porgy and Bess" a standard opera, whatever that might be. Gershwin called it a Folk Opera. It makes copious use of jazzy passages; its cast of characters, almost entirely African American, consists of ordinary people and not larger-than-life operatic heroes. American verismo.

The plot moves briskly and the hit tunes tumble one after the other; if they were sung in Italian, they would be called arias. An international group of collectors of recordings of "Summertime" claims to know of at least 20,142 public performances of that song, of which 13,842 are said to have been recorded.

 

Fanfare for the uncommon Aaron Copland

A young man, Morris (probably ne Moishe) Kaplan was in England, on the way from Lithuania to America, when he anglicized his name to Copland. Some years later, in 1900, his fifth child, Aaron, was born in Brooklyn and came to grow up to become the most American of American composers, a goal he aimed at almost self-consciously.

His music is American, not simply because he incorporated into it both jazz and blues, making use, as well, of older American tunes -- though he did all that. Nor is his music American because so much of it is devoted to American themes: "Appalachian Spring," "Billy the Kid," "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson," the opera "Tender Land." But even though Copland wrote many works that derive from European sources, including atonal music, the core of his output evinces a tonal world that became a kind of paradigm of American "classical" music, strongly influencing a subsequent generation.

While numerous technical analyses have been put forward of this Copland-American style, I will confine myself to a few general characteristics. The themes or melodies Copland invents are relatively simple and concise and when they are more extensive, they are likely to be made up of smaller units. Copland's rhythms are often distinctly declamatory and predominantly unhurried.

Perhaps most notably, Copland's harmony is derived from French rather than German music, most probably by virtue of the fact that he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the first American composer to do so. And finally, Copland makes a self-conscious effort to orchestrate with great clarity, letting each voice be heard with little or no doubling, making for a more open, less "sophisticated" but also less fuzzy texture.

Arguably, Copland's "Third Symphony" is the greatest American work in that genre. The first movement makes copious use of themes of the popular "Fanfare for the Common Man." Throughout its course, it steadfastly maintains its ability to keep the listener fastened to the orchestral progression.

The symphony is only one of a great many of Copland's works -- from chamber music to ballet to operas to scores for Hollywood films. But it serves as good evidence for the claim that Aaron Copland was the greatest American composer of the last century-- a century he spanned, since he died in 1990.

 

What is the moral of this story about the modern "origin" of American music?

Early on I said that I was mildly surprised that a most important trio of American masters consisted of three Eastern European Jews. Surprised, because that's not what you would expect when considering American music.

But only mildly surprised, because, after all, it is a fundamental truth of American history, and one that is in danger of being forgotten: Our open society liberated the newly arrived and first-generation Americans, and they harnessed their native talents and energies to advance the themes and tasks of their new homeland.

A recent study, "What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution" (for which I filled out a questionnaire), makes that point. But read the obituary pages of The New York Times, peruse the list of American recipients of the Nobel Prize or just listen to the accents of the professors who teach the science courses in our universities or to those of the physicians that treat our ailments. These are sufficient reminders of what the United States can accomplish when it honors its birthright as the land of the free.

First published on September 23, 2007 at 12:00 am

Copyright ©1997 - 2007 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Muslims in America

The Fate of a Proposed  Muslim Cemetery in Dudley, Massachusetts

   When my wife Fannia and I were looking to buy a house in Evanston, after I had been appointed as dean at Northwestern, the real estate agent who drove us around, said of the house we wound up buying, “A few years ago you could not have bought it: 2112 Orrington Avenue was not to be sold to Jews.”

  That was in 1973, somewhat after the end of the pervasive anti-Semitism earlier in the century. It was certainly in full swing when we arrived in New York in 1939, only to wane notably after the end of World War II. (I mention this because I suspect that most of the readers of this blog do not know how far we have come from the time when in the US, anti-Semitism was widespread, even the norm.)

   Now, alas, it is the turn of the Muslims. A sad New York Times story¹ gives an account of an unsuccessful attempt by Muslims to purchase a chunk of land near Dudley, Massachusetts to be able to create a Muslim cemetery, on about six to twelve acres of a much larger area of local farmland they were prepared to buy.

