Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday March 8, 2011
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INHERENTLY UNEQUAL: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903
Lawrence Goldstone
Walker
ISBN 978-0802717924
242 pages
$26
Reviewed by Kevin Boyle
"Constitutional law," Lawrence Goldstone says toward the end of "Inherently Unequal," "is ... simply politics made incomprehensible to the common man." It's meant to be a sound bite, a clever coda to a cautionary tale of justice corrupted and denied. But it speaks to a cynical strain that runs through this history of the late 19th-century American struggle to define the boundaries of racial justice -- and that makes Goldstone's story darker than it ought to be.
It's dismal enough to begin with. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Congress drafted and pushed to ratification two constitutional amendments -- the 14th and 15th -- intended to guarantee African-Americans full equality before the law.
Almost immediately the Supreme Court began to eviscerate Congress' work. First the justices ruled that the federal government had very limited power to protect its citizens' rights; most of the time it was up to the states to assure equal treatment.
Then, bit by bit, the court gave states enormous leeway in defining equality. If Tennessee was willing to allow Klansmen to terrorize African-Americans, Virginia willing to allow judges to block blacks from juries, and Kentucky willing to institute a poll tax that stripped African-Americans of the vote, that was their prerogative. The process peaked in the infamous 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, when the justices upheld Louisiana's claim that it was free to segregate its railroad cars, because African-Americans were being restricted to seats that were separate from but equal to whites'. Less than 30 years after their passage, the 14th and 15th Amendments had been all but swept aside. In their place stood the fearsome figure of Jim Crow.
Goldstone offers a clear, cogent reading of the court's machinations, no small accomplishment since the justices generally rested their opinions on convoluted legal reasoning rather than on broad principles. And he's completely convincing when he argues that behind those carefully parsed opinions lay a deep-seated racism strengthened by the justices' embrace of Social Darwinism. Before taking the bench, for instance, Chief Justice Melville Fuller had helped to segregate Chicago's schools, while Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown, who wrote the Plessy decision, privately supported black disenfranchisement as a bulwark against the pernicious power of democracy.
But Goldstone isn't satisfied with exposing the Court's corruption. He also insists on slashing away at those who championed racial justice. In his telling, the Radical Republicans who wrote the amendments were zealots determined to give their particular moral code the force of law, public opinion be damned. Those activists who tried to defend black rights before the court -- men like Albion Tourgee, the lead lawyer for the Plessy plaintiffs -- were invariably bumblers whose ham-fisted tactics undermined the cause. Even Justice John Marshall Harlan, Plessy's only dissenter, isn't spared. True, Harlan turned his dissent into a ringing defense of equal rights. But he was also a racist, Goldstone writes, who believed that African-Americans were "simply equal under a benevolent set of laws created by whites." Worst of all, the author claims that the freedmen whose rights the amendments were supposed to protect "were utterly unsophisticated in either self-maintenance or self-governance," lacking "even rudimentary knowledge of social organization." Not only does that characterization fly in the face of a half-century of historical scholarship, but it also undercuts the force of the story he's telling. If African-Americans weren't ready for citizenship, why worry when their rights were denied them?
When he turns to the lessons the tragedy teaches, "Inherently Unequal" grows grimmer still. Of course the justices twisted the law to their own purposes, Goldstone says. But that's what the Supreme Court justices do, grabbing hold of whatever precedent they need, "cherry-picking from a vast array of potential paths to fashion and re-fashion the law to suit." So constitutional law has no meaning beyond whatever politics or prejudices the justices want to impose. And the courageous struggles that men and women waged more than a century ago to make a more perfect union were nothing more than shadow plays, flickering faintly in the darkness.
Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the author of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age," which won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CRAZY U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College
Andrew Ferguson
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1439101216
228 pages
$25
Reviewed by Steven Levingston
My daughter's college applications are all in, and now we can quietly go nuts while admissions fairies coast to coast get busy, as Andrew Ferguson wonderfully puts it, "sprinkling pixie dust and waving wands, dashing dreams or making them come true." It's an apt metaphor because, as anyone who's been through it knows, the family caravan to collegeland is magical and terrifying: You begin wide-eyed and innocent, skipping along with outsized hopes, only to shrink before the fire-breathing ogres of the SAT, the essay, the deadlines, the costs. In "Crazy U," Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured.