  I can’t think of a less intrusive use of land than as the place to bury one’s dead. Now and then a quiet ceremony and that’s it. That’s particularly true of Muslim rites which emphatically don’t go in for funereal show biz. The dead should be buried close to where they lived and promptly, if only to avoid embalming. Graves are to be simple, without monuments and internment is to be without elaborate ceremony. In short, if the citizens of Dudley had investigated Muslim funeral practices, they would have found them to be exceedingly unobtrusive. The annual six to ten burials that were envisaged would hardly have been noticed by the surrounding community.

   The Times article does not mention that inquiries were made about Muslim practices and it is highly probable that such information was not sought. The one townsman who is quoted no doubt spoke for many of his fellow citizens: “You want a Muslim cemetery? . . . Fine. Put it in your backyard. Not mine.”

   Note, parenthetically, that neither the Dudley Times story nor my references to Jews in America refer to such special causes of immigration as the Holocaust for Jews or the ISSIS-related events among Muslims. These remarks are meant to look at both groups as being in the long tradition of immigrants to America. 

   In one way this Massachusetts account can be taken as one of an untold number in which the previously arrived propose or engage in negative behavior, to use an hygienic term, toward more recent arrivals, especially from areas other than Western Europe. Such reactions were of course particularly provoked when the number of those who came during a relatively short period of time was large. Such as micks from Ireland,  dagos from Italy, chinks from China and quite a few others. There is a word for looking down on each segment of humanity that arrived in the US after the middle of the 19^th century.

   And yet, my beginning this account with a reference to prejudice against Jews points to a closer analogy to those who sought to create a cemetery in the middle of New England. Those Irish micks fled the potato famine in their own country; what they had in common was the desire to escape hunger. Those dagos from Calabria and Sicily left their homes for analogous economic reasons. Since both these groups were largely Roman Catholics, they indeed were in America second class citizens for a long stretch of time. They were not, however, persecuted for their religion, either at their old or their new homes. Of course each of such populations had many other traits in common—language, of course, and the food they ate—cultural traits, rather than institutional ones.

   Jews and Muslims, on the other hand, are—each group—bound together by religious institutions that have their own quite visible practices that set them apart from the larger population surrounding them, most of which came to America before them.

   These are big topics and I have already said more than I intended—that is, more than I feel sure about. The “simple” point I want to make is that I see those New England Muslims as being treated  in ways Jews were dealt with not so long ago. Our similarities has me hope that Muslims will ultimately and successfully be integrated into American society as Jews have been, with their own institutions intact.                
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¹ “Muslims Seek New Burial Ground, and a Small Town Balks,” http://www.nytimes.com /2016/08/29/us/muslims-seek-new-burial-ground-and-a-small-town-balks.html?emc=eta1

Trump

A Resolution
No Doubt Soon to be Broken

   Donald Trump is a kind of grizzly joke. He spouts off daily—coherently or not, in conformity with earlier statements of his or not, rantings of whatever comes to his mind, when not briefly interrupted by formal speeches produced by one or another of his handlers. The press—all  parts of it from mundane reporters to well paid pundits and highly placed columnists—pour out thousands of Trump-related words a day. It’s annoying, since quite repetitive, but I can’t blame those scribes. They have a subject the like of which hasn’t been around in my memory.

   But Trump, unfortunately, is a real person or at least a real phenomenon. Hard to believe, but true. Historians will have to do a lot of explaining about how a joker (“a person considered unworthy of repsect”) came to be the candidate for the United States presidency of one of the two major parties aiming at that ultimate goal. Bizarre.

   I am tempted to join the throng of commentators, but realize that I have nothing to add—other than yet more rhetoric.  That leaves me with my wobbly resolution to swear off on Trump comments.

   Let’s see how long it lasts.

Le Plus Ça Change . . .

This piece was written in February 2003 and was intended to be an op ed for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The sloppy record in my computer does not tell whether or not it was used. (But to search in the morgue of the P-G is more of a nuisance than is warranted.)

Crashing Through the Looking Glass

Rudolph H. Weingartner

            We’ve moved into a topsy-tervy world Alice never dreamed of.  If living in it didn’t have such horrendous consequences, that tale would be even more amusing than those of Lewis Carroll.  Our betters—the people we have chosen to govern us—seem to have imbibed of a potion that has them turn our world upside down.

            The majority of the federal appeals court in St. Louis, to begin our journey, ruled the other day that a deranged prisoner may be forced to take a drug that will, while it functions, make him sufficiently sane to meet the Supreme Court’s sanity requirement for being executed.  That’s like forcibly attaching a prosthesis to a one-legged captive so that he can be made to jump from the frying pan into the fire.  The fact that the “restoration” of the prisoner’s sanity would lead to his execution was irrelevant, the court’s majority declared, to the appropriateness of compelling him to be sane, at least while he remains alive.

            This ruling affects but one person now and probably not many in the future, but is nevertheless a good example of the wackiness that resembles nothing so much as an infectuous disease.  Many have made fun of the nuttiness that has urged us to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect our houses from chemically or biologically polluted air.  But I’ve not seen comments about the magnitude of that project.  I calculateed that my comfortable middle class home would require 422 linear feet of duct tape plus 430 square feet of plastic.  Given that we are a population of 290 million and assuming that on the average four people live in a housing unit and, further, that my own commodious dwelling has four times the barricading requirements of the average, the country would need about 7.7 billion feet of tape and approximately 7.8 billion square feet of plastic to keep all of the US breathing easy—at least at home, since I haven’t included places of business.

            Probably, this Homeland Security recommendation was just another effect of the disease that has been spreading through governmental circles.  But when the exhortation to buy was followed by the injunction not actually to use this gear, it is easy to become suspicious that the real point was to give a boost to the homewares industry.

            We do, after all, know that the economy needs tending to, even if we don’t think it should be done in the way that our infected Washingtonians have in mind.  The massive tax reductions that have been proposed have been much discussed.  But that plan has not been clearly enough juxtaposed with the desperate straits in which our states and cities find themselves—the worst in more than half a century.  What are these states and cities doing to alleviate their fiscal woes?  Both Democratic and Republican governors and mayors expect to raise taxes in order to pay unavoidable bills, in the absence of adequate help from Washington.  Alice would have a clever verse to describe this nuttiness.  I can only fall back on two clichés: money is being taken from Peter to pay Paul and we know full well who is at what end of the stick.

            How Washington is infected by topsy-tervyness in international affairs has been consuming hours of television time and acres of newsprint.  Our betters come close to shirking their responsibility concerning a present danger while obsessively pursuing a future possible one.  North Korea actually possesses nuclear bombs plus the capacity to send them overseas, while Iraq, which we threaten with immanent war, has not yet managed to get that far.  Our government is rightly concerned about the lack of assurance that Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed.  No doubt, that lethal material is being stored in hard-to-detect bunkers.  Yet at the same time, a war is in preparation that, if it breaks out, will surely bring those weapons out of their hiding places—to be used on us and our friends.

            Our friends—that is, if we still have any.  Perhaps the deepest symptom of the upsidedown disease that has conquered Washington is its attitude toward the nations with which we share this planet.  Globalism is our policy Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  At bottom, there is but one economy, we insist, that transcends all national borders.  Togetherness is the watchword on those days of the week.  But when the occasion arises to do something together—prevent global warning, create a court that encompasses that globe, or prevent a vicious dictator from acting up, it is Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday.  On those days, Washington is for going it alone and unilateralism wins out. We are prepared to turn all of our friends into antagonists so as to avoid the compromises that are inevitably exacted by cooperation. This is a unilateralism that will isolated from all who matter on this globe for countless years to come.

            Reality is not where Washington sees it. We badly need an antidote that will reverse the disease that has gripped the city from which we are governed.

Trump Stands Alone

What’s Truly Unique about Donald J. Trump

   “With his bombastic swagger, changing policy positions and larger-than-life persona, Mr. Trump has proved to be an irresistible subject for writers and political satirists,” thus in the New York Times of July 4. That’s a partial explanation for the endless stories that are being written about him, sometimes as many as three or four in the same issue of the Times. I, too, am essentially hooked and read most writings that I come across about The Donald.