The book is both a hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to college admissions. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has done his research, poring over mountains of published material and interviewing admissions officers, college coaches, academics and the guy behind the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. But if you're looking to crack the admissions code, beware: Ferguson slams into a hobgoblin blocking the way. He calls this monster the "law of constant contradiction."
Parental meddling? He finds a newspaper article that deems it a curse but another that says, "Parents, you owe it to your high-schooler to get involved!" The essay? One book urges, Write about an exotic foreign trip -- you'll stand out. But a counselor warns, "Admissions committees are so sick of foreign trips."
Ferguson cuts through the muddle to elevate the discussion and deliver some powerful big-picture analysis. We learn the tortured history of the SAT and how it has become "the most passionately controversial element in the world of college admissions."
We get a stark portrait of the one-way trend in college costs. Ferguson recalls that his annual tuition bill in 1978 at the small liberal-arts college he attended was $5,100. Adjusted for inflation, his fee today would be $16,500 -- far below the $40,000 his alma mater charges. He combs over College Board handouts explaining how to pay for college and is repeatedly reminded that $143 billion in financial aid awaits students. He wonders for all of us, "Maybe it's good news that $143 billion was available for aid. But isn't it bad news that we need the $143 billion in the first place?"
It may seem strange to say that a book so full of heartache is a pleasure to read, but Ferguson's storytelling is irresistible.
You root for the obsessive, well-meaning dad and his lackadaisical son, and you laugh out loud over their college-app tug of war. There's the son telling his high-school counselor that in college he wants to major in beer and paint his chest in the school colors at football games, prompting dad to snap later: "It'll be a big help when he writes your recommendation."
Then there's dad handing his procrastinator a book on successful college essays and watching the boy vacantly turn it over in his hands. "I thought of the apes coming upon the obelisk in the opening scene of '2001: A Space Odyssey,'" dad writes.
"He did everything but sniff it." And here's dad encountering a mother who gloats that she and her daughter worked three solid months on the essays every day after school plus weekends. "We did three months of work too," he tells her, "in twelve days."
And finally the Ferguson applications are on their way to a range of schools -- tough ones such as Georgetown and Notre Dame and the safety school of Indiana University. Now his tale catches up with our family drama -- and with that of all of this year's applicants: the seemingly everlasting wait. Adding to the father's tension, the son sets up a college interview with a local alumnus, prompting dad to say: "I don't mean to nag," and then he nags his son to shave before the meeting, and not to use the word "like" too much, and "please, please, don't wear your baseball cap to the interview." Waiting for word also brings an incessant weighing of the odds. Ferguson calculates the impact of the "hooked" slots -- those going to students who have an advantage because of athletic prowess, status as an under-represented minority, parents who have lots of money or attended the university. After all those places are scooped up, Ferguson reckons, the chances of getting into a dream school are "much worse than a crapshoot."
But the dice do come up for his son. He gets in to one of his preferred colleges, a place Ferguson will identify only as BSU, Big State University, because he sees in its curriculum weaknesses shared by many of today's institutions of higher learning.
His complaint: that colleges are leaning too far toward the do-it-yourself curriculum that prepares students for the workplace rather than for deep, critical thinking. As he puts it, "You could get a degree in the humanities (at BSU) without studying literature, or a degree in history without ever sitting through a survey class in American or European history."
Ferguson takes us up to move-in day at BSU, noting how bewildered his son looked as the family was leaving. Dad himself was nearly grief-stricken. "Some part of them is gone for good," he reflects. "It's been turned away from home and toward a place we don't really see, that a parent can't reach, is not supposed to reach." His sadness then flamed into an insane anger "at all the things a man can't control." Leaving the campus, he stopped at a gas station, filled the tank and gunned the engine until he "felt a sickening tug and heard the sound of sheet metal being ripped from the welded bolts, because I'd left the nozzle in the tank." He heard nothing from his son for several days -- then the phone rang. The college boy was in the laundry room of his dorm, in a panic. "Which goes in the hot water, colored stuff or white stuff?" he asked his father. "Mom told me and now I can't remember. ... And nobody here seems to know either."
Steven Levingston is nonfiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at levingstons(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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