   Trump is indeed unique, no doubt about it. But when you come down to it, only somewhat “more so” than anyone else. (The scare quotes because you can’t be more or less unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness.) To bore you some more, every human being is, strictly speaking unique, meaning that everyone has a combination of traits—a specific bundle of attributes (and not just of secondary characteristics such as location in time and space) that together are not to be found in anyone else, with perhaps some identical twins as close as you can get to an exception.

   Without losing sight of the little lesson in the paragraph above, we must look at what one might call the significance of a person’s uniqueness. If Joe is unique because he has a peculiar shade of red hair together with an unusually long nose, that, in the scheme of things, does not make Joe significantly unique, to make up another label. Well, Trump, with his bundle of weighty characteristics, is, for sure, significantly unique.

  Others have inherited tons of money from their parents. Others have developed hotels, golf courses and much more; others have succeeded in showbiz on TV. How many have done all of the above? Only very few, if anyone. Clearly I’m piling up traits that attest to the ways Trump is distinguishable from everyone else, and probably enough of them.

   I’m no historian, but I have no doubt that many another candidate for high office has been an oddball, if not like The Donald, then in his or her own particular way. Moreover, there have surely been aspirants for important offices, including the presidency, who did not have the qualifications to serve successfully in the positions they sought.

   And Trump is clearly not qualified to be president of the United States. He lacks the temperament, he lacks both the experience required to be a president and he lacks the knowledge of issues that a president has to deal with. All this and more has been widely discussed. Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a rare political comment for a Supreme Court Justice, refreshingly expressed her dismay at the candidacy of one so unqualified. Still, all this makes Trump’s uniqueness significant, while he is surely not alone as a candidate for a job for which he (most of the time “he”) is not qualified.

   But there is still another and very important way in which Trump is unique. As an unqualified candidate, Donald Trump has attracted the support of voters in the recent primaries to beat off more than a dozen others who aimed to become the presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency. I don’t know how many others can tell the same story, but I do believe that it is quite remarkable.

   A recent very long and excellent article in the New Yorker¹ (among many other accounts) gives a good description of the people who are fervent Trump supporters. Their enthusiasm has them ignore the issue of qualification—not in the sense that they discount it, but in that they don’t think about it in the first place. Moreover, their support of Trump is not so much rooted in a set of beliefs, such as his proposed policies on immigration or what he proposes to do about international trade, etc. Rather, his supporters are jazzed by sound bytes, to conclude with language of yore.

   I don’t think that Trump will win the election on November 8, but that is by no means a sure thing. Justice Ginsburg has, jokingly, threatened to move to New Zealand, were he to become president. I don’t have to pull up stakes to get out from under a Trump presidency, since I’ve already absconded and live with my daughter and family in Mexico. But for all of our sakes, I hope he remains a private citizen and his comet-like appearance goes the way of all comets.

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¹ George Saunders, “Trump Days,” The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016.

It Was Not Always Thus

An Op-Ed Of Yore

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

Wednesday June 22, 2011

By Rudolph Weingartner

Congress appears to be almost wholly polarized, with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. But many suspect, sometimes backed up by one poll or another, that the rest of the country is not so bifurcated, that countless citizens have not been captured by one or another ideology but merely lean this way or that, everywhere harboring reservations.

Rather than try to compete with pollsters by also counting noses, I've devised a simple test that might help readers know just where they stand on the political continuum and, by inference, others of our countrymen. Answering my questions may tell you what you already know, but you also might learn something about yourself that had been veiled, obscured.

First, two cautions. I am not dealing here with contentious cultural or social issues, such as abortion, but only economic ones. And my little test is crude; the reader must judge whether it is better than nothing.

Let me begin by describing a fictional, utopian United States where [a] everyone who wants to work and is able to do so has a job; [b] everyone has access to competent health care; [c] the elderly and the handicapped are not left destitute; [d] the country's budget is usually in balance.

My test is aimed at those who agree that each of these four conditions constitutes a good thing, even if they doubt that they are attainable. You are now invited to state what you are willing or not willing to have the government do to bring us closer to such a desirable society.

Regarding [a], jobs, give yourself three points if you think the government should create public jobs to keep down unemployment; two points if the government should spend money to stimulate the economy; one point if the market should be left to solve employment problems.

Regarding [b], health care, three points for a single-payer system like Canada's; two points for government to subsidize health insurance as needed; one point for government to provide, at most, vouchers for private health care.

Regarding [c], Social Security, three points for raising the payroll tax to preserve the retirement disability system; two points for increasing the age of eligibility; one point for privatization.

Regarding [d], the budget, three points for raising taxes to balance it; two points for raising taxes and cutting government spending; one point for reducing spending only.

The highest score possible is 12 points, representing dyed-in-the-wool liberals, strong believers in an active government. The lowest score possible is three points, representing staunch conservatives who believe in the smallest government possible.

Now note that there remains a considerable range of nine steps between the poles. Indeed, while I have always thought of myself as a committed liberal, my position turns out not to be that pure.

For jobs, I get two points for government stimulus. For health care, I would be happy with subsidies, another two points. For Social Security, I'm for some tax increase together with upping the age of eligibility, giving me two and a half points. Finally, to balance the budget, I also take the middle ground: both raise taxes and reduce spending, for another two points. That comes to eight and a half points -- a wishy-washy liberal, far from a pure liberal's 12.

What's true of me might well be true of you; indeed, a sizable fraction of the voting population likely hold positions far from either extreme. Let's let Congress know.

Rudolph Weingartner is a University of Pittsburgh professor emeritus of philosophy

Presidential Rhetoric

   As we near the end of Obama’s presidency, I want to say a word about him that is not concerned with the policies and measures that he espoused and, within real world constraints, implemented.

I am in agreement with most of those, but that is only background to the remarks I want to make.

   Obama speaks to the public in the way a president should. He is always clear, always grammatical, quite eloquent, without rhetorical gimmicks, with a flourish now and then. Truly a good speaker.

   You might think that’s what it takes to be president; but that is not so. Of course we “accept” a president’s speech in whatever form it is rendered because it’s the president; we don’t really have a choice. But if you  to Obama’s forebears looking for eloquence, you gingerly reach Carter and Kennedy, then you go back until you get to FDR, long ago. He most certainly knew how to talk to the public; he could be eloquent and was the creator of memorable phrases. Bill Clinton is certainly in the same league as a communicator, but did not produce formal disquisitions as did FDR and Obama. It is worth mentioning a candidate for the presidency, Adelai Stevenson, who was a truly outstanding speaker, but who ran twice against Eisenhower, but had no chance against the not very articulate victorious general (who, a propos of nothing, signed my bachelor degree—or some surrogate did—when he was briefly president of Columbia University.)

 The others who occupied the White House since Franklin Roosevelt could be considered to have been competent speakers, though a couple of them just barely so. The moral of that story is that eloquence, in the sense of FDR and Obama, is not at all a requirement for the highest office of the land on the Western side of the Atlantic. While it is quite unreliable for me to asses the eloquence or lack of it of President Hollande of France or Chancellor Merkel of Germany, I’m fairly confident that  neither of them has made speeches of noteworthy eloquence.

   It is probably the case rhetorical quality plays a larger role in the effort to acquire a high office such as a presidency than to carry out the office gained. Herbert Hoover’s mundane speech was no match for Roosevelt’s witty way with words and Obama’s expressiveness no doubt contributed notably to his victory against Hillary Clinton in the hard-fought 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

   In any discussion of rhetorical effectiveness one must not ignore a ruler who came into office in the same month as FDR—and that is Adolf Hitler. His speeches played a significant role in his being designated the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic—the lat because he promptly turned into a dictatorship and served as its Führer until he committed suicide when the allies overran Berlin. His addresses, of which there were many, were heard by all who could get into earshot of a radio. These speeches were not eloquent in the normal sense of the word. Hitler had a voice that could only be called screechy, his pronunciation was that of a lower-class Austrian, not at all the German equivalent of the well-spoken language of a Roosevelt or Obama. He mostly spoke at the top of his voice; you might call it screaming. But it conveyed a tremendous passion and his messages were seductive. It is amazing that he retained the loyalty of a large fraction of the German population even when it was clear that the war was lost.

   Da capo al fine. Obama eloquence will be in the past after January 2017. Trump has given no sign of wanting to produce an extensive and coherent speech, while Hillary speaks well in short remarks and longer disquisitions, but she is not truly eloquent; she may persuade, but not really inspire. For the foreseeable future, at this juncture, Obama will be the rhetorical high point for the next decade or so.  

President Obama's Visit to Hiroshima

Hiroshima

   President Obama is about to visit Hiroshima and has made it clear that he will not apologize for us having dropped the bomb. Emphatically, he is right not to do so. The war had been going on for four years and its next task would have been an allied invasion of Japan, mostly by American armed forces. Such an invasion, necessary to defeat Japan, would have been immensely costly in equipment and, especially, in human lives. Paul Fussell, a soldier in the war and later a distinguished professor of English, has vigorously defended the dropping of that bomb¹ for saving the thousands of lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. I was in boot camp when the bomb was dropped and soon came to realize that instead of becoming an endangered cog in the wheel that would finish off the Japanese, I would have a peaceful career in the US Navy.

   Indeed, that’s what I had. It took me to China where I was able to visit several cities, but my ship made only one quick trip to Japan, to Sasebo. Even there I did not get beyond the harbor, not to mention to nearby Nagasaki, where the second, and in my view unnecessary, atomic bomb was dropped.

   But many years later, not as a teenager, but as a white-haired retired professor, I did get to Hiroshima, as a tourist on a boat, that stopped at many interesting Japanese sights. We visited Hiroshima, now sixty-something years later, a city elegantly reconstructed, with prominent features that memorialized its past as a victim of the most powerful explosion ever.

  One of these is a museum—not a big one, but not tiny either, the Peace Memorial Museum. I don’t remember all of its exhibits, but I remember the main theme that runs through just about all of them. What I found annoyed me to the degree that I started a lengthy discussion with my fellow travelers when we were all gathered back on the ship.

   Succinctly, the museum’s main theme, maybe its only one, is how we Japanese—and not only we inhabitants of Hiroshima—were victims during the Second World War, how in many different ways we suffered. The exhibits depicted the Japanese as victims, as sufferers. There is just one small reference in that museum that quietly declares that Japan started the war. Only a very alert and thoughtful Japanese visitor to the museum would become conscious of the fact that there would not have been all that Japanese suffering had Japan not brought the United States into the war by bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Needless to say, there is nothing about the fierceness of Japanese fighting, the murderous oppressiveness of Japanese occupations--think of the massacre at Nanking--nor about the cruelty of Japanese prisons.

   I know very little about Japanese history, nor about the country’s sociology, so that I have only a rather vague notion as to why the Japanese are so reluctant to recognize the sins of their past. Their attitude is very different from that of today’s Germans who for many years have acknowledged the evils of their Nazi history. Perhaps the difference in attitudes is rooted in an important difference in the postwar history of the two countries.

   Today’s Germany is in many ways discontinuous from its past of those dozen years ruled by Adolf Hitler. When German defeat was in sight, Hitler committed suicide and the leaders of the German government either fled the country or also committed suicide or they were arrested by the Allies and then tried at Nuremberg, though many quietly stayed in their jobs. At the highest governmental levels, the break was pretty sharp. After le deluge—Adenauer. As for the German people, they had the choice of either rejecting Nazism or of keeping their mouths shut.

   In Japan, the Allies—mostly the US under General MacArthur—insisted on installing a parliamentary government, a major change. But there was continuity nevertheless, importantly symbolized by the fact that Hirohito, who was Emperor of Japan throughout the war continued to be Emperor of Japan until his death in 1989.

   These political facts are by no means enough to explain the reluctance of many of Japan’s leaders to acknowledge the country’s past transgressions and leave it to students of Japanese civilization to provide explanations for this reluctance to face up to Japan’s history.

  I grant that a museum in Hiroshima is not obligated to exhibit the many Japanese actions that prompted their opponents to resort to that horrendous measure to win the war, of using a weapon that demolished an entire city in a thrice. But it would also be appropriate for such a museum to make it clear that if Japan had not started that war, Hiroshima would not have been destroyed.

   I hope that on his visit to Hiroshima, President Obama will make it clear that the destruction of their city was a response to Japan's horrendously aggressive role as our enemy in the second World War.    

    _____________________

¹https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf

US Politics in Ancient Days

   This OpEd was written in March, 2003, a decade and a half ago. My sloppy record does not tell me whether the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ever printed it. Can you think yourselves back to the pressing issues of those days? It's not an easy task, but try to do so, if only for the sake of finding out how far we have come--and how for better or for worse.

Crashing Through the Looking Glass

Rudolph H. Weingartner

            We’ve moved into a topsy-tervy world Alice never dreamed of.  If living in it didn’t have such horrendous consequences, that tale would be even more amusing than those of Lewis Carroll.  Our betters—the people we have chosen to govern us—seem to have imbibed of a potion that has them turn our world upside down.

            The majority of the federal appeals court in St. Louis, to begin our journey, ruled the other day that a deranged prisoner may be forced to take a drug that will, while it functions, make him sufficiently sane to meet the Supreme Court’s sanity requirement for being executed.  That’s like forcibly attaching a prosthesis to a one-legged captive so that he can be made to jump from the frying pan into the fire.  The fact that the “restoration” of the prisoner’s sanity would lead to his execution was irrelevant, the court’s majority declared, to the appropriateness of compelling him to be sane, at least while he remains alive.

            This ruling affects but one person now and probably not many in the future, but is nevertheless a good example of the wackiness that resembles nothing so much as an infectuous disease.  Many have made fun of the nuttiness that has urged us to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect our houses from chemically or biologically polluted air.  But I’ve not seen comments about the magnitude of that project.  I calculateed that my comfortable middle class home would require 422 linear feet of duct tape plus 430 square feet of plastic.  Given that we are a population of 290 million and assuming that on the average four people live in a housing unit and, further, that my own commodious dewelling has four times the barricading requirements of the average, the country would need about 7.7 billion feet of tape and approximately 7.8 billion square feet of plastic to keep all of the US breathing easy—at least at home, since I haven’t included places of business.

            Probably, this Homeland Security recommendation was just another effect of the disease that has been spreading through governmental circles.  But when the exhortation to buy was followed by the injunction not actually to use this gear, it is easy to become suspicious that the real point was to give a boost to the homewares industry.

            We do, after all, know that the economy needs tending to, even if we don’t think it should be done in the way that our infected Washingtonians have in mind.  The massive tax reductions that have been proposed have been much discussed.  But that plan has not been clearly enough juxtaposed with the desperate straits in which our states and cities find themselves—the worst in more than half a century.  What are these states and cities doing to alleviate their fiscal woes?  Both Democratic and Republican governors and mayors expect to raise taxes in order to pay unavoidable bills, in the absence of adequate help from Washington.  Alice would have a clever verse to describe this nuttiness.  I can only fall back on two clichés: money is being taken from Peter to pay Paul and we know full well who is at what end of the stick.

            How Washington is infected by topsy-tervyness in international affairs has been consuming hours of television time and acres of newsprint.  Our betters come close to shirking their responsibility concerning a present danger while obsessively pursuing a future possible one.  North Korea actually possesses nuclear bombs plus the capacity to send them overseas, while Iraq, which we threaten with immanent war, has not yet managed to get that far.  Our government is rightly concerned about the lack of assurance that Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed.  No doubt, that lethal material is being stored in hard-to-detect bunkers.  Yet at the same time, a war is in preparation that, if it breaks out, will surely bring those weapons out of their hiding places—to be used on us and our friends.

            Our friends—that is, if we still have any.  Perhaps the deepest sympton of the upsidedown disease that has conquered Washington is its attitude toward the nations with which we share this planet.  Globalism is our policy Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  At bottom, there is but one economy, we insist, that transcends all national borders.  Togetherness is the watchword on those days of the week.  But when the occasion arises to do something together—prevent global warning, create a court that encompasses that globe, or prevent a vicious dictator from acting up, it is Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday.  On those days, Washington is for going it alone and unilateralism wins out. We are prepared to turn all of our friends into antagonists so as to avoid the compromises that are inevitably exacted by cooperation. This is a unilateralism that will be isolated from all who matter on this globe for countless years to come.

            Reality is not where Washington sees it. We badly need an antidote that will reverse the disease that has gripped the city from which we are governed.